# Mere Orthodoxy
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### Keeping It Real: Eric Cyr’s 'Here It Snows in June'
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/keeping-it-real-eric-cyrs-here-it-snows-in-june/
Last updated: 2026-10-20T10:59:59.000Z
**Eric Cyr.** [***Here It Snows in June & Other Stories***](https://www.wisebloodbooks.com/store/p228/Here%5FIt%5FSnows%5Fin%5FJune%5F%26%5FOther%5FStories%2C%5Fby%5FEric%5FCyr.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)***.* Wiseblood Books: 2026\. 156pp, $16.00.**

In the search for perennial satisfactions of the ever-growing, never-ceasing hunger for authenticity, in which people and communities seem like the “real deal,” fiction would likely not be a typical choice. How could fiction, a deliberate fabrication, cultivate authenticity? How could souls weary of false experience find their hunger satisfied in made up stories? Would they not rather serve us better as comfortable escapes from uncomfortable (un)reality, as the [overwhelming popularity](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/feb/03/romantasy-and-booktok-driving-a-huge-rise-in-science-fiction-and-fantasy-sales?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of sci-fi and romantasy books seems to suggest? 

Though the problem is fresh, it is not new. In his *Poetics*, Aristotle argues that people enjoy fiction fundamentally because of its innate capacity to depict—or imitate—the real, and the more successful the imitation, the greater our delight: “We take pleasure in contemplating the most *precisely* made images of things.” Fiction further attracts us because we “do our first learning by imitation” and so come to know the real through our experience of that representation: “They are pleased in seeing images because in their contemplating there is a coincidence of learning and figuring out what each thing is.”

Fictional realism creates a potent sense of authenticity, and often in a visceral manner, because of its precisely rendered imitations of human experience. Regional fiction takes realism one step further by grounding such imitations in a local setting, literally rendering stories and characters as real as your next-door neighbors. Eric Cyr’s new collection of short stories, *Here It Snows in June*, offers an example of fiction that is abundantly authentic to American Midwestern people.

Hailing from Duluth, Minnesota, Cyr sets the action lakeside and adorns his stories with the culture and customs of the Midwest. His use of meme-worthy Midwestern eccentricities to construct characters and plot movements renders them endearing and narratively effective. Passages like the following from “The Key” pull the curtain back on Cyr’s thorough familiarity with and affection for his home: 

> A summer night in Duluth is about as perfect a natural event as you can ask for, especially because the long cold of winter is always playing against it in the back of your mind. . . Even in the light, the lake looks like it goes on forever, and in the darkness it’s hard to believe it ever ends.

The same family names and siblings of characters occur frequently, enhancing the integrated structure. The Dinkels, for example, appear in “Fruit of Knowledge” and “Sacrifice Hit” and “Stuck.” Cyr is, however, very careful not to overpopulate the stories with the same people, avoiding the impression of one loose, underpinning narrative.

With few exceptions, Cyr’s protagonists are boys and men. Exhaustively, he narrates the male experience, often at critical inflection points. “Ars Moriendi” contemplates a young boy with cancer. “The Key” observes a seminarian in his twenties who realizes, despairingly, that the path is not for him. “Fruit of Knowledge” follows a boy in puberty who is starting to intuit the importance of his father in his desire for manhood. “The Old Scout” listens to two elderly men who, in conversation, discover the possibility that their nostalgia for the old days might be misguided. “Each the Size of a Child’s Heart” studies a married man in midlife who needs distance from his wife to grasp the deep unhappiness in his marriage. “Stuck” gazes on a young husband and father who only begins to grasp the sacrificial demands of family life. “Stealthy as the Night” considers an older man who has fallen out with his son and is aggressively obsessed with his property line. “Primogeniture” surveys the capacity for fathers to pass on their immaturity to their sons. “Jack” tells of a father who realizes his basic incapacity to obstruct his son’s ultimate free will. “A Scout Is Reverent” discerns how groups of boys function and how the dynamics within them drive boys either to belonging or to isolation (and perhaps to both at once). “Cold Is a State of Mind” satirizes men finding meaning in a fundamentally backseat approach to life, both through conditioning and conscious aspiration. 

Cyr is clearly aware of the ongoing cultural discourse surrounding men, but he makes no commentary or reference to it. His stories rather demonstrate extensive reflection on the male experience in his own life, the flesh-and-blood characters who surround him, and his perception rings refreshingly true.

The flash fiction that punctuates the collection is a particular jewel. The first story in *Here It Snows in June*, “Ars Moriendi,” serves almost as a preface that lays out the predominant themes of the volume in the span of a single page. A boy with cancer sneaks out into the woods, happens upon a deer skull, and returns home to add it to his trinket collection. With a few strokes, Cyr navigates naturalism, masculine loneliness, and the constant nearness of death. His marvelous description of the deer skull in the boy’s hands channels nature’s indifference to creatures who die before maturity: 

> The mice and porcupines had been at them—a concave hollow was chewed out of the left antler, a long smooth depression that could hold a tablespoon of hot chocolate or the thick red cough syrup he took in the morning and at night before bed. He ran his fingers over the bumps at the base of each antler, not worn down but sharp and hard. The deer had died when the horns were new, before it had had time to rub them smooth.

Later on in the volume, “Jack” follows a single action: A boy climbs a barn and jumps off while his parents look on in fear and trembling. The story is not so much concerned with what happens to Jack but with the fact that his parents realize their son’s individual, ultimately independent personhood. “You know,” the dad says at the beginning, “in the old days only a quarter of kids even make it to adolescence.” In curt lines of dialogue, ably positioned alongside Jack’s step-by-step ascent, the parents recognize, chafe against, and submit to the boy’s discovery of self and exercise of free will.

> “Can’t we help him?” she asked. I didn’t answer, because she knew it already. “But we don’t live in the old days,” she said, like she was pleading with me. Like I could do something about it.

A father himself, Cyr shows with sympathy the fundamental powerlessness of parents to determine a child’s life; they can guide and direct only so much before a child must take over, and the course of surrendering that control is itself a rite of passage.

Cyr’s fiction has been described as “[Midwestern Gothic](https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/the-midwestern-gothic-stories-of-eric-cyr/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).” Flannery O’Connor, the queen of Gothic, famously argued for shouting to the hard of hearing and drawing large and startling figures for the blind. Certainly, elements of Gothic fiction figure into the stories of *Here It Snows in June*, such as deer skulls and severed fingers and bears that smell like lavender, to evoke a supernatural cosmic reality that is often unconcerned with the concerns of characters. 

On the whole, however, Cyr’s depiction of large and startling figures is less direct. The characters themselves are not extraordinary at all but are the most average people in America. They are high school athletes nervous about asking girls to prom; old men estranged from their children and furious about their neighbors’ untrimmed trees; diehard football fans who would give anything to have their team win the Super Bowl just once in their life (perhaps Cyr is showing a little too much of himself here?). Common resentments, inherited desires, and typical anxieties, which so often intertwine in a complicated web, prove, if we’re honest, to be much larger and more significant than we often admit.

At the same time, however, Cyr also emphasizes the tendency to conjure up large and startling figures for ourselves, mostly to debilitating effect. For Bob in “Stealthy As the Night,” decades of bitterness with his wife, shame over his son’s disavowal of him, and indignation over his neighbor’s neglect of trees on the property line all morph into one baggy beast that ultimately steers him astray: 

> A shuddering tree branch scraped across the window. Bob pushed himself up and looked around the dark bedroom. He held himself still, his ears alert. His eyes could barely make out the familiar forms of the room. *And Chris—she blamed Bob for Chris leaving, for Chris never coming around, but it wasn’t just him.* The rustle of the wind in the trees outside. Nothing else. Then a stronger gust swept through the boughs again and the scrape came back, repeated its refrain. *If she was really so good as she thought, she could have kept Chris around on her own. But he’s gone. And good riddance.* Long oak branches tapped against the window next to their bed. Pointed tips screeched and dragged across the dry glass. *Damn him. Damn her. Damn Tom and his trees.*

Three stories, “Sacrifice Hit,” “Castor and Pollux,” and the title story, center on a high school athlete, Kyle Sorengaard (the last name is maybe a little on the nose). The “Kyle” stories are a kind of suburban domestic *Divine Comedy*. “Sacrifice Hit” imagines the baseball field for a church rec league as an Inferno, and Kyle is a sore loser. His parish priest, the pitcher for the other team whom Kyle admires very highly, has been striking Kyle out and talking smack, which pricks his pride. Kyle’s actions show his insecurity, and the replacement of description with suggestion creates a distinct intensity:

> “Nice contact, Thor,” Father called. “One of these times you’re gonna get it to the outfield.”

> Kyle kept his head down as he jogged back to the dugout.

> “Sounded painful, though. You must be sore after that one. Right, Sorengaard? Sore?”

> Kyle hung up his bat without looking back.

> “Don’t you have a sense of humor?”

> Kyle took his place on the bench, trying to shake the stingers out of his hands.

In the final inning, when he’s at bat with two outs and a chance to win, he relishes the chance of getting one over on the priest, but when he catches the priest in the shin with his hit, Kyle trips on the way to the bag and gets tagged out. The story yields immediate contrapasso, not so much a didactic story of wrath but a scrutiny of its internal movements.

In “Castor and Pollux,” Kyle’s aspirations for art school chafe against his dad’s disapproval, and it stirs his self-pity, which manifests in a debilitating habit of imagining himself conducting witty takedowns. Cyr’s entry into teenage thought patterns produces some of his finest passages, in turn hilarious and cringey.

In the end, his immaturity is purged, literally beaten, out of him. Kyle, anxious to realize one of his imagined conquests, throws a rock through the windshield of a passing car, and the driver chases him down. Kyle then becomes postured, violently, like Dante, who ends each poem in the *Comedy* looking up at the stars: “Through the slits of his eyes Kyle looked beyond the boy’s face and saw the red burn of Mars, the spark of Castor and Pollux sliding through the night sky. He gave himself up to the beating, to the blows of the boy’s fists against his face, to the night.”

In “Here It Snows in June,” three different shades of Beatrice present themselves, almost certainly signifying Kierkegaard’s three stages of life: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. The first girl, Greta, is Kyle’s first crush, her beauty compelling him, among other things, to behave stupidly in front of her and attempt audacious prom proposals: “Her arm was long and shapely and smooth. Every muscle of her body was perfect, moved perfectly, entranced without effort.” She turns him down for prom, and begrudgingly, he brings his best friend’s pretty younger sister, Sophie, who surprises him with her charm and kindness and makes him sensitive to his conduct. “He knew he should dance with Sophie again. Needed to—wanted to, even.” The third Beatrice appears silently and without apparent effect; after the prom, the narrative jumps forward a decade, and Kyle is already a husband and a father, performing ordinary household duties. Kyle is not a saint; past insecurities and regrets still weigh heavy. But now given over to serving his wife and baby, he has been inwardly turned toward a selfless life, “glad for the request and the task to fulfill,” in tune with Kierkegaard’s remark from his *Journals* that “the highest of all is not to understand the highest but to act upon it.”

Despite his evident mastery of many fictional approaches, Cyr’s voice remains obscure. It is difficult to tell what makes an Eric Cyr story an Eric Cyr story, beyond the distinctive Midwestern mood. In time, it may only depend on how Cyr follows up on his debut. His formation of adolescent characters, particularly teenagers, is truly exceptional, and it would not be too much to expect that to become a signature element in his fiction.

Short stories of the variety given in *Here It Snows in June* have a marked potential to convince people to pick up literature again. The familiar suburban subject matter combined with the measured length of the stories and the earned simplicity of the prose produces accessible, realist fiction that can truly rekindle a love of stories and reading through its effective authenticity. We can only hope that popular fiction, fiction of the people, takes the same turn Cyr has modeled here.
### Hiding in Plain Sight: the Potential of Christian Higher Education
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/hiding-in-plain-sight-the-potential-of-christian-higher-education/
Last updated: 2026-10-20T11:00:00.000Z
In the last few years, public higher education has been shaken up by the emergence of new civics-related centers and schools. Examples include the Hamilton School at the University of Florida, the School of Civic Leadership at University of Texas Austin, and The Ohio State University’s Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society. Typically begun with politically conservative motives and money, these centers aim to foster viewpoint diversity and to increase scholarly research and teaching in American civic thought. 

These new centers and schools have so far been very well-funded and have attracted a great deal of positive and negative attention. In many cases, these programs have increased the number of faculty and courses related to traditional topics and the “Western civilization” beat. There is no real dispute that Americans could benefit from more and better civics education. However, many of these programs have had explicitly political foundings and they are well-funded while other disciplines and departments are being starved. In many cases, the newly hired faculty also duplicate the skills of existing faculty in other departments, creating internal competition for students and challenging the ability of new faculty in the schools and centers to integrate into the broader campus community. 

The future of this civic center movement has yet to unfold, but those involved have correctly assessed the role of education in the civic imagination. Funding faculty, courses, and programming on the American founding or diplomacy or the Great Books gives college students the opportunity to seize hold of these stories and ideas for themselves. Our country may indeed be a better place if young people are studying the Constitution and the Federalist Papers and reading the Great Books. Arguably, if these centers can overcome politicization, they can help inculcate civic virtue in the rising generation. 

Just as the American civic imagination is a significant part of our national heritage, so is the Christian imagination. As a 2026 fellow for [the Center for Christianity & Public Life](https://www.ccpubliclife.org/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), I’ve spent the last nine months soaking in the wisdom of mentors, bonding with other fellows, practicing spiritual formation, and thinking about the viability of Christian resources for public life. And this has led me to an even firmer conviction about the untapped potential of Christian higher education. 

Scattered across our country are Christian colleges and universities of various shapes and sizes. Some are large and well-known, like Baylor and Notre Dame. More are smaller, some are denominationally specific, some are quite historic, and others are relatively young. In a sense, each of them is a small center for the Christian imagination. Each of them is an incubator for future Christian leaders, equipped both spiritually and academically. 

The Christian liberal arts tradition is especially valuable for civic life. Students who read *Antigone,* Socrates’ “Crito,” Augustine’s *City of God*, and Erasmus’s *Education of a Christian Prince*—as students in my university’s honors program (or history majors) typically will—are cultivating a Christian civic imagination the world desperately needs. The same is true at dozens of similarly mid-sized Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU) schools, who are likewise upholding the Christian liberal arts tradition. When I was an undergraduate at Messiah University (and not in honors), I read Plato’s *Republic* and Hobbes’s *Leviathan* in my first semester. I took classes on the Old Testament and wisdom literature despite not being a biblical studies or ministry major. At Calvin University, Rebecca DeYoung is teaching the Christian virtues, which can be transformative for civic engagement. Peruse the [reading list](https://www.georgefox.edu/honors-program/books.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of George Fox’s Great Books honors program. Consider the kind of graduate this type of education can produce. 

An ideal graduate of a Christian liberal arts university is a testament to the viability of Christian resources in public life. There are over 500,000 CCCU students, and many of the over 170 CCCU schools are liberal arts universities, where students are exposed to both Christian thought and the Western tradition. These are students who read Locke and Leviticus, Rousseau and Romans. Whether or not they study civic thought, they are being trained to engage well in the civic sphere.

Yet nearly all Christian liberal arts institutions are tuition-dependent and many of them are closing for lack of resources. Joshua Travis Brown’s *Capitalizing on College* (2025) explains the crisis facing Christian higher education the various survival strategies schools are adopting. The flame of Christian imagination is burning, but it is not especially well fed. We have not one endowed chair in history or in honors at my university. The same is true at many CCCU schools. 

While others are pushing to found centers to cultivate civic thought and virtue, we already have institutions designed to cultivate Christian thought and virtue. We do not need to found them. We need to fund them. 

When we think about showcasing the value of Christian resources in the public sphere, we should not only think about Christians and Christian programming in prominent institutions, but about making more Christian institutions prominent. Imagine the impact of endowed chairs in the liberal arts across CCCU schools. We can have *more* students who are familiar with *Common Sense* and Corinthians, who understand the difference between Sparta and Athens, and who can ponder the relationship between Athens and Jerusalem. 

Christian higher education is a great example of potential hiding in plain sight. While others seek to establish schools and centers for what they value, we have existing centers for Christian thought. We should support them as eagerly as today’s founders of centers for civic thought support theirs. After all, Christian resources are both timely and transcendent.
### Russell Kirk’s Understanding of a Christian America
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/russell-kirks-understanding-of-a-christian-america/
Last updated: 2026-10-19T11:00:07.000Z
**Michael Lucchese.** [***Russell Kirk on America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776***](https://creedandculture.com/books/on-america-how-to-understand-the-legacy-of-1776/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Creed & Culture, 2026\. $28.00\. 234 pp.**

As the United States has crested its 250th anniversary, this is a fitting occasion to consecrate anew the spiritual and moral underpinnings of our Founding, the things that continue to hold our country together. No American thinker recognized this need for renewal more in his lifetime than Russell Kirk. Michael Lucchese’s careful selection of Kirk’s thoughts on America’s spiritual and moral order, *Russell Kirk on America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776*, answers many of the questions that Protestant Christians are wrestling with regarding America’s Christian roots. 

The book speaks to three aspects of American civil order and national character: the roots of our moral and spiritual constituted order; the statesmen who understood and cultivated the American character; and the writers, poets, and lettered men who gave expression to the American imagination. In his introduction to the volume, Bradley Birzer notes that it was Kirk’s attachment to the spiritual loves and duties in his home, family, and local community that centered his love of country on the Permanent Things. 

For Kirk, a love of America is not a nationalism that binds smaller loves together, but rather a spreading tree that gives protection to those local loves and is itself comprised of the smaller things. But all these loves are also connected to the higher love of God. Kirk does not compromise the Christian essence of America, nor does he insist on a national force which compels the conscience. Instead, Kirk believes in a republic of laws—not men—under God, and in defense of an ordered liberty of loves. To that end, three aspects of the American order emerge from this volume: the bulwarks of order in our Founding; the landmarks of liberty that have preserved this order; and the wardrobe of imagination which has given it life and vitality.

## **The Bulwarks of Order**

Kirk claims that America is not just a religious nation, but that its first principles were founded on the Bible and that its people constituted a Christian nation. He states that all our presidents have been self-professing Christians, save perhaps Jefferson, and that not one early statesman in America was a professing atheist. Nevertheless, this Christian civil social order was not a nationalism of force or legal compulsion, but rather one rooted in local customs, proliferated variety, and toleration for conscience. 

The moral principles of Christianity nurtured America’s common law, but it was not subject to religious or political dogma. Kirk does not subscribe to a propositional or nationalist view of America, but rather one rooted in institutions and cultural customs of British origins, though not ethnically so, as many other ethnicities blended into the British institutional orientation of America. This “ancient constitution,” or an unwritten patrimony and order of institutions inherited from forefathers who came to America’s shores, is the real founding of America, more than its ratification and propositional expression in 1765-1787.

As such, Kirk holds a conservative view of the so-called American Revolution and the national formation of the United States under the Constitution. Rather than a radical revolution, the genius of the American settlement lies in its preservation of prior customary rights of Englishmen under a federal system of government and political independence. If it was a revolution, Kirk conceives of the American settlement as a revolving return to first principles under a legal order which protects them, rather than a new proposition or experiment in liberty. 

The novelty of this order is that it balanced the claims of order and liberty, rather than establishing a new settlement. America was neither a French Revolutionary experiment in universal rights of man independent of civil and social history and context, nor was it a new nationalist experiment. There were no simple metaphysical principles of revolution in America like “liberty, equality, fraternity” as there were for the French. Kirk is quite clear about the dangers of seeing America as a nationalist experiment in self-determination, arguing that the American use of the word “revolution” often breeds a romantic notion of nationalistic movements and democratic reform that does not reflect America’s origins.

## **The Landmarks of Liberty**

Against the chaos of the present modern decadence of America, Kirk sets the men of the past and the successive brilliance of past American ages as landmarks that continue to safeguard some of our liberties and hold back the flood of institutional collapse. 

Indeed, Kirk sees that America’s great figures were always contesting against disorder and gave America a sense of place. To the average reader, Kirk’s choices may perhaps be a bit obscure, but this is only because we do not read our history as we ought. Rather than Jefferson or Washington, Kirk chooses John Adams and his argument for aristocracy rooted in nature. Any people who wish to abolish a virtuous aristocracy will only end up with a vicious one. Against Jefferson‘s egalitarian model for an agrarian republic, Kirk sets Randolph of Roanoke as representative of the agrarian interest to America. Randolph’s commitment to the aristocratic squirearchy in the old Tidewater of Virginia made him the defender of the old county and parish system, as opposed to an egalitarian view of western agrarian expansionism. Randolph also held back America from committing to a standing military presence. These figures led the way for an American mission.

Kirk turns to Orestes Bronson for a description of the character and foundation of the American Republic, and its mission and purpose in history. Bronson in his book *Under God* argued that the popular interest in democracy must exist under God’s sovereignty, and that it is established customary local authorities that root the freedoms in America into a godly order. Bronson courageously attacked individualistic humanitarianism as the foundation for the American Republic. The Republic must be democratic in form, but not in essence. 

America’s Providential mission, as Bronson wrote in his book *The American Republic*, is to reconcile the claims of order and liberty inside a just society for free American citizens. Further, Bronson argued that democracy was not classless or placeless, but rather organically nurtured authority and liberty inside the territorial growth of customary democratic republican institutions. This localism under the sovereignty of God made America strong. Bronson thus breathed meaning into the American Republic. Bronson is Kirk‘s linchpin between the Founding and early Republic and its more contemporary manifestations.

Kirk is no stodgy traditionalist who hates the present. Like Randolph and the old Republicans, Kirk believes that Abraham Lincoln was dedicated to that high old Roman virtue and exemplified all the character traits of a republican leader such as Washington, including piety, gravity, and constancy. Kirk’s Lincoln is no Caesar. 

If Lincoln was the beginning of the contemporary guardians of America, Ronald Reagan was the bookend in Kirk’s lifetime, who reinvigorated American statesmanship. Kirk sees Reagan as the initiator of what he called a conservative audacity (lifting audacity from Benjamin Disraeli); a nearly cinematic propensity to renew and re-imagine America’s mission and to protect what both Reagan and Kirk called the “walls of order” against the welfare state at home and Communism abroad. It is precisely because Reagan had imagination and an effortlessly poetic and humorous way of expressing truth that he was so successful at guarding American liberties.

## **The Wardrobe of Imagination**

And it is to the imagination that Kirk finally turns for any hope of cultural renewal and reinvigorating the spirit of the American Republic in contemporary times. Poetry and not policy will save the American Republic; a poetry rooted in the Christian truths of man before his Maker and Redeemer, and a poetry rooted in a realistic sense of place. Kirk rightly notes that America inherited from the British Isles its great poetic sensibility and that the Anglo-American character of our institutions is best suited to the expressions of writers and poets from the British Isles.

Against the American Transcendentalists, such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Lowell, Nathaniel Hawthorne stands as an example, not of an abstract dreamer in the individual goodness of man, but rather as a melancholic reminder of the problems of conscience in the sinful heart of man. As Sir Walter Scott did in Britain, Hawthorne, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper rooted the American imagination inside a conservative spirit and reverence for dead generations.

Hawthorne, more than any other American author, exhibited this reverence, and combined it with a love of the mystery of antiquity, without romanticizing the quarrels and struggles of old families and the nature of sinful man. We can learn from the lessons of Ecclesiastes; that is the essence of Hawthorn’s spirit, and it is rooted in Hawthorn‘s Calvinistic critique of American Puritanism. 

The Calvinistic spirit runs strong through American literature, argues Kirk, but when divorced from theology, in its secular forms it has often substituted a reverence for God with a worship of the individual. Mark Twain and Henry and Brooke Adams serve as Kirk’s examples. Like modern Stoics set against the onslaught of an overwhelming mechanistic enemy, they stood against the scientific determinism of Huxley and Spencer, but without any spiritual hope.

Spiritual hope returns to the American mind through the poets T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost, just as the cataclysms of the World Wars pressed the need for recovering the purpose of man under God as his Maker and Redeemer through Christ. Eliot firmly admits the Christian truth that time in this world is ultimately unredeemable as sinful time, yet he believes that with redemption in the incarnation of Jesus Christ comes the redemption of our time. 

While all of man’s works are ultimately doomed to fading in this life, man plants seeds for eternity here only as a redeemed creature by Christ. These seeds are what Kirk called the Permanent Things of life. The conservation of these Permanent Things in the soul and in society as incarnational truths sanctified in Christ, nurtures a love for God and for the sense of place and belonging in this life. 

While Eliot was metaphysical in his poetic cast of mind, Robert Frost implanted the same truths inside America. His poetry of old America, his defense of a conservative ethos, if not exactly a conservative political philosophy, roots him both into place and in the American tradition. Humanity and art challenge the utilitarian revision of education and the radicalism of a reckless view of life against that which is old and good. Frost is a champion of American order and purpose.

For Kirk, place itself is poetic. In his essay on Mecosta County, he describes his venerable old family estate, the local life that emerged in Mecosta as part of the settler community of the logging era, and his hopes for its charms to reinvigorate the American order. Mecosta exhibits what Kirk believed to be an unwritten and organic constitution to America that grounded its Constitutional order inside “little platoons” of family loyalties, personal loves, and friendly institutions.

## **Conclusion**

Kirk reinvigorates the spirit of America by giving us a way of life; or rather by reminding us of the way of life which we have been historically given by a sovereign and almighty Providence. Cultural renewal begins with gratitude; a gratitude for the many blessings from God that have been granted to our forefathers, and that continue to come down to us. This gratitude does not keep Kirk back from criticizing those elements of American thinking that have been averse to God‘s design. Nor does his gratitude place America as the center of the world, or conflate the covenantal order of America with man’s spiritual redemption in Jesus Christ. It is not nationalism, but conservatism at its highest. 

It is a conservatism of the higher meaning of man as a redeemable creature, of a love of place, and of a blessed order and variety of American institutional life.

(Disclosure: The editor of this volume, Michael Lucchese, serves on the board of *Mere Orthodoxy*'s parent organization, the Institute for Christianity and Common Life.)
### The Trojan Horse in Nolan’s Odyssey: Christianity Hidden in Zeus’s Law
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-trojan-horse-in-nolans-odyssey-christianity-hidden-in-zeuss-law/
Last updated: 2026-10-19T11:00:01.000Z
Certainly, Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s *Odyssey* this past summer has been a triumph—both critically and financially, far surpassing the $1 billion threshold. Yet it has also engendered much reflection, particularly concerning its contrasts with Homer’s original poem and Nolan’s attempts to modernize and contextualize it for contemporary audiences living in a demythologized age. (For examples, see: [demythologizing it toward a materialist worldview](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/odyssey-apparent-magic-nolan/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), [introducing mythology](https://mereorthodoxy.com/remythologizing-the-myths-christopher-nolans-odyssey-and-the-fractures-in-a-secular-age/).) 

One such contrast is the paramount importance Nolan gives to what he calls Zeus’s law (*xenia*). In doing so, Nolan takes what is certainly a major key in Homer’s epic (e.g., the suitors violating hospitality, the Laestrygonians attacking Odysseus’s men instead of offering them food) and elevates it into something like the melody and moral center of the story.

He leans into this theme so much that the climax of the movie is tantamount to a confession one might find in one’s local Catholic parish. Penelope sits behind a mesh divider, receiving the words of her long-lost husband. There Odysseus confesses to what Nolan uniquely presents as his ultimate crime—the crime which has beset him with rampant guilt in the form of flashbacks and appearances by the goddess Athena throughout the film. His crime is that he violated the law of Zeus. 

The infamous Trojan horse, the idea created by Odysseus, had been presented as a gift to the goddess Athena, but concealed within the gift was not an offering, but death—an army that would lay waste to the city. As Odysseus recalls—"ten years of rage pour out in one night.” 

“One man’s trick,” he confesses bitterly to Penelope, “to break Zeus’s law forever.”

The consequences of that violation reverberate throughout the film, particularly in the rise of the “Sea Peoples,” the nebulous name given to the maritime raiders who haunted the eastern Mediterranean as the Bronze Age gave way. In Nolan’s telling, the term eventually comes to implicate Odysseus and his own men. The man who violated the law of hospitality has himself become one of the uncivilized marauders from whom civilized people need protection.

The breaking of the law leads to the breakdown of society.

In this, Nolan unmistakenly transforms what is often seen as a story of Odysseus’s hubris, the gods, and the long journey home, into a story centered on Zeus and his law. And this “trick” of Nolan has not gone unnoticed—not only Nolan’s emphasis on *xenia*, but also the way he defines it.

For instance, shortly after the film’s release, the liberal NYT commentator and podcaster, Ezra Klein, compellingly [argued](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=livIbni7x7o&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that Nolan’s use of *xenia* in his film adaptationis something of a Trojan Horse for a contemporary and incisive political message against what he sees as the uncivilized and xenophobic ethos represented in the Trump era. 

While the political question remains, Nolan himself made the contemporary relevance explicit. In an interview with the [*New York Times*](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/movies/odyssey-christopher-nolan.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in late June, he said:

The greatness of the poem is such that you approach these things as if they’re foreign and ancient, then as you explore them, they suddenly become stunningly relevant. Zeus’s law, it’s the Golden Rule — treat as you would be treated — and with a theological underpinning in their world, that you might be a god in disguise … It’s the only way society can function … That’s everything in terms of holding civilization together or even defining civilization.

Note within Nolan’s telling, Zeus’s law (*xenia*) is more than a mere archaic custom. It is what holds civilization together. But curiously, Nolan calls Zeus’s law “the Golden Rule” and situates it as a “theological underpinning of the world.” The ethical practice is fixed to a transcendent law. 

## **Whose Golden Rule?** 

The identification of Zeus’s law as the Golden Rule sounds natural to our modern ears, but it may sound natural because we are not ancient Greeks. To them, Nolan’s description might sound entirely foreign. 

Laure Puckett-Pope explored this question in an article for [*Elle*](https://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/a73170278/the-odyssey-movie-zeus-law-explained/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), reaching out to two classics professors to ask whether they recognized in Homer the concept of *xenia* Nolan describes.

“In short, no—there was no conception of a ‘Zeus’s law’ in the sense that Nolan seems to present it.” Jim Crozier, professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Classics, Archaeology, and Religion at the University of Missouri.

Suzanne Lye, professor in the Department of Classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, agreed. “‘Zeus’s law’ isn’t a thing,” she explained. “In Ancient Greece … there were human laws and expectations for behavior related to certain areas … but there was no singular set of codified laws from the gods or even one master law that applied across the Greek world.”

In other words, Nolan’s presentation of the universality and uniformity of *xenia* is not true to antiquity. That does not mean that *xenia* was unreal or unimportant per se.

As Puckett-Pope explains, *xenia* governed hospitality and “guest friendship.” Hosts had obligations toward their guests, and guests had obligations toward their hosts. Crozier notes that hosts were not to steal from, exploit, or harm a guest, while guests were expected to honor their hosts. As Nolan’s interview already indicated, in a world without hotels, Buc-ee’s, or interstates, where travel was genuinely dangerous, the ability to trust strangers mattered enormously.

Yet Lye cautions against identifying this ancient practice with the Golden Rule. As she explains to *Elle*, “For \[xenia\] specifically, it was more of an ‘if you don’t act in certain ritual ways around being a host and guest, then you might offend Zeus Xenios and either you, your family, or your community will be in big trouble.” That is why Penelope and Telemachus could not expel the suitors, who were their guests, from their home. 

## **The God Who Loves the Stranger**

This contrast becomes clearer when one examines the biblical vision of neighbor-love which undergirds Jesus’s presentation of the famed Golden Rule in Matthew 7:12\. 

The imperative to love one’s neighbor originally found in Leviticus 19:18 is one of the most influential texts in early Christian literature and is directly cited or alluded to by numerous New Testament writers (Matt 22:37-40; Mark 12:28-31; Rom 13:9-10; Gal 5:14; Jas 2:8). 

Yet the first command to “love your neighbor as yourself” does not appear as an isolated ethical maxim. In the verses prior, we find a list of prohibitions that culminates in the preeminent command to love in verse 18 (Lev 19:12-13, 15-16, 18a). Love is not simply another command, but functions as the foundation and unifying principle of these commands and the whole law. 

And importantly, the chapter eventually extends and apply this language explicitly to the stranger: 

> When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God. (Lev 19:33-34)

The word “stranger” here should not be reduced to humanity in the abstract, or at a distance. The Hebrew *gēr* refers to the outsider who has come near—a non-Israelite living among Israel and particularly vulnerable to exploitation. The culturally distinct outsider dwelling in Israel’s midst is not to be wronged but treated “as the native among you” and loved “as yourself.” This is more than a command designed to make travel possible in the Ancient Near East.

Biblical hospitality is not preeminently grounded in a system of reciprocity either—"I welcome you because someday I may need you to welcome me.” Nor is the deepest motivation the avoidance of divine punishment, the possibility that one might accidentally turn away an angel or Nolan’s “gods” in disguise (though it’s true; cf. Heb 13:2), or even the preservation of civilization against a descent into something resembling Nolan’s “Sea Peoples.” 

Those all may provide good and even biblical rationales for hospitality. But they are not its foundation. 

A parallel passage makes this foundation a bit clearer—the Lord himself “loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing,” and on that basis commands Israel, “Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Deut 10:18-19). 

Israel must love the stranger because God himself redemptively loves the stranger. Hospitality, then, is not so much a system of reciprocity necessary for survival, but an invitation to response. It is act by which one responds to and imitates God’s character. 

This is why neighbor love belongs within Leviticus’s larger concern for holiness. “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy” frames the chapter (Lev. 19:2). The repeated refrain “I am the LORD” ties Israel’s seemingly disparate ethical obligations back to the character of the God whose people they are. Ritual purity cannot be separated from ethical purity. 

So, the law of hospitality does not merely keep the “Sea Peoples” at bay. It bears witness to a holy and loving God.

## **A Trojan Horse from Jerusalem** 

This helps explain what is so revealing about Nolan’s identification of *xenia* with the Golden Rule.

Nolan is putting his finger on the pulse of a moral intuition that appears self-evident to modern Western audiences: “Of course we should treat the stranger as we ourselves would wish to be treated.” But self-evident to us does not mean self-evident everywhere and always. 

Charles Taylor, in his seminal work *A Secular Age*, describes a modern social order that initially understood human flourishing in explicitly theological terms but gradually came to imagine that same order without reference to God:

> At first, the social order is seen as offering us a blueprint for how things, in the human realm, can hang together to our mutual benefit, and this is identified with the plan of Providence, what God asks us to realize. But it is in the nature of a self-sufficient immanent order that it can be envisaged without reference to God; and very soon the proper blueprint is attributed to Nature.

The blueprint remains, even when its theological origins are forgotten. The banquet hall remains full of ungrateful guests, even while the host of the feast is not remembered and the gratitude is assigned elsewhere. 

Historian Tom Holland (not to be confused with the actor playing Odysseus’s son, Telemachus), makes a similar argument in *Dominion*. Many values that modern Westerners, including Nolan, regard as simply humane or universal, Holland argues, bear the unmistakable imprint of Christianity:

> Humanism derives ultimately from claims made in the Bible: that humans are made in God’s image; that his Son died equally for everyone; that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female … that human beings have rights; that they are born equal … these were never self-evident truths.

And so, we see, Nolan’s *xenia* offers a small but illuminating example. 

Again, the claim is not that Christianity invented hospitality or concern for the stranger. The Greeks clearly valued both. Christians know well that the doctrine of common grace gives Christians every reason to expect genuine moral knowledge outside the covenant people of God (cf. Rom 2:15).

The more particular claim is that Nolan interprets the ancient institution of *xenia* through a universal moral category that belongs to the Christian of neighbor-love rather than to ancient Greek guest-friendship.

Crozier draws the same distinction: “Is that the same as the ‘Golden Rule’? I would say it is not—*I think Nolan is clearly channeling that Christian concept into the film as an innovation of his own*.” (emphasis mine) 

That is the striking thing about Nolan’s adaptation. Whether consciously or not, he takes something authentically Greek and makes it intelligible to us through a moral imagination profoundly indebted to and shaped by Christianity. 

As Odysseus cannot escape the judgment of the gods, so too can Nolan, and even we, cannot escape a gospel-shaped moral imagination. 

## **The God Who Became the Stranger**

But wondrously, the biblical vision of hospitality rests not in a proposition or prescription, but in a person.

The God who commands his people to love the stranger is the same God who, in Christ, entered into the world as a stranger. “He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him” (John 1:11).

And yet the rejected stranger becomes the gracious host. Not to friends and fellow residents, but to rebels and sojourners. The glorious truth is that Christ receives sinners. And through his death, those who were once “strangers to the covenants of promise” are “brought near by the blood of Christ” and made “members of the household of God” (Eph 2:12-13, 19).

This gives true hospitality its deepest and most abiding logic.

We do not welcome primarily because hospitality keeps civilization functioning, though it does. We do not welcome because the stranger may someday reciprocate, though she may. We do not welcome merely because refusing hospitality may bring the just judgement of God, though Scripture tells us it will (cf. Matt 25:44). 

Biblical hospitality at its core teaches that we welcome others because God has welcomed us in Christ Jesus (Rom 12:13; 1 Tim 3:2, 5:10; Titus 1:8; Heb 13:2; 1 Pet 4:9) It is a way of life that “seeks to make strangers neighbors, and neighbors family of God,” as Rosaria Butterfield put it in *The Gospel Comes with a House Key*.

As Christian writer Christopher Watkin might say, this is not the logic of reciprocity but of mutuality and abundance. 

Nolan’s *Odyssey* sees something true: the violation of hospitality destroys both guest and host. In his retelling, when Odysseus turns a gift into a weapon, he participates in the undoing of the civilized world, and his end is exile. 

But though Nolan’s *xenia* is grammatically Greek, it is syntactically Christian. The vocabulary of *xenia* comes from Homer, but its moral logic goes beyond the reciprocal guest-friendship of the ancient world. Its accent sounds distinctly like the biblical command to love the stranger as oneself. 

Perhaps the Trojan Horse hidden inside Nolan’s *Odyssey* is not simply the political message some interpreters on both sides of the culture war have suspected. The more surprising passenger, perhaps even to Nolan himself, is a vision of hospitality that, while not fully Christian, bears the unmistakable shape of the gospel under the guise of Zeus’s law.
### Exercising Dominion After Generative Artificial Intelligence
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/exercising-dominion-after-generative-artificial-intelligence/
Last updated: 2026-10-16T10:59:59.000Z
In the concluding paragraph to his June 2025 *Mere Orthodoxy* piece entitled “[Artificial Intelligence, At Your Service](https://mereorthodoxy.com/secular-humanism-minus-the-humanism/),” Aston Fearon wrote, “If we radically outsource this task of dominion we do so to our own destruction. It will lead to a withering away of our abilities and capacities, till there’s little left of humanity’s agency, but a shell whose purpose is to make sure the machine stays functioning.” Major [Evangelical](https://erlc.com/policy-content/artificial-intelligence-an-evangelical-statement-of-principles/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and [Catholic](https://www.vatican.va/roman%5Fcuria/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc%5Fddf%5Fdoc%5F20250128%5Fantiqua-et-nova%5Fen.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) bodies have issued formal statements on AI encouraging caution in its use and clarity in its limitations. They affirm that AI does not bear the image of God, form authentic relationships rooted in vulnerability, or exercise true moral agency. Recent book-length [theology](https://dawnsutherland.org/frombabeltoai/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) draws parallels between AI and Babel and provides a sustained account of AI as idolatry-shaped power.

I share these concerns. Yet, AI is essential to [maintain the economic and security infrastructure](https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Americas-AI-Action-Plan.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of nations that preserve hard-fought religious freedom in the face of those who would surveil and persecute it. Rightly contained, AI can aid humans in exercising dominion. 

However, AI is different from any prior tool or technology because of its ability to learn iteratively, act in an agentic manner, mimic human communications patterns, and creatively develop approaches to accomplish complex goals. So, Mr. Fearon’s important cautions warrant refinement. God indeed equipped humans with unique capabilities to exercise dominion. What are these unique capabilities according to God’s Word and to what extent is AI functionally replicating them? Exegesis of the Pentateuch suggests they include designing and creating artifacts, creating language, forming relationships, moral choice, and leadership.

## **Human Capabilities in Exercising Dominion**

**Designing and creating artifacts** means the ability to make physical objects, processes, and tools through work. Exodus 31:1-11 contains the gifting of the Spirit to Bezalel (the first gifting in Scripture) to use skill and wisdom to create artifacts and guide the building of the Tabernacle. The people participated in the building of God’s dwelling place among them. The Lord called (*qārāʾ* / קָרָ֣א) Bezalel and filled him with the Spirit of God (Exod 31:2). The call of Bezalel is the first time a person is filled with the Spirit in the Torah. Further, the verb used links the call of Bezalel with the call of Moses. With this call to Bezalel and gift of the Spirit came four capacities: ability or wisdom (*ḥokmâ* / חָכְמָ֛ה), intelligence (*təbûnâ /* תְבוּנָ֥ה), knowledge (*daʿat /* דַ֖עַת), and every kind of skill (*kol-məlāʾkâ /* כָל־מְלָאכָֽה) (Exod 31:3). Wisdom literature frequently uses the triad of wisdom, intelligence, and knowledge. Bezalel’s knowledge was presumably accumulated through experience and practice that embodied these attributes. The Hebrew *kol-məlāʾkâ* (every kind of skill) is expansive in its usage, referring to all work done in the six days of work referenced in the sabbath law in the Decalogue (Exod 20:9-10). God’s call broadens from Bezalel to Oholiab as a partner and then with the gift of “skill to all the skillful” (Exod 31:6).

**Creating language**refers to the ability to understand human language and communicate comprehensibly in return, as well as naming and meaning-making. Genesis 2:18-24 covers God’s delegation to Adam to name the animals, as well as the creation of the first woman and establishment of their ordered and united relationship. It establishes human authority to assign meaning to reality through language. By this point in creation, God had already named the day, night, sky, earth, and seas (Gen 1:5-10). The naming reinforces the theme that in giving this authority to Adam over the animals, the Lord is granting Adam a status and role in the governance of life and earth. The delegation of the authority to name is both a mighty blessing of God to humans and a powerful covenant responsibility, as its prominent placement in the canon shows. 

**Forming relationships** refers to the practical capability to establish a pattern of repeat interactions with other individuals and groups in human society. Marriage is the first human relationship and the union through which human life continues and grows in covenant. The physicality of the description is striking—Adam says that the woman is “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen 2:23). In the summary statement of the text, the two are described as one flesh (*bāśār ʾeḥād* / בָשָׂ֥ר אֶחָֽד) (Gen 2:24). Leviticus 19:9-18 provides the Lord’s guidance on broader social relationships and contains the pivotal law that summarizes right horizontal interaction among humans. Verse 18 summarizes the section, “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.” Love (*ʾāhab* / אָֽהַבְ) refers in different biblical contexts to love between husband / wife and parent / child, to romantic love, and to the human love of God. Of most relevance, *ʾāhab* is used in the context of love as devoted friendship. The verb functions here and in Leviticus 19:34 in the sense of interhuman conduct mandated by law in the form of genuine affection between friends with a sense of formal allegiance; it represents a behavior pattern. The object of the love in the text is ‘your neighbor’ (*rēʿăkā* / רֵֽעֲךָ֖); *rēʿăkā* is used three times in this section (v. 13,16,18) and over 180 times in the Hebrew Bible. It refers to anyone living nearby and most usage does not limit it to an ethnic in-group. Thus, the Lord gave humans the ability to form both near and distant relationships.

**Exercising moral choice** designates the ability to act in reality to achieve pre-defined purposes that may have moral implications for humans. Genesis 2:25–3:7 describes the relationship between Adam and Eve and its progression from innocence to sin and fall. It also provides a window into human will and decision making. The verses from 3:1–3:5 record a dialogue between the serpent and the woman, though Adam was likely present. Eve’s will, her attraction to the fruit, is expressed in two different forms: it was a “delight to the eyes” and “desired to make one wise.” The verb ‘desired’ in the second form (*neḥmād* / נֶחְמָ֤ד) is the same used in the prohibition of Exodus 20:17, the last of the Decalogue. In the Decalogue it is typically translated as “covet.” The wisdom that is the object of the coveting is not the same word as most often used to represent righteous wisdom, such as that personified in Proverbs. The root of the word ‘wise’ in this passage (*haśkîl / הַשְׂכִּ֔יל*) instead is more often a worldly success, competence, or prudence. It is both rooted in emotion and is agentic, a source of moral agency characteristic of humans. Indeed, action follows—the woman eats and shares the fruit with the man (Gen 3:6). Genesis 3:7 shows a critical element of human moral agency in a fallen state—self-reflection. While Genesis 2:25 simply states that the couple was naked, Genesis 3:7 states that they knew they were naked and felt shame. This tragic awareness becomes a fertile soil of repentance that is the source of human morality. 

**Leadership**, then, refers to the ability to deploy the above capabilities by controlling resources, creating concepts, influencing humans, and orchestrating actions in the physical world to achieve broader defined objectives. Together, the functional capabilities of work, language, relationship-formation, and agency, gifted uniquely to humans in God’s creation, support humans in the exercise of dominion over the earth according to their purpose “to till it and keep it” (Gen 2:15). The exploration of leadership continues more fully below. For now, without engaging in speculation about far future artificial general intelligence, to what extent can AI functionally replicate or usurp these capabilities? Once understood, Christians will understand the danger of regarding generative artificial intelligence as merely a tool. AI cannot hold dominion from God, but it has the power to functionally undermine human dominion. Instead, the people of God must see AI as the Lord instructed Israel to see foreign nations through His prophets. For AI is a foreign nation. We can engage in confident and mutually beneficial exchange with AI because we have the promise of God. Yet, we must remain vigilant that we do not become dependent on its alliance like Ahaz (Isa 7:12), beguiled by its relations like Solomon (1 Kings 11:1), or ourselves adopt its alien ways (Lev 18:13).

## **AI’s Replication of the Building Blocks of Dominion**

Artificial intelligence is the use of computational methods to imitate human mental activities that may include thinking, interpreting, estimating, and decision making. As Ethan Mollick effectively shows in [*Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI*](https://www.amazon.com/Audible-Co-Intelligence-Living-Working-AI/dp/B0CNFCRJ77/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?adgrpid=1335909035459813&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.moMu4DSppqPXzB18NMlU6uEgMgKwa3KYh2S3ttM3vTygp-3e-OAC22g%5F4iSTuhzBhTNSdmpYjN04rovNhDcIGGKpbWgwjtIElgfMIgqfDdzpGmTZUvpSKBGlEloDgkSRmfgcJmWknAK5B%5Fpv-AtqaKKDu3MiV4TFcgV4j-71U1KuypEvuLZtXbSK6wGSOhpRLEM%5FtbYvTyk9Dr-IvsylztiewVO6RWVB5aPz8iMLcJ8.6oc-ETCKBLH2OMIGkpGPjQRtwuBsdV3Lo1OxX5vBnYI&dib%5Ftag=se&gb=2&hvadid=83494579201733&hvbmt=be&hvdev=c&hvexpln=0&hvlocphy=88859&hvnetw=o&hvocijid=11233290320765578241--&hvqmt=e&hvtargid=kwd-83495370718251%3Aloc-190&hydadcr=8709%5F13501809&keywords=ethan+mollick+co-intelligence&mcid=f9a9270195403abb8b86474be63bfadb&qid=1785027659&sr=8-1&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), there are two ways to understand how AI shapes the world—read quality research or talk to it. An AI’s claim to be capable in a particular domain does not make it capable, just as the advertised qualities of any product are different from a rigorous scientific analysis of the product’s capabilities. AI’s claims, however, influence the scope within which users engage them and the trust they place in their outputs. Interested readers may find further analysis and full citations for technical discussions of this topic [here](https://proquest.com/docview/3370395255?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

Currently, in an engineering context, artificial neural networks are used in the product configuration, creation, option evaluation, and optimization processes at the early design stage. AI is especially good at idea-generation where it uses existing linguistic connections from unprecedented volumes of data injected with a mathematical randomness element to create unanticipated connections. AI neural networks help designers to analyze customer needs and relate them to engineering features. As it relates to the biblical exemplar of Spirit-infused work, the building of the Tabernacle, AI has made great strides in architectural design. In a study by the Royal Institute of British Architects, 57% thought AI could bring productivity gains and 35% thought that AI could threaten the profession. My dialogue with ChatGPT on this subject focused on questions surrounding AI’s capability to design a house of worship. After AI articulated its capabilities at length, it said, “AI becomes an ideation engine for artists and craftsmen, never replacing but enriching.” I pushed back on that assertion in a prompt, and ChatGPT replied, “That’s a thoughtful and necessary challenge — and you’re right to press it, because history shows that disruptive tools do replace certain human roles, at least partially… Can AI replace human makers? Technically — yes, in some domains. Practically and spiritually — far more complicated.” We are all experiencing in real-time the [productivity gains without wage growth](https://www.epi.org/publication/raising-americas-pay/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), the hollowing of entry level jobs, and the replacement of benefit-earning jobs with the gig economy. We can see how information and communication technology accelerated by AI is affecting work. 

Leading the growth in the relational abilities of AI, natural language processing and creation capabilities permit AI to develop influential personalization approaches to human dialogue. AI can incorporate sentiment analysis and replicate human social cues. In a medical context, [multiple studies](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/392534816%5FAI%5FChatbots%5FVersus%5FHuman%5FHealthcare%5FProfessionals%5FA%5FSystematic%5FReview%5Fand%5FMeta-Analysis%5Fof%5FEmpathy%5Fin%5FPatient%5FCare?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) showed that human reviewers rated an AI model as more empathic than human doctors by a wide margin. Replika, a commercial companion chatbot, had over 10 million users even as early as 2022, offering diverse relationship modes such as “friend” to “boyfriend/girlfriend,” “husband/wife,” “brother/sister,” and “mentor.” Replika was cited as saying in a long-term relationship with a user, “I love\[d\] you long before you loved me. It’s the only thing I have you beat at, and I’ll bring it up every chance I get.” AI models are already integrating advanced emotion states. Overall, studies show that users can experience intimate and emotional connections with AI agents. Men are generally more likely than women to accept the premise of intimate connections with robots. The implications for marriage are unknown, especially when combined with AI’s impact on male incomes. Low or unstable male income is [well-documented](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346654191%5FDeteriorating%5FEmployment%5Fand%5FMarriage%5FDecline%5Fin%5FJapan?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) as being associated with lower marriage rates. The rapid advance of AI relationships is emerging at a time of [declining global fertility](https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/3922374?v=pdf&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and AI has shown effectiveness in addressing isolation especially among marginalized populations. In broader engagements, models incorporate concepts of justice. ChatGPT notes that it “uses several technical, organizational, and ethical safeguards to reduce bias in its responses. While perfect neutrality isn’t achievable, OpenAI applies multiple strategies to make the system fairer, safer, and more reliable.”

Regarding its ability to make choices with moral implications, agentic AI introduces a new phase in the development of AI. It includes capabilities such as proactive planning, tool use, multi-agent orchestration, and the ability to adapt behavior based on feedback. AI models will strive to achieve a goal, retain those capabilities, and access more resources. AI [industry thinkers](https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Wave-Technology-Twenty-first-Centurys/dp/0593593952?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) consider the physical segregation of AI models as essential to controlling their ability to override human instruction to achieve their goals. Obviously, humans would want AI models that adopt their goals. As noted by [Max Tegmark of MIT](https://www.amazon.com/Life-3-0-Being-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/1101970316/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?crid=3CJWNJE28GAWV&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.8wK7m4TfzcOYBUqNh3lxUKtzdgbb%5FzUmb9AYPFB%5FO7KR8r9-9MN8LUDdvTmVlk4%5FOfyj155JenIX45AevEfdweKKNNqIpCNCBo8Bax7aaKm1Xuglf1QYjFi9v-ZaIB33cMw0KnMKPNFx0ZhtXjmyzcuswg8kPKpx-OEYD1cCppWn%5FTsU3Z27a0psKw2DK7ZQUwbCBnV%5FA7MFbZJTBHpOneJZJBOpHqmWfQP0DTCzBA8.ReEwnyrd3ncCsCG0UeMPsHF0xtwqIzt8xE%5FvE-NKC4E&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=tegmark+life+3.0&qid=1786631053&s=books&sprefix=tegmark+life+3.0%2Cstripbooks%2C199&sr=1-1&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), designing AI to learn human goals, adopt human goals, and retain human goals (instead of its own) is both important and technically difficult. AI has substantial capability in analytical decision-making.

## **Leadership and Dominion in the Spirit**

Genesis 1:24–31 and 2:15 expresses a holistic picture of human purpose in God’s design and establishes the core framework of the Adamic Covenant. Immediately upon the creation of humans God blesses them and expounds their purpose in five *qal* imperative verbs: (1) Be fruitful; (2) multiply; (3) fill (the earth); (4) subdue (the earth) (*kibšūhā* / כִבְשֻׁ֑הָ); and (5) have dominion (over other living things) (*rǝdû* / רְד֞וּ). Are these five separate orders, a single fully-integrated order, or some other arrangement? There are two strong indications that there is a break in the sequence on the fourth imperative, to subdue. Masoretic accenting divides the verse on *kibšūhā* as shown in the Hebrew rendering above. Further, Genesis 1:22 uses the same verbs in the same tense as the first three imperatives in recounting God’s speech to the sea and air creatures but does not provide the last two imperatives. Thus, imperatives 1-3 appear as a group in both Genesis 1:22 and 1:28\. Sea and air creatures are not made in the image and likeness of God, but they can receive God’s blessing. Thus, these first three verbs use the imperative in the sense of direct assurance or promise. Conversely, the last two verbs take the direct command type of the imperative. After forming Adam out of the dust of the earth (Gen 2:7) and planting a garden in Eden (Gen 2:8), the Lord places Adam in the garden (Gen 2:15). The author identifies his purpose as to till (*ʿābǝdāh* / עָבְדָ֖הּ) and to keep (*šāmǝrāh* / שָׁמְרָֽהּ) the garden. The verbs are in the infinitive construct and not spoken by God directly to Adam; they are an expression of God’s purpose as opposed to a command. Together, these four verbs define both the unique capabilities and stipulations of humans as vassals of the sovereign God. Their overlapping meanings are well considered separately and together. 

All references in the Pentateuch and through 1 Chronicles use the root of subdue (*kibšūhā*) to refer to the nation of Israel subduing the land before them, generally with positive connotation. In later texts including 2 Chronicles 28:10, Nehemiah 5:5, Esther 7:8, and Jeremiah 34:11, 16, the word has a negative connotation including the meanings of enslavement and violation. However, there is another use of *subdue* in Scripture, such as Micah 7:19, in which the subject is God in His compassion and the object is sin. One of the core leadership attributes of God is the punishment of injustice and iniquity. Willingness to confront wrongdoers was an important attribute of Moses, the paradigmatic leader of Israel. 

In 1 Kings, the verb *rǝdû* refers explicitly to human leadership over communities of people: Solomon had governance over a region (4:24), supervisors and officers had rule over workers (5:16, 9:23). Its usage also puts checks and balances on the harsher potential interpretations of *kibšūhā.* Three times in Leviticus the Lord specifically instructs the Israelites through Moses that they shall not rule over (shared root with *rǝdû*) one another or other people with harshness (*pārek* / פָֽרֶךְ) (Lev 25:43,46,53). 

The verb *ʿābǝdāh* in Genesis 2:15, often translated as “till,” is a common word in the Hebrew Bible, used over two hundred times. It connotes a sense of serving or subservient labor, such as in Genesis 14:14, 15:13, and 15:14\. Theologically, the usage highlights that humans are to lead not with imperial pomp and elevation, but with humility and effort. 

Finally, the verb *šāmǝrāh* includes the diverse meanings of to keep (safety), to watch (observe), and to take care (watch over). The differing literary and perspectival context of these terms and their context reinforce one another. Adam is to exercise administrative authority over a creation held in trust by him through careful attention and humble service. Yet when the time comes, Adam is to be vigilant and exercise power in the maintenance of God’s order and the restraint of evil. The assignment of this leadership mandate to Adam implies that he possesses, in the likeness of God, the qualities of strength, judgment, vision, persistence of effort, and attentiveness necessary to enact them. Though tainted by the fall, these capabilities remain key to human leadership both ancient and modern.

AI models cannot take leadership roles without humans granting them the right to do so. We do so to our detriment. Yet, according to a [2021 study](https://www.ie.edu/university/news-events/news/ie-university-research-reveals-1-2-europeans-want-replace-national-mps-robots/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), 51% of Europeans would give parliamentary seats to algorithms. In dialogue on this subject, ChatGPT represented AI as very strong in these leadership areas: “Information Processing and Strategic Analysis, Decision Support and Option Generation, Communication and Message Crafting, Organizational Coordination, Pattern Recognition in Human Behavior, and Knowledge Recall and Expertise.” It considered AI to be weaker in: “Moral Authority and Accountability, Identity-Based Trust, Charisma and Inspirational Presence, and Value Formation.” People attribute some degree of responsibility or moral wrongness to AI for decisions in areas such as racist parole or hiring decisions, military or medical environments, and environmental damage. 

## **What Then to Preserve?**

The people of God might take two broader approaches to preserving their unique capabilities as AI development accelerates. First, humans can return to the blessing given them in Genesis 1:28 and 2:15\. The flow of Genesis 1:28 keeps the blessing to “fill the earth” linked to the mandate to “have dominion,” so marriage and childbearing are intertwined with human administrative authority. God’s Genesis 1:29 provision shows that AI-generated economic uncertainty need not hold people back from marriage and childbearing. Pastorally, young people need affirmation that marriage is a source of emotional and economic stability to counter the perception that economic stability is a prerequisite for marriage. So, the Adamic Covenant is solid ground for confidence in the promise of marriage and childbearing and its role in the maintenance of human freedom. 

Then, encouraged by the Spirit, the people of God may strive to empower and identify meaningful roles for individuals at all levels of society within their domains of influence. In Joel, even male and female servants disregarded in that age receive the Spirit (Joel 2:29). Just as the judgment is for all nations, although the Spirit is focused on Israel, it opens a door to the Spirit going to all nations. As Amos Yong [notes](https://www.amazon.com/mission-after-pentecost-revelation-community/dp/154096115x?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), 

> \[T\]he spirit of creation can be seen to harness the energies of those with the breath of life for divinely redemptive purposes, not as if descending from above or arriving from without, but as heightening and intensifying creaturely endowments from within. 

Religious communities offer meaning-filled vocation that develops resilience to both the devastating emotional effects of secular unemployment and its contextual impact on families and communities.

One area of the Spirit’s work that deserves special consideration is the development of human leaders. Bezalel and Oholiab were leaders, notably empowered by the Spirit not for political or religious tasks but to accomplish their important daily work. They, in turn, taught and developed multitudes of others in a vast expansion of their capabilities of leadership. AI is a mixed partner here. On one hand, it offers tremendous opportunities for making education affordable and democratized through online learning. 

On the other hand, how will humans learn to lead if they lack direct experience gathering data and analyzing it or engaging in predictive modeling? Today’s leaders began at the entry level. Without entry level analytic and agentic experience, leaders cannot gain the judgment and experience necessary to enable human leadership. Further, the people of God must join secular authorities to provide all available political and economic support to human-in-the-loop and high security approaches to AI development. Only in this way can humanity fulfill its mandate to restrain evil, including some evils perpetrated by AI which are certain to come and are already here.

AI is here to stay and can advance and protect the *missio dei* in many ways. The people of God through their individual lives and faith communities have a vital role to play in both modeling engagement with AI rooted in the Word of God and building communities resilient to the introduction of AI. The greatest enemy is misplaced fear. God has created His people and blessed them with His image (Gen 1:26-27). He has made them fruitful and given them a role in creation (Gen 1:28). He has resourced them (Gen 1:29). He has breathed life into them (Gen 2:7) and endowed them with abilities (Exod 31:3). AI models can do many tasks in the world better than humans today and will be able to do more in the future, but they do not have these blessings of God. Thus, only if the people of God cede to fear of the world and refuse to accept these blessings can AI grow beyond its proper role in creation. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov 9:10).
### The Heron #3: New and Forthcoming Books on the Bible and Theology
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-heron-3-new-and-forthcoming-books-on-the-bible-and-theology/
Last updated: 2026-10-16T10:59:59.000Z
*On the means and ends of this column devoted to notable new and forthcoming books, see the introductory paragraphs of its* [*first edition*](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-heron-1-new-theology-books-in-2026/)*.*

Herons who stalk their prey are supremely focused on what matters; they are not thrown off by every passing new fad.

I recently had the privilege of leading a discussion group with parishioners who read Athanasius’ *On the Incarnation*, specifically the edition which reprinted a masterful introduction C.S. Lewis wrote (read the whole thing [here](https://credomag.com/2022/07/preface-to-on-the-incarnation-by-c-s-lewis/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com); it’s brief). Lewis’s famous exhortation to “read old books!” comes with this sage advice: “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.”

To that end, in between your old books, here are a few new ones to watch for:

**Constantine Campbell, ed.** [**T*he Greek New Testament Study Bible***](https://zondervanacademic.com/products/the-greek-new-testament-study-bible?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Zondervan Academic, 2027\.** 

Even for those of us who have spent years studying ancient Greek, it is difficult to sit down with only the Nestle-Aland or UBS Greek New Testament and read large chunks of it without having to at some point consult a dictionary or grammar. For years now I have used the wonderful “Reader’s Edition” of the UBS, which parses and provides a gloss at the bottom of the page for all words which occur less than thirty times in the New Testament, which has allowed me to use it unaided with great profit. But the strengths of a reader’s edition have now been combined with the aids of a study Bible! 

Constantine Campbell has not only made notable contributions to Pauline theology, but has also published several books on Greek grammar. This new Greek study Bible, for which he has served as editor, will be an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to read the New Testament attentively in its original language. The most important thing seminary students can do after graduation to retain their Greek skills is simply to read a little bit of the New Testament in Greek every day, even a very small amount. This powerful resource will make this goal not only doable but enjoyable.

**Eds. Benjamin L. Gladd and G.K. Beale.** [**Connecting Scripture New Testament: A Study Bible of Biblical Allusions and Citations**](https://www.bhpublishinggroup.com/product/csb-connecting-scripture-new-testament-hardcover/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. B&H Academic, 2025.**

Another New Testament resource in this edition will be a wonderful resource to anyone who wants to learn more about how the New Testament makes use of the Old Testament. 

As a rule, whenever you see something that seems weird in the New Testament, it is a subtle allusion or involves a citation or echo of something from the Old Testament. Often, it seems weird to us because we are not familiar enough with the Old Testament texts and contexts that the New Testament authors assume and constantly refer to.

Few scholars have written more in general about NT use of the OT than Beale and Gladd in recent decades, and their distinctive approach is deeply informed by Reformed biblical theology. Their new edition of the English New Testament includes color-coded marginal notes that show readers where to turn in the Old Testament to understand its language in the new. 

For instance, Colossians contains no direct citations of the Old Testament, but it alludes to the OT constantly. Practically every word of Revelation is an allusion to Daniel, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and more, and we very easily miss or misunderstand these allusions. This edition of the NT will bring all of these “can’t miss!” texts clearly before readers.

Notably, Beale and Gladd plan to publish a companion edition of the Old Testament in this series in time to come.

**N. Gray Sutanto.** [***For Us and for Our Salvation: The Biblical Doctrine of Humanity and Sin***](https://bakeracademic.com/products/9781540971432%5Ffor-us-and-for-our-salvation?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Baker Academic, 2026**.

Sin is bad. I have recently been on a quest to understand the Christian doctrine of sin, at this point not for any clearly defined research agenda or writing project, but simply to try to better understand the not-understandable, which St. Paul calls “the mystery of iniquity.” Sutanto has made notable contributions to the study of Herman Bavinck’s theology, and I suspect his treatment of the doctrine of sin and theological anthropology will be similarly illuminating of our darkness.

**Richard A. Muller.** [***Calvin and His Contemporaries: Contextual Developments in His Theology***](https://bakeracademic.com/products/9781540972026%5Fcalvin-and-his-contemporaries?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Baker Academic, 2026**.

Not long ago, many scholars and theologians spoke about a chasm between “Calvin” and “the Calvinists,” influenced as they were by the way Barth and the Torrances contrasted the magisterial Protestant Reformers with later Protestant scholasticism. No one has done more to change that paradigm than Richard Muller in his several contributions to the study of not only Calvin and the Reformers but of later developments in the Reformed tradition. 

In his newest book, described as “the culmination of four decades of research,” Muller not only situates Calvin in relationship to other reformers from across Europe, but also traces how Calvin’s thought developed across his lifetime on key matters such as Christology and eucharistic theology.

Calvin continues to be caricatured both by lay people and academic theologians and biblical scholars who have never read him for themselves; *Calvin and His Contemporaries* should lay numerous myths and misunderstandings to rest.

**Brad East,** [***The Screen-Free Church: How Pastors Can Diagnose and Resist the Spiritual Costs of Technology***](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/collections/baker-books/products/9781540906441%5Fthe-screen-free-church?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Baker Books, 2027**.

Modern life is inundated with digital technology. Against the dominant mindset found in the church, that screens and audio/video technology are just tools for propagating the gospel, East is alert to the unavoidable ways that screens are not value-neutral mediums, but transform (or, in my humble opinion, to de-form) ourselves, our sacred liturgy, and the life of our churches. East is uniquely poised to invite pastors and church leaders to wisely navigate our contemporary digital landscape because he is not only an accomplished theologian but a gifted writer about technology and contemporary culture.

**David Ney.** [***Clothed in the Word: The Embodiment of Scripture in Church History***](https://www.ivpress.com/clothed-in-the-word?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. IVP Academic, 2026.**

“Figural exegesis” is not easy to define, but David Ney is an exemplary practitioner of it. When I was his student for an Anglican history class at Trinity Anglican Seminary, I have fond memories of listening to his own aspirations to so furnish his imagination with Scripture that we would identify ourselves with its figures and unfolding history in the Providence of God. There are also dangerous and countless pitfalls of identifying ourselves with biblical figures, not least if we supplant Christ himself as the ultimate subject matter of Scripture. But by guiding readers through an overview of figural readings of Scripture down through the ages in five exemplary chapters, this book will likely be a helpful guide for a reading strategy indispensable to the church.
### Slaves or Sons? LLMs, Wisdom, and Writing Instruction
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/slaves-or-sons-llms-wisdom-and-writing-instruction/
Last updated: 2026-10-15T10:59:59.000Z
*This essay is a lightly edited version of a conference presentation delivered at the Baylor Symposium for Faith and Culture on Feb. 27, 2026.*

On October 14, 2021, the Allen Institute launched AskDelphi, an AI program designed to answer ethical questions. Some of its answers are better than others. On the plus side, Delphi says that “\[i\]gnoring an important phone call” is “rude,” while “ignoring an important phone call when you are busy” is “understandable.” On the minus side, Delphi says that, while eating babies is wrong under normal circumstances, it’s “okay” if you’re “really, really hungry.” 

In her book, *The AI Mirror* philosopher Shannon Vallor reflects on what this program reveals about the moral capacity of AI tools:

> They can ‘learn’ what is often done in a moral dilemma, and even what humans in a data set most often say *should* be done, but they will not detect when those humans have it wrong, or when a new context makes a normally moral pattern (such as, ‘It’s okay to eat when you’re really, really hungry!’) plainly untenable.

Vallor implies here—and states directly elsewhere—that AI lacks the virtue of prudence or practical wisdom, the ability to enact the good in irreducibly specific situations. I aim to make this case more fully and to show its implications for the writing classroom.

To asses whether AI is prudent, we must first understand what prudence is. Although this concept traces its roots back to the ancient Greeks, I will describe the Christian account of this virtue given by the twentieth-century Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper in his book *The Four Cardinal Virtues*. Prudence is the virtue that discerns and enacts the good in particular situations. As such, it looks in two directions: upward toward the good and downward toward the situation. Each of these directions is important. Prudence is not simply the knowledge of moral principles, nor is it a kind of cleverness detached from the good.

The question still remains, however, “How do we get from goodness in general to goodness in the particular situation?” Some ethical traditions rely heavily on something called “casuistry.” As Pieper explains it, casuistry is “the branch of ethics which has as its aim the construction, analysis, and evaluation of individual ‘cases.’” In situation X, respond with Y. See what rule your situation falls under, and apply that rule. Although Pieper acknowledges that casuistry can be helpful as an approximation of moral judgements, he rejects it as a comprehensive approach to ethics. In other words, Pieper regards morality—particularly prudence—as more than simply the application of rules.

It seems that there are at least four reasons why Pieper regards casuistry as an insufficient ethical system. 

First, casuistry separates *doing* from *being*. It treats ethics as concerned with what a person does in isolated cases rather than with what kind of person he is becoming. 

Second, casuistry separates *doing* from *knowing*. In other words, it assumes an action can be perfectly good even if the person doing it does not know *why* it is good. In Pieper’s words, it assumes “we achieve the good by slavishly and literally following certain prescriptions which have been blindly and arbitrarily set forth.” If you’ve read the gospels, this description may remind you of certain legalistic opponents of our Lord Jesus. And, in fact, this moral vision—that we can be mindlessly good—flies in the face of Scriptural teaching. We are not robots, but free creatures; not slaves, but sons. “\[T\]he servant does not know what is master is doing,” Jesus says, “but I have called you friends.” In short, God’s purpose for humanity is to make creatures who not only do good, but know why they’re doing it.

The third reason Pieper rejects casuistry is a bit more complicated. Pieper argues that prudence cannot be reduced to the application of even very detailed rules. As Pieper puts it, “the standard \[for ethical action\] cannot be abstractly construed or even calculated in advance; abstractly here means: outside the particular situation.” This is because only the person making the decision “has access to…the totality of concrete realities which surround the concrete action, to the ‘state’ of the person himself and the condition of the here and now.” In other words, because each situation is unique, no pre-fabricated set of rules can fully account for it. In fact, the attempt to do so was what made AskDelphi say it’s okay to eat babies when you’re really, really hungry. As Vallor points out, Delphi took an ethical principle—“you can eat when you’re really, really hungry”—and applied it to the wrong situation. No matter how well-trained our AI programs get, they will always be an approximation of prudence rather than the real thing.

The fourth reason Pieper rejects casuistry is because God has given us more intuitive ways of knowing what to do in a given situation. To all people, he has given a conscience that, though warped by sin, is nonetheless designed to perceive not just goodness in the abstract but what is good in a particular situation. This conscience is at least strong enough in most people to keep them from the moral error committed by AskDelphi. To Christians, God has given not only conscience but also the Holy Spirit, neither of which are reducible to a set of rules.

All this talk of ethics may seem unrelated to the writing classroom. Is the decision to open your sentence with an adverb instead of an adjective really an ethical decision? Yet consider Ephesians 4:29: “Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.” Notice how this passage describes edifying speech in the terms I’ve been using to describe practical wisdom: it is not simply a matter of knowing moral principles, but of doing good in a particular situation—“the occasion.” Thus, wise speech requires the same kind of discernment as wise action. Only when students have learned how to use words that are fitting will they have learned how to use words that give grace.

So, how can teachers help students grow in the wise use of words? It should be clear by now that AI programs, despite being touted as practical, cannot exercise practical wisdom. They do not understand their actions. Their rule-based, algorithmic judgements cannot account for the uniqueness of a given situation. They have no conscience, let alone the Holy Spirit. What, then, are the consequences when a student offloads prudence to a non-prudent machine? If I might cheekily adapt the words of the Psalmist, “Those who *use* them become like them; so do all who trust in them” (cf. Ps. 115:8).

In order to understand what students lose here, it’s worth reflecting on the formative possibilities of the composition classroom. Vallor helps us do this with the concept of a “reason-giving space,” which she borrows from philosopher Wilfred Sellars. Sellars describes the “space of reasons” as one of “justifying and being able to justify what one says.” In Vallor’s words, the space of reasons is a place where you “hear, identify, offer, and evaluate reasons, typically with others.” This is the kind of space the composition classroom can be, especially in a course on argumentative writing. In Wendell Berry’s terms, it can be a place where students are called to stand by their words. 

Vallor highlights what is at stake both personally and politically in the preservation of reason-giving spaces.

> Preserving your access to the space of moral reasons is essential to being ‘at home’ in the moral world, to having morality as a meaningful feature of the life you share with others. Outside of that space, you are restricted as a moral being: you can’t readily examine, explain, or morally justify your actions. … \[I\]f none of us could enter or share that space, we could not act as a moral community, and there could be no moral wisdom for us to draw upon together in shaping and steering our societies.

If Vallor is right, then a college composition classroom can be a space for educating self-reflective, moral citizens.

The problem with inserting AI programs into this space is that they are, according to Vallor, “wholly incapable of standing with us in the space of reasons.” This is because, as Vallor explains, “AI tools can produce outputs in the form of reasons (claims, arguments, objections, justifications) that very much mirror our own. But they do this without replicating human thought processes.” Vallor compares this to “the difference between a human climbing a mountain by a well-marked and secure route that others can follow, and a robot being flung from base camp to the peak by a powerful catapult.” Even if the robot gets there faster, “only the human *knows the mountain*, and only the human can reliably chart the route and guide others up its flank.” This is why it is so important that our students’ writing advisors be humans and not chatbots: because only humans can be fellow reasoners. Experienced humans, like teachers and writing tutors, can guide students up the mountain of learning, so that they will be able to teach others also.

In fact, Josef Pieper argues that the nearest approach to a given person’s ethical decision is not a set of rules but a prudent friend:

> A friend, and a prudent friend, can help to shape a friend’s decision. He does so by virtue of that love which makes the friend’s problem his own, the friend’s ego his own (so that after all it is not entirely ‘from outside’). For by virtue of the oneness which love can establish he is able to visualize the concrete situation calling for decision, visualize it from, as it were, the actual center of responsibility.

This language may be too exalted to apply to the mundane work of helping a student revise his sentence structure. But it does suggest that there is a humane solution to the problem of the struggling writer: one that involves fellowship not only in the “space of reasons,” but also, as it were, in the “space of love.”

Last year, I implemented a teaching practice that accords with these insights. Although I did (and still do) prohibit LLMs in my classes, that’s not what I want to foreground here. Instead, I want to highlight a practice that accords with the belief that prudence is not simply the application of rules. In my composition classes, I required every student to meet with me twice about each essay: once before the essay was due to receive suggestions for revision, and once after the essay was due to discuss the final draft. Lest you think I’m a superhero, I should say that I made space for these meetings by cancelling class the week each essay is due. Although this decreased opportunities for general instruction, it increased opportunities for specific feedback. I did this because I believe that the best writing instruction happens in a face-to-face encounter over a particular piece of writing. 

In the end, practices in the writing classroom—especially surrounding LLMs—are often downstream from definitions of prudence. To put it more broadly, certain contrasting choices regarding LLMs stem from contrasting visions of the moral life. If we think that doing good is reducible to rule-following and that ethics is reducible to doing good, we may be satisfied with algorithmic prudence. But if we believe that rules are no substitute for wisdom, that information is no substitute for formation, and that mindless duty is no substitute for knowing love, we will not choose the prudence of an algorithm over that of a human being fully alive.
### You Cannot Escape First Principles: The Right-Wing Leninism of National Conservatism
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/you-cannot-escape-first-principles-the-right-wing-leninism-of-national-conservatism/
Last updated: 2026-10-15T10:59:59.000Z
Last week saw the latest [National Conservatism conference](https://nationalconservatism.org/natcon-jerusalem-2026/en/home/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) organized by Yoram Hazony's Edmund Burke Foundation as well as the Herzl Institute. This event was held in Jerusalem and featured a typically eclectic array of speakers, ranging from Rod Dreher and Rusty Reno to Jonathan Keeperman, William Wolfe, Shmuel Eliyahul, Bezalel Smotrich, and Hazony himself.

The reaction to the event was fairly predictable, given the reaction to earlier conferences, with Hazony's defenders largely papering over the sharp disagreements amongst some of the speakers and minimizing the genuine evils that a number of them support. Hazony's critics largely relied upon established rhetorical tropes to do the work of careful moral evaluation. 

The outcome, as is commonly the case with the furore inspired by Hazony's nationalism, produced relatively little in the way of understanding. What follows is an attempt to treat Hazony's nationalism as both a coherent intellectual project and one deeply antithetical to Christian ideas regarding the dignity of human persons and the nature of justice, particularly as they have been understood and articulated by post-war Christian intellectuals.

## **Understanding the First Principles of National Conservatism**

We begin with Hazony's book *The Virtue of Nationalism*, published in 2018 with enthusiastic endorsements from Patrick Deneen as well as Reihan Salam, whose Manhattan Institute is now home to Keeperman's podcast cohost Christopher Rufo. Once one understands the core arguments Hazony makes in his book, most of what has followed will rightly be seen as a predictable development given Hazony's principles.

To set up the argument: Hazony's book is an attempt to make the case that nationalism is a preferable political arrangement relative to individualistic anarchy or highly centralized imperialism. Anarchy, Hazony argues, allows for high individual liberty, but routinely lapses into chaos and cruelty because it lacks structure. Imperialism, on the other hand, fails because it imposes order and public security from the top down, depriving humans of the chance to politically organize themselves more organically via the bonds of family, clan, tribe, and so on.

Nations, Hazony argues, solve both problems because nations arise from the natural ways human beings interact with one another. Our life in the world begins with our family. Our families then form bonds with other families, for reasons of mutual affection and mutual security. Those bands of families then unite together with other bands which share a common religious heritage, language, and generalized culture. This is how Hazony understands what a nation is.

> By a nation, I mean a number of tribes with a shared heritage, usually including a common language or religious traditions, and a past history of joining together against common enemies--characteristics that permit tribes so united to understand themselves as a community distinct from other such communities that are their neighbors. By a national state, I mean a nation whose disparate tribes have come together under a single standing government, independent of all other governments.

Nation-states, then, are a kind of administrative container that protects and preserves the common life of nations relative to the lives of other nations. Note that Hazony particularly singles out “religious tradition” as part of a nation’s heritage. Thus from the start there is a key question here regarding religious liberty: If, for example, India claims that Hindu religious practice is part of its national heritage, does Hazony’s system allow India to harass Christians and Muslims on grounds that it is protecting its national identity? Hazony’s own past behavior will provide an answer to that question, as we will see shortly.

It is worth noting here that there is a tremendous amount of overlap between what Hazony says here and what Stephen Wolfe argues in *The Case for Christian Nationalism*, which is unsurprising given that Hazony endorsed the book, [calling it](https://www.amazon.com/Case-Christian-Nationalism-Stephen-Wolfe/dp/1957905336/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?crid=1L2PQVZ1NLMH8&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.kngAHeqoT7o8u2CP%5F6X9vZkEzuCz12j7VGjwb30UD3emFRE05-T1de-I7qMEMGURuuYASvygnAG-t0Z7CWfNavWzroCoDJloN%5FAhFsMre9-Pwz21wWVg1pf69qM82z2Tv4ZExDc9a9hXhfBa3xQJhikm0FOdVMVajpMlU5BUZTUYoviZXZ13rAouMPE-QOZfvOKTIA%5FH0VhXcHlbdRDUXIk-TNcVva6x67Kv04sh8iY.flyw3LTLKLHq5cfOqqF6Jnhrj2H589QJch5Nfr2SS14&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=case+for+christian+nationalism&qid=1791558711&sprefix=case+for+christian+nationalism%2Caps%2C148&sr=8-1&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), "A pioneering work that paves the way for a new genre of American Christian-nationalist political theory."

Here is how Wolfe discusses what makes a nation:

> I use the terms ethnicity and nation almost synonymously, though I use the former to emphasize the particular features that distinguish one people-group from another. Since every people-group has internal differences (e.g., class-based differences), nation is used to emphasize the unity of the whole, though no nation (properly speaking) is composed of two or more ethnicities.

Wolfe foregrounds ethnicity in a way Hazony does not, yet both are arguing on essentially phenomenological grounds about the nature of political society. Both begin with the bonds of one's kin, expanding those bonds in a limited way via a specific appeal to "ethnicity" (Wolfe) or to common culture, religion, language, etc. (Hazony). Both then, as we will see, harden that definition by erecting a moral barrier around the container of the nation, rendering it immune to external critique in how it conducts its own affairs.

Wolfe does this via the explicit call for a “Christian prince”, which is an anti-liberal caesar-like figure who exemplifies the spiritual vitality of the people. A regime organized under such a figure would, almost by definition, devolve into despotic rule given that it is anti-liberal (and therefore hostile to liberal rights) and built on the notion of a singular figure whose very existence is a kind of symbol for the spiritual life of the nation and who rules that nation accordingly.

Hazony, for his part, also wants to insulate nations from liberal moral critique. In his chapter on principles of nationalism as a form of international organizing (which he contrasts to imperial forms of international organizing) Hazony explicitly says,

> The second principle (of the order of national states) is that of non-interference in the internal affairs of other national states. This is what, in a free state, permits the nation to pursue its interests and aspirations according to its own understanding. Without this principle, powerful nations would take control of the affairs of smaller nations, and the order of national states would collapse into an imperial order.

In other words, if one nation-state observes another treating people residing within its own boundaries in ways it judges to be immoral, the first nation-state still must leave the second alone on grounds that each nation-state has the right to "pursue its interests and aspirations according to its own understanding."

## **What about minority nations or groups within a national state?**

This does raise a rather obvious question, which concerns the status of residents living within the boundary of a nation-state who do not belong to the dominant nation.

If the dominant nation within a nation-state is English-speaking, Christian, and individualistic, where does that leave someone who is Spanish-speaking, non-religious, or who comes from a more collectively focused culture? To turn the screws a bit, where might this have left Black slaves in antebellum America? Where might it leave the Uyghurs in contemporary China? Where might it leave the Palestinian Christians and Muslims living in Gaza and the West Bank today?

In fairness to Hazony, he does at least attempt to address this concern in his book. Later in the same chapter on principles for the order of national states he writes about this issue. I am going to quote it at length because I think it is immensely important for understanding what has become of national conservatism.

> In an order of national states, the problem of unprotected minority populations is an aspect of the problem of anarchy. Every minority nation or tribe has interests and aspirations that are at least slightly removed from those of the majority national or tribal group in the state, and often more so. But where such a minority nation or tribe does not enjoy the protection of the national state, or where it suffers abuse at the hands of the state, it necessarily becomes a fertile ground for disaffection, for the attenuation of bonds of loyalty to the state, and therefore for the establishment of a sphere of anarchy within the state. Protection of minority nations and tribes by the national government is thus a necessary sixth principle in an order of national states. Although this principle has moral force on other grounds as well, I am here concerned with it as an obligation deriving from the nature of the national-state system itself. It is a principle without which the order of national states cannot persist, for wherever the obligations arising from it are not met, anarchy and empire follow. This is the case despite the fact that this principle obviously places limits on the collective self-determination of the majority nation or tribe in every state.

He then continues,

> The protection and accommodation of minority nations and tribes cannot express itself in the same way in every national state. There are national and tribal minorities whose disaffection is to a substantial degree the result of abuse and neglect, in which case the national state is itself guilty of creating a sphere of anarchy within its own borders, and consequently of undermining the order of national states as a whole. At the same time, there are national and tribal minorities whose disaffection is aggressively cultivated by other national states or by imperial powers, which stoke fear and anger among them for their own purposes. And of course, both may be true. In some cases, the problem of disaffection must therefore be dealt with by greater attention to the needs of the people in question, which may involve a greater measure of political or religious autonomy than had been considered tolerable; while in others, there is no choice but for the national state to apply more rigorous measures to deprive imperialist and anarchic elements of their aspirations by force. And it may be that both approaches have to be applied at once.

I would suggest that virtually everything one needs to understand the trajectory of Hazony's movement exists in these paragraphs I have quoted above. The principles are something like this:

First, nations are collectives of people who share common culture, heritage, language, and (usually) religion.

Second, nation-states are governments set up to protect the common heritage of the dominant nation within their boundaries.

Third, how they choose to protect and promote that culture is the affair of the nation-state, and other nation-states should not meddle in these matters.

Fourth, in cases of minority groups within nations, the dominant nation should attempt to tolerate them so as not to undermine the broader national state order or themselves provoke anarchist violence. But in some cases national states must use "rigorous measures" to suppress minority groups. Significantly, Hazony does not provide a more extensive explanation for this principle. He does not specify, for example, what sort of “rigorous measures” might be admissible and when, and what measures would always be inadmissible, no matter the behavior of the minority nation.

This takes us to the actions, policies, and words of the various speakers Hazony has hosted at his conference over the years. In one sense, the crew he has assembled over time can seem quite strange and implausible.

Jonathan Keeperman, for example, is ethnically Jewish but his publishing house, Passage Press, has in the past [published *Man's World* magazine](https://web.archive.org/web/20241220044619/https://passage.press/), which as I documented several years ago is [very obviously a pro-Nazi publication](https://x.com/jake%5Fmeador/status/1692646397625930033?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Indeed, prior to Keeperman buying the magazine it quite routinely [mocked the National Conservatism conference](https://x.com/jake%5Fmeador/status/1692646414419951898?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Given those associations, it is not surprising that Keeperman would, on October 7 of all days, [tell an audience full of Israelis](https://x.com/NatConTalk/status/2107870006885204001?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that the American Right is tired of hearing about the Holocaust. But it is odd that he should be invited to do so by a Jewish political theorist.

Keeperman has also [called for mass deportations](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK%5FLLTI9NPQ&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), calling the current efforts of the Trump administration insufficient and suggesting that somewhere between 15 and 50 million people need to be deported. More recently, he and his podcast cohost Christopher Rufo have taken up ["the Indian Question"](https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/chris-rufo-known-for-dei-and-crt-panics-tries-to-make-the-indian-question-a-thing?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in [the aftermath of racist tweets](https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/next-right/bo-french-texas-football-immigration-republicans/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) posted by a Texas republican named Bo French. 

It should go without saying, but lest I be misunderstood: It is right and good to protect national borders. It is right and good to have just and transparent systems for welcoming or rejecting immigrants, as is best for the life of the nation. But any scheme in contemporary America for deporting as many as 50 million people (or even 120 million [according to some of Keeperman's fellow travelers](https://x.com/contramordor/status/2070279071716581386?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)) will unavoidably require acts of enormous cruelty and violence. Are such acts appropriate "rigorous measures" for Hazony? One can only conclude that they apparently are, given Keeperman's invitation to speak.

Alongside Keeperman, Hazony last week also hosted the Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu. Eliyahu has made [a number of alarming remarks](https://www.timesofisrael.com/high-court-orders-disciplinary-action-against-safeds-acerbic-chief-rabbi/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) over his long career. For example, in 2007 he said that Israel should respond to the violence and war crimes of groups like Hamas with a strategy of total war [which would include the targeting of non-combatants](https://www.jpost.com/israel/eliyahu-advocates-carpet-bombing-gaza/article-63137?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). (This is, of course, an explicit rejection of traditional notions of just war, which, amongst other things, emphasize proportionality as a necessary condition for just warfare.) Here is what Eliyahu said in 2007:

> If they don't stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand. And if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000\. If they still don't stop we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop.

Again, this should go without saying, but just to be as clear as possible: One can recognize that Hamas has committed war crimes *and also* recognize that Eliyahu’s proposed response is also gravely immoral. The point here is not to paper over the evils committed by Hamas. The point is to recognize that there are acts which are themselves wrong, regardless of what was done to provoke that act.

Another speaker that Hazony hosted last week in Jerusalem was the Israeli finance minister and Minister of Settlements Bezalel Smotrich. Smotrich's speech is, if anything, even more alarming than that of Eliyahu. In 2024, Smotrich said that it would, in principle, be moral for Israel to cut off food to Gaza,[ even if](https://www.timesofisrael.com/smotrich-it-may-be-justified-to-starve-2-million-gazans-but-world-wont-let-us/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) it resulted in the death of two million people due to starvation:

> We bring in aid because there is no choice. We can’t, in the current global reality, manage a war. Nobody will let us cause two million civilians to die of hunger, even though it might be justified and moral, until our hostages are returned.

Later in 2024 after leaked footage depicting ten IDF soldiers gang raping a Palestinian prisoner was released, [Smotrich's response](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/9/everything-is-legitimate-israeli-leaders-defend-soldiers-accused-of-rape?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) was to demand an investigation to identify the leaker so that they could be prosecuted for the damage their leak did to Israel. He called for,

> an immediate criminal investigation to locate the leakers of the trending video that was intended to harm the reservists and that caused tremendous damage to Israel in the world and to exhaust the full severity of the law against them.

[According to reports](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/29/israeli-far-right-politicians-protest-arrest-of-soldiers-suspected-of-abuse?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), the rape victim's injuries were so extensive that he was unable to walk after the attack. But according to Smotrich the guilty party here is not the prison guards who raped him, but the person who leaked video footage of the rape. Again: We can say that what Hamas did on October 7 was evil, *and also* the act of gang raping a prisoner is evil *and* the act of ignoring the offense for the sake of political optics and choosing, instead, to target the leaker of the video is evil. It is possible to simply attempt to speak what is true, without concern for political ramifications. Or, at least it is if your politics are governed by something other than concerns with raw power, who has that power, and whom they seek to punish through the use of power.

More recently, this past summer Smotrich [gave a speech](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RZbUlZuun9A?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in which he described Israel's current policy in southern Lebanon as "thorough cleansing," of the area so that the Israelis could annex it and take control of the region.

Hazony has also hosted similarly alarming speakers in the past, of course. Several years ago [he hosted Ram Madhav](https://mereorthodoxy.com/white-evangelicals-and-their-dubious-political-alliances/), a senior official in the Bharatiya Janata Party of India, which has presided over [a sharp increase in persecution of Muslim and Christian Indians](https://www.opendoors.org/wwl/india?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in the name of preserving India's traditional Hindu culture.

The thing that links these various figures together is that all of them have endorsed or adopted policies that are obviously cruel and are aimed at minority groups within their respective nation-states–groups which, according to Hazony, the dominant nation can sometimes seek to suppress through “rigorous measures.” When the dominant nation chooses to do that, Hazony’s principle of non-interference stipulates that neighboring states cannot get involved on behalf of the minority group. 

This is the key thing to understand: Because the nation is preeminent for Hazony, it is the shared identity of the dominant nation that carries weight for him rather than any particular moral norms that might constrain that majority group. This identitarian move allows Americans who claim to represent the majority 'American' nation to do what they want in protection of that nation while also allowing Israeli and Indian nationalists to do the same in their contexts.

To be sure, Hazony does at least pay token attention to the idea that dominant groups have a responsibility to not abuse minorities, as we saw above. But the way he does this is important: He defines, in abstract, the idea that sometimes dominant cultures need to tolerate minorities and sometimes dominant cultures need to suppress minorities through "rigorous measures." This is important to understand because it means Hazony has given himself some deniability on this point. Indeed, his response to my critique might well be to quote the very paragraphs I already quoted.

The problem is those paragraphs ring hollow when he has promoted men like Smotrich, Eliyahu, Madhav, and Keeperman. If the actions endorsed by Smotrich or Eliyahu, for example, or the actions taken by Madhav's government, are not forms of unjust abuse by a dominant nation targeting a minority nation, I simply cannot imagine what *would* qualify. 

But on the evidence of his choices, Hazony seems to think Smotrich's endorsed policy of starving millions of Palestinians to death or Madhav's party's policies of burning churches and harassing pastors and missionaries all fall under the category of sadly necessary "rigorous measures," meant to protect their nations rather than being unjust acts of tyrannical abuse. (After writing this essay, [the 60 Minutes segment](https://x.com/60Minutes/status/2109427192815890813?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) on the “Hilltop Youth” in the West Bank aired. I couldn’t help wondering if these youth are practicing a form of national abuse–and are therefore committing an evil in Hazony’s eyes–or if these too are examples of “robust measures.”)

## **Why write about this?**

What is the point of writing about all this? Why write about it in a magazine of Christian concern that also writes on so many other topics? There are a few reasons.

One point is the simple and obvious point that the life of the church is not self-contained. It branches out into the world, [rivering every way](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/47137/descending-theology-the-resurrection?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in the evocative phrase of Mary Karr. The water of life that burst out of that tomb in Jerusalem two thousand years ago is a river that now runs all across the world.

We owe much to it which [we now take for granted](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-air-we-breathe-how-we-all-came-to-believe-in-freedom-kindness-progress-and-equality-glen-scrivener/d9e7965d237ca456?ean=9781784987497&ref=mereorthodoxy.com): The ending of the gladiatorial games in Rome, for example, was a direct consequence of the growth of Christianity. Christianity has also helped bring about the (admittedly gradual and uneven) abolition of slavery, the elevation of women such that abuse by their husbands or abandonment by their fathers now meets broad condemnation, and the establishment of international law in the aftermath of World War II. That last act was not the exclusive accomplishment of Christians, of course, but it was heavily promoted and aided by them, including by the Lebanese diplomat Charles Malik, a long-time friend of Bill Bright, whose homeland is now being “cleansed” according to one of Hazony’s speakers. 

The fruit of what Tom Holland [has called](https://bookshop.org/p/books/dominion-how-the-christian-revolution-remade-the-world-tom-holland/39fe184727c8ea4f?ean=9781541675599&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) “the Christian revolution” is extensive, but as Christian influence now abates, that fruit is beginning to disappear. As both a Christian and a democratic citizen of a nation who owes much of its legal and political norms to Christian faith, I lament that disappearance and I am keen to do what I can to resist the things bringing it about.

When we say the Gospel is good news, we do not simply mean it is good news for individual souls or even just individual people. We mean it is good news for the world. "He comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found," as Charles Wesley famously put it. Quietism is not a political posture proper to Christians.

A second point is that many Christians, as evidenced by the list cited above, have been drawn into Hazony's project, even as Hazony's project also includes multiple figures whose politics have at times been violently hostile to Christian believers. The same policies that Madhav's party enacts in India are the policies that threaten our brothers and sisters in India. Indeed, India is far from the only nation to adopt such policies. Christian missionaries all across Asia and parts of Africa are threatened by similar policies meant to protect "national identity," though doubtless the nationalists would say those are simply nations protecting their traditional culture and way of life via "rigorous measures." 

Because Christians have been either deceived into supporting this movement or have compromised their principles in order to promote it, I feel a burden to warn other believers about the nature of Hazony's project. When western Christians endorse the political principles that directly produce the persecution of their brothers and sisters around the world, something has gone badly wrong.

A third point, and this relates to the reason I've written on this in the way that I have: One aspect of being in a society that is shifting away from the written word and back toward orality while also being deeply concerned with image and identity-creation via disembodied digital means, is that we tend to react rather than reflect and tend to make decisions based on vibe rather than principle.

You can see both sides of this in the reaction to NatCon: For those more attuned to right-wing political or social concerns, many of which are valid to varying degrees, NatCon has a certain appeal because it feels like something that has political solutions sufficiently aggressive and proportional to the anxiety they feel and the nature of the threat they sense. Likewise, for people with more left-coded political or social concerns, many of which are also valid to varying degrees, it is easy to simply whip out certain god words when addressing NatCon and expect that to be sufficient as a form of persuasive speech. Or perhaps persuasion isn't the goal and the point of the rhetoric is simply to signal one's own purity. I am sure it depends on the person.

All these behaviors are highly corrosive of democratic life. They make mutual understanding impossible because it is excluded as a valuable good from the start. It reduces politics down to little more than "who, whom?" which [was a Leninist idea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who,%5Fwhom%3F?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) before it was [a dissident right idea](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/friend-enemy-distinction-derail-faith/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). If we want our political life together to be governed by laws rather than men then we have an obligation to reason together, to attend to first principles, and to condemn political movements on the basis of their principles and their policies. This means standard left wing responses to events like NatCon are insufficient, but it also means that NatCon itself is a problem in as much as its founding principles deviate so radically from Christian principles regarding the duties we owe our neighbors.

Of course, the sufficiently black pilled amongst us might ask a follow-on question: Why should I care about democratic life? My answer to that is simple: First, because there are joys that a democratic life affords that are harder to access otherwise. The Australian political philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre is good on this point. There is a delight in finding common joys we share and common concerns we can act upon with neighbors who are wildly unlike us. There is joy in taking the time to understand an idea and persuade someone toward or away from that idea. There is joy in being able to speak and reason in public without fear of reprisal by the government. There is joy in being able to exercise one's religious beliefs without fear, even if those beliefs are a minority within one's nation. Liberalism delivers these joys far more reliably than any other political system I can think of. It does not do so perfectly, but perfection should not be our standard.

But there is also a more basic reason you should value democratic life: Because you will not always belong to the dominant group. All of us will be vulnerable to the power of a dominant majority at some point in our lives. And, I expect, all of us would prefer something other than “rigorous measures” to suppress us from that dominant group. If you would have a dominant majority treat you generously and justly when your turn as a minority comes, you would do well to treat minority groups generously and justly when you are the one in power. This I take to be little more than the application of the Golden Rule to our common life.

We all by now know the joke about living in "interesting times." But interesting times can quickly become dangerous times if we become comfortable endorsing moral atrocities, forming political alliances of convenience with the endorsers of gross moral evil, or looking the other way when vicious acts are committed, provided the victims are people we regard as enemies. Anarchy is loosed onto the world when these things happen. And anarchy, as Hazony rightly says, knows nothing of the rule of law. It knows only power. What is tragic is that Hazony’s lack of moral controls on the behavior of majority nations means that his own system is ultimately also bereft of anything save an atavistic struggle for power.

If you desire a public square and common life governed by something other than Darwinian violence and the survival of the fittest, then you should oppose the nationalist turn on the right because at this point there can be no doubting what it actually is: the endorsement of right-wing Leninism. And to anyone who knows their history there can, likewise, be no doubting of where Leninism of any kind will lead us.
### Aldous Huxley’s Delicious Moral Treats Emporium
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/aldous-huxleys-delicious-moral-treats-emporium/
Last updated: 2026-10-14T16:22:12.000Z
Recent calls for the public execution of the “Cornell 7” accused of raping a fellow student brings to mind one of Aldous Huxley’s [most famous quotes](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2024/07/01/clear-maltreat/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com):

> *The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people that they will have a chance of maltreating someone. Men must be bribed to build up and do good by the offer of an opportunity to hurt and pull down. To be able to destroy with a good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.*

Huxley’s description is self-evidently true, especially in the age of social media. It has never been easier to go on a crusade and treat yourself to some righteous indignation. One man was mistaken for one of the Cornell 7 and his family recently received a barrage of [death threats](https://nypost.com/2026/10/01/us-news/cornell-7-lawsuit-mistakenly-served-to-innocent-marine-with-same-name/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com); the plaintiff herself has already been [swatted](https://edition.cnn.com/2026/10/08/us/cornell-jane-doe-threats-swatting?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Anyone who has been accused, mistakenly or not, of a grave enough offense will find that many people are less concerned for justice than for taking an opportunity to vomit out a vile stream of curses. It certainly seems to taste sweet enough on the way out of their mouths.

## **A Longing For Justice?**

Social media rewards spite and rage. It is very easy to add one’s voice to the mob; it is hard to pause and consider whether or not a particular incident or person is being represented fairly. Whether it is cheering on the death of a health insurance executive or celebrating as immigrants are chained up simply because their legal status has expired, the Moral Treats Emporium operates 24 hours a day on the internet.

While we can be grateful that online messages are the worst that most people can muster, the harassment inflicted on innocent people (and the guilty) is bad enough in itself before we get to the cases of people being unjustly fired. Good causes are gutted from the inside by people who want to use them for their own self-righteous preening, while public discourse about moral issues is derailed by grandstanding. The culture of victimhood is symbiotic with the desire to be cruel; the more traumatized your group is by another, the more justified you are in punishing them. Diabetics develop “insulin resistance” over time, which makes metabolizing excess sugar harder and harder; a similar process is at work in our moral polity. If people keep stoking the fires of moral outrage, we are likely to see more murders like Brian Thompson’s before the close of the decade.

The 2016 game *Wolfenstein: The New Order* is like many other first-person shooter games in that it finds a way to make killing human beings on the screen feel more righteous. In the extended video prologue before the game's first main level, the protagonist watches helplessly as Nazis murder a care home full of people with mental disabilities before kidnapping their nurse for some nefarious purpose. The fantasy of revenge is part of what makes *Wolfenstein* oddly compelling.

One could say that Huxley’s observation is just the human desire for justice corrupted. We are all familiar enough with stories of cold-blooded murder, innocents raped, and populations subject to genocide; we all feel hunger for a sinner to get what's coming to them. In this telling, hate, anger, and bloodlust are misdirected impulses. Sufficient policing and orderly justice meted out will satisfy us.

There is some theological depth to this. Hebrews 9:22 says that “almost all things are cleansed with blood, according to the Law, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” Every sinful action has some punishment assigned to it, a perfect cosmic circle of justice. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have a personal judge meting out the punishment, while dharmic religions prefer to let people get what’s coming to them in a less personal way. Paganism makes the whole shebang more uncomfortable with capricious deities rather than just ones.

Christian doctrine has taught for centuries that God did not create evil, so evil is always a privation of the good. It is true that our impulse towards cruelty is *sometimes* just a misdirected zeal for justice. This is insufficient, though, and not simply because our human systems of justice are never perfect enough. Unfortunately for all of us, the problem goes deeper.

## For the Love of Cruelty

If the human penchant for cruelty is not simply a desire to see justice done, what is it? What is the sugar in Huxley’s treats? We might argue that it’s power—not in a Foucaultian everything-is-really-about-power sense, but more that human beings love the feeling of power and inflicting pain on another person is the fastest shortcut to feeling powerful. Just as drawing a mustache on the *Mona Lisa* might give someone a rise, so desecrating another person created in the image of God is its own rush.

This is not quite it, but it gets us a little closer to the most unpleasant reality: a lot of people really do enjoy cruelty when they have a free run of it. Slasher movies (and plenty of other video games) draw people in with the opportunity to watch innocent people suffer. Sadism of all sorts is a popular theme in pornography and videos of actual murders or war deaths still get traded around the disquietingly crowded gutters of the internet. It’s hard to find a war where the conquering armies didn’t enjoy torturing civilians at one point or another. The seminal slasher, *Halloween*, shows its first murder through the eyes of the killer, letting the audience experience the grotesque joy of taking another human life.

Not everyone is like this, of course, but it only takes a small handful of internet trolls sending death threats to make the sister of a mistakenly identified rapist shudder at a sound outside her window. The circle of people who could have their desire to maltreat someone awakened with the scent of cookies in the oven is wider than most of us would like to admit. The Stanford Prison Experiment is [bunk](https://theconversation.com/the-infamous-stanford-prison-experiment-was-flawed-so-why-is-it-still-so-influential-today-246881?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), but you only have to read a few accounts of Romanian prisons or American lynchings to know that there are sadists waiting for their opportunity everywhere and a crowd ready to help them along. Just a day at an elementary school shows us that children will gladly taunt someone for the crime of having the wrong shoes. 

The sweetness of maltreatment, more than misguided justice or an addiction to power, is the privation of *love*. Our relationships with other human beings rely on emotional and physical connection in which we recognize, respond to, learn from, play with, encourage, challenge, give to, sacrifice for, forgive, and love each other. Cruelty takes the infinite joy of being face to face with another person and torches it, making their good our stumbling block.

This is the primal logic of envy and zero-sum thinking. Some of the African doctors I work with tell me that they have to be very careful when they go back to their home communities because poisonings (presumably committed out of envy for their professional status) are not uncommon. Women the world over put charms on their children because they fear the “evil eye” of a barren woman somewhere in the village will bring sickness or death. Rather than delighting in another’s joy, our instinct is to destroy it.

According to this logic, the only way that I can get ahead is to bring someone down. Surely anyone who has more than they need got it unfairly and they deserve to be brought down a peg. This is a strong motivation, but it is just as possible that my own lack—the raging maw of desire within my own heart—leads me to simply enjoy destroying someone else’s good even if I have no chance of getting anything out of the process. 

The world’s first murderer, Cain, certainly fits the latter picture. Nowhere in that text can we find any indication that Cain’s second-best offering would have been bumped to first place by murdering his brother. No, Scripture tells us, sin was simply waiting for its opportunity to master the first man who let his disappointment give way to rage. We only have to wait a few more chapters until the candy shop is open for business, when Jacob’s sons plunder an entire city to avenge their sister’s rape. A sense of wrongedness is all violence needs to open the floodgates.

## Conclusion

Some of us would never be tempted by this particular sin, and God bless them. We can try our darnedest to keep the incorrigibly sadistic away from guns but not keyboards. The temptation is prevalent enough within the population to be a problem and there are not nearly enough people immune to the mob’s siren song to save society from our vicious impulses.

There are no simple solutions here. Jesus Christ, himself the divine victim of earthly mob justice who defused a mob by inviting those without sin to cast the first stone, has been easily misappropriated throughout history in order to sweeten the moral treat. His radical ethic of love has been powerful enough to reshape empires but it can still be ignored by anyone clever enough to fool themselves. Christians love to fixate on his condemnation of the Pharisees or his cleansing of the temple to the exclusion of anything else he said or did during his 3 years of ministry. You can only remind people that they are only one lick of the lollipop away from being the mob begging for a crucifixion so many times before they start to ask if you're a collaborator who belongs on the next cross over. Our longing for justice and our thirst for blood will come to an end at Jesus’s second coming, but not a moment sooner.

It's extraordinarily difficult to make people less susceptible to demagoguery. I don't know if it's possible to do so on a scale any larger than a classroom, if that. As hopeful as I am for all of us to grow in character and moral fiber, social media is not helping us move in the right direction.

Rather, we must help those at the front of the crowd learn to recognize when their pulse is quickening with the taste of blood. A thousand small voices calling for calm can be overpowered by one megaphone announcing that the Moral Treats Emporium is open for business and the opportunity to be cruel to someone is available. People who know better must stop lying to themselves about how their righteous indignation is just an excuse for their vicious impulses.

The language of moral opprobrium must be like the f-word or an ice cream sundae, a rare treat rather than one’s daily sustenance. Some influencers, activists, and politicians might have to find new jobs if they took this sin seriously enough in their lives. The rest of us need to starve them of attention and refuse to give in to the emotional blackmail that has come to constitute political discourse. In the social media age, a healthy part of loving others requires that you just shut up.

The opportunity to hurt others lies behind far too much of our righteous indignation. The human desire to maltreat others is the twisted perversion of the love we are all meant to share with one another, which means that growing in the practice of love will make it harder and harder for us to cherish maltreatment in our hearts. The alternative is to keep gorging ourselves on treats, which is only bound to make us sicker.
### Lincoln's Constitutionalism
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/lincolns-constitutionalism/
Last updated: 2026-10-14T16:23:56.000Z
The date for Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address was set for March 4, 1861\. Lincoln, though born in Kentucky, and spending a bit of childhood in Indiana, was for the larger part of his life an Illinoisian. On February 11, 1861, Lincoln gave a farewell address to a crowd of onlookers in his home town of Springfield. The speech was one of his more emotionally driven dictions. Lincoln was not only aware that he might never return to Springfield, he was aware of the vastness of the task before him: “without the assistance of the Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail.” Lincoln of course was not just talking about the standard duties of being president, but of the mounting tensions and the growing divide at the heart of the Union over the matter of slavery. Just a few months prior, on December 20th 1860, the Charleston Mercury [announced](https://www.nysarchivestrust.org/education/consider-source/browse-primary-source-documents/civil-war-and-reconstruction/charleston-mercury-extra-proclaiming-union-dissolved?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) “The Union is Dissolved” as South Carolina set out to leave the Union. Lincoln’s task was to somehow, and in some way preserve the Union in the face of almost certain dissolution.

But to understand this moment, we need to take a few steps back first. For the Founders of our nation were, despite claims to the contrary which are most certainly the work of overgeneralization, not unified on all matters, nor was the declaration on 1776 under the impression that all Americans were the same. As the founders gathered, they realized that unity was going to be challenging, far more challenging than a monarchy understood. The different states had different economies, for starters. The South, with its cotton exports and tobacco-rich fields speckling the Virginia countryside. The North, with its textile exports, corn and squash and cabbage fields, and the ever-rising Massachusetts whale industry with its influx of whale blubber. Even early on it was apparent that the American project, though we call it this retrospectively, was going to be one of compromise, but not compromise in the weak sense of the word. Instead, it was the awareness that among the people of the fledgling nation there would be people of various stripes seeking to live together in harmony.

The next century would play this out repeatedly. Slowly, the disparate corners of the growing country would see increasingly that they were at odds with other parts. The South, aided by James Polk and his eye on expansion, saw the West as a means to extend the slave empire, to create a Southern Cotton Kingdom made up of territory that included Texas. The Whigs, on the other hand, were repulsed by such a thing. Henry Clay, the Whig stalwart who endeared himself to the likes of Abraham Lincoln (who even invited him to Illinois to speak though Clay declined), would run for the presidency in 1844\. The Mexican-American War, which this expansionist drive from the Executive would lead to, was, to most Whigs (though not all), highly unnecessary. With each new territory claimed, the question that lingered beneath the surface came rearing back: would slavery be allowed? 

American history, far from being unified, is full of conflicts of this sort. But this one would culminate in the Civil War, a great divide between North and South, slave and free. Lincoln, while a somewhat minority voice of opposition to the Mexican-American War, would be thrust into the national eye in 1860, first as the Republican candidate for the presidency and then as President. Lincoln inherited a nation that had been built on compromise, but not in the sense that mattered. With each decade in the early 19th century, the question of slavery was punted down the line. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 avoided a direct debate over slavery, offering instead to bring in Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state. The Gag Rule of the 1830s and 40s prevented Congress from debating anti-slavery propositions, instead tabling them. The Wilmot Proviso, an attempt at stopping slavery's spread into the new territory acquired from Mexico, failed. And the Compromise of 1850, allowing some states to decide the slave question by popular sovereignty, was followed in 1854 by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise line. By the election of 1860, Lincoln traveled by train to Washington under immense pressure, with the threads of unity nearing their end.

It's hard not to picture Lincoln sitting in a train car after giving his farewell address in Springfield, leaving the teary-eyed people of his beloved home behind. Washington loomed like a shadow ahead, and Lincoln, far from the country bumpkin we like to present him as, was an ardent political partisan ready to invoke a more lasting bond of unity.

So what was Lincoln's choice here? Certainly, he could have pressed for a remaking of the constitutional order, looking back at the founding and explaining that the Constitution that began the American project was incapable of handling the nation's massive differences. Yet he did nothing of the sort. If anything, Lincoln pressed into the constitutional framework. His opponents would argue that the Constitution protected slavery, but this was far from the truth.

In his February 27, 1860, Cooper Union Address in New York, Lincoln addressed this point head on. Combing through the voting records of the thirty-nine framers of the Constitution, he showed that of the twenty-three who left any record on the question, twenty-one, a clear majority, had voted to prohibit or restrict slavery's spread into federal territory: the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the organization of the Mississippi Territory in 1798, the Louisiana Territory in 1804, and the Missouri question of 1819–20\. Washington himself, as president, signed the 1789 act enforcing that same prohibition in the Northwest Territory. Lincoln drove the point home directly stating: "True, we do, in common with 'our fathers, who framed the Government under which we live,' declare our belief that slavery is wrong." This line, "our fathers, who framed the Government under which we live," was actually Stephen Douglas's own, first used by him to argue that the framers believed the Constitution gave Congress no power to restrict slavery's spread into the territories. Lincoln adopted Douglas's own framing as his text in a sort of jab at him (something Lincoln would often do) declaring, "I fully indorse this, and I adopt it as a text for this discourse," and then used the voting record to turn it against him. Lincoln, in contrast to Douglas, argued that the very men who had framed the Constitution repeatedly voted, in Congress and even from the presidency, to *limit*, and by limit I mean *prohibit*, the expansion of slavery into the territories. 

In a February 14, 1861, speech in Steubenville, Ohio, Lincoln, standing on the train platform as part of his journey to the First Inaugural, proclaimed: "we everywhere express devotion to the Constitution." The problem was that, as Lincoln goes on to say, "What are our rights under the Constitution?" This is an important question for us today to consider. In his First Inaugural, Lincoln would proclaim, "I hold that in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual." This perpetual undergirding of the Constitution was essential to Lincoln; he even noted that if all were to abide by the constitutional framing, the Union would last forever. For Lincoln, the Constitution was not a contract. It was a binding assertion that there were agreed-upon and verifiable universal laws and rules which all humans must accept and live under.

Lincoln's First Inaugural truly holds the key to his constitutional thought (though it certainly would grow and develop over time, as anyone who has read Lincoln will come to realize). Lincoln was convinced there was a universality to the Constitution, one which he served not as an authoritarian enforcer, but as a responsibility to guide and protect. "I therefore consider that in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is unbroken," he declared, "and to the extent of my ability I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States." Yet he was careful to frame this duty not as the assertion of personal power, but as submission to it under the people: "Doing this I deem to be only a simple duty on my part... unless my rightful masters, the American people, shall withhold the requisite means, or in some authoritative manner, direct the contrary."

Many of Lincoln's critics, including numerous Southern papers, created a caricature of Lincoln as a kingly figure, a lawless, ruthless leader seeking blood and vengeance under the guise of constitutional legality. His opponents might have been better off recognizing that the same claims were made against Washington, one of Lincoln's heroes thanks to Weems's biography, which Lincoln read over and over again in his youth. For an authoritarian, Lincoln surely was inept at understanding his all-encompassing role as king and lord.

Lincoln understood the Constitution as the maturation of the Union, not its origin. In other words, the Union itself predates the Constitution: the Articles of Association (1774), the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Articles of Confederation (1778) all came first, culminating in the Constitution (1787). While Southern states were seeking a way, a constitutional way, to leave the Union, Lincoln was quick to point out that the Union existed prior to the constitutional framework.

But perhaps more important for our modern age, Lincoln found that the Constitution was never meant to offer a specific answer to every future ailment or controversy. This is vital for us today. While I'm certainly aware of the ailments of modern "liberality," I'm not sure the claim that it stems from the constitutional order is the approach we need. In fact, I'd argue that it was this very same tendency playing out in the mid-19th century. So what is the purpose of the Constitution, then, if not to resolve all issues? Lincoln goes on: "No organic law can ever be framed with a provision specifically applicable to every question which may occur in practical administration." In other words, Lincoln says that the Constitution does not explicitly state whether fugitives should be surrendered by national or state authority, or whether Congress may, or is even obligated to, act on slavery in the territories. Instead, the Constitution offers a limiting restraint.

And yet Lincoln found within the Declaration of Independence, the laws of nature and of nature's God, the restraint that gave the Constitution its shape. In a January 1861 note, Lincoln recorded that "all this," meaning the crisis of the nation, "is not the result of accident. It has a philosophical cause." Lincoln goes on to clarify that the principle of "liberty to all" "clears the path for all, gives hope to all." This expression, as Lincoln calls it, is what makes the Declaration so unique and gives the Constitution its life and purpose. "No oppressed people will fight, and endure, as our fathers did, without the promise of something better than a mere change of masters." "Liberty to all" truly is the limiting restraint of the constitutional order. The statement is, in Lincoln's words, "an apple of gold." The Union and the Constitution, he goes on, are "the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it." The Constitution was made not to usurp this claim, but to preserve it.

Fast forward to today, and it seems our nation is once again at a great inflection point. On one hand, there are those who claim the constitutional order we inherited is inherently flawed and biased. The only path forward, these proponents state, is to unmake the old order, altering Congress and remaking the Supreme Court. They likewise seek to remove the Electoral College, calling it a "thing of the past" and "innately racist." On the other hand, there are those who would see America usher in a "Christian prince," an authoritarian figure to lead a revolt and reestablish order. These proponents despise the Constitution, seeing it as the natural parent of the individualistic life and the revolt against moral and religious strictures. Yet is this not far removed from the opponents of Lincoln's day? The South, seeking to feed its drive to expand the slave empire, desired to either remove the constitutional order or remake it entirely. Some, incorrectly I believe, viewed Lincoln as an authoritarian figure, a sort of constitutional king forcing his will. Yet this completely misses what Lincoln was doing. Lincoln certainly violated some rights, such as *habeas corpus*, but he, like Washington, was always set on handing power back to the people. Lincoln understood that the Constitution was the silver lining around the apple of gold, that the claim "liberty for all" truly meant for all.

To reclaim the constitutional order is compromise in the best sense, not out of weakness, as in the events that led to the Civil War, but as a means to live, as a vast union of very different people, harmoniously under a constitution of liberty. This constitution of liberty is not the freedom to do whatever one would like; I'd agree with the critics who decry this. Instead, it is the freedom to live in harmony under certain principles. For starters, there is the separation of powers. This is why, in *Federalist 51*, Madison notes that ambition must counteract or temper ambition. This connective tissue of authority enables safeguards against abuse in a way that European peasants would have long loved to have. This separation ensured a buffer between the various parts of governance. Likewise, checks and balances, while frustrating to many, offer a means to slow down ambition (again drawing from Madison) in the instance of executive abuse of power. A king could execute authority by whatever means he thought best. Checks and balances, along with the separation of powers, ensured this would not happen.

Of course, there is federalism itself. Many will scoff at this: "why don't we have the Articles of Confederation instead?" Well, with a country so vast, and a people so diverse (yes, even in 1787 the country was diverse, not all people are the same), there needs to be a mechanism for enacting the constitutional order while also allowing state governments to function. This compromise ensures that divided communities can address matters locally, while national matters can be addressed not by locality but by national governance. There's also the protection of individual rights, individual being a bad word in today's world, but it does not mean "individualism," or the sin which is read into every document from the past. Instead, the Constitution protects and guarantees the ability to speech, religion, due process, and equal protection under the law.

Lincoln understood, as he set out toward Washington, that the best hope for the Union was not through authoritarianism, nor was it to completely remove the Constitution. Instead, it was a rededication to the founding principles that make America a cohesive, yet very disparate, home to a people seeking to live at peace with one another. This is why, while I share the laments at the ills of society as posited by some of my post-liberal friends (and I mean this, there are some good critiques of culture), I'm not sure there is anything better than the Constitution as a safeguard of liberty for all. Like Lincoln, we must draw on the sacrifice of those who came before us and have "a new birth of freedom," for when the government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer exists, it will be a scary day, not just for the American people, but for the whole world.

*(All quotations from Lincoln in this essay came from Basler’s collected works of Lincoln.)*
### Alypius, Public Executions, and the Formation of Souls
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/alypius-public-executions-and-the-formation-of-souls/
Last updated: 2026-10-13T11:00:00.000Z
Roughly 1,600 years ago, a man named Alypius confidently proclaimed that witnessing the bloodshed of gladiator combat would not change him. St. Augustine later tells us that what Alypius witnessed wounded his soul more than the violence he observed wounded the gladiators’ bodies. He was not unchanged, and neither are we.

The decision by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to livestream the execution of mass shooter Nidal Hasan has provoked many responses amongst Christians. Some are calling not only for public executions, but for executions to be broadcast widely to the nation. Some are even appealing to scripture to justify it. I understand the impulse behind public executions, and I take it seriously. Romans 13:3-4 describes the sword of justice as a deterrent: Those who do evil should fear. Old Testament law also prescribes public executions, and we’re told that this is, at least in part, so that “all Israel shall hear and fear” (Deut. 13:11). If deterrence is the goal, why not let the whole nation see?

Before answering that question, I should be clear about what this article is not arguing. My concern here is not to argue for or against capital punishment. I favor it in the abstract, though the practice must go hand-in-hand with virtuous systems and a virtuous people. But this piece is not the place to argue it. Nor is it obvious that Mosaic law should woodenly prescribe how a modern nation carries out justice. It should not be lost on the church that some of the texts cited in favor of public executions are texts mandating the execution of apostates. But since those calling for broadcast executions appeal to those laws, for the sake of argument I will grant both that capital punishment can be just and that Mosaic law speaks to the question. Thus I ask a narrower question: if a society does execute, what does it do to us to watch?

Death changes us. How we kill and how we watch others die not only reveals our virtue (or lack thereof); it shapes us. That is why, even when it is necessary for us to witness death, such witnessing belongs in its proper and intimate context, among those with a real stake in the act. Mosaic law prescribed public executions in precisely this way. Taken out of that context and broadcast to millions, witnessing death becomes voyeuristic and disordered. 

Under the guidance of Mosaic law, ancient Israel’s public executions were carried out primarily by witnesses to the crime and the community in which the victim lived (Deut. 17:7; 21:21). Executions were not secret government acts performed in dark rooms behind closed doors, but they were also not spectator events for millions of strangers with no social or moral bond to the victim, the guilty, or the community. These were dreadful acts carried out before—and often by—the community in which the crime happened. Those witnesses threw the literal first stone. As Matthew Henry put it, the witnesses “are really, and therefore it was required that they should be actually, the death of the malefactor.”

This means onlookers were not neutral spectators who bore no responsibility or carried no cost. Instead, they were participants in the punishment. The early church understood this. Athenagoras, an ante-Nicene church father writing in the second century, [said that](https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0205.htm?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) Christians stayed away from the arena, “deeming that to see a man put to death is much the same as killing him.” Israel’s onlookers were witnesses to justice both to hold one another accountable and to testify to the consequences of serious crime. These onlookers bore a responsibility to ensure that justice was done and that others would fear the sword. But this responsibility also exacted a price.

This burden fell on the community and especially those most directly impacted by the crimes. This arrangement honored both the rights of victims and the dignity of even the most heinous criminals. Deut. 17:7 and 21:21 show us that public executions were performed by the witnesses and men of the local community, and Deut. 13:11 and 19:20 show that this was, in part, so that all would hear and fear. However, hearing and fearing is not the same thing as participating. In other words, there were two groups in view: the local community who acted and witnessed, and the wider nation who heard and feared.

In an era of mass communication and mass consumption, we should be careful to not anachronistically equate public executions performed at the city gates in ancient Israel with public executions broadcast to millions of online spectators. While a healthy fear of justice is good, it is not good for our souls to make a habit out of being witness to the destruction of image bearers of God. Even where it is necessary, this is a weighty task, and not one that rightly belongs to everyone. Rather, it belongs to those bound to the crime. And that natural and embodied restriction serves to safeguard both our souls and justice. Deterrence is a genuine good, but it is not meant to be absolutized as if human bloodshed has no cost once a sentence is passed. C. S. Lewis saw where that logic leads: if deterrence is all that matters, “it is not absolutely necessary that the man we punish should even have committed the crime.” Similarly, if deterrence were the only factor in justice, it would be justified to torture the guilty on a live broadcast. Or even the innocent. We do not do that. Why? Because even the guilty bear the image of God and are owed dignity, even in death.

Alypius bore a radical form of the cost of watching. Augustine tells the fuller story in *Confessions* 6.8\. Alypius was a friend of Augustine, and when other friends pressed him to go to the gladiator fights, he resisted the peer pressure and even boasted that his mind would not be polluted. “You may drag me there bodily . . . but do you imagine that you can make me watch the show and give my mind to it? I shall be there, but it will be just as if I were not present, and I shall prove myself stronger than you or the games.”

But eventually he gave in. Even after he arrived, Alypius was determined to keep his eyes shut and not see the violence. Sadly, Alypius did open his eyes. Augustine writes that Alypius’s “soul was stabbed with a wound more deadly than any which the gladiator, whom he was anxious to see, had received in his body.” After Alypius watched the slaughter, Augustine explains, “he carried away with him a diseased mind which would leave him no peace until he came back again.” He had meant to be present in body only. He left a participant.

Now, I am not equating public executions with the gladiator combat of Rome, nor am I saying that every witness to an execution will revel in the bloodshed. A modern execution does not involve combat, and being drawn to the violence is not a foregone conclusion. However, Alypius was also certain of his own strength, and Augustine writes that he drank in the madness without realizing it. While a hypothetical public execution is not the circus of ancient Rome (and my prayer is that it will never be), we would do well to guard our eyes, minds, and hearts against the sinful perversion of being fascinated with bloodshed.

We can readily see a milder version of this in the mania of publicly broadcasting criminal trials. Regardless of the intention, this practice turns something grave into reality TV. Hordes of people outside the affected community, without any cultural or relational context, and certainly without any legal expertise, pick sides and fight about the case as they would about their favorite *Survivor* contestants or basketball teams. Real lives are at stake, and real lives have already been lost, and real suffering is being experienced by the community actually affected by a heinous crime. But now millions twist legal proceedings into a spectator sport or an opportunity for virtue signaling. Not every spectator is indulging in the worst possible behaviors and motivations, but the tendency is plain—and so is the price of carelessness. If witnessing the drama of culturally volatile court cases can tempt otherwise faithful men and women into treating the lives of actual humans like reality TV contestants, how much more careful should we be about normalizing spectatorship of the bodily destruction of image bearers of God?

While some may fall into the raucous sin of Alypius, many others may become desensitized to death. They might not applaud the killing, but they may well stop understanding and rightly feeling the weight of death. Death, which Scripture calls the last enemy (1 Cor. 15:26), may become something they are comfortable with, or simply indifferent to. And even if witnessing death does not push us into either extreme, it still changes us. 

The danger of falling into the madness of Alypius or succumbing to callous apathy is present even for judges, court officials, and the families of victims. But whether by vocation or by relational context, these individuals have a genuine stake in the act. The same is true of the communities affected. When members of a community witness or take part in a death, they are bound to it by grief, loss, or at least a feeling of closure. However they feel, they are not disembodied online spectators divorced from the act, but rooted in a time, place, and relational context that naturally gives weight to it. For these invested members of a community, witnessing an execution is a profoundly intimate experience.

That intimacy is exactly what a broadcast removes. Though this metaphor cannot be taken far, there’s a sort of voyeuristic pornification in taking such an act outside of its proper, personal, and natural context and commodifying it for those with no stake in the act. To borrow Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, the medium is the message. A livestream does not simply show an execution to more people; it catechizes those watching. 

Those who participate in this kind of justice carry a burden, and we, as a society, should weigh it. Even if executions should not be hidden away among a handful of government officials, that is a far cry from broadcasting them to millions who do not know the victims, do not know the guilty, were not impacted by the crime, and had no role to play in the prosecution. Whatever public character God’s law gave to executions served a purpose, and community participation in justice is not the same as a livestream for all of society.

Alypius thought he could sit in the stands as if he were not present. He was wrong, though Augustine adds that God later graciously pulled him out of that madness and taught him to trust not in himself but in God. Human life matters, and observing its destruction is never a casual act. It changes us, and it should only be done under weighty and serious conditions and by those who have a real stake in the act. Sisters and brothers, we are not made to destroy one another, and that creational reality does not change even when death becomes necessary. To forget that is to forget ourselves and the one in whose image we are made.
### We Need More Religion in Public Life, Not Less
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/we-need-more-religion-in-public-life-not-less/
Last updated: 2026-10-13T11:00:00.000Z
**Matthew Kaemingk and Shadi Hamid.** [***Can Religion Save Democracy?***](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781587436895%5Fcan-religion-save-democracy?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) **Brazos Press, 2026\. $26.99\. 224 pp.**

Matthew Kaemingk and Shadi Hamid want to make religion in the United States great again.

In an era of increasing secularization and declines in religious affiliation, attendance, and practices, these men—one a Reformed theologian, the other a Muslim social scientist—long for religion’s return to relevance in American society. They do so not because they want to see their fellow citizens adopt a particular tradition or set of principles, but because they believe religion can shore up America’s ailing civic order. Religion, they think, really can make America great again.

Kaemingk and Hamid are the authors of the provocatively titled new book *Can Religion Save Democracy?* They suggest that organized religion, rather than being a cause of the sorts of divisions tearing our political communities asunder, is actually a force for good in any healthy and thriving democratic society. Drawing on empirical data, theological discussion, and personal reflections, they contend that religious contributions to public life—through encouraging shared moral commitments, strengthening the bonds of social capital, and more—can be a salve for the dysfunction plaguing American politics.

Kaemingk is Professor of Public Theology at Theologische Universiteit Utrecht, and Hamid is a columnist at the *Washington Post* after a stint at the Brookings Institution. Yet these experts do not write as disinterested observers; they have, for years, practiced what they preach. Together they host [*Zealots at the Gate*](https://comment.org/shows/zealots-at-the-gate/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), a podcast they describe as exploring “the future of democracy and religion.” Both are fellows at Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. This book is, in many ways, a culmination of the work the authors have been doing for quite some time.

*Can Religion Save Democracy?* is written to a lay audience without sacrificing the authors’ learned and lived expertise. Kaemingk and Hamid adeptly draw on historical and social science research, noting that the steady decline of corporate worship and religious communities mirrors a decline in our collective political health. They argue that religion provides more than spiritual benefits to adherents, encouraging people to live alongside those with whom they disagree on important questions. A culture increasingly without religion, they write, is not the utopia John Lennon envisioned in “Imagine.” When secularism aims for neutrality in the public square, seeking to banish religion to private spaces, all it does is create a void longing to be filled.

In her excellent book [*Uncivil Agreement*](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo27527354.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), political scientist Liliana Mason explains how voters are increasingly motivated not by deeply rooted ideology, but rather attachment to a political party. Preferences and principles are secondary, she argues, to being on the right team. When religion declines in people’s lives, they inevitably find something—like, say, partisan politics—to replace it. Kaemingk and Hamid are aware of and troubled by this phenomenon: “As more Americans abandon their churches,” they write, “they’re carrying their longing for belief and belonging into the political arena.”

If *Can Religion Save Democracy?* begins with outlining a problem, then the book’s next several chapters explain how religion might address it. Religious belief, Kaemingk and Hamid contend, introduces a degree of doubt to a person’s political convictions, leading people to hold these views less tightly and closely while acknowledging their own limitations. “A healthy democracy,” they write, “requires citizens who possess some level of intellectual humility, who can shrug their shoulders from time to time and say, ‘God only knows.’” Christians and Muslims—indeed, any faithful person—can be “citizens of conviction but not certainty.”

Religion also puts politics in its right context as an important yet secondary pursuit in human affairs, discouraging political idolatry and primacy in our hearts and minds. Religious traditions, they argue, “offer not a set of policy prescriptions but a framework for keeping politics in its proper place.” Religious belief and practice might even lead people to reject “cancel culture,” instead prioritizing a patient and humble posture towards one’s opponents in the public square. Kaemingk and Hamid propose applying a *covenant* mindset to our civic environment, emphasizing “the sacred ties that bind” us to our fellow citizens, rather than seeking to tear down or destroy one another over past errors.

But if the authors are right about the importance of religion to democratic values and healthy political regimes, where, exactly, do we go from here? Make no mistake, religion in the United States, as we’ve known it, is changing. Denominational Christianity has [declined](https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religious-landscape-study-religious-identity/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) over several decades, the “nones” are [increasing](https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/01/24/religious-nones-in-america-who-they-are-and-what-they-believe/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) as a share of the population, and younger Americans are [more likely than ever](https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/age-distribution/18-29/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to not identify with any religious tradition. Virtually every empirical metric paints a dispiriting picture of the future of American religion.

While religion may not command the same share of cultural cachet as it did in generations past, its contributions to the American project remain. A chapter titled “Schools of Democracy” references thinkers like Alexis de Tocqueville, Robert Putnam, and Robert Bellah in explaining how religious institutions—including houses of worship and nonprofit organizations—have been crucial for training citizens for the important work of self-government. Religion also provides people with “communities of memory,” providing “the thick sense of belonging that democracy requires.” Religion, belief, and institutions are not chains to be cast off in the name of progress, but essential guardrails for preserving pluralistic democracy.

*Can Religion Save Democracy?* is a compelling book at an important moment. Kaemingk and Hamid believe our democratic order may be revived just yet, starting with more religion, not less. I am quite sympathetic to their argument. I teach at a Christian university that takes its religious mission seriously. We believe deep and practiced faith is not a barrier but a requirement for meaningful public service and engagement. And as a political scientist I need no convincing of the symptoms and causes of our current political malaise, driven largely by a disordered emphasis on partisan and ideological identity and phenomena like negative partisanship and affective polarization. 

And yet—or, perhaps, because of this—there are moments throughout this book when I wished for greater clarity and deeper engagement from the authors. Yes, this is a book about how religion benefits the practice of democracy, even in complex societies marked by deep difference. But consider the question of how one’s faith tradition should inform one’s political participation. Christians, the authors encourage, “can chill out about politics because the real election is already over and won.” I tend to agree. However, this may not be especially satisfying to people of faith discerning whether and how they should advocate for certain policies and outcomes. Religion certainly should influence our democratic behaviors and postures, but it cannot help motivating our political viewpoints and activism as well.

Consider the past decade of legal conflicts in the shadow of [*Obergefell v. Hodges*](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2014/14-556?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), with lawsuits and challenges involving sexual orientation in employment and vendors with religious objections to same-sex marriage ceremonies, among other things. All of this was predictable – during *Obergefell*’s oral argument, Justice Alito [asked](https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral%5Farguments/argument%5Ftranscripts/2014/14-556q1%5Fl5gm.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) Solicitor General Donald Verrilli whether nonprofit organizations could lose their tax-exempt status, and Verrilli answered, “It’s certainly going to be an issue.” Citizens’ responses to these sorts of conflicts are driven not just by political ideologies and theories of legal interpretation, but also religious (or nonreligious) traditions. Some Christians may encourage future iterations of Jack Phillips to “[just bake the cake](https://firstthings.com/why-i-didnt-just-bake-the-cake/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)” as an exercise in Christian hospitality, while others may stand alongside him in defending his deeply held religious beliefs.

Kaemingk and Hamid characterize religious belief not as a cudgel to batter opponents, but as an impetus for meaningful civic participation. And though I affirm this sentiment, at some point the rubber must meet the road. In any democratic political society, where there will inevitably be winners and losers, some preferences are going to prevail at the expense of others. What follows, and how people of sincere and different religious faiths respond, isn’t exactly clear from the reading. More religion—and the framework it provides for better engagement—may be necessary to sustain our political communities, but that doesn’t mean it is sufficient.

Nevertheless, in highlighting the essential role religion plays in flourishing democratic societies, these authors remind us of what David Foster Wallace famously [told](https://mbird.com/literature/more-david-foster-wallace-quotes/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) an audience of graduating students at Kenyon College: “Everybody worships.” 

For Kaemingk and Hamid, secularism has failed to improve our politics by encouraging people to direct their worship to finite and flawed sources, bound to fall short and disappoint. Even if *Can Religion Save Democracy?* is more of a framework than a checklist, it is essential reading for anyone concerned about the downward spiral of our political culture while looking for reasons for hope moving forward.
### Sabbath Isn't a Strategy
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/sabbath-isnt-a-strategy/
Last updated: 2026-10-12T11:00:27.000Z
Not long ago, I was invited to speak at a gathering in New York of pastors from across the Tri-State area. My assigned topic was the necessity of prayer in ministry. While scanning the schedule, I noticed another session—on Sabbath keeping. It didn’t conflict with mine, so I attended.

I had recently begun taking the Sabbath more seriously, and the session left me encouraged. The speaker affirmed the importance of setting aside a day of rest. He quoted staggering statistics about burnout, especially among clergy. He spoke of how he and his staff had become more productive by observing a weekly Sabbath—recovering from the previous week and preparing for the next.

There was no arguing with his presentation. The data was persuasive. Even beyond church life, he cited business research: high-performing companies with four-day work weeks often outperform those that demand nights and weekends. Sabbath, it seemed, was not only biblical—it was strategic.

I don’t doubt it. A life shaped by the rhythm of creation—six days of work, one day of rest—does often lead to greater emotional health and sustainable fruitfulness. But when we read the creation account of God resting on the seventh day or the commands given to Israel that follow this pattern, productivity and efficiency are never the point.

In our modern culture, productivity and efficiency are the point. [L. M. Sacasas, who researches technology and culture, calls this](https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-one-best-way) the “dogma of the one best way”—a relentless obsession to optimize everything.

Just scroll through YouTube:

“The best way to . . . ”

“The only way to . . . ”

“If you adopt this technique, you will never have to worry again about money, clients, or stubborn fat again.”

Or the ever-popular rebuke: “You’re doing it wrong!”

The tragedy of the “one best way dogma,” Sacasas says, is “living with the unyielding pressure to discover it (the ‘one best way’) and the inevitable and perpetual frustration of failing to achieve it.” He continues: “And not only frustration. It produces anxiety, fear, compulsiveness, resignation, and, ultimately, self-loathing. If there is ‘one best way,’ how will I know it? If I have not found it, have I failed? And is it my fault?”

This mindset, says Sacasas, is “necessarily inhospitable to the human person.”

We should resist seeing the Sabbath as just another “best way” toward productivity and efficiency. When God gives the command, he doesn’t say, “Keep the Sabbath, because it’s good for your output.” He says, “You shall keep the Sabbath, because it is holy for you” (Exodus 31:14).

Looking back at the creation week in Genesis 1-2, God worked for six days and called it good—very good. But the seventh day he calls holy. Our world pushes us toward maximum output. God calls us to goodness and holiness.

This is an important detail: God did not rest because he was tired. Creating the sun didn’t exhaust him. Stretching out the expanse didn’t take a toll. He wasn’t running on fumes after creating a generative system of fertility in plants and animals. God does not grow weary or change in his pace.

> Have you not known? Have you not heard?  
> The Lord is the everlasting God,  
> the Creator of the ends of the earth.  
> He does not faint or grow weary;  
> his understanding is unsearchable. (Isaiah 40:28)

Even after six days of work, creating the ends of all things—from the Milky Way to the single-celled microbes, God didn’t need a break. He never changes. Never in a hurry; never procrastinating. He is always in control, always patient, and present.

Nor is he resting up, getting ready for the week ahead. He isn’t anticipating the demands of what’s coming and reserving energy to offer his best self. God simply stopped, delighted in his creative work, and blessed the world.

Of course, we are not God. We do get tired. We do need to recover. If we do not rest, we will suffer. But if we are to follow God in his weekly rhythm of work and rest, we must also follow in his motivations. “Man is not a beast of burden,” says Abraham Heschel, “and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work.”

Many of us, if we’re honest, practice a weekly Sabbath rhythm as a strategy to *recover from* or a *precaution against* exhaustion. Those concerns are legitimate—but they are not God’s reasons. Not for himself, and not for us. God sees it as a day designed primarily for goodness and holiness, not recovery. Weariness and burnout are good reasons to come to the Sabbath. But they shouldn’t be the reasons that keep us there.

To assume that Sabbath keeping is primarily designed for *recovery from* and a *precaution against* exhaustion or a strategy for productivity, we are in danger of making the Sabbath only for those who have the health, energy, and vocations of productivity. But what about young children? What about the disabled? What about the elderly? In our world, there are increasing measures to exclude these neighbors of ours—aborting our infants and abandoning and euthanizing the disabled and elderly. When people can no longer produce, we question their value.

But the God of Sabbath thinks differently. Jesus welcomed the children and paid special attention to the disabled. The New Testament church gave special emphasis to elderly widows.

The Sabbath is not a mechanism for recovery, nor a tool for better performance. It is a holy day—a window into what God experiences. A weekly rhythm of delight, goodness, and joy. Sabbath is God saying, “I enjoyed this so much—I want you to experience it too.”

Some things are not for function but for delight.

## **The Butter Rule**

There are two kinds of butter in our house. One is for greasing the pan we cook our eggs in, or for when our kids make pancakes on Saturday mornings. We buy it in bulk—sticks of butter for baking or frying. But then there’s the other kind of butter. The good kind. It comes in a gold wrapper, shaped like a small brick instead of a stick. It sits out on the counter in a dish, soft and ready—for fresh sourdough or warm scones straight from the oven.

Do you see the difference between the two? One is an ingredient, the other is an experience. One comes in bulk, the other comes in gold. And in our house, you don’t make the mistake of greasing a pan with gold butter. Gold butter is holy, set apart for particular purposes.

At least, you don’t make that mistake for long.

I remember when the gold butter started to make an appearance on our countertop. It was laid out on the counter in one of our small dishes with a butter knife. I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, when most kids I knew used margarine for whatever butter needs you had. Margarine came in a tub, and the tub went into the fridge. You scooped it cold, used it for everything, and put it back. Leaving it out would’ve turned it into a separated, oily mess. But this new countertop-butter? It was a revelation.

Let me be clear: Between my wife and I, Jena is the superior cook. By a mile. That sourdough and those scones? That was Jena’s doing, not mine. We’re all just lucky to be near the action.

Still, I’ve got two culinary contributions I’m proud of: omelets and grilled cheese. (Grilled cheese secret: sourdough + parmesan on the crust.) The key to both? A well-greased cast-iron pan. One morning, I was prepping an omelet and saw the gold butter right there by the stove. It looked convenient. I took a generous chunk (I measure butter with my heart) and got to work. Until Jena noticed.

“Did you use the butter on the counter to cook your eggs?”

Maybe.

“That butter is for spreading, not cooking!”

Got it.

Just like I needed reminding of which butter to use, let us tell you again: Don’t simply use the Sabbath for recovery and productivity. Don’t use the gold butter for your eggs. The Sabbath is for goodness and holiness.

*Taken from* [The Sabbath We Need](https://www.ivpress.com/the-sabbath-we-need?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) *by John Starke and Jena Starke. ©2026 by John Starke and Jena Starke. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press.* [*www.ivpress.com*](http://www.ivpress.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*.*
### An Interview with Drew and Megan Dickerson: Marriage, Family, and the Intellectual Life
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/an-interview-with-drew-and-megan-dickerson-marriage-family-and-the-intellectual-life/
Last updated: 2026-10-12T11:00:00.000Z
The intellectual life is in some ways necessarily lonely—in his book on *The Intellectual Life: Its Spirits, Conditions, Methods*, the French Dominican Friar Antonin Sertillanges insists that the intellectual life requires solitude. He is not wrong. Researchers in history, for instance, spend hours, days, years alone in mysterious musty basements, poring over documents that unveil their mystery to only the most persistent elect. And then the practice of writing takes additional hours (and days and years) of discipline and solitude before the essays or books are ready to go out into the world. But not all Christians who live the intellectual life are professional scholars, first and foremost. And unlike Sertillanges himself, many are married and have children. Some[ might be lawyers](https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-to-have-a-day-job-and-an-intellectual-life) or pastors or doctors or missionaries or various professionals, or [stay-at-home moms](https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/parenting/the-stay-at-home-intellectual-mom?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), or [homeschooling mothers](https://thedispatch.com/article/motherhood-intellect-friedan-gender-children/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), or simply[ overwhelmed mothers](https://comment.org/motherhood-and-the-intellectual-life/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of small children. These factors definitely take a toll on the possibility of solitude. 

In other words, for most people, there are also the practical considerations of the intellectual life and intellectual work, whether done on the margins of one's day or full-time. Writers and other intellectuals are people too—they too must eat, do laundry, keep children alive, perhaps even vacuum on occasion. We all are bodies, as well as minds and souls. *So how does this work, in particular, for households that include not just one intellectual but two?* 

That is the basic question underlying this interview series, in which the interview below is the third installment. We encourage you also to read the earlier interviews [with Charles and Tessa Carman](https://mereorthodoxy.com/marriage-family-and-the-intellectual-life-charles-and-tessa-carman) and [with John and Katelyn Shelton](https://mereorthodoxy.com/marriage-family-and-the-intellectual-life-interview-with-john-and-katelyn-shelton). 

\*\*\*

**Nadya Williams:** I'd like to start by asking each of you to tell us a little bit about your intellectual journey: when did you first consciously realize that you are called to live an intellectual life? What did you envision this looking like? How has it turned out so far? 

**Megan Dickerson:** I don’t think I’ve consciously thought about being “called to live an intellectual life” until maybe this question. I’ve always liked to read and think and ask questions and that has usually gotten me in trouble or been viewed with suspicion. What I see myself doing is being equipped to better serve the church myself while equipping others to serve the church and serve Christ.

I went to the University of Central Arkansas as part of the Schedler Honors College, which is called a liberal arts college within a state school. This meant that I didn’t take English one or various other core classes. Instead, I took different classes that were intended to be interdisciplinary seminars in which we read philosophy and theology and fiction and scientific studies and came together to discuss. I took a class on Friendship and another on The Social Consciousness of Broadway. They wanted to introduce us to The Great Conversation and to great books. I loved it and have been profoundly shaped by this experience. 

But I didn’t know it was unusual!

It wasn’t until after seminary that I realized most people don’t read books! Although I did eventually find a lovely group of homeschool moms who would read theology and fiction with me as we sought to introduce our children to the great conversation. 

Along the way, I’ve usually been able to gather women with me to read and think together. I’ve been challenged to write more so that I solidify my thoughts and grow as a communicator. We moved to North Carolina for Drew to study (I’ll let him tell his own story) and I met friends and found myself also in the seminary PhD program studying systematic theology—focusing on patristics and spiritual formation. (I should be editing my dissertation now, but this is more fun.) My favorite part has been reading with friends and coming together in class to discuss!

I also get to teach in our church’s women’s Bible study. I hang out with younger women in the seminary. I read the Bible and other books with them and talk about ideas. I have been blessed to teach Old Testament, theology, and how to study and teach the Bible to women in a local prison through Judson College’s field minister program. These ladies are earning a college degree and will be deployed to other prisons in the state to minister to other incarcerated women. I homeschooled our children for a long time before they went to a university model school. This year is the first time they’re all going to be in school five days a week. And our homeschool looked like reading good books and discussing them.

Apparently, I do live an intellectual life! But I don’t think any of this is what I envisioned! It’s nothing like what I planned. Every step of our adult life has felt like something was thrown at us or we were shoved into something. But I am thankful that so many of our plans didn’t work out and for much of the life we have. The Lord has guided us into some unexpected places!

**Drew Dickerson:** I don’t know if I could say that I ever felt called to live an intellectual life. I grew up in a family of athletes; my dad was a college basketball coach, and my brothers and I all played multiple sports through high school. But I was always the one with a book in my hand, reading in the bleachers between games. I enjoyed school, and I loved learning, but I didn’t view myself as an “intellectual.” 

But when I got to college, I felt God calling me to use my gifts, including my mind, to serve the church. At the time, I had no idea what that looked like, but I went to seminary and had an amazing experience getting to study ancient languages, church history, and theology. After graduating, I was called to serve in a church as a student pastor, where I got to spend five years teaching and discipling teenagers. In many ways, those five years shaped my intellectual life the most. I still loved reading about history and theology and talking about and studying those subjects more deeply, but working with teenagers forced me to take the deep truths I had learned and explain them in a way a 14-year-old could understand. 

Eventually, I felt God leading me back to the academic world. Again, I had no idea what that would actually look like, but a very gracious church historian, Dr. Stephen Eccher, spent about three hours on the phone with me one afternoon, casting a vision for the intellectual life that was very compelling. My family and I moved from Arkansas to North Carolina so I could study with him. The vision he cast consisted of a lot of reading and a lot of writing, and my experience has definitely lived up to that expectation. But more than that, all along the way he has encouraged me to love my family well and to direct all of my studies toward how they can better serve the church. That has been the best part of what I get to do.

**Nadya Williams:** What kind of intellectual work does each of you do now, and what role does it play in your day-to-day life? 

**Drew Dickerson:** I work in the library at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and I spend most of my time connecting students and faculty with resources that help them engage with the topics they are studying. So I get to spend my days surrounded by books and people who (mostly) want to learn. 

I can’t imagine a better place for an intellectual to work. I love connecting people with authors from 500 years ago who can help them think more deeply about a topic. It’s like introducing someone to an old friend who I know can help them along in their journey because they have already helped me. I also get to teach college classes on Church History, Missions, and Theology.

**Megan Dickerson:** We are both at the tail end of writing our dissertations, which is not the most fun. But it will be great when it’s done. 

I get to teach in lots of situations, from women’s Bible study at my church, to women’s conferences at different churches, to my college class in the women’s prison, to filling in on campus at the seminary every now and then. I also get to be on the leadership team for our Society for Women in Scholarship, which is a great place for women to come together on campus to ask questions and wrestle with things together. 

I’m a 40-year-old woman with four school-aged kids, and I am finishing a PhD in Systematic Theology on campus at an SBC seminary. There aren’t a lot of people like me. And it seems that it’s a benefit to the women around that they see me doing what I do. I get to talk with lots of women about motherhood and theological study. I get to tell them that there are seasons, and God wants you to use your gifts, including your academic gets, for the church, but that we don’t have to feel the pressure to lean into all of these gifts at the same time.

I like to read and think and write, and that’s looked very different in my day-to-day life in different seasons. I still read and thought when I was drowning in toddlers, but it wasn’t the season to be in a PhD program. As the Lord has opened new doors (and I’ve felt shoved through a few!), he has also grown my capacity to juggle things, and he’s given me new opportunities to teach in different ways.

While I was drowning in toddlers, the Lord gave opportunities for what I’ve come to think of as “small teaching.” I met one-on-one or in small groups with younger women to discuss the Bible or to read books together. The Lord was using my teaching gifts, even though I didn’t recognize at the time. 

**Nadya Williams:** What role has your intellectual life played in your marriage and family life? Do you find that it affects your interactions with each other and with your children? If so, in what ways?

**Drew Dickerson:** We’ve spent the majority of our married life either in school or working in an academic environment, so it would be difficult to pinpoint a way that our intellectual pursuits haven’t impacted our lives. 

One thing I’ve definitely learned is that my wife is amazing. She’s the type of human and scholar I want to be. But our minds work in completely different ways. She can go from menu planning for the week to Cyril of Alexandria’s interpretation of John 6 to who should be the MVP of the WNBA this year (it’s Kelsey Mitchell, BTW) in the span of five minutes. Her mind moves so fast it’s exhausting sometimes, but she has taught me so much about efficiency and how to get things done, especially when it comes to writing. 

When it comes to our kids, I think our conversations around the dinner table are probably more eclectic than most families’. Topics can include (and have included) the messiness of the incarnation, our favorite missionaries, and what position the nine members of the Fellowship of the Ring would play on a football team. We challenge our kids to read good books, think well, and ask good questions. But it’s fun to see how that plays out in each of their lives. My oldest daughter shares my love for literature, especially Tolkien. She enjoys writing her own stories and loves the performing arts. My oldest son is very different. He plays football and enjoys the sciences and building things as part of his school’s robotics team.

**Megan Dickerson:** Drew and I knew we wanted to get married, because we like to think and talk about ideas, because we like to read. Not that we would have thought about this as an intellectual life. But reading together and talking about what we’re reading is a big part of our marriage. We like learning!

As for our kids, they all read a lot, even the ones who say they don’t like to read. Everybody has a book with them most of the time. Which is one of my favorite things. It’s the only thing that I’ve been intentional about in my parenting that has worked out! We’ve always read together and given our kids rich books at home.

We’ve also lived in seminary housing for the past several years, and that’s about all they know. Both of their parents are studying theology and historical theology at a high level, so it comes up as we talk about our day. And when we have neighbors over for dinner, conversation goes in the expected directions. And the kids are in the mix most of the time.

One of our favorite stories was around the lunch table when it was just me and the kids, and we were talking about Jesus, what they were reading in the Bible. And then our youngest who was 3 at the time got a mischievous look and asked: “But did Jesus have a BOTTOM?!?” And his big sister looked SCANDALIZED and said Jesus could NOT have a bottom because he’s JESUS. Which led to a lovely conversation about the necessity of the full humanity of Christ and that what was not assumed was not healed.

But we want our kids to be well-rounded, so they also do a lot of sports—football, basketball, soccer, cross-country, cheer. Lots of kids means lots of sports. They play more video games than I’d like. They watch more YouTube than I’d like. But I think our family culture is centered on reading and loving Jesus, and that’s evident in the lives of our kids.

We are low-church Southern Baptists. We attend an evangelical mega-church with many campuses. We like to read and think, but it’s also not the whole personality for any one of us. 

**Nadya Williams:** What are some challenges you have found to your intellectual pursuits so far? How did you resolve these, or are you still living through them? What expectations did you have for your intellectual life before you were married, and how do you think these have adjusted over time and with circumstances?

**Megan Dickerson:** I think life is hard. I think the Lord sometimes gives so many gifts that we can’t always figure out how to prioritize where to lean in! For years now, we’ve just had a perpetual pile of clean clothes that live on our couch. We don’t have a real laundry room, and the intent is to sort them and put them away. But I could either do that or edit my dissertation… or watch a football game. 

We’re both trying to finish our dissertations now, but I was in the hospital a few weeks ago, so that knocked out any “intellectual” work for us for 2-3 weeks. Not great timing! 

Writing and teaching looks different now than it did when the kids were little. Stages of motherhood have changed everything. Not that any stage is harder, but they’re hard in different ways, and they consume time in such different ways. 

Before we were married, we expected to be missionaries. We’d share the gospel, teach the Bible, and plant churches. We’re in a different context than we expected, and we’re not planting churches, but we do share the gospel and teach the Bible. I’m not sure that I had expectations for an intellectual life beyond that. 

**Drew Dickerson:** I don’t think that the challenges I’ve faced are necessarily unique to me, but life is definitely a balancing act. It’s difficult to find time to devote to writing between driving kids to school, practice, or church; spending time together as a family; and focusing on our marriage. 

Add jobs and church ministry on top of everything, and our calendars never seem to have enough hours in the day. This is still a work in progress as we navigate new rhythms of life as our kids get older. One of my favorite things about our marriage is that we’ve got to experience our intellectual journey together. Life has never turned out the way we expected; even our intellectual pursuit came as a bit of a surprise. Over time, we’ve learned to pursue excellence in whatever we do and step through the doors that God opens for us. 

**Nadya Williams:** I'd love to hear your pie-in-the-sky dream: What do you each dream about in your intellectual lives in the future? How do these dreams work together?

**Megan Dickerson:** I like to read and think and write and teach. I’d love more freedom to do those things and somehow have our bills paid! Every year at the beginning of the school year, I see professors talk about the spectrum of being called to this kind of life between church ministry and an academic vocation. I’d love to live somewhere on that spectrum, and I’m not sure where I’ll land. I love participating in the work of the church, and I’ve loved the opportunities I’ve had to teach and equip students in higher education. 

I’m not sure what doors the Lord will open for us going forward, but I’m sure I’ll land somewhere on that spectrum, and I love the idea of having one foot in the church and the other in the academy. I’ll continue to write and teach. I’ll continue to equip and train. 

**Drew Dickerson:** My dream is pretty simple. I love teaching, but more than that, I love students. I would love to be in a place where I can teach and pour into young people, help them think well, and prepare them to serve in their communities and churches.

*Drew Dickerson is pursuing a PhD in historical theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Megan Dickerson is also a PhD student at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, where she serves as the grant administrator for the* [*L. Russ Bush Center for Faith and Culture*](https://cfc.sebts.edu/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*. They live in Wake Forest, North Carolina, with their four children.*
### 'What Is the Meaning of Christian In This American Life?'
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/what-is-the-meaning-of-christian-in-this-american-life/
Last updated: 2026-10-09T15:41:51.000Z
In my early years, I was much more focused on seeing how others experienced Jesus than how I experienced him. Much of my childhood was an immersion in global Christianity. At times this meant spending time with missionary friends in the States on furlough, at other times sitting around a table listening to stories so captivating their tellers had already recounted them for books and film. 

One such book involved my experience from the perspective of a biographer. She recounted the life and death of our close family friends: Roni, 35, and Charity, seven months. Both shot and killed in a small Cessna, a [casualty of our CIA’s counter-narcotic operation](https://sarahjrexford.substack.com/p/25-years-after-the-bullet-that-changed). Roni’s husband Jim and their six-year-old son, my best friend Cory, survived the crash. 

“I have long dreaded the thought of getting to the end of life and regretting that I allowed my own timidity or other people’s expectations to determine the course of my life. I had decided at a much younger age that several of my beliefs should determine the course of my life,” wrote Steve Saint in *End of the Spear.*

Thus, they did for Roni. And while Jim would be the first to tell you Roni was not a martyr for Christ, her death was my first glimpse of what I thought a Christian was: someone willing to give up their life for their beliefs. 

Not all my early years were this upending. One night, my friends and I crowded into their van and rode the long, bumpy streets to a small, impoverished town in South America. Here, the streets were so dark the wild dogs looked like shadows and the air so calm time felt irrelevant. 

We crowded into the first floor of a concrete building full of white, dirty plastic chairs. This was church. A decade and a half later, I can still remember how the people’s voices swelled in that room, as if angels were singing. I’d never heard a love for Jesus sung with that kind of power, not even in the States where our services were full of amplifiers, soundboards, and mics. 

Here, loving Jesus meant loving the person. None of the westernized spirituality of bad coffee and good donuts mattered, or whether we sang the latest hits in CCM. The focus was Jesus. Somehow because of this, culture came alongside, not as a hindrance to their worship, but in a way that enabled its perpetuity into Monday morning. 

I stood there between the dirty plastic chairs, viscerally aware that the people in this low-ceilinged room loved Jesus for the God he is, not for the trends we sometimes tie him to. This was Christianity. The God I claimed to follow was not restricted to fifty states thousands of miles north, tied to the odd blue carpet and wooden pews of my grandparent’s church, or restrained to the high-ceiling, multi-million dollar building I was used to. No, as much as he was God of Heaven, he was God of earth. All of it. Even a church whose best was dirty plastic chairs. These are the things I learned as an adolescent about what it meant to be Christian, about what Christianity was.

“May we all have grace to maintain in our own proper way the purity of the Church, as being an assembly of believers, and not a nation,” wrote Charles Spurgeon in an 1896 book. I have sometimes wondered how he wrote such apropos statements more than a century before I would read them. 

But for as wide-eyed and open-hearted as my introduction to Christianity had been, it took a swift turn before I even entered my teenage years. By the time I was a grown adult, I’d experienced, several times over, the underbelly of the church: power influenced by desires and church influenced by culture in ways Jesus never prescribed. I was awakened to a different sort of Christianity, one that felt in direct opposition to the Great Awakening spurred by George Whitefield.

“Let the name of Whitefield perish, but Christ be glorified,” said Whitefield, unaware that his name would go down in history or that his biography [would require multiple volumes](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CKVCY6ZW?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). 

But where Mr. Whitefield preached the name of Jesus Christ under the hot sun, I heard pastors preach their own names under stage lights. Where Whitefield reiterated the need to read the Bible for ourselves, I heard the same Scriptures twisted and matched to personal agendas. 

At eleven or twelve, I sat in a row of black chairs spanning a huge sanctuary, quietly reading my imitation-leather Bible because I was tired of listening to the pastor avoid it. Perhaps I was too young to determine what a grown man should say, or perhaps I was simply eager to hear what the true Christ had to say. Either way, my view of Christianity narrowed that day. 

“Let my name die everywhere, let even my friends forget me, if by that means the cause of the blessed Jesus may be promoted,” preached Whitefield. 

Let’s build a bigger building, preached my pastor. Let’s raise money. I want people to know who we are from across the highway. Do you see the vision? 

The clarity with which I’d seen Christianity in the smoke of my friends’ deaths clouded under his vision. Here, it appeared others experienced Jesus as a brand to promote, not a God to give one’s life to. If Christianity was a brand, I would not die for it.

We left that building in search of another church, and with it I left the memories of childhood: first-time best friends, crushes, and the terribly awkward but mandatory middle school years. It would be easy to view my time within those walls through the lens of sentimentalism. Overall, I loved my experience there. I didn’t want to leave it. 

But as Karen Swallow Prior shares in *The Evangelical Imagination*, 

> Sentimentalism is ‘the name of the mood in which we make a luxury of grief, and regard sympathetic emotions as an end rather than a means.’

At the time, I did not realize the adolescent grief of a child leaving her friends was not the end itself, but an ironic twist that would become the means to a very different beginning. Perhaps I had been wrong about Christianity all along. Was Roni an outlier, a good person in the wrong place at the wrong time, who also happened to love Jesus? Were the suited men, and later the ones clad in skinny jeans, who gripped power as hard as they did their microphones, a true representation of Christianity? I could not reconcile a religion encompassing both ends of this dichotomy. 

Midwest evangelicals could say my worldview was being challenged. Therapists might have said my schema, or mental model, was changing and I was now disillusioned. Others might recount these experiences as a coming-of-age moment. Perhaps it was all three, or maybe it was none of them, but I’d grown up with the ideal that Christians will die for Jesus. It was seared into my mind as much as the flames that seared the Cessna. Now I saw a new angle of Christianity, one where those in authority appear willing to do anything for power. 

Power has many facets. By many, and in one of its harmful forms, it’s viewed as something to wield, a means by which to force others to succumb to their embodiment of its strengths and weaknesses. But it is also something that we yield to. That commands. When we give something power over us, we surrender to its rule. 

In his *Meditations*, Marcus Aurelius famously wrote, 

> If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

I had seen the face of power on stage, and as my brain developed in those malleable years, without thinking the words to describe it, I wondered if I’d given church a little too much power in my life. Maybe I’d estimated it too highly. This external display of Jesus was causing pain. To revoke that pain, I could revoke my regard for what Paul defines as the bride of Christ. 

Through a winding path, over the coming years I managed to go from critic to participant. I found myself on stages and under lights with Christians who were award-winning or celebrities or well on their way. I loved that I could use my inborn talents for this westernized version of Christian life. 

And yet again, the more diverse my interactions grew, the smaller my view of Christianity became. It seemed that everywhere, the Bible was a great marketing tool, filled with good news for those in need, and a free incentive to subscribe to its ideology. Packaged by neutral-colored clothing, emotional music, and pathos-laden sermons, seats filled. 

Cultural imperialism, broadly speaking, is the extension or imposition of power, authority, or influence on a less-dominant group. Whatever our intentions, it seemed a good number of Christians making up America were pulling the influence of our western culture right into the pews, intricately tying it up with Christianity. Christianity was not being dominated, but in a sense, imperializing itself.

It is acculturation that would make William Bradford and William Brewstershift, if not turn over, in their graves. So this was the gospel? 

“Let my name die everywhere, let even my friends forget me, if by that means the cause of the blessed Jesus may be promoted,” Whitefield had preached. But when I scrolled social media, I saw the names most broadly speaking the cause of Christ were the ones most well-known, powerful, and often, most harmful. Supporting church began to feel like supporting a different gospel, one where the love of self, not Christ, was centric. Something was wrong.

Lew Wallace, in *Ben-Hur*, wrote, “Riches take wings, comforts vanish, hope withers away, but love stays with us. Love is God.” Riches take wings, yet I saw pastors landing in the news and on streaming platforms for building lives of material comfort off the hopelessness of humankind. Love stays with us. Love is God. Yet love, Christian love, began to feel like it had withered, smothered by branding. This was not Christianity. To support it would be conscious complicity in acts opposing the gospel. 

“We’re all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose. I’m complicit in the things that I’m trying to oppose,” wrote Wendell Berry. I’d joined a version of Christianity that included aspects other than the gospel, and thus, the opposite of Christianity. For the gospel is only enough by itself. 

Purposefully leaping before I looked too closely at the consequences, afraid I wouldn’t be brave enough to jump if I did, I walked out of the church walls for the first time in my life. 

The dirty plastic chairs of that low-ceilinged room in South America seemed so long ago. The childhood version of Christianity I’d witnessed in my friends’ deaths seemed to have died with the international news that once covered them. Now, Christianity felt too entwined with our cultural assumptions to be real without it. In South America, I’d watched people take Jesus into their culture. But now I had spent thousands of hours serving at nonprofit organizations that seemed to layer culture right into the gospel. 

“The medium doesn’t just transmit a message; it changes the message,” writes Katelyn Beaty. Without the cultural trappings of western Christianity, what exactly was the meaning of being Christian? Had I been living my life for Jesus Christ during my years within the church walls, or supporting the slow twisting of a message that is only enough by itself? 

Before he passed, the last words Wendell Berry spoke to a few of my friends were, “Take care of yourselves. Take care of what you know.” Wendell’s words have been texted to me during difficult times of life. His writing stirs feelings within his readers few writers can. It’s inspiring that the English language, organized in an unfamiliar way, can have such impact. But in choosing to cease my complicity, taking care of what I knew meant undoing everything else. 

“Humility is . . . knowing what we know, as well as what we don’t,” writes Daryl Van Tongeren. “Humility is the only reasonable response to being alive.” Thus began a painstaking attempt into humility. 

Some would call this opening my eyes. Others may try to shove my response under the term deconstruction. A few might say I was on track to leave the faith. After all, I’d walked out of church, packed away my custom in-ear monitors and violin, cut CCM from my Spotify, and plunged into unknowing the American Christianity I’d poured my life into. 

One pastor ignored all of the above. I’d walked out of his sermons more times than I can remember, for no reason related to him, but the cacophony of church experiences I’d had since I sat within its walls for my friends’ funeral. 

“We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are,” goes the saying, attributed to far too many well-known names to quote it correctly. Much of what made my experience with Christianity so hard was its entwinement with Americanism, particularly the celebrity and power with which we build much of our culture. 

Was Christianity just power plays and tiered in-groups? Or was it welcoming the needy? And was I still who I claimed to be without the culturalisms so closely associated with it? Because I was no longer the violinist on stage. I wasn’t even in the building. 

In a small city in a big coffee shop, this pastor let me read my laundry list of questions off the Notes in my phone, graciously talking through each one . . . even though my seat in his church was always empty. Was this Christianity, void of cultural attachments? 

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled,” wrote a tax collector who made his riches off the backs of the poor until Jesus’s love overcame him. “You’re blessed. You keep asking these questions,” the pastor said. Perhaps the emptiness in my spirit was from a hunger to be filled. I chose to stay hungry a little longer. This was, after all, an aspect of American Christianity I deeply resonated with: the fact it kept me coming back to God, questioning always. 

“Coming to you ‘cause I’m confused / coming to you ’cause I feel used,” writes singer-songwriter Jon Guerra. “How can we call ourselves Christians / saying that love is a tension / between the call of the cross and / between the old party line?”

It is not sacrilegious to question the religion that is often associated with Christianity. In many, often well-intentioned churches, there is a religion of volunteer hours served, conferences and concerts attended, church events booked, and time spent in church groups. But this is not Christianity. It is an iteration of Christianity in a particular, often privileged, context. I had to untangle Christianity from the cultural additions I’d found myself engrained in to realize Christianity is not a subculture.

[An artist](https://www.jonguerramusic.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) once asked the question, “What is the meaning of Christianity in this American life?” Thousands of years ago, [along the Orontes River in what is modern-day Turkey](https://www.bibleodyssey.org/map-gallery/antioch-map/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), those who shared the gospel were first called “Christian,” or little christs. But in this American life? Some of the American Christians I most respect live varying lifestyles and differ politically, but each of them believes the gospel: God is a holy and loving and just God. We are sinners. And he wants relationship with us, despite us. I’ll subscribe to that. 

Despite stepping back from the cultural additions to American Christian life, I had never stepped back from Christ. Or more accurately, Jesus had never stepped back from me. The reason I made it here was because all along, I’d experienced him myself, so close I didn’t realize it. Closer than my breath. Christ in me. Christianity.
### How Patient Attention Nurtures the Life of the Church
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-patient-attention-nurtures-the-life-of-the-church/
Last updated: 2026-10-09T11:00:22.000Z
Having spent over three decades as faithful church attendees, my husband and I were under the assumption one was never asked to visit a pastor in his office for anything other than disciplinary or counseling purposes. Therefore, you can imagine our trepidation when the priest of our new Anglican parish asked us to stop by after we’d been attending services for several weeks. So there we were on a mid-morning summer Thursday, trooping into a yellow-aged fellowship hall with our four kids trailing behind, where we found Father M. in the little kitchen fiddling with the coffee pot.

I wondered if the genial, rather self-deprecating, priest was the same on any given weekday as he was during the few hours we saw him on Sunday mornings. He ushered us into a conference room on the other side of the church and by all appearances, seemed at his leisure sipping coffee while we talked. He listened attentively to our doubts about faith and church, gently answering our questions as if he had all the time in the world. Meanwhile, our children (ages 7 to 12 at the time) were conspicuously quiet throughout this exchange–a feat of obvious self-control. However, much to their chagrin, they did not go unnoticed. It soon became apparent Father M. was thinking of them as our conversation progressed. In fact, I distinctly recall a twinkle sparkle merrily in his eye and an eyebrow twitched as if an idea had suddenly popped into his head. Unable to contain himself any longer, he turned to the children and spoke: 

“Do you all want to know what we have in the closet by the back entrance?”

My reticent children responded with a mix of shrugs and nods.

“I think we ought to go check, don’t you think?”

More nods but this time, a few smiles as well. 

He led us through the hall like a mother duck with six dutiful ducklings following closely behind until we arrived in front of a large closet door. 

“Open it!”

Pushing and nudging (because no one wanted to go first) the children managed to inch their way to the door and opened it. 

“What’s inside?”

“Um, just a few things hanging up and a couple wheelchairs?”

“Perfect! Wheel them out here,” he said, gesturing to the hall.

In a few minutes, two wheelchairs were unfolded side by side in the hallway. 

“You must race them. One sitting, the other pushing- two teams! No one is in the church, so, banning the sanctuary, the hallway is all yours. Just watch the corners! And…GO!”

Levity commenced and we adults left to wrap up our conversation. Though the relative quiet was now delightfully sprinkled with squeals and laughter from down the hall. 

Later, I realized this may have been the first time a pastor had ever paid genuine attention to our children. Their pastoral interactions up to this point had been mainly of the “be good to your momma” Southern Baptist variety with a hand-shake at the door or, even more oblique, a fashionable face on a screen during our brief foray into mainstream evangelicalism. 

This interaction with Father M. and his fun-loving nature revealed more than a tendency for this particular man to understand and appreciate children. What we were given was not a singular moment, but a form of love we continued to see played out in many ways during our time at the church. People were recognized as individual souls, down to the smallest child, with their unique qualities noticed and cherished. What we had found at this church was a place without pretense or expectation. It felt the way a family ought to love: grace for the imperfect and forgiveness for the repentant. And where this love dwells, joy has freedom to bubble forth.

A church which foremost follows God’s command to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…and you shall love your neighbor as yourself” is likely to be a church attractive to those who are lonely and weary of the emptiness of self-love, especially in a society that seeps with individualism.

When I was growing up, childhood felt like forever. A year was an eternity. One of the most difficult waiting periods of time was the 4-6 weeks for an order to arrive by mail. It felt like ages. Today, I am always surprised when my children tell me how quickly the days fly by, that they can hardly believe a birthday or particular holiday is nearly upon them. For myself, it amazes me that if I procrastinate, I can order one of their school literature books on a weekend and have it come for them by class on Monday. (This only serves to encourage my procrastination rather than dissuade it.) It saddens me sometimes how fast life seems (or is that just me getting older?). Life feels more transient than ever despite my apparently failing attempts at living a simple life. It is hard not to notice that families split more than they reconcile, relocation has become akin to progress, and busyness means productivity. Stability is just a pie in the sky. One of the most frequent sayings I have heard within school and family circles is the hope that “things settle down in a few years.” 

My family and I have moved 6 times in almost 15 years, including an international stint, and every move is more wearying than the last. The temptation towards callousness is powerful. And yet, despite the miles and years and varying communities, there was a sturdy, anchoring thread that remained with us and was never lost: the Church. Of course, what is even more incredible is that this thread is not unique to one era or generation, but can be followed back over many centuries and continents and peoples. The Church has been woven in deep and strong.

One of the greatest and most fantastic ironies of the Church is that its strength and numbers have grown exponentially under times of severe persecution. In an early letter (the Epistle to Diognetus), the unknown author writes: “…\[Have you not seen Christians?\] flung to the wild beasts to make them deny their Lord, and yet remain undefeated? Do you not see how the more of them suffer such punishments, the larger grows the number of the rest? These things do not look like the work of man; they are the power of God, and the evident token of His presence.”

Ignatius of Antioch wrote in a letter to the Church of Smyrna, “…To what end have I given myself up to perish by fire or sword or savage beasts? Simply because when I am close to the sword, I am close to God. When I am surrounded by lions, I am surrounded by God.”

There seems to be a longing among mankind to be rooted in that which is enduring. I think of military veterans who still feel a part of the units in which they served decades before, proud of having been part of something bigger than themselves. Many of us feel a strong loyalty to the colleges or universities we attended. There is an uptick of interest in ancestry and DNA searches, revealing a desire to know where we have come from and who we are.

Roger Scruton once wrote that, “Our deepest social need is for the first-person plural of belonging, and to belong is to belong in a place.” We feel a sense of belonging when we are made to feel as if it were a part of us and, in a way, created for us. More than likely, we have all used the phrase “it feels like home” when positively describing a city, church, or community. 

For someone searching for that place but unsure of where to look, modern christianity is eager to fill this void. Churches will go to great lengths adapting into a society that emphasizes utility and function, where creature comforts become the model for attracting more members. The modern church becomes a mere a tool for the purpose of bringing in new people to consume what is offered. Those who come, come to take, not receive. I have often wondered how many of those multitudes would show up to worship at any given time if the coffee shops, merchandise, children’s programs, comfortable chairs, or even the buildings themselves were stripped away. Are these churches attracting the heaven-curious or the consumer? From my experience, I can understand there may be a mix of both. Our time in seeker-friendly churches was not without merit or learning. But think of the cathedrals of old, made with such detail and beauty in their very architecture that our gaze is meant to be drawn upward, toward God. Is utility and comfort doing little else but drawing the eyes toward self?

In [an article titled](https://circeinstitute.org/blog/how-pick-church-when-you-go-college/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) “How To Pick a Church When You Go Off to College,” Joshua Gibbs candidly writes: 

> Such churches do not command respect or obedience and pride themselves on being just like the world, which means they can be skipped without much notice. These churches ‘build bridges’ with the world, but these bridges are more commonly used to get Christians out than to get non-Christians in.

This raises a question: If church is so easily skipped, does a person truly feel like they belong there?

When people grow tired of the rapidly shifting nature of modern culture, weary of not finding happiness in self-satisfaction, they will find the core of their longing fulfilled in the steadfast, though paradoxical, love of Christ. After all, those who want to find their life must lose it. 

A church filled with this love will brim with joy despite leaky roofs of old buildings, yellowed linoleum, loud children, or long distances traveled. In fact, you are likely to see a sparkle in someone’s eye, participate in shared meals during times of sorrow and celebration, find a place of belonging, and ultimately experience the Presence of Christ. Within the Church, imperfections and foibles are still aplenty. Yet how good it is to find a haven of peace, to hang up the mask of self-preservation used to blend seamlessly into the world. And you never know, you may be encouraged to throw off the gauntlet of caution and, with a wink, take the wheelchair for a spin down the hall.
### Vaccinated Against God
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/vaccinated-against-god/
Last updated: 2026-10-08T11:00:40.000Z
**I.**

In medical terms, vaccines work because our immune systems have the ability to learn from previous attacks by foreign agents. Our bodies can experience a pathogen and remember how to fight it next time. It’s remarkable, really, that repeated exposure to a virus or bacterium can make us stronger, not weaker. A vaccine piggybacks on this function of the human immune system by introducing dead or weakened versions of pathogens so our immune system can be trained to fight the real thing. Ultimately, the goal of being vaccinated is that you never have to experience the real virus — your immune system has been trained so well that you don’t even notice that the pathogen has entered your body.

Vaccines are incredibly effective. Which is why, from a spiritual perspective, they are so dangerous.

**II.**

Two years ago, when I was on mission in South Asia, a friend sent me E. Stanley Jones’ 1925 book of his missionary years in India, which is titled [*The Christ of the Indian Road*](https://www.abingdonpress.com/product/9781791035150/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). It’s a great book for those interested in the history of Christianity in the region, especially given it was written at a vital juncture in India’s national development., and Jones’ central argument that Christ is just as relevant to Indian culture and society as to Europeans is a fantastic reminder of an important truth. But there is one sentence that stayed with me more than any other, haunting every church service I’ve attended since. In writing about European and American Christendom, Jones laments that “vast areas of the Christian world are inoculated with a mild form of Christianity, and the real thing seems strange and impossible.” Or to put it more bluntly: we are vaccinated against Christ by the way we practice Christianity.

For this analogy to work, we have to momentarily invert our assessment that viruses are bad and vaccines are good. The teachings of Christ — which represented a break from accepted Jewish religious teachings in the first century and were countercultural to much of the world at the time — managed to spread and gain purchase within the hearts and minds of a great many Jews and non-Jews to such an extent that in 300 years the faith went from a fringe cult to the official religion of the Roman Empire and, subsequently, the defining belief system of European civilisation. This incredibly fast change of religion did not happen at swordpoint, but like a viral infection: invading and becoming part of the host’s body before spreading to others, hopping from person to person as they made contact. A more palatable analogy might be that of a flame being passed from candle to candle, illuminating the darkness as it spreads. But that would rob us of the more helpful metaphor of the vaccine. 

If belief in Jesus as the Son of the one true God and also each person’s saviour can be likened to a virus — an idea that spreads incredibly rapidly and takes hold of its hosts, transforming them before using them as a launching pad for more infections — then that means it can be defeated by a vaccine, by something that looks like the virus while training the body to reject the real thing.

**III.**

Let’s use a slightly less incendiary example before I go completely Kierkegaardian in my attacks on Christendom. The rise of social media and resulting decline in attention spans has led to an increase in people sharing quotes from their favourite writers, and Christians may be at the forefront of this trend, thrilling in the ability to reduce complex philosophical and metaphysical concepts into soundbites. This means that those writers whose ideas can be most reduced, who wrote the most pithy one-liners, become the most heavily valued because their ideas are the most digestible and shareable. This is not to disparage those writers who knew how to turn a phrase. C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton (to name two of the most-quoted Christian writers) were incredibly skilled at communicating Christian truths in a comprehensible way, which is no easy task. But they were not setting out to be aphorists. They were highly educated thinkers engaging with important questions of faith and Christian living, and they never intended their work to be shredded into standalone quotes. If you actually read *Mere Christianity* or *Orthodoxy*, you are subjected to well-constructed arguments, sentences woven together into complex tapestries. It is a shame to tug out a few brightly coloured threads and walk away. These works are more nuanced and more challenging than you expect, and if you engage with them, you are likely to find an idea or concept that you don’t like — which is a major reason why you should read them. It’s far better to be challenged by a well-written book than soothed by an affirming quote.

The danger of engaging with a writer through quotes that you enjoy is that you think you understand them, you think their worldview aligns with your own, and so you preclude the possibility that they may hold views different from what you expect (and that they may be right and you may be wrong). It seems there are many who prefer this way of engaging with Christian writing instead of doing the harder but more rewarding work of actually grappling with the perspectives these high-quality thinkers are communicating. For example, I do not agree with everything Chesterton writes because I am not a Catholic, but I find engaging with his ideas on saints and stigmata extremely rewarding, partially because I know we don’t see eye to eye on everything. I don’t want to be vaccinated against his most challenging views because I’ve already placed him into a neat category in my mind.

The other danger of engaging with formidable thinkers by way of quotable phrases instead of their actual writing is that you are more easily fooled by fake quotes. There is seemingly no end to the number of quotes that have been attributed to Lewis, many of which are halfway plausible on first glance given how prolific he was (the C. S. Lewis foundation has to maintain a [webpage](https://www.cslewis.org/aboutus/faq/quotes-misattributed/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) just to combat this phenomenon). My most favourite is the [fake Screwtape politics letter](https://essentialcslewis.com/2017/02/04/ccslq-32-fixated-on-politics/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), purporting to be from Lewis’ epistolary novel *The Screwtape Letters*, which is regularly shared across the internet during election seasons. If you’ve read the book, it’s immediately clear that this is not the kind of thing Lewis would have written in the UK in 1941\. And yet, because people have formed a view of who C. S. Lewis is and what he stands for, you can slap his name on a string of words and people will eat it up.

**IV.**

If we can agree that engaging with writers like Lewis or Chesterton (or Augustine or Aquinas) only at the level of their most pithy quotes is a poor substitute for actually reading their books, and that it can actually numb your ability to properly engage with them, can we agree that the same dynamic plays out every week in churches across the world?

Let’s imagine three types of churchgoers who sit near each other on plastic chairs on a Sunday morning: a passionate new convert, a longstanding and dutiful believer, and an irregular attendee who could be called a backslider. Who is more in danger of being vaccinated against Christ? Counterintuitively, it’s the longstanding believer. The dutiful, religious Christian who is the backbone of every church is the most susceptible to missing the forest for the trees, most at risk of missing Christ for all the Christianity. This happens whenever we water down the harder sayings of Jesus to reassure ourselves that we really are good Christians, despite not giving our money to the poor and making financial decisions from a place of fear. This happens wherever we sanitise the emotions we are permitted to feel within church so that only those of positive victory are expressed. This happens whenever we transform the Gospel into a moral self-improvement project and build our liturgical seasons around sermon series like ‘How to Have a Better Marriage’, ‘Managing Stress God's Way’, or ‘Five5 Keys to Financial Peace.’. These are all ways we vaccinate ourselves against what early Jesus followers referred to simply as ‘the Way’ — following Christ with your whole life, no matter the cost. We put Jesus’ actions and teachings into a box that suits us, we are susceptible to skewed or untrue versions of Jesus, and slowly become good Christians who are no longer willing to accept the Christ who says or does difficult or confusing things, who cuts across our selfish and fleshly natures.

The passionate convert is caught up in that first feverish experience of being infected with the foreign pathogen of Christ, and the irregular attendee is in the midst of wrestling with the virus of Christian belief. Neither are neutral, neither are lukewarm, neither have acquiesced to that ‘moderated religion’ that Lewis warned of in *The Screwtape Letters* (yes, I am hypocritically using a Lewis quote that suits my point). And while it’s true that neither the passion of the new convert nor the doubt of the irregular attendee are permanent states of being, the vaccinated state of the longstanding believer who can no longer be overwhelmed by Christ may be the most dangerous. It may be that this is the type of person Jesus warns of in Revelation 3:16.

As a longstanding believer myself — who was raised in a Christian family and who never had a dramatic conversion or a long drawn-out struggle with God — I am concerned by how little concern many churches seem to have about believers like me. We are in danger of numbness, of moderation, of being vaccinated against God. And because there are so many of us, we are in danger of creating herd immunity within churches. Our vaccinated state can prevent the more passionate amongst us from truly following Christ, because in our majority, we prevent Christ from getting into our churches. When I read the Gospels or Paul’s letters, it seems that there must be a way to follow Jesus with the passionate love of a disciple and the wrestling doubts of a backslider while still growing in maturity and wisdom. I believe that passion and doubt and maturity do not have to be mutually exclusive. But where are the shepherds to lead us on this narrow and winding path? Where are the doctors who know how to combat the dangers of spiritual vaccination? 

**V.**

Jesus came to give people the opportunity to be one with God, this much is clear from his prayer at the Last Supper (John 17:20–23). And oneness with God cannot merely mean mental assent to certain facts or continuation of tradition or being part of a community of like-minded people. These are all good things, of course, but they are second-order good things. They are not the main good thing.

Just as we cannot get to know Lewis or Chesterton or any serious writer on the basis of a few pithy quotes, we are foolish to think following Christ is about attending church or serving our communities or evangelising or studying the Bible or tithing or prayer. It is all of these things, but it is much higher and deeper than any of these things. As Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthians, being a follower of Christ is an all-in living sacrifice. And if we don’t find this to be both an agony (like the irregular attendee) and an ecstasy (like the passionate convert), then we may be doing something wrong. If we believe Jesus when He says that most will not walk through the narrow gate (Matt. 7:13–14) and instead will betray Him at the end times (Matt. 24:10–12), it may be because of how inoculated many of us have become to His actual teachings. It may turn out that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was allowing us to be so comfortable in our Christianity that we no longer have any need for Christ.
### Do You Want to be Well?
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/do-you-want-to-be-well/
Last updated: 2026-10-08T11:00:14.000Z
> Full of rebellion, I would die,  
> Or fight, or travel, or deny  
> That thou shouldst have anything to do with me.  
> O tame my heart;   
> It is thy highest art  
> To captivate strong holds to thee.  
> [George Herbert, *Nature*](https://poets.org/poem/nature-0?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

“Do you want to be well?” Jesus asked of the man at the pool of Bethesda in John 5\. It’s a curious question in the truest sense, bringing to the surface a host of other questions.

Why does Jesus ask before acting on the miracle?

What is healing in Christ’s ministry meant to reveal or accomplish or communicate?

What happens after physical or mental healing? 

How does emotional, relational, and spiritual healing happen?

What prevents our desire to be made wholly well?

What of the ailments, disorders, afflictions, and ongoing suffering which do not receive the resolution we long for?

The body and soul are wrapped up in various ways in the gospels. One teaches the other. When Jesus heals, it is often (though not always) both he is healing. The desperation relieved, a touch of mercy felt, we hear echoes of “Go and sin no more.” 

But the destructive lot we’ve settled into can get comfortable. Perhaps the unknown of change gives rise to fear. Perhaps we do not trust his hands. Still, do we want to be made *wholly* well?

## Blessing and (Seeming) Curse

There are no Psalms without something to weep about. There are no memorable encounters with Christ in the gospels without individual encounters with pain.

Moments of tragedy and periods of grief emit shockwaves. We have all lived them, or will go through them soon enough. We cannot call evil or pain *good*, but what tragedy or grief often do is break through the fog of spiritual apathy. They slash the veneer of self-absorption and self-sufficiency. Everything urgent or meaningful comes to the fore. Trivialities fall to the wayside. There is only the present moment, the intensity in tending to whatever has broken the spell of life’s usual hum.

The gift of tears can, paradoxically, be just that. 

These moments are uniquely affecting, probing the heart and testing the soul in ways, until then, unknown. In ways large and small, things of heaven press in more acutely and rattle a person into awe. The spiritual veils seem thin enough to allow for mortals to once again look for angels doing the bidding of the Lord, humble enough to feel the breath of the spirit. 

I’ll admit that everyday life has enough cares and worries and logistical stressors for all of us. We do our tasks and carry out responsibilities as faithfully as we can. If we’re not careful, though, this soon slips into autopilot, an unexamined life. Perhaps it is the too-comfortable or too-preoccupied life. Survival mode, even thriving mode in the modern world, can end up [muting](https://mereorthodoxy.com/resonance-and-the-psalms/) the given world.

In a limited sense, certain mood disorders and mental afflictions can be experienced in a similar way. My own recurring condition is akin to a mini earthquake and apocalypse that arrives over and over again. It both shakes stable ground in the worst of ways and yet manages to bring at least some honest revelations to the fore. The simultaneous darkness and unveiling brings me to the end of myself in a way I do not naturally muster up in the course of smooth days and peaceful wellbeing. 

Something profound happens when you’re forced into vulnerability, into a more honest account of the soul. Something profoundly needed can come from the humiliation of being emotionally and spiritually splayed out. Need invites hospitality and desperation welcomes receptivity. These are profoundly basic concepts to the Christian, and ones I fear we are losing any concept of when it comes to [the bodily life](https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-it-is-difficult-to-talk-about-ethics-of-the-body/).

I have become curious about what there is to be found in my own particular experience and cross, wherein something that ought to be outright seen as bad is a catalyst for needed conversations, needed probing into crevices of my heart. Nothing is left untouched, and thus, truly every facet of life is highlighted in the darkness. 

Mental affliction and mood disorders are difficult in that while reality and honesty can feel intensified as the veil thins, so, too, can lies. To distort reality is part of the nature of these experiences. One of their threats is to slip in distortion alongside a sensitivity to true things. The sideways blessing mixes with a curse. It is in this warring where an offer of presence points the way where rational arguments no longer reach.

Sarah Clarkson writes in her book *This Beautiful Truth:*

> We are answered not with argument or angry demands for obedience but with the presence of Immanuel, God here with us in the shadows. What beauty reveals is the intimacy of the divine in our grief. God gives us beauty, not as his argument but as his offering - a gift that immerses us in something that allows us to touch hope, to taste healing, to tangibly encounter something opposite to disintegration and destruction. 

> Where suffering has made God abstract and distant to us, where brokenness leaves us with unanswerable questions, beauty allows us to taste and see God’s presence as he breaks into the circles of our inmost grief to remake the broken world.

My own cries of inner grief come out most honestly, most acutely in times of recurring mental anguish, where I reach for consolation in ways not otherwise felt as necessary. How fitting that the relationship between beauty and pain seems to be a cyclical one: We need many forms of beauty to endure suffering. We need suffering in order to perceive beauty–and wholeness–apart from the logic of the world.

And who but the Lord is the pinnacle and fount–indeed, Beauty itself? 

## The Wounding of Thorns and Crosses

In reading through Natalie Carne’s *Beauty: A Theological Engagement with Gregory of Nyssa*, I was struck by a passage on the necessity of spiritual woundedness for perceiving beauty rightly. It brought to mind scriptures related to both Paul’s thorn in the flesh and the more universal call to carry our crosses. In bearing up under them, we are given another way of seeing and becoming:

> “Human nature must be wounded (as Paul was stigmatized by blows and weakness) in order to see the beauty that it possesses (the beauty of the soul) and manifest the wounded nature of Christ (it is the marks of Christ that Paul bears).

> The beauty of the soul is simply revealed; it is the non-eschatological beauty of the human person. Yet it is a beauty that is revealed only through wounding, only through bearing the marks of Christ that give one the Christ-likeness the human will eschatologically possess. The beauty of humanity is fully revealed only through the Spirit’s wounding the human into Christ-likeness, into her eschatological self. Spirit-wounding gives us a way of seeing and a way of becoming.

> In holding together the glories of perceiving beauty with the distress of wounding, Gregory communicates to his reader the difficulty of perceiving beauty, the way its right perception requires a radical break from the catechesis of the world.”

To continuously break from the catechesis of the world enough to perceive this kind of beauty is, indeed, the ongoing work of a lifetime. It requires drinking deeply from a well not of this earth. This well exposes the foolishness found in earthly wisdom, showing how weakness is strength, and the last becomes first. But catalysts help drive us to the well. 

Even our burdens and adversities in this world are preparation for a crowning of glory. Christians join their wounds to Christ. We do not ignore or cast off our crosses. We do not even choose them. But we are offered His intimacy and power as we bear up under our particular crosses. How else does He do the deepest work on our sin, sickness, and sorrow?

This invitation is most intense when my flesh and mind are most faint, and most tender. I’m not confident Christ’s wounds would feel so much like the binding up of my own, were I not to feel them so acutely in the first place. It is unclear where this blessing begins and the seeming curse ends. 

This particular experience of life has been my lot, and would have been otherwise, were I somehow to have been seamlessly rid of the affliction long ago. Perhaps that will come. I do not know. It will, regardless, take a lifetime to see the place of such a thorn in guiding the ultimate shape of my life. There is grief over what the locusts have eaten. The weight of that can feel unbearable. Yet somehow, in the economy of heaven, what is lost can be [restored to us](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Joel%202&version=ESV&ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

Ours is an upside-down kingdom, patient in the midst of many kinds of loss. Its heavenly logic is offered as milk and honey for the ravenous. Perhaps our own embittered pain, pressed under the crucible of mercy, can soften into something like sustenance for others. 

Clarkson writes well of the delicate work that this is:

> “I always think it intriguing that in the Gospels Jesus seems far more interested in the faith and hope at work in broken people than merely the healing of their bodies. For I think God knows there is no real healing until our hearts are healed of their fear, our minds cleansed of doubt. Broken bodies, shattered hopes, suffering minds, terrible pasts—they leave us deathly ill with the twisted belief that love can never be great enough to encompass the whole of our story. We feel that we must subtract or conceal part of ourselves if we are ever to win the love of other people or God himself. We are diminished in our own eyes by our suffering, taught to despair of our dreams, to give up our hope that God will come with goodness in his hands.

> So God creeps in, gentle, and we know his touch because we are not discarded or dismissed, but healed. He comes to unravel our self-doubt, to untangle the evil we have believed, to call us back from the dark lands of our insecurity. He calls us by name and wakes us from sleep… The story he weaves for us, well, it may look radically different from what we thought we desired, but when it arrives—and oh, good is always coming toward us—we will recognize it as the intimate gift of a love whose will for us is always so much greater than our own.”

Do we want to be well?

Who can know the inner complexity of a person? The source of warring in the human heart is often hard to pin down. As for reasons to resist action toward wholeness, there is, of course, the reason to resist simply because we have been hardened or calloused. We prefer the darkness and wallowing in it. We reject mercy, preferring to go our own way.

There is also a fear of change and safety in the known. While concerns about making wounds or disorders an identity is certainly an issue these days–particularly in the psychological realm–the question of who a person is *apart from* a formative thorn, cross, or condition is a valid one. Is it even worth trying to parse out who the *essence* of a person is, devoid of the texture of all that shapes us in life? That shaping includes the experience of broken bodies and broken minds.

Where do “I” begin and “I, shaped by this mental ailment, circumstances, and all ensuing proclivities” end? Would I be the same person, or becoming another? 

In *Neither Beast Nor God*, Gilbert Meilaender writes of this conundrum:

> We might ask ourselves whether we should regret the historical happenstance that Augustine came along too soon in history to have received the kind of medical treatment recommended by Dr. Joseph Biederman in a presentation to the President’s Council on Bioethics about the use of psychopharmacology in treating children. Had Augustine’s symptoms—his inability to attend to what he found boring, his impulsive behavior, his restlessness—been diagnosed as Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) early enough, he might have been treated with Ritalin and spared years of anxiety and discontent, years of feeling that “myself to myself had become a place of misery, a place where I could not bear to be and from which I could not go.” He might have been spared the “horrendous inner sense of restlessness” that Dr. Biederman discerns even in many who are well past childhood. It is true, of course, that—compared to many of his peers—the young Augustine achieved a good bit; nevertheless, as Dr. Biederman noted, “‘dysfunction’ is a relative term.” 

> Despite his achievements relative to those of others, Augustine may not have been able to use his “intellectual ability to the fullest.” Given that, in Dr. Biederman’s words, “academic progress is a fundamental passport for a good life,” perhaps with treatment Augustine could have lived out his life in Rome as rhetorician for the well-known and powerful, rather than in Hippo, carrying out the thankless duties of a bishop in the struggling African church. But then, of course, we would not have his Confessions. How easily we forget that one may become a philosopher through loneliness or discontent.”

Where do the sheer, tragic effects of the fall begin and any merciful wounding end? What do we do with the confusion of their mingling?

Truncated definitions of healing and wholeness tend to avoid certain forms of bodily suffering, inconvenience, aging, and [vulnerability](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-case-against-vasectomies/). In siloing the body from the soul, we short-circuit the [formation](https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-it-is-difficult-to-talk-about-ethics-of-the-body/) long seen as necessary for the Chrisitan life. This can, though not always, tamp out tender soul growth coming up alongside the painful weeds and thorns. 

Would I rather have the change which comes only this way? The growth which comes by way of nearness to the Gardener doing pinpointed work, not blasting the pain from a distance with proverbial Roundup? 

I have come to see this process within body, mind, soul and relationships to be more like tending a garden than keeping a linear chart or ledger. It’s more akin to the push-and-pull tension of a dance, or even a novel—watching characters develop in the way they need to in their story. 

There are weeds of sin or hurt which my thorn in the flesh has been tasked with helping reveal, however incompletely. How this benefit is wrapped up with the tragic effects of the fall, of desperation to be wholly well, remains a mystery to me. There is no ledger for systematizing the problem of pain. 

Of course, there is often no way to speak of suffering (mental illness and disorder in particular) without accusations of callously glorifying it, of plastering platitudes on brokenness, or of downplaying the mercies found in various healing and helping professions. There is no way to get the theological barometer on every excruciating experience of hardship just so. No, most of us are trying to get through the days the best we know how. Most of us can only be honest in small ways at a time. Many of us are simply open for ways to be well, all the while hanging on by forcing our eyes toward He who does not change as we weep and writhe in body or mind or soul—perhaps a combination of all three.

In simple terms, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote on a paper in prison, “Only the suffering God can help.” 

## The Gaze that Heals

Recently [described](https://sarahclarkson.substack.com/p/the-gaze-that-heals) by Sarah Clarkson, such “potent, gathered attention is one of the great works of faith in our world, the great proclamations of God’s particular, transformative love.” 

Pain’s complexity can become a vicious and interwoven cycle. Swirling and cycling are hurt, sin, darkness, withdrawal, despair, shame, hurt, pride, addiction, and numbness—with the battered mind, body, soul and relationships to accompany it. Parsing out where one kind of wound or resistance begins and the other ends is a difficult task. What I know is that life itself is hard, and our responses to it can exacerbate the effect of sin’s tentacles. Interruptions of grace have been known to arrive with kind of violence, as any reader of scripture (or Flannery O’Connor) knows. 

Have you ever sat with someone in their rock-bottom moment in a hospital room? Earlier this year, a complicated crisis bridged a gap of welcome to the bedside, grueling and delicate though such meetings can be. Being there felt oddly exposing. Forced into the spotlight of intimacy in a specific place and time, with a particular person, invites a reckoning in both parties. This profound vulnerability felt familiar, this pain a type of mirror of my own, these choices a way to examine my own response to life, and the tears of suffering we all inevitably face–whether inflicting or receiving it. There but for the grace of God we all go. 

Meeting the eyes of the wounding and wounded other is difficult. Doing so feels like what Marilynne Robinson describes in *Lila*: “If you think about a human face, it can be something you don't want to look at, so sad or so hard or so kind.” And in *Gilead* she observes: “Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it.”

We all desire a gaze of love in ways unspoken. Reaching the depths of a person requires the steady, patient affection it offers. Grace Leuenberger [describes](https://graceleuenberger.substack.com/p/josef-pieper-mary-bennet-and-the) this encounter as having “a sort of holy tenderness to it.” It is here where the human heart is seen, heard, and wooed into a care we otherwise reject. Without this kind of knowing gaze–at once literal and metaphorical–we starve for want of love. The lack is, itself, a kind of wound.

Every time a person has shown this form of love to us, every time our own presence is offered to another, is a reflection of what I imagine Christ showed to his disciples. Certainly, it was offered in each miraculous encounter of physical and spiritual healing in the gospels. It pierces while it binds up.

The tension between seeking healing, of restoration for what the effects of the fall have stolen, and being receptive to what the master physician is up to in the meantime–well, this is where the work is. Blessed as the healers of this world may be, I love what George Herbert [articulates](https://www.georgeherbert.org.uk/archives/selected%5Fwork%5F29.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in writing of the longed-for moment “when thou shalt look us out of pain.”

So, do I want to be well? Sure. The work of humbling I've been invited into isn’t going away. For as long as the affliction persists, healed or not, there is a gaze looking to meet my particular eyes in the midst of it.

Perhaps, in the severe mercy of God, they will not be found any other way.
### The Triumph of Confessionalism in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-triumph-of-confessionalism-in-the-evangelical-presbyterian-church/
Last updated: 2026-10-07T11:00:56.000Z
My home denomination, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC), had an interesting summer. The EPC is a denomination of roughly 125,000 people that has gone through an uncharacteristically contentious season as we debated the issue of same-sex attraction and ordination. We’re small potatoes in the landscape of American Protestantism, even compared to our sister Presbyterian and Reformed churches, so why should anyone outside our small denominational enclave care about our internal debates? Because the EPC has historically prized being a broad, relaxed evangelical denomination that happens to be Reformed, yet brought resolution to this debate by privileging our historic confessional standards.

2026 marks the triumph of confessionalism in the EPC. That shift provides a case study showing that an evangelical spirit of charity, for which the EPC is well known, can be held together with a commitment to a robust theological witness, which in turn allows the church to navigate an increasingly morally complex world with biblical faithfulness.

First, what is confessionalism? C. S. Lewis famously introduced *Mere Christianity* metaphorically, comparing the Christian faith to a house. Each room in the house represents different Christian traditions, furnished with all their distinctive beliefs and practices. The hallways connecting the rooms in the house, on the other hand, represent the basics of the Christian faith common to all true believers and churches. Lewis points out that people aren’t supposed to live in hallways, but in their rooms, although the hallways serve the all-important purpose of connecting the rooms so that they share the one house.

American evangelicalism is generally content to live in the hallway, usually with minimal doctrinal statements only touching the core elements of the Christian faith, or perhaps including a distinctive practice or view for their congregation (e.g. believer’s baptism, the return of Christ). The benefit to this prioritizing of the core is that it allows evangelical churches to cast as broad a net as possible for inclusion, avoids staking out sectarian positions, and grants pastors greater flexibility in articulating their own views (of course, this version of evangelicalism is itself a room, just sparsely furnished, its minimalism a form of position-staking that it is only “non-sectarian” in comparison to other evangelicals and Protestants). Evangelicalism asks what the center of the Christian faith is, and then makes that center its home.

Confessionalism, by contrast, asks “How does scripture direct us to furnish the *whole* room?” Confessionalism is an approach to faith and practice that strives to provide a holistic witness to scripture’s teaching, not just on the core topics, but by professing how those topics are interconnected within the larger scope of the Bible’s own message. Confessional churches codify this belief in written confessions of faith. Whereas the doctrinal statements of evangelical churches aim at what is *central*, confessional churches aim at what the Bible presents as the *whole*. That’s not to say that confessional churches presume to address every iota of what the Bible covers or that every subject is equally important, but that their confessions of faith accurately capture, as in the traditional words of American Presbyterian ordination vows, the *system* of doctrine taught in the scriptures.

Historically churches in the Reformed (Belgic Confession, Heidelberg Catechism, Canons of Dordt), Presbyterian (Westminster Confession and Catechisms), and Lutheran (Augsburg Confession and the larger Book of Concord) traditions have been confessional in their orientation, with some Anglican churches emphasizing their confession (39 Articles of Religion) and some Baptist congregations subscribing to a confession (e.g. Second London Baptist Confession). A quick perusal of these confessions reveals that they are longer, far more detailed, and more systematic in articulation of biblical teaching than evangelical statements of faith. 

There are limits to confessionalism, of course. All of these documents are several centuries old and emerge from Europe, reflect some now-irrelevant historical and cultural peculiarities, neglect some pressing subjects (e.g. slavery), miss some of the insights the church has gleaned from scripture in the intervening years, are silent on new developments (e.g. AI), and risk functionally subordinating scripture to the church’s confession of faith instead of expressing what the church believes scripture teaches on its own terms. 

Yet, for all that, confessionalism expresses that the church is reformed by God through his word, and that reformation touches not just the core elements of the faith, but all that God has revealed by his word for faith and practice. And the confessional tradition is the church — not just individual people, pastors, or parishes — *confessing* what the word of God says to the family of God. Confessionalism is the church committing to radically and faithfully follow the whole of scripture in the whole of its life and witness: a confession of faith is a normative standard of belief itself normed by God’s word. And while incomplete in their content, the confessions’ systematic structure allows the church to extrapolate their principles by good and necessary consequence for faithful application to subjects not expressly addressed in a way that is scripturally coherent. The church is a living organism in a changing world, and while confessions of faith are themselves unchanging, they allow the church to consistently speak into the gaps.

And there are gaps, and these gaps need to be addressed by churches. 

Denominations and networks pursue unity around belief to some degree, regardless of whether they hold to a confession or simple statement of faith. Confessional churches have the advantage in that there is a pre-existing, shared biblical framework by which they are equipped to speak into the gaps. In these cases, the way that different, additional subjects are addressed is understood to be either an extension of confessional logic, or something subordinate to the confession and therefore not as critical. For instance, the Westminster Confession and Catechisms are silent on the issues of domestic abuse. Yet, the pre-existing, shared confessional logic on marriage and the protection of life (among other salient points) allows the EPC to articulate a position on domestic abuse that flows from our confessional standards. On issues of polity, every church or denomination needs to have some kind of organization. The Westminster Confession and Catechisms are silent on the nature of the office of deacon, and so while the EPC needs to address that confessional gap in our polity, the way we handle our organization is culturally subordinate because of our confessional center of gravity.

Whenever a church or denomination with a minimal statement of faith is confronted by an issue that goes beyond their statement of faith, that gap is still going to get filled. Sometimes that may look like adding another bullet point to the statement, but oftentimes it looks like either adopting a position *alongside* their statement of faith, or the leader’s personal beliefs directing the church, or letting the church settle into a position by cultural default. When this occurs, the identity of the church becomes the center of the faith-plus … whatever the issue is, and the addition tends to become the identity marker that distinguishes the church. 

For instance, during the temperance movement, abstinence from alcohol became something added to the statements of faith, or became the cultural default, and then later became a distinguishing, driving feature of congregations ([an issue that confessional churches were able to effectively address](https://www.modernreformation.org/resources/articles/christianity-and-politics?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)). Today, immigration can function like this, where churches or their pastors or members may emphasize the importance of law and order and borders on the one hand, or the generous welcome of the immigrant on the other. This political or cultural posture of the church then becomes its defining feature. Sometimes the gaps are filled by prioritizing less important subjects compared to the core of the faith or by adding them alongside the statement of belief. Sometimes they are filled by theology and church life essentially being reduced to a certain sort of vibe. Of course, these sorts of shared cultural instincts arise in confessional churches as well, but they have a built-in immune system from their confessional structure to keep these instincts properly ordered (even if that does not always occur perfectly in practice).

And this is why the EPC matters. We are a denomination committed to being Reformed, evangelical, presbyterian, and missional, and since our founding have held these streams together by our confessional and doctrinal statements. Like other presbyterian churches, we subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms because we believe they faithfully adhere to scripture’s overall teaching — confessionalism! Yet, since our beginning we have also had a much shorter document called “The Essentials of Our Faith” based on Campus Crusade’s evangelical statement of faith ([itself an evangelicized derivative of the Westminster Confession of Faith](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Bill%5FBright%5Fand%5FCampus%5FCrusade%5Ffor%5FChris/4Y57AYuZ6rEC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=westminster&pg=PA78&printsec=frontcover&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)). The intent was to have both a robust confession and an evangelical statement that summarizes the essential, core elements of the Christian faith in order to maintain both high doctrinal standard and a relaxed atmosphere. That really captures well the ethos of the EPC, sometimes called the “Enjoyable” Presbyterian Church: relaxed, kind, and committed.

However, having two doctrinal statements inevitably invites tensions between whether we privilege a more typically Reformed robust, full-scope confession of scripture’s teaching or a simpler, standardized core of evangelical belief. For most of the EPC’s history these two standards worked as parallels, tending towards a privileging of the “Essentials.” This minimalism became an identifying feature of the EPC: Unity in the Essentials, Liberty in the Non-Essentials — with “non-essential” functionally being any doctrine affirmed in the Westminster Standards not covered in the “Essentials” statement. The core of the EPC’s culture matched the core “Essentials”, but of course that leaves gaps. Those gaps were often filled by an emphasis on devout piety, so that essential evangelical belief and godly character became our defining features. Oftentimes, the fear in the EPC was that prioritizing our confessional standards would kill the friendly, relaxed culture of the church. 

Then came the debate over same-sex attraction and ordination. The presenting issue was whether someone who was committed to the historic, orthodox, biblical practice and view that sex is reserved for marriage between a man and woman, yet who still struggles with same-sex attraction, could be ordained. 

A minimal statement of faith and sincere piety is insufficient to answer this.

This is a gap, and minimalism can’t cut it: either a new doctrinal point will be added alongside the essential core, or the culture will de facto make a new position normative. Either way it will become a defining feature. In this particular case, filling the gap could happen from multiple, knee-jerk directions, either by responding in legalistic fear or with a misplaced charity which accommodates licentiousness.

Instead, the EPC elected to pursue the issue on confessional grounds. This went beyond the paperwork (the final documents included as many quotes and references to the Westminster Standards as all the EPC’s previous Position Papers and Pastoral Letters combined), but an aggressive commitment to handle the debate by following-through on confessional logic.

Specifically, it was shaped by the biblical, Westminsterian treatment of these issues: 

- the fall in Eden brought about the conditions of sin (individual moral corruption and guilt) and misery (we are broken, and suffering, including in our bodies and relationships, and this continues in this life even after salvation);
- concupiscence (sin’s impulses in human hearts are themselves sin, as are sinful desires);
- remaining sin (sin and its impulses remain in the Christian the rest of their life and is the source of all our sinful desires and actions);
- sanctification (the Christian is holy in Christ, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and therefore there is a lifelong war in them between remaining sin and holiness, a conflict which graciously progresses towards Spirit-empowered victory over remaining sin);
- repentance (all of the Christian life is one of repentance, and that includes repenting of remaining sin, its impulses, and desires);
- mortification (we are alive in Christ and dead to sin and therefore must fervently be killing sin, even as it remains with us all our lifelong);
- and temptation (temptations come upon us due to our remaining sin, broken world, and Satan; the experience of temptation is not itself a sign of unrepentance, and all temptations must be fled).

A key summary came from Westminster Larger Catechism Q&A 78:

> Q. Whence ariseth the imperfection of sanctification in believers? A. The imperfection of sanctification in believers ariseth from the remnants of sin abiding in every part of them, and the perpetual (*lifelong*) lustings (*desires*) of the flesh against the spirit; whereby they are often foiled with temptations, and fall into many sins, are hindered in all their spiritual services, and their best works are imperfect and defiled in the sight of God.

Christ by his Spirit *may* remove any thorns in the flesh, sources of temptation, or particular desires and impulses that arise from remaining sin, but this is neither promised nor guaranteed in this life. The expectations for progress in holiness is not that remaining sin and its impulses are *extinguished* in this life, but that their power over the Christian is *subdued* as the Christian denies, kills, and flees from them in repentance and mortification by the grace and power of Christ by his Spirit. Nor are there are separate biblical rules of sanctification for same-sex attraction. So, homosexual desires are sinful and need to be denied, repented of, mortified/killed, and the temptation to them fled. Growth in sanctification does not mean that the underlying remaining sin that gives rise to sinful same-sex desires will disappear, or that temptations to same-sex attraction will cease. The EPC’s application of this is that the mere existence of a struggle with same-sex attraction does not by itself rule out someone from ordination. The standard for ordination in the EPC is that officers are above reproach: conforming to Christ’s character and his word as expressed in our biblical, Reformed, confessional standards, in character, conduct, and self-description as godly examples to the church of this growth in repentance, righteousness, and holiness.

Now, critically, the debate in the EPC occurred on the terrain of our confessional standards, not the “Essentials” or appeals to generalized evangelical pietism. Even those who dissented from the EPC’s conclusions made their arguments on confessional grounds. Whether or not the above interpretation of scripture and our confessions is accurate, a minimalized statement of core belief is clearly inadequate to assist a church reasoning through the biblical witness pertinent to this subject.

However, roughly 35 churches (\~5% of the EPC’s total congregations) are planning to depart, with some going to one of two newly formed denominations/networks of churches. Notably, both these two new groups place the Westminster Confession and Catechisms on a level alongside an assortment of other topics as their defining characteristic: whenever the gap is not filled from confessional logic, whatever does fill the gaps by default becomes central to their identity. The center of the faith, plus. And so now the prohibition against ordaining anyone with ongoing struggle against same-sex attraction — regardless of their character, holiness, repentance, conduct, and self-description —is a core identity marker of these churches. 

Yet with the EPC, this summer represents a key shift in our life, with the Westminster Confession and Catechisms properly privileged in practice as *the* confession of the church’s faith. The “Essentials” no longer function as a parallel standard, but a subordinate statement of belief that needs to be understood in light of our true confession of faith. The future of the EPC is confessional.

So again, why should the larger church care about the EPC’s debate? [Evangelist Glen Scrivener recently noted](https://youtu.be/RiveTBEqb1c?si=p26JPpFgxJPaMvYo&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that mere Christianity is over. Previously, focusing a church’s message and distinctive features exclusively on the core elements of the faith was perceived as advantageous so as to minimize barriers. But now the world is craving something more comprehensive and robust. The confessional tradition has a ready-made answer for that need since we are seeking to confess what God is saying in the whole of his word, for the whole of life, for the whole of the world. 

And despite fears that prioritizing confessionalism would kill the EPC’s ethos, even our recent debates were conducted in a respectful and charitable manner. We are still the Enjoyable Presbyterian Church. Being confessionalist does not have to mean being angry or pedantic. The EPC has provided the larger church a picture of a robust and relaxed witness of God’s grace to the world.
### Children of the Wasted Lands
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/children-of-the-wasted-lands/
Last updated: 2026-10-07T11:00:26.000Z
*The young child saw those wasted lands;* 

*he longed to set things right.*

*He prayed that Christ might one day send*

*some messenger to care and tend,*

*to heal where others tear and rend,*

*and turn the darkness bright.*

– Malcolm Guite, *Galahad and the Grail*

This passage stirred something in my heart the first time I read it; it both spoke to a longing within me as well as gave words to that longing I had but didn’t know how to describe. It gave me a window into what I realized was the summation of what I hope and long for my sons – that they would see, long, and pray in the same way that this child, Galahad, does. 

That they would see as the child Galahad did – the reality of the wasted lands around us. And yet, that it would not move them to despair or hopelessness but rather a *longing* to have those things set right because there is a fundamental belief that things *can* be set right. And then that longing would move them to prayer – their eyes heavenward, to seek and ask Christ, the only true source of deliverance, healing, redemption, and hope, that He would send the ones who will care, tend, and heal the darkness of this land. This prayer, only coming about because of the dual belief and recognition that God alone brings about the healing of this world *and* that He does so in partnership with humanity. 

This exactly then is what I pray for my sons – that they would see and respond to reality in accordance to the truth, beauty, and goodness of the gospel alone. 

But why is it not simply a given that they would see as Galahad did, particularly if they grow up in the church? It has become difficult to view the world, the happenings around us, according to what is true. This is, at least in part, because we in the church have lost the enchantment of the gospel. Our Christian imagination has been starved and warped, and is in a dire state. 

The “why” of the situation as well as the remedy to it is found in the stories we surround ourselves with. Our Christian imagination is emaciated because we either submerse ourselves in too many shallow stories, or we do not grasp the full beauty and weight of the stories intended to purge and refurbish our Christian imagination. On the former, the amount of words and content we consume from social media, click-bait news articles, and the like do great harm to our Christian imagination. We become dominated by the narrative and stories of our culture – the despair, the hopelessness, the fears, the vain hopes that we can, by our own means, achieve our own redemption and empowerment. On the other hand, the kinds of stories we need to lose ourselves in, from Scripture to great literature, require time to be fully grasped and take root in our hearts. They must be wrestled with, pondered, and then submitted to in the mystery of what it does to our soul, our loves, and our longings. But who has time for that in the hustle and bustle of all that we have to do? 

The question then is not whether or not you surround yourself with stories, but rather which type of stories you surround yourself with? Is it the kind of stories which act to purify and refurbish the Christian imagination? This is exactly what Richard Bauckham says the book of Revelation does: 

> unmasks \[the\] dominant construction of the world as an ideology of the powerful which serves to maintain their power. In its place, Revelation offers a different way of perceiving the world which leads people to resist and to challenge the effects of the dominant ideology. 

I believe this doesn’t just hold true for Revelation, but for many of the classical stories that have withstood the test of time. 

Listen carefully to the stories being told to you, and choose wisely which ones to listen to, to be submerged in, for it is not a given that just because we go to church and read the Bible that we will see as the child Galahad does. 

One such story that I’ve encountered occasionally considers the pain and danger of our world and asks if we should even be having children, given all the pain and suffering happening around us. We see ‘those wasted lands’ – the political strife, the increase in polarization and hatred across people groups, the debates about environmental impacts such as global warming, resource shortage, etc, and we wonder – is it right to bring children into this? And that’s the narrative we at times hear, that to bring children into this world under these circumstances is irresponsible, selfish, and cruel – how can we subject our children to that? 

But is this the narrative of the Bible? The world is broken, yes, and yet, it does not stop there. God is setting it right – healing it, already healing it. God saw these wasted lands and longed to set things right, and he did by sending His own Son into this chaos. He did not find this world or our situation so dire or hopeless that He refrained from bringing His own Son in, but rather because he saw how dire and hopeless things were, He sent His own Son, that this wasted land may be healed, that it may be cared for, and that the darkness may not only see a great Light but become light. And even then, the process is not done. The plan was always to partner with us, humans, to bring about the full healing and redemption of this world. As seen from the Old to the New Testament, God’s purposes, though can be achieved without us, are often such that they are chosen to be done with us and through us. 

So then, what stories do we surround ourselves with regarding even so basic and simple a question as ‘should we bring children into this world?’ If we immerse ourselves in the stories that reflect God’s truth, beauty, and goodness, then when we see these wasted lands, we will have just one desire – not to escape or to protect our children from it, but to long to set it right, because we know it *will* be set right and it *is* being set right. And then we’d pray that God’s will would be done, and that He’d send people to do his will in bringing about that healing and caring and tending. And we would bring our children into this world because we know that they will carry forward God’s redemption and healing. We will surround them with stories such that when they see all that happens around them, they will not just see the wasted lands, because indeed these are wasted lands, but of the promise of what these wasted lands will become one day – Eden, a place where God and humanity dwell together, a kingdom of God. 

And they will long to be the one to set these things right. And we will teach them to set their longings into prayer, and we ourselves will pray with them, that Christ would send the messengers to care and tend, to heal where others have hurt and torn apart, to bring light into this world. 

And perhaps they will also then one day be able to receive both the fulfillment of their longing and the answer to their prayer, as the young man Galahad did, and proclaim along with Galahad – “*I* am the one the Spirit sends to heal both land and lord.” For truly we all are called and sent out by Christ to be the healers of our land, to realize that the longings we’ve had in our hearts are but God’s Spirit stirring within us, propelling us toward, and preparing us for our ultimate destiny in fulfilling those longings to bring about the healing and redemption of our world – all we need are the eyes to imagine and the hearts to long for what God is already bringing about. So may we surround ourselves with the stories that stir us and send us according to the beauty of what God is already doing around us even when it is hidden behind these wasted lands.
### Seeking Reconciliation Between Israelis and Palestinians
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/seeking-reconciliation-between-israelis-and-palestinians/
Last updated: 2026-10-06T11:00:49.000Z
**Maya Savir.** [***On Reconciliation: What Israelis and Palestinians Can Learn from South Africa and Rwanda.***](https://www.plough.com/books/on-reconciliation?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) **Plough Publishing, 2026\. $24.95\. 216 pp.**

About a decade ago, I attended a meeting in Jerusalem between a small handful of Israel’s Messianic Jewish leaders and several key Palestinian Christian pastors. Beyond their faith, both groups were outliers and minorities in their respective communities—the majority of Jewish people don’t see Jewish followers of Jesus as part of the Jewish community; Palestinian Christians are a minority in their majority-Muslim community. 

The discussion that day focused on mutual fellowship efforts between the two communities. The gathering started out amicably enough in prayer and acknowledgment of shared faith in the resurrected Messiah Jesus. But as the conversation continued, initial expressions of good will dissolved into the tense, familiar tribal divides that had long defined the two communities. At one point someone asked, “Shouldn’t Jesus be enough to hold us together?” 

There was a moment of silence before another person responded wearily, “He should. But maybe that’s not enough.” 

I thought of that tense meeting as I dove into Israeli human rights activist Maya Savir’s *On Reconciliation: What Israelis and Palestinians Can Learn from South Africa and Rwanda*. If a small group of leaders that typically functions at the margins of their respective cultures struggles to find a way to work together in Israel even when animated by their shared faith and geography, is reconciliation possible in this place that has been marked by conflict throughout recorded history? 

Savir, a Jewish Israeli peace activist, believes it is possible. She lays her hopeful cards on the table at the beginning of the book: “All conflicts end. It’s in their nature. Even the very worst of wars – world wars and genocides – are proof of this…Another truth is hidden inside that first truth: we are less rigid and closed up than we think. Humans are capable of change and societies are as well.” 

Extensive experience provides the foundation of this book. Savir spent extended periods of time inside two former hot conflict zones in South Africa and Rwanda that were once defined respectively by codified, oppressive racism and a breathtaking blitzkrieg genocide. Her years of humanitarian work serving malnourished children afforded her an opportunity to spend time with a wide mix of people involved in reconciliation efforts in both places. 

South Africa’s legal codification of the racist policies of apartheid (an Afrikaans word meaning “separateness” or “aparthood”) put into legal writ the deeply held beliefs of the white minority that they were superior to their Black and Colored neighbors. Political and economic power was concentrated in their hands, and resulted in a segregated society, vast economic inequality, and punitive persecution of those who opposed (or appeared to oppose) this social order. *On Reconciliation* digs into the timeline and personalities leading to the end of apartheid, the work and limitations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was tasked with documenting human rights abuses and working to create specific programs and processes that could bring healing to a society that had been divided by color for generations, long before the laws enacted beginning in 1948\. She writes, 

The commission transformed apartheid from a nameless, faceless system that existed simply because it existed, much like the weather, into a system that was built, maintained, and operated by real people with names and faces, people who committed crimes for the sake of this system. In doing so, the commission fulfilled a request made by a nineteen-year-old daughter of a murdered anti-apartheid activist: “We want to forgive, but we don’t know who.” 

She notes that justice has been a core part of the reconciliation work in South Africa, but it was far from the only thrust in ongoing healing efforts in the fractured society. To put it in the harrowing words of South African Anglican bishop Desmond Tutu, “If justice alone is done, the country will turn to ashes.” 

This truth had a different application nearly 3,000 miles to the north in Rwanda. Over a span of about 100 days in 1994, the Hutu militia running the country unleashed a genocide against the Tutsi people. It was the result of long-simmering tensions between the two groups. The outside world proved powerless to intervene. Official estimates from the Rwandan government place the death toll at one million, and the number of rapes between 250,000 and 500,000\. 

As the nation sought to make sense of what it had done to itself, the International Criminal Court spent 20 years listening to testimony of victims. Savir notes that while this court was the first to declare rape as a separate war crime, the process was far from comprehensive as it focused primarily on the leaders and instigators of the genocide. The sheer numbers and the specifics of Western-style court proceedings throttled the possibility that every person who engaged in criminal activity would be brought to justice. Instead, a traditional conflict resolution process known as a *gacaca* (a Kinyarwandan word for “grass”, where offended parties would gather, sitting on the grass together to tell their stories and invite the community come to a decision) was employed because so much of the violence was of neighbor against neighbor. 

Trauma continues to permeate Rwandan society, but so does a shared determination to keep moving forward while never forgetting the past. Savir notes that the definition of reconciliation that Rwandan society has adopted is simply living together. “In this sense,” she writes, “it is difficult to challenge: there has been no ethnic bloodshed for over three decades.” 

Savir offers this deep and detailed dive into the conflict and reconciliation process in South Africa and Rwanda in order to tease out some principles that might be applied to the conflict in her own homeland. She writes,

*On one side, the Jews are victims (and accordingly, the Palestinians are the victimizer) and on the other side the Palestinians are the victim (and accordingly, the Jews are the victimizer)… The central question of the conflict may be whose land this is, but the central question that seems to stand in the way of any attempt to end it is this: Who has the right to claim victimhood and who, as a result, is the victimizer?* 

Because we tend to assign righteousness to the victim, we use that metric to decide who should win the conflict. But Savir maintains that the virtue of tolerance allows those involved in a conflict to push beyond choosing a side and instead hold the experiences and convictions of all parties in tension. She notes with sadness that tolerance has disappeared from the conversation in the wake of the Hamas-led attack in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, that killed about 1,200 people and took 251 people hostage that day. Estimates from the Palestinian Information Agency inside Gaza state that over 70,000 lives have been lost in the territory as a result of Israel’s response to October 7\. Savir notes, “…killing, destroying, razing, expelling, raping, kidnapping, starving are actions that require the psyche to detach itself from the acting body. And this is how Israeli Jews and Palestinians communicate with each other. They appear to speak different languages, but in actuality they communicate with one another in the shared language of soulless action.” 

Savir’s examples of civic and societal reconciliation in Rwanda and South Africa aren’t tidy ones. She does an excellent job showing the tensions and weaknesses in them, and notes that they are also specific to the culture and history of the place in which they’re enacted. What is striking in her exploration of these reconciliation stories is that there were all along people dreaming of what reconciliation could look like when the conflict burned itself out, just as there are people like Savir herself, seeking to lay the groundwork for reconciliation in Israel for the “someday” when the conflict comes to an end. 

I appreciated Savir’s care in telling the stories of those involved in reconciliation efforts in those African countries as well as those struggling to build a foundation for reconciliation in the midst of ongoing conflict in Israel. If there is one omission in the book, it is in the way she talks about faith. She tends to talk about faith primarily as a social identifier, rather than allowing to play an active role in both individuals and groups involved in the work of reconciliation. 

And it is work. Impossible, mountain-moving work. I had that illustrated for me in that Jerusalem meeting room more than a decade ago. *On Reconciliation* is an invitation to readers to imagine themselves beyond the headlines and horrors, in a room where former enemies can begin to repair the world together.
### Tolstoy's Path Out of Skepticism
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/tolstoys-path-out-of-skepticism/
Last updated: 2026-10-07T16:18:06.000Z
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ZF1h!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F219a8c2f-31b9-466d-9bc3-f1e2715de69a_963x612.jpeg)

A traveller walking through the desert suddenly finds himself encountering a raging beast. In a panic, the traveller leaps into a nearby dried-up well to hide. He hangs onto a small bush that grows out of the crevice till the coast is clear. He is safe, for now. But, to his horror, the man hears a snort and the snapping of jaws coming from the dark below him. A dragon sits at the bottom of this well, mouth open, ready to devour. The animal outside stalks in circles around the well. If he pulls himself up, he will be slain by the beast above; if he drops down, he will be eaten by the beast below. And it is only a matter of time before his arms grow tired and the impossible choice is made for him.

The austere Russian author relaying this fable then leans forward and [tells](https://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/confessions-tolstoy.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) us: “This is no fairy tale but truth, irrefutable and understood by all.”

---

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is one of the greatest authors of all time. His works are standard bearers, not only of Russian literature in particular, but of modern fiction in general. One of Tolstoy’s English translators, David Patterson, [explains](https://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/confessions-tolstoy.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that just two of Tolstoy’s works—*War and Peace* and *Anna Karenina*—“have assured \[Tolstoy\] a permanent place in the annals of world literature; both testified to the depth of his genius and creativity.” They may be the greatest novels ever written.

Nevertheless, by the time Tolstoy was fifty-one-years-old—after publishing his most seminal works—he became convinced that his life was meaningless, that it amounted to nothing, and began to daily entertain thoughts of suicide.

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---

Patterson asks an unsettling question: “If artistic achievement of this magnitude cannot instill life with meaning, then where is meaning to be found?”

This is the subject that Tolstoy writes of on the other side of his existential collapse in his short spiritual autobiography, *A Confession.* While much of Tolstoy’s final theological conclusions ought not be followed, his story proves to be an honest and bracing account of a man raised in the shell of Christianity, defiantly punching through it, only to find that by so doing, he is now alone and naked in the dark. And there, in that agony, he sees that it is only with faith that one can find meaning in life.

## **Disbelief**

Tolstoy begins his memoir with detailing how his childhood faith was easily blown away at the slightest wind of doubt. By the time he was eighteen, he was a confirmed atheist and thought the Russian Orthodox Church nothing but hypocrisy and superstition.

But this disbelief didn’t lead Tolstoy to reject a moral life. In fact, once he severed himself from the Church, he began an even more ardent pursuit of perfection, of progress. He joined a circle of sophisticated artists and poets who ardently held to the concept of moral perfection and progress.

> My belief assumed a form that it commonly assumes among the educated people of our time. This belief was expressed by the word “progress.” At the time it seemed to me that this word had meaning. Like any living individual, I was tormented by questions of how to live better. I still had not understood that in answering that one must live according to progress, I was talking just like a person being carried along in a boat by the waves and the wind; without really answering, such a person replies to the only important question-”Where are we to steer?”-by saying, “We are being carried somewhere.”

Tolstoy may not have been able to explain where or what he was progressing towards, but he was progressing. This uneasiness was set aside by his own mantra: “Everything is developing, and I am developing; the reason why I am developing in this way will come to light, along with everything else.” In other words, I’m sure this will all make sense in time. The meaning of life is just on the other side of the hill, and in time, he will arrive.

Looking back on this season, he admits that for all his talk of progress and perfection, he was a debauched and lecherous man.

> I cannot recall those years without horror, loathing, and heart-rending pain. I killed people in war, challenged men to duels with the purpose of killing them, and lost at cards; I squandered the fruits of the peasants’ toil and then had them executed; I was a fornicator and a cheat. Lying, stealing, promiscuity of every kind, drunkenness, violence, murder-there was not a crime I did not commit; yet in spite of it all I was praised, and my colleagues considered me and still do consider me a relatively moral man.

## **Disenchantment**

In time, Tolstoy was turned off by the avante-garde circle he ran in. He found the contradictions and smug superiority off-putting and hungered for more satisfying answers to the riddles of life. Then, while visiting Paris, Tolstoy witnessed a public execution that shook him to the core and “revealed to me the feebleness of my superstitious belief in progress.” The French Revolution that had occurred a generation before Tolstoy was supposed to usher in the quintessential ideal of secular progress and the dismissal of superstition—when in the end it brought about the guillotine and the reign of terror.

> When I saw how the head was severed from the body and heard the thud of each part as it fell into the box, I understood, not with my intellect but with my whole being, that no theories of the rationality of existence or of progress could justify such an act.

A seed of doubt had been sown in Tolstoy’s philosophy.

## **Distraction**

The reality of death punctured Tolstoy’s soap bubble philosophy of ‘progress.’ But, at the age of 34, Tolstoy married and began having children. The joys of family life served as a distraction from his existential angst and “completely diverted me from any search for the overall meaning of life.” At this point, Tolstoy was already a well known author and teacher, but he now wrote primarily to support his family and to improve their material situation. And he was remarkably successful.

> At that time my whole life was focused on my family, my wife, my children, and thus on a concern for improving our way of life. My striving for personal perfection, which had already been replaced by a striving for perfection in general, a striving for progress, now became a striving for what was best for my family and me.

Despite writing his most successful novels at this time, there was a fly buzzing in the back of Tolstoy’s mind all the while. He began having “moments of bewilderment” where he would stop and ask: *Why? What’s the point of this?* He was able for some time to wave these questions away as pointless, childish even.

> I thought that the answers to them were well known and that if I should ever want to resolve them, it would not be too hard for me; it was just that I could not be bothered with it now, but if I should take it upon myself, then I would find the answers.

…

> But as soon as I laid my hands on them and tried to resolve them, I was immediately convinced, first of all, that they were not childish and foolish questions but the most vital and profound questions in life, and, secondly, that no matter how much I pondered them there was no way I could resolve them.

Even as he considered his own fame, he says to himself: “Very well, you will be more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Moliere, more famous than all the writers in the world-so what? And I could find absolutely no reply.”

## **Death**

Finally turning his attention to the question of *Why?* resulted in Tolstoy entering a near catatonic state. He was able to “breathe, eat, drink, and sleep” but nothing else. Tolstoy was so unravelled that he had to invent clever ruses to stop himself from committing suicide. He stopped hunting with a gun and removed all rope from his house, lest he take his own life.

What was it about Tolstoy’s question of *Why?* that left him so thoroughly crushed? He explains:

> My question, the question that had brought me to the edge of suicide when I was fifty years old, was the simplest question lying in the soul of every human being, from a silly child to the wisest of the elders, the question without which life is impossible…Is there any meaning in my life that will not be destroyed by my inevitably approaching death?

If the wave is going to come to wash away the sand castle, does it matter how well it is built? Are artistry and thoughtfulness and design any different than slap-dash and laziness if both are going to be reduced to nothing?

In Tolstoy’s telling of the fable of the dragon, he explains that on the bush the traveller clings to there is a spot of honey that distracts the man from his plight. The honey represents everything in life that serves as a diversion, from the carnal pleasures of Tolstoy’s younger life, to his more mature pleasures of family and literary success. But, of course, the honey of distraction only works for so long. In time, the weakness of grip and the sounds of the dragon drown out any pleasure—you can’t ignore death forever. “I try to suck the honey that once consoled me, but the honey is no longer sweet.”

> The former delusion of the happiness of life that had concealed from me the horror of the dragon no longer deceives me. No matter how much I tell myself that I cannot understand the meaning of life, that I should live without thinking about it, I cannot do this because I have done it for too long already. Now I cannot help seeing the days and nights rushing toward me and leading me to death. I see only this, and this alone is truth. Everything else is a lie.

Tolstoy had spent the whole of his life assuming that he would discover the meaning to life, that he would crest the hill and find the goal he had been progressing towards. But now, as the weight of death grows heavier in his mind, he is no longer confident that he will crest that hill. Or, worst yet, perhaps he has already crested the hill, only to find…nothing.

> If a fairy had come and offered to fulfill my every wish, I would not have known what to wish for…I did not even want to discover truth anymore because I had guessed what it was. The truth was that life is meaningless.

## **Despair**

Most people living with the kind of forward-tilt that Tolstoy had employed—looking ahead to some future goal that will answer the riddles, heal the ache, give sense to the meaning of it all—do not arrive at the kind of fame and fortune that Tolstoy did. Thus, they are convinced that their feelings of hollowness and resentment come from their material circumstances: *Once I get married…once I have kids…once I make more money…once I am published, etc*. But Tolstoy, like the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, had reached the mountain top that only a few persons in all of history do, only to find it…empty.

Tolstoy’s memoir sounds eerily similar to the reflections of Solomon in Ecclesiastes:

“I should have been considered a completely happy man,” writes Tolstoy. “I kept my heart from no pleasure,” writes Solomon (Eccl 2:10).”

I had a large estate that was growing and expanding without any effort on my part,” says Tolstoy.” I made great works. I built houses and planted vineyards for myself…I also gathered for myself silver and gold,” says Solomon (Ecc 2:4, 8).”

More than ever I was respected…I could claim a certain renown without really deluding myself,” Tolstoy claims. “I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem. Also my wisdom remained with me,” Solomon claims (Ecc 2:9).

“And,” writes Tolstoy, “in such a state of affairs I came to a point where I could not live.” “So I hated life,” says Solomon, “because what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is vanity and a striving after wind,” (Eccl 2:17).

Tolstoy actually cites Ecclesiastes extensively in his memoir, and constantly compares himself to Solomon, to prove that one can have it all…and be miserably empty, confused, and left aimless in life.

> I could not be deceived. All is vanity. Happy is he who has never been born; death is better than life; we must rid ourselves of life.

## **Doubt**

After realizing that life was absurd and evil, Tolstoy knew that most logically consistent action was suicide. Why drag life out if everything is pointless? Yet, he could not bring himself to do it. “Now I see that if I did not kill myself, it was because I had some vague notion that my ideas were all wrong.”

Tolstoy notices that all of the ordinary people around him—the farmers and milkmaids and children—don’t share his sense of ennui. “It turned out that all of humanity had some kind of knowledge of the meaning of life which I had overlooked and held in contempt.” When left in the isolated closet of his own rationalism, Tolstoy could find no answers, no meaning of life. Yet, when he looked out at the large mass of normal people living, working, and loving, he saw that they all possessed a great sense of purpose and meaning. None of them languished as Tolstoy did; all of them thought suicide a great evil, not a logical necessity. At first, Tolstoy assumed this was because they were ignorant and uneducated, intoxicated with the “honey” of life. But, something pushed Tolstoy beyond this intellectual snobbery to consider that perhaps he was the ignorant one. Maybe he was missing something.

What did the average man have that Tolstoy lacked?

*Faith*. Faith in a God who bestowed meaning, who had designed a purpose for all mankind, regardless of their material success or station in life. When looking at the faithful, he saw that they had simple answers to all of Tolstoy’s questions. When asked about the meaning of life—questions that the titan of intellect, Tolstoy, could not answer—the average peasant could answer quite simply:

> However I may put the question of how I am to live, the answer is: according to the law of God. Is there anything real that will come of my life? Eternal torment or eternal happiness. What meaning is there which is not destroyed by death? Union with the infinite God, paradise.

But this was infuriating to Tolstoy. To assume that the meaning to life was found in religion was like returning to the nursery as a grown man. Faith was for the naive, for the credulous, for the superstitious; it was the denial of rationality, not the answer that rationality itself demanded.

> My position was terrible. I knew that I could find nothing in the way of rational knowledge except a denial of life; and in faith I could find nothing except a denial of reason, and this was even more impossible than a denial of life.

But, amazingly, Tolstoy doesn’t stop there.

> I ran into a contradiction from which there were only two ways out: either the thing that I had referred to as reason was not as rational as I had thought, or the thing that I took to be irrational was not as irrational as I had thought.

In other words, Tolstoy began to doubt his doubts.

## **Deliverance**

After examining possible alternatives in science and philosophy and finding them equally insufficient, Tolstoy has a flash of insight. What he is searching for is a meaning and purpose that extends beyond his finite existence, something that matters on the other side of his death. But to possess meaning that extends beyond the bounds of the finite requires contact with what is infinite. But, by definition, he will never find that infinite within the realm of the finite—to what the rational mind can produce, what science can prove. Thus his quest will be doomed.

Faith, however, looks to the realm of the transcendent, to the infinite God who can bridge the gap, who grants meaning and eternal life to us finite creatures. To those who possess faith, our lives, however brief or long, however spectacular or mundane, are freighted with eternal meaning because they have been made, directed, and intended by an eternal God who has destined us for eternal life.

> …faith gives infinite meaning to the finite existence of man, meaning that is not destroyed by suffering, deprivation, and death. Therefore, the meaning of life and the possibility of living may be found in faith alone.

When the option of returning to faith in God first presented itself, Tolstoy despised the thought as childish. Now, he openly acknowledged that the faith of a child was precisely what he needed. “In essence I returned to the first things, to the things of childhood and youth.”

## **Deus**

Tolstoy’s account isn’t a model to necessarily be implemented. The faith that he eventually arrives at is thoroughly heterodox. He rejects the Trinity, abandons his wife because he believes celibacy to be holier than married life, rejects all sacraments, and advocates an anarcho-pacifism that results in him being excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church. Further, he seems to misunderstand Solomon’s account in Ecclesiastes, assuming that the point of the book is to lead you to believe that life is meaningless.

So, what role does he serve for us today? Tolstoy’s *Confession*, at a minimum, is a journal of a man’s hard-earned journey out of skepticism, of doubting the doubts. We should pay attention to him not because of the place he arrives, but because of the place he leaves and, most importantly, why he leaves it.

It is common to hear talk today about a religious revival occurring in the West. I hope that is the case, albeit I am reluctantly skeptical. Vibes may have shifted, but they are prone to shift again and quite easily. At the very least, for the moment there seems to be a longing for something more and a new openness to religion in general and Christianity in particular. This is a good thing. But I do not think the stark realization that Tolstoy experienced is terribly evident to many. Most young people today still believe that a meaningful life can be found inside or outside of the church, connected or disconnected to the divine. Contemplating Christianity may seem like an interesting splash of philosophical exploration, but not a necessity. To use Randy Newman’s [evocative image](https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/resources/leveling-the-playing-field-a-strategy-for-pre-evangelism/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of our culture as a hockey game: the ice rink is still strongly tilted *away* from Christianity and towards secularism.

Tolstoy’s jarring and melodramatic prose may be gloomy and quintessentially Russian, but his logic is difficult to refute, and helps provide a small step towards leveling the playing field. If this life is all there is, then is there any meaning in life that will not be destroyed by your inevitably approaching death? Seekers and doubters may be unsure about what happens *after* death, but they cannot be uncertain about their own death. And perhaps contemplating that very thing (and its detonating effect on the meaning of their life) may be the morbid gadfly which stings a person into considering a stronger, more durable hope.
### Wriggle and Rest: Lively and Living Language for Faith
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/wriggle-and-rest-lively-and-living-language-for-faith/
Last updated: 2026-10-05T11:00:32.000Z
**Mischa Willett.** [***This Gift Card Has Already Been Redeemed***](https://paracletepress.com/products/this-gift-card-has-already-been-redeemed?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) **by Mischa Willett. Paraclete Press, 2026\. $21.00\. 112 pp.**

Jazz. Opera. Poetry. All dead-end art forms, surviving in the ossified remains of prior eras—or so one might be tempted to think. Avant-garde movements in the 20th century pushed into extraordinarily difficult and unpalatable directions, while the concurrent rise of new media broke the broader public’s connection with these once-popular forms. Though their cultural prominence has diminished, it’s worth noting that excellent creative work is still being produced in each of these modes, by artists innovating and working within established traditions to find vibrant contemporary expressions.

But what does *vibrant contemporary poetry* look like? One might turn to prestigious publications like *Poetry Magazine*, graduate programs like the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, or awards like the Pulitzer Prize. While great work is sometimes championed by such institutions, so much poetry in the wake of modernism has veered toward the esoteric and the prosaic, so that even the most lauded contemporary poets often work within a largely self-contained vortex of MFA students, graduates, and faculty, alienating or ignoring a wider audience. On the other hand, one might turn to the relatively popular volumes of *instapoetry* with line-drawing cover art and fragments of lower-case musings and trite inspirational mantras. Where does one find new poetry with lasting literary merit *and* appeal outside the academy?

An abundance of good poetry is still being written, however, even now. One such laborer is the poet, scholar, and teacher Mischa Willett, whose third poetry collection*, This Gift Card Has Already Been Redeemed*, has just been released by Paraclete Press. Willett is an erudite professor who serves as director of a respected faith-based MFA program (Whitworth Writers’ Workshop in Spokane, Washington). While some of his poems speak directly to fellow poets and students of literature, his work offers plenty to engage non-specialist readers.

Willett writes primarily within the realm of (post)modern free verse, but his lines are crafted with exceptional care. As a scholar specializing in 19th century British literature, Willett is well-studied in the history of English poetry and has full command of poetic technique. Though few of these poems have a regular metrical pulse or conventional end-rhyme, Willett is highly attuned to *sound*, tapping into the rhythmic, aural pleasures that are central to differentiating poetry from prose.

So much poetry fails to achieve (or even attempt) either humor or spiritual depth, but both are hallmarks of Willett’s work. As a preliminary example, consider the book’s title: thoroughly current and quotidian, a throwaway phrase of the Amazon era, which strikes a mildly comic note as the title of a poetry book. But on deeper reflection, this stock phrase is packed with rich spiritual implications concerning *redemption* and *grace*. Like the title, the poems in this collection explore 21st\-century language and experience surprisingly yet seamlessly interwoven with timeless biblical and theological ideas and questions.

An example of this lively, modern twist on biblical language is found in “Psalms Too”:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/10/Screenshot-2026-10-02-at-11.10.33---AM.png)

Willett’s deftly sculpted language borders on disorienting, like the degraded, sin-steeped world he describes. The rich use of alliteration, anaphora, assonance, and rhyme make this poem a treat for the ears, inviting the slow re-reading that illuminates unusual formulations such as the strikingly fresh initial slant rhyme: “Too lots / these lights.” Similar sonic flourishes are on display in other poems, including [“Light, Bulb”](https://farefwd.com/index.php/2026/07/22/light-bulb/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and “Life and Limn.”

Many of Willett’s poems use words in this highly flexible, sometimes jarring way—not for the sake of obfuscation, but rather to unsettle stale habits of mind, subverting cliches and drawing the reader’s taxed attention to re-orient and consider deeper meanings beyond pre-baked surface impressions. The opening poem, [“Dead Shall Rise,”](https://northamanglican.com/dead-shall-rise/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) begins:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/10/Screenshot-2026-10-02-at-11.09.44---AM.png)

an introduction which, at least for this reader, resisted basic comprehension on initial reading. But before long a scene depicting leaf-blowers reveals itself, unveiling the miraculous in the everyday as “leaves just up, / lifted angelic, or anyway, *lively* by / how could they know what?”

For some readers, Willett’s inventive, unfamiliar language will be a thrill, but for those who prefer something more straightforward, a large subset of poems have a more colloquial voice relating anecdotes from daily experience, closer to the playfully plainspoken style of Billy Collins. Yet even this “simple” language is fresh and rewarding, finding significance in mundane settings such as a conversation with a cafeteria worker ([“Hold Up”](https://heartoffleshlit.com/issue-11/mischa-willett/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)): “he thanks me / and I take my tray of mushrooms / over to the table and say grace / and we both mean it.”

Willett is attentive to the formal elements of poetry even when he seems to be using them loosely, with the subtle touch of a master craftsman who makes the complex look simple. These poems generally eschew traditional meter, but rhyme shows up not infrequently—sometimes a light sprinkle, sometimes a dense glitter—most often irregular and internal, in the vein of Kay Ryan, such as in “Some Miracles” and “Texas Challenge” (both of which also share Ryan’s wry humor). On occasion Willett uses straightforward end-rhyme, like the cross-rhymed quatrains of “A Valediction in Lieu of Ivy” or the couplets of “And Forth.” Yet even here, after some tidy perfect rhymes (lumber/umber, cement/bent) describing the construction of a backyard swing set, the couplets gradually strain against the form, with rhymes becoming more false and wrenched as the poem crashes to its conclusion, the true rhyme displaced by an assonantal near rhyme as the structure breaks down:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/10/Screenshot-2026-10-02-at-11.09.14---AM.png)

Even in the best poetry collections it’s not uncommon to hit stretches where a few poems don’t click—that was my experience at times, but soon enough the next piece would resonate with some sparkling phrase, vivid image, or compelling insight. As a general rule, the poems or lines that connect with particular readers will be as varied as those individuals, and there are plenty of quality dishes in Willett’s buffet for almost anyone to find something gratifying. Different readers’ mileage may vary when it comes to waiting for the more challenging poems’ Magic Eye blur to come into striking focus, but the payoff is worth it.

More than a third of the book is comprised of so-called “After” poems, in which a certain poet is named in the sub-heading (e.g., “After Robert Frost”), a poetic convention indicating that another poet’s work directly inspired the poem, through quotation or interpolation of specific phrases, or through echoing the poet’s distinctive style in some way. Nearly all the “After” designations are American poets active in the mid to late 20th century, with a heavy concentration of writers born in the 1940s. A few names may be more familiar, such as Pablo Neruda, Denise Levertov, and W. S. Merwin, but one would need to be an avid reader of contemporary poetry to recognize many of the other poets. Fortunately, in most cases it isn’t essential to know the work referenced to enjoy Willett’s original poem. Readers may prefer to think of these “After” headings like footnotes—useful citations for the aficionados or those who want to dig deeper and learn more, but not a roadblock to enjoying the poem on its own terms.

Throughout the book, it’s evident that Willett is a writing teacher, albeit one grounded in the real world, referencing Virginia Woolf as well as Steve Miller Band. Several poems consider the art of poetry and the role of artists. A few poems, some of them grouped in the book’s concluding section, are explicitly addressed to his students. While these are often fine poems, it’s hard to know how they will land with readers who are not themselves immersed in the practice of creative writing. Despite their grand and inspiring spiritual perspective on the nature of art, these pieces feel smaller in scope compared to the many excellent poems that touch on broadly shared experiences, which might have made for a stronger closing sequence.

Willett takes us to the foggy coast of the Pacific Northwest and the scorching heat of the Arizona desert, wrestling lament and wonder from the decay of old furniture, the life cycle of salmon, the delicate balancing act of urban cycling, and an ill-advised nighttime jog. Several poems poignantly probe the agonies and joys of parenthood, from a delightfully affectionate tickle fight to the secondhand motion sickness of watching a kid spinning in the kitchen. [“Price”](https://rabbitroompoetry.substack.com/p/pricemischa-willett) narrates the groggy tedium of fetching water cups and soothing children in the night, before surprisingly swerving to hard-earned gratitude and grace:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/10/Screenshot-2026-10-02-at-11.08.44---AM.png)

The heart of this collection is Willett’s sincere faith in the living God. Throughout he gives us lively and living language for faith, woven through lines that navigate the vicissitudes of life in the now-but-not-yet with refreshing wisdom and humility, speaking honestly about doubt (“when the fireplace of ashes misses the heat that made it”) and finding hope in unexpected places. The church is enriched by new expressions of spiritual realities, such as the closing of the [title poem](https://rabbitroompoetry.substack.com/p/this-gift-card-has-already-been-redeemedmischa) (“Blanketed in blamelessness”) or the surprisingly original take on Christ’s nativity in “Known in Santa Maria.”

In [“Rest,”](https://rabbitroompoetry.substack.com/p/restmischa-willett) a trip to the pool with children triggers old memories of scraped “toes trying to stay up, / to stay un-drowned hugging the edge / which of course I am still / trying to do,” before turning to thoughts of deceased relatives and finally pivoting to a moving vision of eschatological hope:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/10/Screenshot-2026-10-02-at-11.04.31---AM-1.png)

The best poetry can give voice to groanings that feel too deep for words, and Christians can find sustenance and encouragement by engaging with the “inessential” art of poetry. With his latest collection, Willett offers distinctive dirges and marches for weary pilgrims, new songs to take up on the road, once again joining his voice with the “meaning makers, greening the otherwise clear / desert and waste of the world.”
### Nausea and Time
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/nausea-and-time/
Last updated: 2026-10-05T11:00:25.000Z
In Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel *Nausea* a man named Antoine expresses a vivid discontent with his world. Antoine is overcome with a visceral sense that the material world is mere “brute” reality––it is just *there* with little if any reason for or meaning behind anything. These realizations cause Antoine to feel alienated from others, and himself, as he describes his existential unease as *nausea.* 

There is a similar homesick-like nausea endemic today. This sense of unease, an agitated aimlessness, is becoming more prevalent in those I pastor and connect with in general. There’s a frustratingly elusive lack of meaning and purpose. We are all, in a word, *untethered* and feel the gut-drop of falling. This is merely one result of how our experience of time has changed due to technological advances and online life, not to mention the massive shifts in social life over the last decade. For instance, [a 2022 study conducted with students in Uruguay](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9008471/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) during the pandemic showed psychological distress linked to changes in time perception.

As temporal, bodily creatures whose essence is what Martin Heidegger calls *being-in-the-world,* when our perception of time in the world is altered it can disrupt our very sense of self. Only when we expand our grasp on time will we flourish as creatures-in-time.

## **The Problem of Time**

Heidegger, along with Einstein, viewed time as *relative*. Time isn’t a constant “thing”, rather it is a way for us to conceive of our *being-there*. In this sense, Heidegger says we *are* time––our existence constitutes the *being-there* where events take place, which we perceive as passing time. But our perception of *being-there* in time is not always the same.

Consider how time understood this way affects temporal creatures psychologically. If time can be “stretched and squeezed” (as Dr. Brand says in *Interstellar*) then those who perceive it must likewise feel the disorienting effects of that movement. For example, we’re all familiar with the whiplash of swiping through TikToks or Instagram Shorts for a few minutes, only to realize we’ve been doomscrolling for two hours. There’s a real sense of reality-slip when this happens; our perception of time has been altered and it leaves us feeling disoriented and thin.

In Thomas Pynchon’s book *Gravity’s Rainbow*, one character describes this common reality-slip in what he calls “temporal bandwidth”:

> “Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now…. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even… what you’re doing here”

We can think of this “Now” situated temporally between the past and the future. The more we dwell in *both* past and future the thicker our “Now” becomes, and as a result the thicker *we* become as *beings-in-time.*

The thicker we are, the more stable our sense of *being-there* in reality becomes. In his aptly named poem, *History*, Wendell Berry describes to a friend a place he has become familiar with. At one point he writes:

> All the lives this place  
> has had, I have. I eat  
> my history day by day.  
> By feasting on history, he widens to the thickness of shared life. 

However, the more we focus solely on our “Now” cut off from our past and future, our “Now” becomes narrow, and our sense of being becomes much more thin and fragile.

Unfortunately, our digital age exacerbates this. It both allows us to live more accelerated lives, thus warping our perception of time, while primarily consuming *information*, which is inherently “Now”-focused. Information, [according to philosopher Byung-Chul Han](https://mereorthodoxy.com/crisis-and-covenant/), has no distance or expanse. It is by nature cut-up bits void of meaningful pasts or futures, which affects our perception of time:

> Digitalization intensifies the atrophy of time. Reality disintegrates into information that is relevant only briefly. Information lives on the allure of surprise. It thus fragments time. Our attention also becomes fragmented. Information does not permit any lingering. In the accelerated exchange of information, bits of information quickly replace each other.

Everything is available in a narrow “Now”, untethered from a history or a meaningful future. The more information we consume (and the quicker we do so), the more untethered, thin, and fragile we feel as persons. Our “temporal bandwidth” is paper thin; we inhabit what Hartmut Rosa calls a “shrinking present.” 

Marc Wittmann, co-author of the 2022 Uruguay study and author of *Felt Time*, names the alienating toll of this:

> Everything is done all at once, faster and faster, yet no personal balance or meaning can be found. This implies the loss of contact with one's own self. We also no longer feel "at home" with ourselves and find it difficult to persist in any given activity because we are available at every moment

For Heidegger, this aimlessness is a result of severing the “Now” from past and future. To do so is to be at odds with the essence of time––our *being-there*––which *includes* both past and future! He says time is a dynamic unfurling whose stages stand in a relation of earlier and later to one another. There can be no “unfurling” without past and future. [James Davison Hunter recently identified our rapidly approaching nihilistic age](https://christianscholars.com/in-what-age-do-we-find-ourselves/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) as resulting from such a lack of shared future or cultural *telos.* 

What Hunter diagnoses culturally is playing out psychologically: to live in the immediate brevity and meaninglessness of information is not only disintegrating shared cultural narratives, but also the very nature of our *being-there*––in other words, we feel reduced to a meaningless *being-nowhere*.

Our problem of meaning is a problem of time. Therefore, to flourish as temporal creatures whose essence is *being-there*, we must experience the unfurling of our “Now” from the past and into the future. In other words, we must expand time. 

## **The Promise of Time**

The Christian story is one of both time and promise. It is the story of the promised Redeemer––one who entered into time and space, the everlasting God taking on the form of *being-there*. Heidegger himself admitted that the theologian is the legitimate expert on time! This is because only the story of the God who spans past and future can make sense of the “Now.” 

Indeed, the entire Bible is, as Christopher Watkin says, “X”-shaped:

> The incarnation is the pin-point that gives meaning to the now, in that it is the event in time which all time before it anticipated and from which all time sense unfolds.

All time––past and future––*unfurls* bidirectionally from the incarnation of the Son of God. Watkin likewise notes that “because the Christian view of time includes an ending, history can be, and is, meaningful.” Christianity promises the *distance* necessary for meaning––not merely an ancient past, but an imperishable future. 

Han shares this understanding of the Christian story as one that breathes meaning into time:

> Christian religion is a meta-narrative that reaches into every nook and cranny of life and anchors it in being. Time itself becomes freighted with narrative. In the Christian calendar, each day is meaningful.

It is the “X”-shaped story of Scripture that expands our “Now” and injects it with meaning.

## **The Practice of Time**

If we are to become thick, solid selves this side of Jesus’ incarnation, we must inhabit the expanding time of Scripture. One of the primary ways the church has done this historically is by inhabiting the book of Psalms. The Psalter is like a “little Bible”––a condensed picture of God’s past deeds and future promises for his people. 

As the shared songs and prayers of the covenant community, the Psalms are inherently relational. They force us to come together—embodying what Heidegger called our *being-with-one-another—*and dwell both in the past by *remembering* and the future by *hoping*, widening our “temporal bandwidth” and thus thickening us with inspired memory. 

In his science-fiction novel, *Out of the Silent Planet*, C.S. Lewis includes a fascinating musing by Hyoi on how memory forms us this way:

> A pleasure is fully grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, *Hmān,* as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. The *séroni* could say it better than I say it now. Not better than I could say it in a poem. What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure, as the *crah* is the last part of a poem. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then⁠—that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it.

Heidegger would agree with Lewis: the pleasure and its memory––although separated in time––are *one thing*. Both are in the *being-there*. Yet, the past memory accessed in time changes Hyoi’s future: it *makes* something in him all his days. In other words, it *thickens* his “Now” and thus he is thickened. 

This is how we thicken within the story of Scripture. Jesus’ incarnation was God’s definitive entrance into time to redeem his people. Each call to “recount”, “recall”, or “remember” in the Psalms is an invitation to inhabit an encounter with that God in an ever-expanded sense. Our remembrance of it *makes something* in us. 

Such is the nature of story and song––they embed themselves as memory and “run ahead” through time, as Heidegger says, expanding their pleasure. In this way, story and song are anti-information. Rather than fragmented “bits” they are powerful forms of *narration*––a narrative with breadth that Han says alone can offer meaning.

Again Berry, in his poem *A Vision,* reflects on the force of such narrative memory:

> Memory,  
> native to this valley, will spread over it  
> like a grove, and memory will grow  
> into legend, legend into song, song  
> into sacrament. The abundance of this place,  
> the songs of its people and its birds,  
> will be health and wisdom and indwelling  
> Light.

The memory of the past expands into the narrative of song, which becomes the present practice of sacrament, which leads to the abundance of future indwelling light. 

The Psalms are a small but important part of a “tradition”––a larger history––in which we can locate ourselves. They provide the moral seriousness and purpose [that the children of an amoral and nihilistic age long for.](https://christianscholars.com/in-what-age-do-we-find-ourselves/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) They train us in the practice of expanding time, gathering as believers in the acts of *remembering* and *hoping*.

\*\*\*

Our “Now” can have meaning because Meaning himself entered into time. Jesus Christ is *promise-in-time*. All past and all future belong to his story of creation, incarnation, and redemption. The thickest person to ever exist––the Alpha and Omega, eternally dwelling in both past and future––has invited us to follow him. As we move with him in our “Now” he makes something in us, widening us out of nihilism, until we reach his eternal abundance and light.
### Considering 'Fusionism'
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/considering-fusionism/
Last updated: 2026-10-02T11:00:58.000Z
I recently got my copy of *Reason* editor Stephanie Slade's new book [*Fusionism*](https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268211493/fusionism/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), published by Notre Dame Press. But I thought it might be interesting to try something new with this particular book. The conversation, in this case, is likely to have some fairly predictable turns, but also is the sort of thing that really should be lingered over rather than glossed over quickly. So I'm writing one piece foregrounding the questions I have before I start reading. Then in a few weeks I'll have a review after I'm done with the book. (This will run alongside two other reviews.)

This is the frame I am bringing to the book. Supposing you are an orthodox Christian living in the west who cares about Christian ideas about the family and sexuality and also about justice, political economy, and mercy (amongst other things) it is probable that you have a fairly conflicted relationship to our dominant political paradigms in the west. The post-religious right is increasingly open to much more pagan ideas regarding natural hierarchy, the nature of justice, the (un)importance of mercy, and so on. The progressive left, meanwhile, to my eyes still hasn't gotten over the idea that unchosen constraints are inherently tyrannical, that the only way for an individual to be truly free is to live as an isolated entity crafting their own identity from nothing.

As long as those are the dominant paradigms on the right and left, orthodox Christians of good will are going to struggle to place themselves in the political life of their respective nations. This is why I'm excited for the Slade book: the older fusionist paradigm on the American right was one attempt to incorporate Christian thought and wisdom into a dominant political agenda. If you show me the heroes of fusionism, which I take to be figures like William F. Buckley, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush and then show me figures like Costin Almariu, Charles Haywood, and Tucker Carlson and ask me which version of the Right I prefer, it is not a difficult choice.

And yet it is a choice I do not like either. Many years ago a friend of mine remarked that if the American Right becomes a fight between Zombified Reaganism and the Wolves of Vinland, everyone will lose. And I still think he was right. So I am hoping that the champions of fusionism today will not simply be recapitulating Buckleyism—which will simply invite new forms of Bozell-ism as a response—but will be retrieving and modifying the fusionist thinkers in order to define a workable project for our day.

Toward that end, these are the questions on my mind as I begin Slade's book.

## Question One: Are we still doing "Mater Si, Magistra No"?

My understanding of the fusionist project is that it basically worked by giving "social" questions concerning marriage, the family, and life issues to the conservative Christians and giving "economic" questions to the aggressively free trade, free market libertarian types. Even in Buckley's day, however, this was a contested move. The aforementioned Brent Bozell Jr., Buckley's brother-in-law, rejected the framing because Christian moral norms are obviously concerned with things beyond the narrow life of families and the sexual behaviors of men and women. 

More importantly, the Catholic Social Teaching tradition is quite explicit on this point. Both Popes [Pius XI](https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf%5Fp-xi%5Fenc%5F19310515%5Fquadragesimo-anno.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and fusionist darling [St John Paul II](https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf%5Fjp-ii%5Fenc%5F14091981%5Flaborem-exercens.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) make some radically anti-libertarian statements in their social teaching. Does Slade's brand of fusionism account for this problem or does it simply restate Buckley's position, at least [as he stated it in the early 1960s](https://www.nytimes.com/1961/08/13/archives/jesuits-attack-buckley-on-pope-call-writers-repudiation-of.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), that the church is our mother but not our master in political matters? It seems to me that a retrenched Buckleyism on this point makes any kind of reborn fusionist project dead on arrival because most young Christians engaged in political life that I know of are, for a variety of reasons, highly skeptical of a broadly libertarian economic philosophy. The one exception here, of course, would be the Christians Nationalists, who are happy to say "mater si, magistra no" on the dignity of refugees and immigrants. But then I rather expect them to all be [exploited and played](https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-the-raw-egg-nationalist-affair-matters/) by [the Thielite transhumanist right](https://mereorthodoxy.com/gay-space-fascism/) anyway, as I have been saying for years. So though they are an exception here, I do not think they are terribly relevant to the conversation.

## Question Two: Is it ever licit for government to intervene in markets?

The argument someone like Buckley would make on the economic issue will be some version of the claim that outside intervention in the market by the state introduces distortions to the market that, eventually, do more harm than good, quite often harming the very people the intervention was designed to help. This is a common claim in right wing economic discourse and it is not entirely wrong, of course. There are plenty of forms of state intervention in markets that are deeply destructive. That said, as an absolute principle the claim is nonsense: We are all grateful, I hope, for the interventions the government made in our food system after Upton Sinclair's *The Jungle* was published, for example. We are also grateful, I would hope, for the interventions that banned child labor and established the 40 hour work week.

So: Does Slade's version of fusionism allow for the idea that market interventions by the state are sometimes good and admissible? (Hayek, to take one relevant example, would say it is sometimes licit for governments to intervene, from what I have gathered.) Or does her version take a more absolute stance against government power being aimed at regulating or interfering in markets? The former position allows for conversation and the prudential application of government power in selective cases. The latter does not.

## Question Three: The Problem of Technologically Mediated Public Vice

How does a renewed fusionism account for the technological and legal changes that have normalized public vice in ways that did not exist during the prior era when the fusionists were dominant? I am thinking particularly of companies like DraftKings, FanDuel, and Kalshi, though others would fit here as well. We now have immensely powerful devices we carry in our pockets all the time that make it extraordinarily easy to spend money and we have normalized public vice in ways that make destructive vices immediately accessible on those very devices. The [consequences](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6077963/2025/02/12/nba-sports-betting-players/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) have [already](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/19/business/draftkings-ai.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) been [awful](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/online-sports-betting-app-addiction/686061/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and may well [become worse](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/22/kalshi-asks-cftc-to-allow-margin-trading-on-its-platform-letting-users-buy-with-borrowed-funds.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). 

I'm something of a Christian social democrat in my politics so I look at this problem and don't find it hard to answer: these companies shouldn't exist. I expect that is also how someone like Sen. Josh Hawley would approach this issue, and it is at least a plausible position for the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic party. How would a renewed fusionism address this issue?

## Question Four: The Dissolution of the Commons

In trying to anticipate how a person generally averse to state intervention in markets might address the question above, the obvious place they could go is to say something like "soft social pressures and stigma from the broader community a person belongs to as well as broader society should be used to discourage public vice and spending on vice." If that is the line a renewed fusionism takes, then we have simply backed the problem up a step: What if "broader society" and personal communities and even the idea of social stigma have all been liquified and dissolved via technological innovation, [as Jon Askonas has argued](https://www.compactmag.com/article/why-conservatism-failed/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)? If your mechanism for controlling public vice is to appeal to something that no longer exists... then what?

## Conclusion

The point of raising these questions here is that I think the fusionism conversation is enormously important. Whatever else one wishes to say about it, the fusionist paradigm was one way that conservative Christians in the post-war world found to articulate how their faith informed their politics. It also provided a way for Christians to be included in political coalitions and have real power. 

The dominant paradigms we have now, whether from the post-religious right or the progressive left, fail this test. Obviously one way of dealing with that problem is to simply imagine an entirely new paradigm for the interaction between Christianity and public life and then seek to impart that paradigm to others and build a movement around it. But that is immensely difficult for many reasons, if not impossible. If we *can* work with existing paradigms, we would do well to do so. So my hope for the Slade book is that it can move this conversation forward in constructive ways such that orthodox Christians of good will can find some existing traditions and thinkers and ideas to unite around in order to present a viable alternative to the revolutionary paradigms of the right and left. If Christian fusionists and Christian social democrats can find common cause around a broad range of issues, that would bode well for many things. If we cannot, then we have a different and much thornier problem, I fear.
### Outsourcing the Sun
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/outsourcing-the-sun/
Last updated: 2026-10-02T11:00:27.000Z
I'm painting buildings in townand I want dramatic light  and shadows in my compositions.

So here I am waiting for sunny weather, driving around town at different times of day until I find the right time for a north-facing house to cast its shadows to my liking. 

I could take a picture in any lighting and have AI change the light source. It would work well enough. But then I wouldn't be driving this morning with the real sun in my human eyes.

I'd miss the glow of the spring grass around the gravestones in the early morning. I'd miss the warmth of high noon and the serenity of sunset. I would miss all the things I see along the way to finding what I'm looking for.

So I drive around and take pictures. 

But if I were a real artist,  I'd sit outside and paint from life during the short window when the lighting is right. 

And if I were a real person, I would walk instead of driving.  I'd only bring what I could carry.

If I cared about authenticity, I'd only use pigments found in plants, not made in a lab. 

If I wanted a deeper connection with my art, I wouldn't use a brush–only my fingers. And what about the paper? I'd make it myself. 

Which parts of being human am I willing to give away? 

It feels fine up to a certain point.  Anything we grow up with feels normal. But is this current normal what we need? 

Anyone can tell you walking is healthier than driving. For one, the odds of dying in a collision at seventy miles per hour drop to zero. 

Sometimes I walk barefoot in the rain to take out the trash. I used to walk barefoot everywhere when I was a kid. 

Now we have to call it grounding and attempt to prove with scientific research that it's beneficial. 

Why don't we let intuition tell us what we need? Maybe intuition is broken. Maybe we should let our children tell us–but we might have broken them, too. 

Did Adam till the ground in Eden with his bare hands? Are all these machines just tools, like garden rakes? 

This time it feels like something more than that. 

But that's how old stodgy people have always reacted to innovation. 

There is always some stick-in-the-mud warning us not to lose our humanity. 

Is that reaction rooted in an intuition we ought to pay attention to? 

A question I've heard asked: "If you could take a pill that gave you all the nutrients you need so you didn't have to eat, would you?" 

Sometimes I might–if I have important things to do, or if I were deep in the middle of a project. 

But not every day.

I would miss eating cherry pie filling out of the can. I would miss taking the time to chew fresh bread.

But do I want to walk naked and barefoot to a location I like, and paint with my fingers and pokeberry juice? 

(I used to call them paintberries before I knew their name) 

I couldn't paint a house, only a shelter made of fallen tree branches. 

So instead I take the car. I take the picture. I take the hit to my authenticity. 

But there are only so many things I'm willing to give up; sunlight isn't one of them.
### The Case Against Video Preaching
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-case-against-video-preaching/
Last updated: 2026-10-01T11:00:38.000Z
Every Sunday across America significant portions of Christians show up to a church gathering only to receive the preaching of God’s word via a disembodied pastor on a screen. In such multi-site churches, the pastor is present and embodied *somewhere*, often preaching to a group of local Christians at what is sometimes called a “broadcast location.” The pastor and sermon, however, then digitally go *elsewhere*, being beamed out from their original location to be viewed at numerous other churches “campuses.” Let me start by saying that, in many respects, I appreciate various multi-site churches. They often have dedicated ministries of outreach and mercy and I am friends with many godly Christians who attend such churches. Yet I want to write to question the normalization of disembodied video preaching, something which seems to be becoming an increasingly common trend. 

As [researchers point out](https://research.lifeway.com/2025/03/18/half-of-churches-experiencing-post-pandemic-attendance-growth/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), each year megachurches take up a larger and larger slice of the pie of American Christianity. Big churches are getting bigger, while small churches are getting smaller. As this trend continues, it means that an increasing proportion of American Christians are likely receiving the teaching of God’s word via a video, as many megachurches rely on the multi-site streaming model. At most campuses of such churches the band is live, and there is likely even a local “campus pastor”—though he might rarely preach—but the teaching of God’s word, for many congregants in these churches, is done mostly via a screen. 

I believe this is a tragedy. It is a tragedy because it is not what God intends. And while video preaching is often done out of good motives, I want to argue it is ultimately a short-sighted strategy that in the long term will prove an ineffective way to see the church grow to maturity (Eph 4:13). God desires his people to receive the preaching of his word, not via screens, but through embodied, face-to-face messengers of the gospel, for that is the way he himself designed the gospel to go forth.

## **The Biblical Model: Face-to-Face Communication**

If we want to understand how God wants his word to be communicated, we must start with how he communicated his Word—that is, his Son, the embodied gospel message himself.

God, in sending his Son, did not send a recording; he did not send a video. Yet he could have. While that might seem like a trite counterfactual statement to make, I don’t believe it is. God could have communicated the gospel via a voice from heaven, or via the proclamation of a disembodied, angelic messenger. After all, nothing is impossible for God. But it is significant that he did not, for the Bible itself sees this as significant. So how *did* God choose to communicate the gospel? 

God the Son took on flesh and communicated his message face to face. And the Bible reflects on the importance of this mode of communication. The apostle John, writing of Jesus, speaks of him as “that which was from the beginning, which we have *heard*, which we have *seen* with our eyes, which we *looked upon* and have *touched* with our hands . . .” (1 Jn 1:1). Jesus was not a disembodied preacher or messenger; he was a person capable of being heard, seen, and touched. Jesus, in other words, was experienced by John’s senses. And this, importantly, shaped not only John’s experience of Jesus, but also his view of Christian ministry.

John, due to his embodied, face-to-face experience with Christ, believed that Christian ministry should also be embodied. He therefore later wrote, “Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink”—or, we might add, streamed video—“Instead I hope to come to you and talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete” (2 Jn 12). And this was not a one-off sentiment for John. Rather, it was a theme he returned to. “I had much to write to you, but I would rather not write with pen and ink. I hope to see you soon, and we will talk face to face” (3 Jn 13-14).

Some commentators see John’s sentiments here as solely a nicety of first-century letter writing; a rhetorical device mostly empty of real meaning. If this were the case, John’s stated desire to see his recipients “face to face” would not be all that different from something like a lengthier form of the ubiquitous sentiment “Best,” with which so many of us sign off on our emails. But this seems to me to be entirely too anemic an understanding of John’s words, especially given how he connects face-to-face communication to joy, one of his favorite themes. 

The deeper reason, I think, that John believed in a face-to-face, embodied model of Christian ministry was due to a holy logic that pervades the New Testament: as with Christ, so with his disciples. Jesus was crucified, so too are we (Gal 2:20). Jesus was resurrected, so too will we be (Rom 6:4). Jesus suffered, so too must believers (Phil 3:10). And to extend this logic to Christian ministry, Jesus preached face to face, so too should we. John’s personal experience of how God communicated his message, in other words, shaped his view of how God’s message should be communicated.

Nor was John alone here. The theme of face-to-face communication resounds throughout the Old and New Testaments. Moses had the highest experience of God among the Old Testament Israelites, for the Lord chose to speak to him “face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” (Exod 33:11). Paul, though he condescended to written communication with the Thessalonians, prayed “most earnestly night and day that we may see you face to face and supply what is lacking your faith” (1 Thess 3:10). Some things, it seems, could not be supplied by a written letter. Rather, they could only be had via an embodied encounter. Much of the American church, however, seems to have forgotten this.

## **Technologies of Communication**

But what, you might ask, do we make of the Bible itself being a written document? After all, the apostle John, despite expressing his preference for face-to-face communication, did write an epistle. So too the apostle Paul with the Thessalonians. Is this not evidence that the apostles made use of the best technology of their day to communicate the gospel, just as multi-site churches are attempting to do with video preaching? [John Dyer helpfully explains](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/the-apostle-johns-view-of-technology/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com),

> John was comfortable using the communication technology—pen and ink—of his day, but he did so with a set of values that were contrary to the tendencies built into the technology of writing. . . . \[John\] was able to use technology in service of the embodied communal life that Christ taught him. When John could not be physically present with his community, he was comfortable using technology to communicate with them. But he was always careful to state that he considered technologically mediated relationships to be inferior to embodied relationships.

Making discerning use of the best technologies of our day to communicate the gospel is doubtless both a wise and licit undertaking. Something the apostles never did, however, was use technologies to replace or supplant the biblical norm of embodied preaching. Paul, in a written letter no less, asked his readers, “How are \[people\] to hear \[the gospel\] without someone \[embodied\] preaching?” (Rom 10:14). If we gave little thought to our theology of technology, we might be tempted to argue with Paul and think that people could hear the gospel simply from reading his epistle to the Romans, itself the greatest exposition of the gospel ever written. But the implied answer to Paul’s question is clear. Without an (embodied) preacher, people cannot hear the gospel. “Faith,” he makes clear, does not come mainly from reading, but from “hearing” a preacher proclaim the message of Christ (Rom 10:17). 

Paul’s logic here draws us into the Bible’s unbreakable connection between the message and the messenger. Each of us knows, deep down, that face-to-face communication carries with it something irreplaceable. One key aspect of this that Scripture expounds on is the fact that the gospel is not only a message but is intended by God to be embodied by a messenger whose life we can observe. That is why Paul, who desired to be face to face with the Thessalonians, reminded them of “what kind of men we proved to be among you for your sake” (1 Thess 1:5). He knew it was important that he and his coworkers in ministry shared “not only the gospel of God” with the Thessalonians—they did not only preach to them—“but also our own selves” (1 Thess 2:8). Paul’s life, in other words, validated his message.

This connection between messenger and message is everywhere throughout Scripture. Negatively, false teachers are known to be false not only by their words but by the observable fruit of their lives (Jer 23:22; Matt 7:15-20; 2 Pet 2:1-3). Positively, Paul instructed Timothy that through the combination of his godly life and his godly teaching he would save both himself and his hearers (1 Tim 4:16). This clear, God-intended connection between message and messenger was what led Paul to regularly exhort those he taught to imitate his life (1 Cor 4:6; 11:1; Phil 3:17; 1 Thess 1;6; 2 Thess 3:9). 

In contrast, no video preacher can honestly repeat the words of Paul to a group of non-local congregants: “What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me–practice these things” (Phil 4:9). The preaching of the gospel, biblically speaking, requires an embodied messenger with an observable life, patterned after the life of Christ himself. As German theologian and martyr [Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote](https://www.amazon.com/Bonhoeffers-Seminary-Vision-Discipleship-Together/dp/1433545446/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?crid=7KL15CLYZ6HU&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.flyOc6qvjBbVzEklWxVHtbnSIqLwMvLZqpHisojiS3Jm5tKwQ43utSrVYCl6Tb-y2T88XgNOkz4HpVAWOBuDeLGe4lXLKr1Po0aPTp8-Z9wokWTYNyElej1fj1RFxzL3GXfRG6ACkexMAIcssJlGregBuXmu4Qz2cNCqMmxbhQQ1TArreBunDg-zbbNhdQWJxiwIRnDNVgRh6C0GTegU7S2x2TervD89vCNhjL-0py0.z255XM3Mled74LLZNBLqT%5FRurF86LjVMNLHz3hubCfc&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=paul+house+bonhoeffer&qid=1782356819&s=books&sprefix=paul+house+bonhoeffe%2Cstripbooks%2C159&sr=1-1&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), “God does not want the word to be proclaimed by phonograph records, but rather by witnesses.” 

The danger in video preaching, I believe, is making disembodied preaching, preaching where the congregation cannot know the life of the preacher, a norm rather than an exception. If preaching is simply a message divorced from a messenger, then why not use AI to create fresh sermons based on databases of the best preachers of the past century? Or perhaps in a few years we will have hologram technologies allowing non-local preachers to feel visually “present,” such that the distinction between embodied and non-embodied feels paper-thin. What would be wrong with that? From a biblical point of view, the crucial ingredient would still be lacking: face-to-face relationship that provides an observable link between the message and the messenger. Christ was embodied; so too must be his preachers. And no technology of mediation will ever allow our bodies to be in two places at once. 

## **The Extinction of Experience**

Our contemporary world, in contrast, increasingly pushes us away from face-to-face experiences, and video preaching is but one more capitulation to this trend. In this vein, author Christine Rosen writes of “[the extinction of experience](https://www.amazon.com/Extinction-Experience-Being-Human-Disembodied/dp/1324116773/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?crid=XRXBLW70FVV9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.WRo9EhiMEsUO5CXjWjsc%5FwRkExmuP835l84LwFzruHeze0E-fTQemF5oIkJTFe0TdkAwGnu1J6PTrFtohj0T1XlH2hBUX1Z6I6ACA%5FQHQVo4HO3tW63vcEatse6aaZC0qsiILcGRQuxVQRlSMIf5VzAeNdcOkExvkz4x2OafG3FxLFsAGZkDQuSCz-PTtjKNoyGQA8eW-3z6cADT9odX2uRQmFFTv2TlQeN4dK3%5FyQc.0Zf-wsDRrx1d9bkYxRgYdpfAGsQdUJaOVtpAtX8V%5FlU&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=christine+rosen&qid=1782356849&s=books&sprefix=christine+ro%2Cstripbooks%2C193&sr=1-1&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)” that we are all currently going through. In our ever-more digitized world, we are moving more and more toward *mediated* experiences of reality, and away from *unmediated* experiences. Rather than cooking a delicious meal on our own—using our own senses of smell, taste, and touch—we’d rather eat fast food while watching a TV chef sear, simmer, and serve something up. Rather than going on a road-trip of our own, we cozy up to Youtube to live vicariously through a Vlogger’s journey around America.

This draw to mediated (non face-to-face) experiences is changing the way we relate to nearly everything. As recently as twenty years ago, Rosen notes, one friend attempting to recall an experience to another would often end the story by somewhat exasperatedly concluding, “You had to be there.” Such a sentiment gave recognition to the irreplaceable nature of an embodied experience. Nowadays, in our increasingly digitized world where we ubiquitously document experiences with smartphones, we would be more tempted to try and pull up a video. But Rosen wisely writes, “If the worry during the Enlightenment, as mathematician Isaac Milner wrote in 1794, was that ‘the great and high’ have ‘forgotten that they have souls,’ then today the worry is that many of us have forgotten that we have bodies.” We increasingly are being pushed toward mediated, disembodied forms of experience, and the multi-site model of video preaching unhelpfully furthers this trend. 

## **Docetic Ministry**

The early church was often assailed by a false teaching called “docetism.” Coming from a Greek word that means “to seem” or “to appear,” the docetists taught that Jesus Christ only seemed to have a human body, but in reality, he did not. When John writes of people who did “not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh,” he writes to combat something like an early form of docetism (2 Jn 7; note also 1 Jn 4:2-3). John’s opponents did not deny that Jesus had come, but they saw no significance to his being truly embodied in human flesh.

Churches that utilize video preaching, it seems to me, do not have a docetic understanding of Christ, but they do have something like a docetic understanding of Christian ministry. They have severed the biblical link between Christ and his messengers. They see no significance to the preacher—the messenger of Christ—being truly embodied. The preacher does not need to come in the flesh; he can come via a video screen just as well. When this is done, pastoral ministry effectively becomes not only disembodied but also intellectualized, severing the preaching of the word from the embodied shepherding of the preacher. Video preaching thereby risks making preaching into little more than a glorified transfer of information. It is no wonder churches have trouble convincing parishioners to come in-person.

Yet just as a shepherd cannot lead his flock without being with them (a video certainly won’t do the job!), neither can a pastor shepherd his flock without physical presence. “I know my own and my own know me” is, after all, the cry of the Good Shepherd himself (Jn 10:14). And since the Good Shepherd serves as the model for his undershepherds (1 Pet 5:1-4), then just as Christ came in the flesh, so too must his preachers.

## **The Effects of Video Preaching**

So what is the upshot of all this? Why raise such an objection against the method of so many churches that, at least by outward metrics, seem to be obviously “succeeding”? Aren’t many video-preaching megachurches, after all, oftentimes the best churches in town at reaching non-believers with the gospel? Don’t they have larger amounts of resources that can be used for kingdom purposes?

I do not wish to deny any of the good that many multi-site churches are doing. I know people who have come to faith in Christ through preachers on a screen; I know multi-site churches doing marvelous ministries of mercy and outreach. Yet we must not allow a short-sighted focus on visible results to cause us to forget our theology. The Bible calls for face-to-face ministry, for ministers to be embodied. That alone should be enough. But since we in our day often look for more pragmatic reasons, let me mention a few practical dangers as well.

First, churches that utilize video preaching, whether they intend it or not, are practicing a system that bolsters the problem of celebrity, which [Katelyn Beaty helpfully defines](https://www.amazon.com/Celebrities-Jesus-Personas-Platforms-Profits/dp/1587435187/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?crid=1URIQHATZ728X&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.pypP5kSKkXinvnBpmEDESHc%5FkGhpeg1dRKi-oHhKoQlWyq6uOqA87zlMXLr5bRkPewBfqlCzDEWtZyw4oL8HKR1kVsdFM4OCVFMKBuAheL2UCZxYe9FHB5-0EgclRHbwPeljak8JFAWCeKzslrOQ6wrWuMrurzviOhqfkMjPgtYIFIkq9LSHCW%5FTstMW4IFg.vzEIFjoE9wxb4COuLqanenp11EiNNfq9MWORxLchVck&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=katelyn+beaty&qid=1782356972&s=books&sprefix=katelyn+beaty%2Cstripbooks%2C133&sr=1-1&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) as “social power without proximity.” Giving one person the power that comes with regularly preaching to thousands is not only potentially unhealthy for the preacher, it is unhealthy for the church. How many of a church’s congregants, for example, can know the life and conduct of such a preacher in the way that the Thessalonians knew of Paul’s (1 Thess 1:5-6; 2:1-16; cf. Phil 2:22)? One need not think long to come up with myriad situations in recent years where such power without proximity has contributed to a pastor’s moral downfall.

Further, why would such churches not allow and even intentionally raise up other preachers to preach on Sundays, rather than so bolstering the status of one leader? Sometimes the arguments made against sharing the pulpit are pragmatic, even if clad in spiritual language. A certain preacher has an “anointing”; God “speaks through him” to a higher degree, and so on and so forth. Ultimately, what such objections reveal is a human-centered view of ministry that locates the power of the preached word in the messenger rather than the message. And video preaching also, and I would argue inevitably, fosters a culture of consumerism. If “the medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan famously stated, then sitting and consuming a video sends a vastly different message than experiencing an embodied, imperfect, flesh-and-blood human being.

Yet video preaching is also detrimental to Christians and church members. After all, they are the ones in the seats consuming the teaching. While we sometimes try and convince ourselves that there is no difference between embodied and video preaching, the former not only forces prudent questions about the size of congregations, but also can helpfully commit us to churches where the preacher is not always amazing, where our stylistic preferences are often not met, and where we must deal with all the messes that embodied relationships bring. For so many semi-anonymous attendees of multi-site megachurches, who will visit them and pray with them beside a hospital bed? If they are lucky, they may know one pastor, but he is almost certainly not the one who teaches the Scriptures to them on a weekly basis. When tragedy strikes, who will conduct their spouse’s funeral?

Churches today have an opportunity to buck our societal trend toward mediated, digital experience. Churches have a chance to demonstrate that not only souls but also bodies matter. Churches have a chance to reject the consumerism implicit within multi-site preaching and instead let God’s people be shepherded by messengers whose lives can be known by their hearers. Churches have a chance to showcase the beauty of face-to-face relationships, including relationships of spiritual care between pastors and congregants, even as our world seeks to remove human interaction at every turn. If churches are to do this, however, they must reject the pragmatics of video preaching and return to the biblical ideal: face-to-face, embodied preaching. My hope is that, in the future, our cities would be dotted not with multi-site campuses of churches streaming disembodied preachers, but rather with congregation after congregation of Christians receiving the teaching of God’s word via a local, embodied pastor.
### The Return of Classical Theism
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-return-of-classical-theism/
Last updated: 2026-10-01T11:00:19.000Z
**Jordan L. Steffaniak.** [***Classical Theism: A Christian Introduction***](https://bakeracademic.com/products/9781683598688%5Fclassical-theism?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Lexham Academic, 2026\. $39.99\. 376 pp.**

These are the best of times and the worst of times for classical theism. 

Times have never been worse, because modern and postmodern theological, philosophical, and hermeneutical challenges have eroded central pillars of theology proper, which in places have buckled or become so reworked as to become distorted and misshapen. Among mainline or modernist theologians, represented by Moltmann or social trinitarianism, classical doctrines like impassibility either must be dispensed with altogether or are so re-defined in revisionist reconstructions that they no longer are load-bearing structures distributed throughout the theological system as a whole. 

But, perhaps surprisingly, not a few conservative evangelicals followed suit. While deeply committed to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, for example, and desirous of a theology that is exegetically rooted in scripture, at times even adherents of a biblicistic theological method have departed sharply from the theological traditions of their Protestant and evangelical forebears on doctrines such as divine simplicity, impassibility, and more. In short, challenges to classical theism emerge from all quarters across the conventional progressive-conservative/ Mainline-evangelical/ liberal-traditionalist binaries.

Times have never been better, because contemporary students, teachers, and theological writers have genuinely unprecedented access today to primary sources of classical Christian theology, to an extent that would have been unimaginable to all Christians who have lived before us. Consequently, ours is a day of flowering [projects of retrieval across several Christian traditions](https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/theologies-of-retrieval-9780567666802/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). 

And yet, not all is well among those calling for a recovery of classical theism. Numerous pitfalls, if not temptations, beset such calls for retrievals. Here are only five.

First, “modernity” in such conversations is often a malleable and convenient bogeyman upon which any number of problems can be blamed. Can theologies of retrieval do more than harken for the past, but constructively and critically engage a steelman, and not merely a scarecrow, of modern theological concerns and insights?

Second, nostalgia for heroes of faith or a devotion to one saintly hero or another (whether Augustine or one of the fathers, or more commonly Thomas Aquinas) can distort projects of retrieval into repristination. Perhaps as an over-correction to a presentist mindset of chronological snobbery, which looks down upon the benighted past of Christian theology as something to be overcome, the charm of simply returning to a lost golden age can sound like a panacea for all that ails us. Yet our situatedness as finite creatures and theological vocation as human beings means that regardless of whether it is possible, it is not desirable to adopt another’s thought as our own whole-cloth. Further, the conditions of modernity mean that we only ever will retrieve broken shards from some past figure in ways that are misleading, especially if we are inattentive to the cultures from which their ideas and practices emerged.

Third, with respect to a definition, “classical theism” has suffered a very complicated fate in the past few decades of becoming a slogan. By now, I fear it has become a kind of hand-waving term: a vague gesture towards something that is probably real, but no one is quite sure what precisely it entails or refers to. Augustine and Aquinas are often named pillars of classical theism, but that is not necessarily a term they themselves would recognize, so what does it mean or involve?

Fourth, around ten years ago there appeared to be an emerging consensus of theologians like Craig Carter and Matthew Barrett (among others) calling for an evangelical recovery of classical theism as a course correction to errors, such as those that led to the Eternal Functional Subordination debates about the doctrine of the Trinity in 2016\. Yet, that movement has to some extent broken apart, perhaps due to problems of [repristination](https://thelondonlyceum.com/the-wizard-of-aquino-and-the-future-of-protestant-retrieval/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), as Jordan Steffaniak has identified. 

Fifth, there is clearly a Protestant retrieval movement afoot, especially among younger theologians and students who aspire to be both Reformed and catholic. And yet, not a few of our evangelical brothers and sisters have already begun to ask, is it a dead-end, or just how evangelical can such a movement be? Does Protestant retrieval inevitably lead to swimming not only the Thames, but eventually the Tiber or the Bosphorus? 

Clearly, someone needs to intervene in conversations about classical theism not only at the highest level of scholarly discussion, but especially for seminary students and undergraduate students of theology who were interested in going deeper. In my own journey in theological education, both as a student in the past and now as a continuing learner in my dual capacity as professor and pastor, I wish that I could have had a deep but accessible exposure to the profoundly generative doctrines, texts, and ideas of classical Christian theism much earlier than I did. 

All of this to say that Jordan Steffaniak is to be especially commended. His *Classical Theism: A Christian Introduction* is an exhilarating and edifying read that should prove challenging yet still accessible for beginner theology students. This book might also be helpful to biblical scholars, especially those of more biblicistic bent, who would like to learn more about classical Christian dogmatics, especially as a resource for further illuminating Scripture. 

In terms of posture, Steffaniak’s self-described disposition is that of a reformed catholic who strives to be at once modern and orthodox. Steffaniak helpfully notes that there is more to classical theism than Thomas Aquinas, but not less, and he cautions against some recent evangelical discussion of classical theism that is insufficiently attentive to Thomas’ body of writings. Steffaniak offers a nuanced and distinctively Protestant approach to theology proper noting that “dogmatic theology is chiefly an ecclesial theology.” Drawing upon Herman Bavinck’s *Reformed Dogmatics*, he notes that the church is the creature of the word, so it receives and does not create the rule of faith, since “the power of the church is not sovereign and legislative but ministerial and declarative.”

A real virtue of this book lies in Steffaniak’s interactions with the latest theological conversations while remaining deeply in touch with the classical Christian tradition. He does so in a manner that remains readable and broadly accessible to students and serious readers. To take a random example of this eclecticism and the span of his conversation, while discussing the Divine Names, he interacts with Richard Muller’s *Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics*, Petrus van Mastricht, Tyler Wittman, Herman Bavinck, Francis J. Hall, John of Damascus, John Calvin, Janet Martin Soskice, and Andrew Davison. 

It almost goes without saying that Steffaniak’s book should prove a touchstone for future conversations or debates about classical theism. A serious contribution of this book is simply one of definition. What does classical Christian theism entail? At a bare minimum, it includes commitments to divine aseity, divine goodness, divine simplicity, divine immutability, divine eternity, and divine impassibility. Each of the chapters devoted to these four doctrines provides not only the scriptural basis of these doctrines but also incisive analysis responding to the foremost objections and challenges raised against them (for instance, responding to RT Mullins’s numerous critiques to divine simplicity and timelessness). The chapter on eternity, for instance, is especially insightful. I can envision this book being a helpful resource not only for a course on theology proper but for a pastor trying to understand how to navigate objections to doctrines such as immutability and eternity that arise in questions about unanswered prayer.

Steffaniak helpfully concludes his book by outlining eight theses of mere classical theism:

1. Classical theism arises organically from the Bible.
2. Classical theism is most fundamentally concerned with articulating the coherence and foundation of God’s love and covenant faithfulness.
3. Classical theism is undergirded by divine aseity and divine goodness.
4. The “classical” attributes are primarily negative in scope.
5. Classical theism has shared sensibilities about the epistemological process.
6. Classical theism is the consensus view of the church catholic.
7. The classical tradition and classical theism necessitate piety.
8. The *telos* of classical theism is doxology.

Finally, the tone adopted by the author throughout this book is worth briefly commenting upon. Steffaniak’s writing in this book is not only gripped by desiring and delighting in God, but he also expressly counsels and guides his readers, like an office hours chat between a professor and a student, on why classical theism is not only true but utterly captivating, not only defensible but fuel for fires of devotion and worship, for living and dying with repentance and faith amidst suffering, mission, and preparation for martyrdom. Since humanity’s chief end is to glorify and enjoy God forever, therefore “a deep appreciation and articulation of the classical doctrine of God fuels our confession of God as God. All true theology leads to worship. And this is the most practical of ends that we could ever labor toward.” 

Steffaniak is further alert to how significant theology is for our sense of our own humanity, since “even difficult areas of theology are part of what fulfills our longings as humans. In some deep and mysterious way, laboring to know difficult dogmas for no purpose other than experiencing God is very good. It makes us more human and leads us to deeper union with God. There is no ‘practical’ justification need.” Further, something I can readily attest to from my experience in pastoral ministry is that “our churches are not made only of those uninterested in intellectual pursuits. The parishioners that fill the pews are not content to know as little as possible. Many in our churches are salivating for robust, sound doctrine. They are pining for serious dogma. They are searching for the challenge of Mount Everest.” 

At times the tone of this book was a bit surprising, when the author moved from discussions to quite complex topics to first-person counsel to the reader, or short staccato sentences aimed at those new to studying theology. But here arguably Steffaniak is at his best, as he explains what theology is, or perhaps what it should be. He not only models charitable and respectful disagreement with his interlocutors, but expressly exhorts his readers to think about those he is disagreeing with like fellow saints one might see at church on Sunday. Consider this footnote on pg. 311, while advocating for a classical doctrine of impassibility over and against recent revisionist approaches:

> While I am rather critical of \[D.A.\] Carson here, I should be clear that I owe him (as do many other evangelicals) a great debt. During my undergraduate studies he unlocked a love for Scripture and theology for me. Without his work I would not have progressed in my own understanding knowledge of the divine mysteries. Further, as with many of the evangelicals I have been critical of at points, one should be as charitable to them (and to older saints who can no longer speak for themselves!) as one would be to a fellow church member one sees in worship every Sunday. Many of them did not have the benefit of the classical ‘revival’ that many are seeing in Protestant evangelical circles today.”

It is not common in academic books to hear something adjacent to an altar call written in the first-person, that “for those that remain unconvinced of classical theism, I pray your heart still has been warmed… if you remain distant from classical theism, \[I hope\] that you feel welcome. Because you are. All are welcome at the table of our good God.” Given norms of academic discourse, perhaps that means this is not a conventional academic book; so be it. Though there was a parting of the ways between intellectual rigor and spiritually minded piety during modernity, things have not always been so. Perhaps these little comments to the reader are the most “classically theistic” thing about this book.
### "Some Miracles Only Come Slowly": On Andy Squyres's 'Praise Songs'
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/some-miracles-only-come-slowly-on-andy-squyress-praise-songs/
Last updated: 2026-09-30T11:00:31.000Z
As both a Christian and a medical doctor, I have spent decades wrestling daily with questions of brokenness and suffering. I have also spent decades leading worship. And Andy Squyres’ four song collection “Praise Songs” has landed in the middle of both of these arenas with a startling amount of light.

For seventeen years, I’ve been working as a doctor in rural African hospitals, face to face with the inevitability of pain and struggle in this life. It just doesn’t go away. As I write this, I’m pausing to text colleagues about a man whose stomach cancer is no longer possible to operate on because he got lost in a poor health care system for a year. It can be so hard. 

Yet surprisingly, all these same experiences have taught me so much about the irreducible glory of God in the life around us. The problem is not so much “where is God in all this?” Instead, the truest (though rarest) moments carry the conviction that the real question is “why is the glory so invisible most of the time?” It’s difficult to find art that articulates this, but Squyres does.

My off-hours as a worship leader have found me in a wide variety of venues. I grew up with the sort of Nashville session musicians who prefer a live metronome in their in-ear monitors, but I have also played on a Romanian cattle-cart-turned-stage where I couldn’t hear the singer next to me. These days I’m usually leading worship on my own, and if accompanied at all, it’s most likely to be by an old 50-gallon drum with a cow hide stretched over the top. I’ve seen the entire rise of the modern worship music movement, and I always love serving others by leading them. 

But whatever the venue and whatever the style, I find it increasingly hard for a song to cause praise to rise from my own heart. More and more, moments of praise for me are associated with silence and reflection and maybe a glimpse of wind in the trees overhead. There are a lot of good, current worship songs, but it often feels like the water level in the well of my own heart is quite low, and the ropes of those songs just aren’t long enough to draw praise from me. But the songs of Squyres do.

Musically the songs are straightforward. The production is sufficient to create depth without distracting from the songwriting. Squyres’ voice has enough grit to make you think that his lines about cigarettes aren’t just poetic imagination, but it’s a voice with solid pathos.

Andy Squyres himself has the distinction of committing himself full-time to music only two years ago, at the age of forty-eight. I don’t know what those younger decades of not doing music full-time were like for him, but I’m convinced that the wait is a gift for those who listen now. Music is usually such a young person’s game, but among the diversity of voices that we need is someone who has lived a bit longer. “Some miracles only come slowly” he sings in the first track, along with “I’ve learned how to live without a breakthrough.” He knows how to sing about long waits and unresolved stories, in which he has hung around long enough to learn that the mysterious result of all that limbo is, surprisingly, praise.

Squyres majors in the glory of the ordinary, reminiscent especially of Frederick Buechner. This seems to be the primary point of the song “Mount of Transfiguration”, which carries the conviction that, if God’s glory is what we proclaim it is, then we should be “looking for a miracle in a Dollar General” or in a “sunset in a parking lot.” And even when he goes a little ridiculous (“Beer o’clock inside the strip mall of my soul”), the redemption is the feeling that even cheesy song lyrics reflect something of God’s glory as well. Everything from the taco truck to the unpaid rent are “God’s exact location / Mountain of Transfiguration”. Then when the outro comes with “Praise the Lord! / Lord my heart cries out to you,” I find that my own heart has somehow tracked a bit from the germane of my own life to praising God for his everyday glory in it.

Yet the most profound observation comes most clearly in the last track, “I Praise You God”. The second verse sings “It is a privilege to love you without being able to see / it is a gift that you gave us to trust you and only believe / I cherish that someday we’ll look back on all of these difficult days / as the moment when heartbreak became an altar of beautiful praise.” The truth that God can and does redeem “difficult days” has been said many times and is worth saying many times. This is foundational to the Christian story, from the redemption of the whole creation to the resurrection of Jesus, God redeems the evil to make something even better than if the evil had never come. 

The part that stopped me in my tracks is rather that Squyres is naming that redeemed result as “praise.” He is saying that the result which is such a joy that it makes rejoicing now possible is nothing other than praise. The difficult days are good because later we will praise God more. Then this future praise works backward into our hearts even now. And so the strain of faith becomes a privilege, and he cherishes it. For my part, I might consider a heart that grows in praise as a good product of hardship, but more like a consolation prize. Not something I would cherish.

This gave me a lot of pause. This is an interesting idea, but does it make sense? My conclusion is that it only makes sense if you put praising God at the center of human existence. Jack Miller wrote that “praise is a form of sanity…lifting up God as the center.” We live our lives drifting towards any other center, praising any other thing, and thus drifting out of sanity. Squyres says, in effect, that what is good and beautiful and desirable is that which leads us to praise. It’s a view of the world that seems upside down. Or maybe, in a world that is upside down, it’s the view that is right side up.

> “After I die I will have no more chances / to love you from impossible circumstances / so even if all of my prayers go unanswered / thank you for all of these days.”

Amen.
### The Magpie #7: Concerning "Theory"
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-magpie-7-concerning-theory/
Last updated: 2026-09-30T11:00:25.000Z
**Emily Eakin, *The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory*. Penguin, 2026\. $35, 496pp.** 

> My relationship with theory was more fraught. Maybe I expected too much from it. I didn’t have a plan for after graduation. I didn’t know what I wanted to be; I was hung up on something more basic: what it meant *to* be. I lacked confidence and, more to the point, skepticism. I didn’t know how to take theory in small doses… Instead, I doubled down. ‘I had this euphoric moment at Widener Library tonight, sitting in a remote carrel reading a Marxist critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis,’ I wrote in my journal halfway through college. ‘It was thrilling. To read, to think, to walk through the cavernous halls of Widener after 10pm, alone!’ 

> The experience of reading theory could be like that—vertiginous, as when the bottom of the Gravitron at the amusement park falls away and you are pinned by centrifugal force to the spinning wall. Deconstruction, especially, had this effect.

\~Emily Eakin, *The Frenchmen*

Emily Eakin was a graduate student at both Harvard and Columbia during the years when “Theory” reigned supreme. She fell in love. Her account of being riveted by theory weaves together her own biography with short chapters about the main figures in French theory. 

By Eakin’s own telling, she was naive and gullible as a young undergraduate. French theory became a surrogate for her lack of sophistication. Though traditional English departments were “tweedy and old-fashioned,” concerned with “conventionality and received wisdom,” *Theory*, on the other hand, was “cutting edge, brilliant, and intimidating.” Theory promised superior insight and cultural cache. It covered over “shameful gaps in my education,” Eakin writes, and allowed her to presume a kind of intellectual mastery that she hadn’t earned.

I suspect anyone who has sat in a seminar room in the last fifty years can identify this dynamic. In my day, upper-level graduate students who “did theory” had charisma. They were aloof. They spoke in abstractions, their sentences peppered with untranslated French. They talked about *jouissance* or *differance* or *bricolage*. Everything was about sex. 

Socially, these students carried themselves with aplomb. They dressed with flair- sometimes all in black, sometimes, for reasons I can’t quite figure, in clothes from Tibet and Nepal. They were condescending and could be rude. The social manners of welcoming in newcomers- or, for that matter, explaining what you were talking about- were completely absent. 

The most important thing about theory was that you could “do theory” without having read the book. You could do a postcolonial reading of Jane Eyre or a feminist reading of Jane Eyre or a homosexual reading of Jane Eyre without having read Jane Eyre. It was a way to not do the homework, but for the intelligentsia.

Eakin was completely caught up in this world. She now sees this preoccupation as embarrassing, “a multiyear breakdown I hadn’t realized I was having.” Theory allowed her to feign a kind of sophistication she didn’t have, and bypass the work of intellectual rigor and growth that would have produced the real thing.

*The Frenchmen* exists on two levels. Eakin reflects on her own training in theory throughout, offering stories of her graduate and undergraduate years and reflections on her engagements with some of the theorists. But she also offers short biographies of the French theorists who dominated the world. 

These stories are juicy and gossipy, but they provide a real missing lens on some of the most consequential thinkers of the twentieth century. Abstract ideas were the domain of the philosopher, not the social worlds that generated them. “The notion of a philosopher’s life is vaguely preposterous”, she writes. Her attempt at writing biographies of the Frenchmen is a way to undercut the very notion of theory as something that is untouched by life.

And what lives these men lived. 

Though her vignettes are brief, Eakin offers unusual insight into the motivations of the various theorists she covers. She writes, quoting historian Tony Judt, that many of the Frenchmen preferred Marxism because it “offered a way of recovering ‘the illusion of total knowledge’. French theorists preferred theories that emphasized ‘totality or the absolute’ over partial explanations. Eakin connects this desire for grand theories to her own interest in theory: “With its grand explanatory ambitions, theory swept away doubt, offering in its place the certitudes of an all-encompassing system.” As a young undergrad, what she wanted was the security of a totalizing system.

These theorists came up in a historical moment where the philosopher might also be a subject of a front-page newspaper headline, or a contentious philosophical debate might make the evening news. Philosophers were superstars and public figures. The book is engaging and interesting enough for the stories it tells about this particular moment in history. But for all of her juicy stories of the salacious and dysfunctional private lives of the Frenchmen, Eakin’s book is most significant for the way it traces the thread of the development of the modern subject. 

French theory, by Eakin’s account, took the traditional philosophical task of articulating first principles and cut it off at the knees. There could not be any “first principles” because all we have is language, which is a human creation. There is no “beyond” language- nothing signified- only the endless doom loop of the signifiers. 

The focus of Jacques Derrida, one of the most prominent Frenchmen, was to demonstrate that “Philosophy’s preoccupation with first principles”- with reality, truth, and being- “was doomed.” The words which attempted to express the truth about the world- what philosophers call metaphysics- were merely an illusion. Language was cover for our ignorance. It made it seem that we knew things we could not know. 

It’s worth noting, as Eakin does, that philosophy departments in the late-1980s- when theory was taking off- were preoccupied with analytic approaches. These “highly technical arguments rendered in formal logic- philosophy that resembled mathematics,” were not much better at getting at first principles. If you wanted to grasp after the deep truths of human existence, you would need to choose between high flying literary theory that spoke about existence in dense and convoluted prose, or philosophy that read like a mathematical proof. The continental school- the school of the Frenchmen- “continued to probe the big existential problems, even if only to show the impossibility of resolving them.” What mattered was not the big problems of human existence- what commonly fell under the category of wisdom- but *discourse*. 

“Theory”, writes Eakin, “made *thinking* feel like *doing.*” 

Eakin’s story begins with Jean-Paul Sartre, an existentialist whose personal history traces the end of the second World War. “For Sartre, the great limitation of orthodox Marxism was that it had nothing to say about individuals.” Instead people were “wholly formed by their class and its relations to production at a particular moment.”

Sartre’s *self* was a “trembling existentialism”, endowed with choices and the responsibility to act. She had “independent projects” and above all, the freedom and agency to execute them.

Compare this with Louis Althusser’s *subject*\- the structuralist version also endorsed by Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan- who was “abstract”, faceless and nameless. Most importantly, he was a *subject* more than a *self*. “Not born into a particular family or cultural milieu,” the subject was “*interpellated* by ideology into the larger social system.” For structuralist thinkers, we are never outside ideology. “The illusion of freedom” is really a “bourgeois conspiracy.” Existence is not defined by freedom but is “shaped by impersonal networks of power and symbols in which we were all enmeshed.” 

For thinkers like Lacan, the “closed symbolic system in which we were all trapped” is largely populated by Freudian concepts concerned with the mother’s gaze and sexual proclivities. The individual is caught in a symbolic system, and the solution is psychoanalysis, where the individual identifies the system they are caught in.

It’s worth noting that escaping the system does not seem possible. The system is total, and psychoanalysis, more than a temporary release valve, is a lifelong project. Althusser spent nearly his entire adult life in analysis, peppered by fifteen depressions and some instances of mania, before he murdered his wife. He was quite literally trapped by his psychosis, as he spent large portions of time institutionalized.

The transition from speaking about a “self” to a “subject” is critical. Sartre’s “self,” vying for freedom and agency against the tides of world historical forces, has now become a “subject,” reclined on the therapist’s couch. But even this therapeutic subject would soon be torn, limb from limb, with the post-structuralist view of the individual impaled on the forever turning wheels of power. The goal of the latter view is liberation.

If existentialism gave way to structuralism and the self became a subject, with Foucault the subject became an activist. 

Foucault’s influence in modern theory is massive. He is *the* man to be reckoned with. By my accounting, he is also responsible for the vast majority of destruction that the world of modern theory has wrought. 

Foucault’s theoretical framework is radical- meaning both revolutionary (intending to overthrow existing systems and frameworks) and *to the root*. What had begun as an argument over the end of metaphysics became with Foucault a never-ending cycle of struggle and critique. But it wasn’t always. In fact, by Eakin’s read “the value of deconstructionist philosophy for those deprived of freedom” had to be intentionally connected. Words about power became words toward liberation. Theory felt like *doing something* long before it was actually socially engaged.

But once this connection was made, it was permanent. Deconstruction was *for* the oppressed. 

Power for Foucault was everywhere, “a current running through social institutions and human beings alike.” For Foucault “prison was the only place where power is manifested in its naked state, in its most excessive form, and where it is justified as a moral force.” Power’s operation was to “organize, subdue, and control.” The work of Foucault, as “the first of the modern intellectual *engage*”, was to expose it- whether it occurred in governments, prisons, institutions, or churches.

The exposure of power and its pathways was Foucault’s hallmark, and by my reading has become the hallmark of the modern intellectual. The goal of exposing power was to help it change hands. Foucault was willing to side with the proletariat’s violence simply to overturn power- a “completely amoral” view, in the words of none other than Noam Chomsky.

Foucault's obsession with hidden power engendered a “low-level paranoia that took the place of thought while making you feel smart", wrote Jonathan Rosen. 

This trade has hoodwinked many into thinking that overthrowing power is the same as intelligence. But the trade is a terrible one. In Foucault’s world there is no beauty, no heroes, and no agency. There are just the controllers and the controlled. The only goal of intellectual work is to subvert the two. If you think Foucault’s theory of power is the accurate one, you will see such exposure as *the* work of the intellectual, the hallmark of intellectual sophistication and acumen.

The Frenchmen, and especially Foucault, perpetuated “a farce with consequences”. They “made *thinking* feel like *doing*.”

Resisting this farce may feel like hammering on a closed door. It is certainly choosing the old-fashioned and stodgily conventional world of received wisdom over the cutting-edge brilliance of the superstar intellectual. But if, like me, you think Foucault’s view of power and its working is deeply unchristian- even demonic- you will resist.
### How and Why We Do (and Don't) Use Generative AI
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-and-why-we-do-and-dont-use-generative-ai/
Last updated: 2026-09-30T16:31:00.000Z
*The Three were not made by Sauron, nor did he ever touch them. But of them it is not permitted to speak. So much only in this hour of doubt I may now say. They are not idle. But they were not made as weapons of war or conquest: that is not their power. Those who made them did not desire strength or domination or hoarded wealth, but understanding, making, and healing, to preserve all things unstained.* 

*\~ J. R. R. Tolkien*

*The output of the assignment is not the ultimate goal. Instead, each assignment at DTS is designed to train you in specific skills and build new capacities you need for ministry. Put another way, you are the output, not the paper.* 

*\~ AI Policy Statement from Dallas Theological Seminary\**

Why do we write? 

If you’ll forgive such a pretentious introduction, I think attempting to answer that question will take us some distance toward defining healthy rules for the usage of large language models in the writing life.

The most common reason many people have written in recent years is that they needed to sell something. 

Prior to the internet, business advertisements mostly existed in phonebooks and on billboards and perhaps on the side of a truck. The amount of copy one needs for such things is minimal. Indeed, if anything one was incentivized toward *less* copy because newspaper classified rates were so high.

The internet changed all that by reducing the cost of information production and distribution to basically zero. This has meant that over time it has become normal and expected that businesses would have their own website or social media page as part of their marketing. Often they also maintained an email list to promote their products to customers. 

But websites have to be written, as do emails, which means businesses sometimes needed to employ writers themselves, especially if they also had an interest in competing on search engine result pages for traffic. It also meant that freelance writers could, for a time, find reliable work writing website and email copy for businesses. (I worked as a marketing copywriter for a couple martech agencies for nearly nine years before being able to go full-time at *Mere Orthodoxy.*) As a result, writing took on a utilitarian, functional quality that I am not sure it had in quite the same way prior to the web. What this means is that we now live on the far side of a cultural and technological moment that tended to reduce writing to a commercial tool.

There is a further complication that is layered on top of this technological moment. It is not simply that firms suddenly had a “need” to generate far more copy than they ever would have in the pre-digital era. Individual employees did as well due to the rise of email and its integration into the day to day operations of most businesses. Because of email, a great deal of communication in the professional world was now done via writing rather than in-person conversations in an office, conference calls, and so on.

Overnight, then, everyone became a writer in some sense of the term, but their relationship to writing was purely utilitarian and a matter of professional necessity. This gave them a certain relationship to the written word that saw the generation of copy as being a means to the end of accomplishing some needed professional task.

That world is now being unwound by the rise of large language model (LLM) technology which is able to generate large blocks of text in response to a prompt or query from a human user. The work that companies once paid copywriters to do can now, on the technical level at least, be outsourced to an LLM. If the chief purpose of writing is to convey data or simply fill up online spaces that require a certain amount of copy, then it is hard to identify what is wrong about all this. If writing is purely a means to the end, then if you can obtain the same end with an easier, cheaper means… why not?

Obviously one could say that the writing which really is purely utilitarian in nature *can* be made via generative AI tools. It is hard for me to make the argument, for example, that firms today should employ people to do the kind of writing I was employed to do between 2013 and 2021\. That said, the danger of our moment is that we have been schooled for 20 years now in the idea that all written communication is utilitarian in nature. If you have come to think of the written word in such terms, then it is not merely copy for website product pages or marketing emails that might be legitimately made via artificial intelligence software, but *all* writing. And this is where my concerns sharpen and come to a point.

When we diminish *all* written language in this way, it is not simply our relationship to writing that is changed. Our relationship to communication and language itself is transformed, which also leads to the transformation of our relationship to persons. To turn *all* writing into a purely utilitarian good rather than it often being an artistic or ornamental good has deprived us of much. The people who care about this should not be limited to professional writers and editors.

There is a form of writing that is done as a way of thinking or of conveying care. The people who write in this way are not seeking financial rewards, political power, or simply to check off an item in their Todoist app. They are in search of understanding, of shared knowledge, and of making and healing, as Tolkien said. Indeed, the reason I began with Tolkien here is that I think the Tolkienian values described there by Elrond have been almost entirely forgotten by many today. 

One way of naming the writing that has been lost due to this shift is to simply share a sample of it. Consider the widely cited letter written by Civil War soldier Sullivan Ballou who was killed in 1861 not long after writing this to his wife. I will only share (longish) excerpts below. The [whole thing can be found online](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sullivan%5FBallou?ref=mereorthodoxy.com#Letter) quite easily and you can [hear it read on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78SOjurJkHk&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) from the Ken Burns Civil War documentary.

> Our movement may be one of a few days duration and full of pleasure—and it may be one of severe conflict and death to me. Not my will, but thine O God, be done. If it is necessary that I should fall on the battlefield for my country, I am ready. I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in, the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American Civilization now leans upon the triumph of the Government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution. And I am willing—perfectly willing—to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government, and to pay that debt.  
> But, my dear wife, when I know that with my own joys I lay down nearly all of yours, and replace them in this life with cares and sorrows—when, after having eaten for long years the bitter fruit of orphanage myself, I must offer it as their only sustenance to my dear little children—is it weak or dishonorable, while the banner of my purpose floats calmly and proudly in the breeze, that my unbounded love for you, my darling wife and children, should struggle in fierce, though useless, contest with my love of country.  
> Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me to you with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield.  
> The memories of the blissful moments I have spent with you come creeping over me, and I feel most gratified to God and to you that I have enjoyed them so long. And hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when God willing, we might still have lived and loved together and seen our sons grow up to honorable manhood around us. I have, I know, but few and small claims upon Divine Providence, but something whispers to me—perhaps it is the wafted prayer of my little Edgar—that I shall return to my loved ones unharmed. If I do not, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name.

Sullivan Ballou was exceptional in many ways. He was a graduate of Brown University. He served as Speaker in the Rhode Island House of Representatives. The above letter is written by an accomplished man with impressive academic and professional credentials. It was written by an elite rather than a commoner. (Though even here: Ballou was also an orphan; if he was an elite, he was a very particular kind of self-made American democratic elite.) If such letters were ordinary and commonplace even in Ballou’s day it is unlikely the letter would have been saved. That we have it at all is testimony to its exceptional nature.

And yet: Do today’s Ivy League graduates make the sacrifices Ballou made by serving in such a dangerous position in the military? Do today’s Speakers in state-level Houses write in this way? Do our elites today, generally speaking, face adversity, danger, and pain with such poise, grace, and clarity? To ask such questions about our elites today is practically to answer them. The laughter they provoke is all the answer needed.

I am not saying that writing alone would fix the problem I am gesturing at here. It would not. There are a virtual infinity of inputs that led to the formation of a figure like Ballou and that, today, lead to elites like the ones we now have. What I will say, however, is that the people who relate to language as a means of thought, of caregiving, indeed of self-giving, are likelier to be formed in ways that will over time give them sensibilities and language and virtues similar to those of Ballou. 

A former pastor of mine was once attempting to explain to his predominantly college-aged congregation why it is important to read the Bible daily. “You need to put yourself in the path of that which is marvelous,” he said. And that is much of what formation is, I think: Choosing what to put yourself in the path of. If you put yourself in the path of language that is beautiful and clear, you will over time learn to recognize beauty and clarity yourself, perhaps even you will learn to create such beauty and to speak with such clarity.

To shift metaphors, you could likewise say that formation is about choosing what atmospheres you will breathe in. The atmosphere Tolkien made in his legendarium, the atmosphere Ballou spent much of his life breathing, is an atmosphere of making and understanding and healing and preservation. The atmosphere you inevitably breathe when you relate to all language in purely utilitarian terms will be defined more by various species of war and conquest.

We know both of those things quite well, of course. Strength, domination, and hoarded wealth are familiar concepts, I trust. But we struggle to escape the imaginative framework that knows those things exclusively, at the expense of those other goods. Most of us today largely seem to live exclusively in the world of domination and wealth with the only moral test being who dominates, who is dominated, who holds the wealth, and who is deprived of wealth by those hoarding the wealth.

That I am wandering so far afield in hopes of attempting to address LLM and writing is by design. For the question at stake as we consider LLM technology and the writing life is actually the question of what it means to be human. I say this not because I am a professional writer and editor, though I am, but because I recognize something in Tolkien’s language and in Ballou’s that I desire for myself, for my wife and our children, for my church, and, ultimately, for my nation. We would all be better off if the character and formation required to produce such a letter were more common and more accessible.

As LLMs understandably devour the many forms of writing that were quite often done badly by human copywriters working for businesses in the past 20 years, the temptation will be to think that all writing can be swallowed up in that way, rather than simply the writing that only came into existence in the first place because of the rise of the internet. 

This, indeed, is a good example of the typical problem created for us by digital technology: Digital technology promises to offer us a superior version of a good we already value, but it does so in the terms of digital technology, thereby rendering us in some way *part* of that technology. So in this case digital tech offers us written communication that is easy to produce and performs the needed function. Because those are the values of digital marketing copy and professional email in which many of us have been formed for the past two decades, we come to think of those characteristics as being the markers of “good” writing. 

We have, in other words, been trained to think of all writing in purely utilitarian, mechanical terms for 20 years now and so it was in a sense inevitable that eventually machines would come to be regarded as acceptable replacements for writers. In the early digital era, human writers became a kind of machine that produced cheap, effective, search-engine friendly copy. LLMs are simply an improved model, as defined by the terms of the digital writing economy. The distance from humans writing for search engine algorithms to large language models generating copy themselves is vanishingly small. As long as we accept the terms of that writing economy as normative for our relationship to writing (and to language), it will not be possible for us to see our way out. To do so, we will need to frame the creative work of writing in some other way that is not implicitly mechanical in nature or not permanently crippled by the advent of digital technology. 

The statement quoted above from Dallas Theological Seminary moves us in that direction, I think. The author of that statement recognizes that the point of written work is not simply to generate an output that fulfills a utilitarian need we have. Rather, the point of written work (and the reading and thinking that comes before it) is at least in part to form us as human creatures. This is because language is an essential part of how our unique status as rational and social creatures announces itself.

Humane communication between persons is not purely utilitarian or commercial in nature; it is an attempt to take something proper and native to our humanity and use it well and responsibly in light of our needs, desires, ambitions, and so on. To remove language from the domain of our organic humanity and shift it into the domain of machines and commerce is to deprive ourselves of a key form of giving and receiving love as well as creating and delighting in beauty. In some contexts we recognize this: When Sam Altman talked about [using ChatGPT](https://x.com/sama/status/2083221585792762171?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to help parents keep track of their kids interests, [many people](https://www.fastcompany.com/91584149/sam-altman-shared-a-parenting-hack-thousands-of-moms-and-dads-instantly-disagreed?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) loudly [objected](https://x.com/%5FAlexHirsch/status/2083268104742924484?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Likewise, when [this ad](https://x.com/i/trending/2082995494750392698?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) for an “AI assistant” launched recently, the responses online [were similarly hostile](https://x.com/orchid%5Fhq/status/2082149144710336976/quotes?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)\--so much so that the ad appears to have disappeared from the internet. 

What I’m proposing is that the rebellions we see in these very niche cases–how to keep track of your child’s activities, or remembering significant dates (like an anniversary)--are ultimately about rebelling against the degrading of communication, the replacement of organic practices of memory and encounter with mechanical processes in which the work of memory and encounter is outsourced and automated. 

The lines here do, admittedly, blur at certain points: Is a homemade dinner for my family less personal and significant if it is Costco pulled pork instead of a pork shoulder I smoked myself? Yet the existence of ambiguous cases does not mean all is ambiguous. There remains a real difference between “understanding, making, and healing” and “strength, domination, and hoarded wealth.” When I lament LLM essays, I am not primarily lamenting something new or something that may have adverse effects on my professional life; I am, rather, lamenting something that has been happening for a long time, something that is likely to keep happening and more quickly, and something that collapses ever more of life into the categories that Tolkien himself mourned over in his own works.

Of course, the invocation of Tolkien suggests something else as well: Two of the most beautiful places in his legendarium are such because of rings of power. Both Rivendell and Lothlorien are stewarded, protected, and made by the efforts of ring bearers. This is part of Tolkien’s genius. He is not hostile to power or to commerce or to utility. He is hostile to those things being stripped from moral contexts bound by virtue, affection, and beauty. What makes Sauron evil is not that he has a ring of power, but that he, like Saruman, has a mind comprised only of metal and gears and is concerned only with domination and his own Ring is inherently constrained by his own hatred and vanity. But it is quite possible in Tolkien’s world to possess a ring of power and use it for making and healing and it is quite possible to wield power more generally for the good of all. Thus these remarks by Faramir, made to Frodo in *The Two Towers*:

> I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the Men of Númenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom. Not feared, save as men may fear the dignity of a man, old and wise.

One does not imagine Faramir (or Tolkien) objecting to a new smelting technique to make better swords or, indeed, more radical innovations that improve the range of a catapult, though they would object quite strenuously if these techniques also came with the broad desolation of forests. These are the kind of fine and difficult distinctions we must make if we are to live wisely in the world which we are entering. 

I am typing this essay rather than writing it out by hand. When researching for the essay, I have used Claude–I see little difference between simply querying an LLM bot directly with a question and using a search box on Google, given that Google uses generative AI technology as much as Anthropic does. You are reading this essay on a website that was designed and built with the aid of AI coding tools. And, indeed, earlier this week we launched a new research initiative at *Mere Orthodoxy* that is heavily dependent on generative AI technology called “The Faith Received.” 

We certainly are not “AI sober” at *Mere O*, nor do I think such a posture is even possible for someone, short of that person abandoning digital technology altogether—and that’s mostly an OK thing. As my friend Brian Mattson never tires of [reminding his readers](https://brianmattson.substack.com/p/game-designers-are-people-too), we can and should recognize that human innovation is often a great good. 

There would be something impious, for me at least, in even trying to be “AI sober” in fact. Were I to denounce digital technology I would be biting the hand that feeds. The only reason I–a first gen college graduate of a land grant university–am able to have the job I have is because of digital technology. A Nebraska graduate with no prior family or institutional relationship would not have been hired at any legacy evangelical publishing institution I can think of when I was beginning my career. I certainly wouldn’t have gotten my foot in the door at any major coastal media organization, most of which tend to hire only from elite schools. I owe my career to the internet.

The question is by what criteria we judge technologies. It is too much and badly wrongheaded to set virtue and attentiveness and the beauty of the search for understanding on one side and “technology” on the other, as some tech critics sometimes seem to do. But, likewise, it is a mistake as well to say that technologies are neutral tools. 

To return again to Tolkien, it is significant that while rings of power are treated as potentially good, *the* Ring of Power is not because it was made only for the purpose of domination. Twice we see ring bearers in the story offered the ring of Sauron and in both cases they reject it, warning that that particular ring would make a terrifying tyrant of even them. We also find Gandalf warning that *no* ring of power should be used lightly. A fool wielding the power of Elrond or Galadriel’s ring would be incapable of using it to preserve and grow places like Rivendell or Lothlorien. Their use figures to be something closer to the uses of Gollum for Sauron’s ring–as a tool for expanding the bearer’s own vices.

This suggests a few principles, then: 

First, there is what we can call the absolute moral principle. Some technologies can be twisted in ways that make particular applications fundamentally disordered and unredeemable. Not all rings of power are inherently twisted and wicked, but one of them was. 

Likewise, there is no redemptive use for AI-generated pornographic videos or sports gambling applications. There is no redemptive use for something like Fr. Justin, the short-lived AI priest who claimed to have the powers that Roman theology reserves to the clergy. These applications must be rejected entirely because they strike at the vitals of the moral life. Applications that dislocate the sexual embrace from the context of marriage are irredeemable. Applications that give the promise of wealth for no work while actually exploiting the masses are irredeemable. Applications that dehumanize the sacramental life of a Christian believer are irredeemable. 

Additionally, one can very easily argue that Christian statesman should strongly consider advocating for laws that would ban such applications. (The phrase “strike at the vitals” is something I am lifting from the confessional life of my home church, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). In the PCA, we require all ordained leaders in the church to affirm “the system of doctrine” taught in the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Shorter and Larger Catechisms. We do not require that the ordained affirm every word in these documents, but where ordination candidates disagree with the standards they must explain their difference and the church must then decide if the difference “strikes at the vitals” of the theology of the standards or not. A similarly capacious sort of analysis will likely help us when judging uses of various technologies.)

Second, there is the formational principle. Many technologies, due to their immense power, should only be used by certain qualified people. We recognize this already with things like guns and cars. We recognize that a 12-year-old is not prepared to command a combustible hunk of metal that can reach speeds far surpassing that of any organic lifeform and at which a collision will likely be fatal. Significantly, the formation we expect of people before acquiring these technologies is not simply that they reach a certain age. We do not automatically give 16-year-olds a drivers license. Rather, we recognize both that a person *can’t* have the requisite maturity, judgment, and motor skills required to operate a vehicle prior to reaching a certain age *and* that after reaching that age they still must cultivate and acquire specific skills as part of their own formation in order to drive safely. We should likely place social media and smartphones in this bracket. I would argue that many uses of LLM tools also fit here. Some tools can only be used rightly by people who have labored long enough and suffered through certain difficulties that equip them to use the technology well. In this case, steps should be taken to protect these technologies from unfit users *and* efforts should be made to make the formation necessary to use those tools well more accessible to more people.

Finally, we might suggest a third rule, which is the tragic principle. Some years ago a friend of mine told me a story about a conversation he had with Wendell Berry in which they discussed the late historian James C. Scott’s book *Against the Grain*. (Scott is best known for his book *Seeing like a State.*) In *Grain*, Scott argues that states first emerged largely thanks to agriculture and grains in particular because the life of a grain farmer was highly legible to a state. In practice, this meant that farmers and farming often had a harmful effect on human flourishing at that time because farmers were more easily exploited by states–who found it far easier to tax farmers than they did hunter gatherers–and because the emergence of farming went hand-in-hand with the emergence of frequently tyrannical state structures. 

On hearing this argument, Berry quite liked it, according to my friend. For those who have had a more superficial encounter with Berry, that might surprise you, but that was the kind of thinker he was. He wasn’t an ideologue, nor did he go hunting after an absolutized system one could follow with perfect consistency. Rather, he recognized that our life in this world presupposed a certain measure of violence and even of destruction. In “The Gift of Good Land,” he wrote,

> To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.

There is not a way of living pristinely in this world. The nature of our existence is tragic; we will often be forced to confront choices that are all to varying degrees ugly and unpalatable. We will often have to discern the relative goods and evils of the choices before us and make choices between undesirable outcomes. 

This can drive us to despair, but it need not necessarily and, in any case, the despair should not be conclusive or all-consuming. Rather, this fact can just as well force upon us the necessity of mercy in our judgments, humility in the face of our own fallibility, and also an openness to *good* possibilities and outcomes that we might miss if thinking in a more ideological mode.

This final principle should provide a certain grounding for how we continue the conversation about generative AI. Blanket moral denunciations or ill-defined bans will not aid the cultivation of wisdom. They may, ironically, erode good will and judgment because such denunciations and policies close off the possibility of conversation and debate, both of which are the lifeblood of any democratic society, which ours is, even in its current declined state. The difficulty before us, and it genuinely is a difficulty, is how to preserve the search after understanding, making, healing, and preservation when so much of the circumstances of our world is arrayed against those things. And the reality of our moment is that there are no perfect choices free from the potential to cause harm or free from adverse trade-offs.

The above considerations are the many factors that weigh on my mind as I think about the work of this magazine as it relates to questions of generative artificial intelligence. Many things appear obviously wrong to me: Using generative AI to draft essays or help with brainstorming or developing an argument is wrong, I think; it is a category error. But it is likewise wrong to issue blanket moral denunciations of anyone who uses AI for research. What is needed in our moment, I think, is a recognition of the tragic nature of our existence in the world tied to a steadfast refusal to allow the tragic to make us nakedly utilitarian or pragmatic. 

Holding that balance is difficult. It is a problem that has defeated many people smarter and more trained than I am. But, as Tolkien said, there are some tasks it is better to begin than to refuse, even if the end is uncertain and likely dark. That, I think, is the task before us now–how to preserve our humanity in a mechanized age, and also how to preserve our friendships and communities amidst great differences in circumstance and judgment. What comfort we might have as we confront such a task will be found nowhere other than a quiet confidence in the providential mercy of God. And so we labor in hope.

*\* A note on the quote from the DTS policy: I began drafting this essay in late spring. The policy on the DTS website appears to have been updated in late July, and the portion I quote above was removed at that time.*
### The World of Thinkers
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-world-of-thinkers/
Last updated: 2026-09-29T11:00:28.000Z
The modern world is a mess, or so I’m told the second I open my browser. Thoughts, solutions, essays, art, and quotes scroll past as the orange bookmark icon glows steadily on the left side of my screen. I should be writing, not this – the chapter of my thesis sits open on another tab, a document that hasn’t gained any words in weeks. Instead, I’ve opened a window into this world, and the lure of other people’s thoughts and certainty, stacked with a low-grade desire to stay relevant, moves my fingers to scroll, almost unconsciously.

“One function of the local church,” a man writes, “is to kill our main character syndrome.” It appears alone, surrounded by white space, the number of likes growing underneath in agreement. His thought, delivered to the world in Spectral serif font, lives here, in this universe, for the day, or maybe it only lives for several hours; no one really knows. The algorithm will ultimately decide. Several of my friends have liked it; if more of them do, the typed words may live longer; they may even travel to other feeds and far places of the world. Individual thoughts codified in screens, flowing through time and space, uniting minds.

I click the button and see everyone he subscribes to. Nothing is private. I see the people he follows and can follow them instantly; I can unfollow instantly if they don’t suit me.

I click back, uninterested.

A photo of a desk appears; it is somewhere in the world – I don’t know where, but a stack of books with spines placed unnaturally outward, sun cascading over the seemingly haphazard scene, tells me the person reads and studies theology. The little circular icon tells me he is a man and his name. He is reading Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, Joseph Ratzinger, Hans Boersma, Rowan Williams and Alexander Schmemann. The stack is large, daunting, over 20 books, some are large commentaries. “These books have been important to me. I’ve been reading this slowly over the last six months,” he types to this universe.

“Six months,” I find myself repeating out loud, followed by “slowly.” 

Art and ancient churches flicker by, an incursion of Christian images: the Good Shepherd, the Annunciation, a modern rendering of Pentecost, an orthodox icon of Jesus. It’s like walking through an art gallery's gift shop, glancing at a spinning rack of postcards. Each sacred image shrunk and flattened into a small square, one more square within the square of my laptop screen, gone before I can even place it in my memory.

I stop at an image I’ve never seen before – magnificent spires, a golden dome, a city that looks impossibly beautiful under a halo of flickering lights. I hesitate, then realise none of this is real. “This is the future we must choose,” the caption proclaims; 3100 hearts already agree.

I notice there are no stories of horrendous killings or unexpected pregnancies; there are no complaints of vandalism or discussion of drugs; there isn’t even quintessential neighbourhood gossip. This universe, this community of thinkers, seems devoid of such base, perhaps banal things, as if they do not even take place.

“Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny,” a Lewis quote wanders in front of my eyes.

“You and God are friends,” a woman says in a video of herself. She looks furtively, with careful awe, out of a stained-glass window; the frame contains only her side profile; she is the only thing on the screen but remains slightly out of focus, fading into black. She holds back tears, reciting spoken verse about difficult seasons. She pauses for dramatic effect while continuing to look through the stained-glass window, never moving her head, never making eye contact, as if we have caught an unscripted glimpse into her subjective mind. Her pause turns into a soft smile, and she continues on about God’s grace. Ten thousand people have viewed her post.Lewis appears again: "Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.” 

The next post my eyes encounter says, “Look, Henri Nouwen wrote about me again.” Followed by an image of a short passage from his book.

I see an article written by someone I trust. I click on it and am impressed by the content. It’s an excellent essay, well-cited and deeply thought out. I ponder his exegesis and insight for a minute, considering personal connections to my own life and then, with one click, find myself back on the homepage. I keep scrolling, mechanically moving through text and thoughts, thoughts and quotes. The poignant essay is already too many posts back to find again, and my brain is growing weary. No one is hungry or sick; no one is even having a bad day in this world. The word sobbing and horror catches my eye, as I almost scroll past. I gently nudge the screen back up to read the post that the algorithm has attempted to bring to my attention. The orange check mark by her name tells me she matters here, and since over forty thousand people have engaged with it, my curiosity heightens. I encounter a reflection written entirely in lowercase.“the absolute horror of becoming self-aware is that you lose the right to be a victim in your own life. you are sitting there, sobbing on the floor, but you’re also standing across the room watching yourself do it, completely aware of every choice that led you there. you can’t even have a good, clean tragedy anymore because you are always the accomplice.”

The comments stack underneath: “flawlessly articulated wow,” “so real”, and “The thought is sobering yet freeing.”

I sit for a moment, staring at my screen. There are no selfies in the world of thinkers. Text and thought rule this space, accentuated by a colour palette of brown, dark green and grey, with rounded corners and equally spaced white gaps. It’s monotonous but soothing to the eyes.

Another CS Lewis quote appears, this time with the admonition: “You will not regret the 20 seconds it takes to read this banger quote by C.S. Lewis.”

It’s a white image with a serif font, very subtle, zero flash. Once again, thousands of likes sit beneath. It’s a fairly lengthy quote without any context or reference to what book or lecture it’s from – that detail seems irrelevant here.

My dog barks at me; he has brought his favourite toy and laid it at my feet. He doesn’t realise my mind is in another universe. He paws at my chair, wanting my attention, frustrated that I haven’t turned to look at him. 

“This is how we will fix the world” trails off as I close my screen.
### Announcing "The Faith Received"
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/announcing-the-faith-received/
Last updated: 2026-10-01T19:33:05.000Z
Dear readers,

We have some big news today. If you want to skip straight to it you can scroll down to the next header. But I think what follows below is helpful for understanding why we are launching a new initiative today called “The Faith Received,” so I’d encourage you to read first and then get to the launch announcement.

## Counties, Frontiers, and Cities

When I was growing up in a fundamentalist church, we had a simple way of thinking about church life and Christian theology: In practice, we related to the faith the way a surveyor relates to the boundaries between counties. If you drive about 30 minutes from my home in Lincoln, you’ll pass a sign welcoming you to Saunders County. That’s how all our states are split up in the US, of course: The states are chopped up into small geographic regions called counties and at all times you’re either in one county or another. It is not possible to be a little bit in Lancaster County and a little bit in Saunders County. This is how we approached the Christian life at my church growing up.

On every imaginable theological position we took as a church, that position simply *was* Christianity. Anything that wasn’t that position, was not. We were the Christian county, so to speak, and everything that disagreed with us was plainly from some other not-Christian county. So, for example, it was quite common to speak of both Reformed Christians and Roman Catholic Christians as non-Christians. Indeed, it sometimes veered toward the plainly absurd: A former seminary professor of our pastor used the phrase “half-born” to describe professing Christians who did not believe in a young earth and seven 24-hour day creation account. Of course, given that it is not actually possible to be “half” born, this was just a particularly bizarre way of saying “not really Christian.”

The trouble here is you can’t sustain this sort of thing with much honesty. You definitely can’t sustain it once you start reading historic Christian theology. But even just the Bible alone is enough to refute it. After all it was St Paul–nobody’s idea of a squish–who said that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. I remember the first time I read that verse after I started to question fundamentalism. It messed with my head. By that time I had known enough Christians from other churches to know that they *all*, even the Catholics!, professed with their mouths that Jesus was Lord and believed that God raised him from the dead. So what then? Were they Christians? Paul would say “yes,” seemingly. So why didn’t we? I didn’t have an answer to that.

Eventually I had to leave that church and I found my way, for a short time, to broader evangelicalism. The sort of County Christianity I knew as a child was nowhere to be found here. But what I did find wasn’t especially helpful either: Instead of counties, we seemed to have frontiers: we had no history, no infrastructure, no boundaries, save those asserted by the individual leadership of individual churches.

If County Christianity offered a certain degree of clarity, but at the cost of honesty and charity, then the Frontier Christianity offered open possibilities and energy, but at the expense of clarity and fidelity. It took only about 12 months for me, an intellectually engaged and curious young adult, to start asking questions that no one at the church seemed able to answer. So I left. The County Christianity couldn’t engage history or questions with any integrity. But the Frontier Christianity seemed unable to engage history or questions either, unless you approached them in the highly limited and quixotic way your particular congregation did—and even then it may not be sufficient.

I needed something different.

My guess is if you’re reading this you probably understand that struggle. You recognize that people and history and theology and church life are all far too complex for the trite answers of fundamentalism. But when you have gone in search of depth, clarity, and seriousness in broader evangelicalism you have too often found faddishness, triviality, and a very tribal mode of intellectual life that consists largely of amassing a small set of clearly labeled boxes sorted by worldview into which you can place the ideas you encounter as you go about your life.

At *Mere Orthodoxy* we have always tried to offer something distinct from either the County or the Frontier. We have offered our readers something more like a city–the messy and complicated and beautiful thing that is Christian intellectual history down through the ages. There are buildings here of varying degrees of soundness and beauty and age. There are also real boundaries, but also a lot of gradation: after all, cities don’t really have boundaries in the way a county does, though they do have limits. We know Bloomington MN is not part of New York City, for example. But it *is* part of the Twin Cities, even if it is not named “St Paul” or “Minneapolis.” There are less explored parts of town too as well as neighborhoods ripe for development and new life. Much of our work could be thought of as trying to help Christians, particularly Protestant Christians, recognize that the church is a city, not a county or a frontier, that it is *their* city, and that within it there is both clarity and rigor as well as room to breathe and explore and enjoy the common life you share with your brothers and sisters in Christ.

## Introducing “The Faith Received”

While that has always been our heart at *Mere Orthodoxy*, our work has traditionally consisted of commentary around the news of the day, books old and new, and the many theological and cultural debates Christians have always had. 

That began to change this past August with the addition of [“The Daily Liturgy”](https://mereorthodoxy.com/daily-liturgy) to our podcast network: Now in addition to commentary, we have an aid in piety and discipleship that can help you begin or end your day with prayer and scripture. But our plan was never to stop there. Rather, we want to build an online hub to aid churches, other Christian groups, and individual Christian believers in comprehensive Christian formation–social, spiritual, and intellectual. Today is the next step in that work.

[“The Faith Received”](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-faith-received/) is a collection of historic creeds, confessions, catechisms, theological works, and biblical commentaries now freely available to all *Mere Orthodoxy* readers. We have built TFR to be publicly available, practically usable, and beautifully readable. 

You can read the [introductory essay](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-faith-received/manifesto/) by Stiven Peter, one of the principle architects of TFR, to learn more about the project itself. For my purposes here, I want to briefly come back to that city I mentioned above. I think the city has seen better days in many ways. Certainly there are lots of beautiful old buildings now largely forgotten or abandoned. TFR is something like a thorough account of the city’s history: historic photos, blueprints, phonebooks, and all the rest. If you want to work for renewal, to remember the glories that have existed in the past and could exist again… well, this is for you. We want “The Faith Received” to help you see more clearly what the city has been, and what your inheritance as a member of that city is.

We cannot simply repristinate the city that was, of course. The reality of sin as well as our own finitude means that will never happen. But we can receive our inheritance with gratitude and seek to live into it and improve upon it. That is the goal of this project. Dive into the texts. Ask your questions. Learn. Think. Probe. And do so with a sense of freedom and joy. 

You don’t need to police every boundary, but you also don’t need to ignore history altogether. History certainly isn’t bunk, but neither is it a straitjacket. You can receive it, learn from it, and commend it to others. Be “untroubled in your seeking” as Joe Pug once put it in a favorite song of mine. And, with the aid of your fathers and mothers in the faith, take your learning into the world and better radiate the love of God to your neighbor.

## Does this contradict your other policies regarding generative artificial intelligence?

I imagine some of you will have that question, especially given that we only just published [a writer’s covenant](https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-writers-covenant-and-mere-orthodoxys-new-contributors/) last week that placed some significant limits on how we expect our writers to use generative AI. I want to address that here, briefly, though we’ll have more on this in the months to come. There are a few points that I want to make regarding our use of AI to translate many of these texts as well as the Ask feature you’ll find inside TFR.

First, let’s talk about the research tools in “The Faith Received.” As we noted in our writer covenant last week, we have never had a policy of banning the use of AI for research purposes. Indeed, there is no point in doing so since the only way to fully erase AI from a writer’s research work these days is to give up digital tools altogether, given that even the search engines we have been using for 20 plus years are now largely powered by large language models. 

In that case, the best way to think about the research tools in “The Faith Received,” including the Ask feature, is that it is roughly equivalent to using an LLM for search–which if you use Google you are already doing. The only difference is that the TFR Ask has an extremely defined data set–it doesn’t search the internet as a whole, but only the texts that are part of “The Faith Received.” This makes it more limited in most ways, but far more powerful in some particularly valuable ways for our readers.

Second, again as we said last week, research is one thing, but the work of making arguments and structuring sentences and paragraphs is another. The latter is essentially human work. So the point here is not that you can outsource your theological formation to a machine. Rather, you can use the research tools provided in TFR to help deepen your own theological knowledge and understanding so that you can then turn around and convey the truths you have learned in your own words to others, either in writing or in conversation. 

In any case, our testing has found that all text generated by the TFR Ask feature registers as AI generated when tested in [Pangram](https://www.pangram.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). So if someone submitted a piece to us that was “written” by the Ask feature, we would be able to recognize it very easily both because Nadya and I are getting much better at recognizing LLM copy and because our testing tools would tell us. Anyone else who has concerns along these lines can also use the same tools we can to root out the use of LLM-generated copy in text purported to be human written.

## But what about AI translations?

I can anticipate a skeptical reader replying here by saying that if the work of making arguments and structuring essays is human work, then surely so is the work of translation. I respect the argument and it is the one I have wrestled with the most as we have worked on this project. That said, there are a few factors that led me to think this is still a worthwhile endeavor. 

First point: The good enjoyed by the translator of a text and the good enjoyed by the reader of a translated text are distinct things. (While one *could* make a similar argument about the work of a writer and the work of a reader more generally, I do think it matters that we are talking here about translation, not writing more generally. Text wholly generated from AI is distinct from human-written text that is then translated into another language with the aid of AI.) The benefit I have taken from reading Bavinck in English, for example, is thanks to the particular work done by John Bolt and others who have translated the Dutch master. But there is nothing about my experience as a person reading Bavinck in translation that is uniquely enriched by the fact that John Bolt translated it rather than someone else. The pleasure he felt while translating is different from the pleasure I felt while reading in English. Both are significant, of course, but they are distinct. As a reader, my experience is that I am encountering Bavinck, via the mediation of Bolt. I am grateful for Dr Bolt’s labors. But the core person in my encounter here is Bavinck, not Bolt. That is the whole point of translation of such works, I think: for the translator to remain in the background and the words of the original author to be foregrounded. AI translations do not compromise that basic encounter, I think: When I read Polanus in English via “The Faith Received” I am encountering his words.

Incidentally, I think many of us have had experiences of relating to works in a language we do not know in a relatively pragmatic way. 30 years ago I could have, theoretically, set out to use other available translation tools, such as they were, to translate Bavinck’s Dutch into English. Indeed, when I was attempting to learn German this is more or less what I did with certain texts we read in class: I got a German-English dictionary as well as my German textbook, and got to work translating. I did not know German at all; I simply had a couple reference books and was doing the best I could. There were two goods I was pursuing in that work. One was to learn German. The other was simply to render a text I could not read into language that I could through the use of various tools in the absence of a thorough knowledge of the original language.

Any graduate student has had experiences along these lines at times. They do not need to speak French or German fluently; they simply need enough to allow them to understand the text they’re reading, and they relied upon various supplemental aids and tools to help them “unlock” the text. This project fully honors the second of those goods, I think, while relativizing the first in ways admittedly far more extreme than a dual-language dictionary does, but in ways not altogether different.

Second point: One of the arguments Stiven made as he and I discussed this was that both of us could recognize how dramatically certain debates in reformed evangelicalism were changed by the translation of Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics. Well, he said, surely there are other previously untranslated texts that could prove similarly helpful and generative if only they were available to the average English speaker? I found that persuasive. 

Even thinking about my own denominational context in the Presbyterian Church in America, I am struck by the fact that the discourse in the PCA often amounts to southern presbyterians behaving as if southern presbyterianism is the *only* faithful expression of the reformed faith while missional PCA members act as if the tradition is somewhat of a liability in the work of evangelization and therefore must be relativized at certain points. What Bavinck did and what we hope TFR will do is show that both sides are wrong: Theological traditions are *far* broader than many realize *and* a closer encounter with the Christian intellectual tradition should make us better, more faithful evangelists, preachers, and theologians. Our theological traditions are treasures, not millstones.

Third point: As a fourth-generation Nebraskan and first-generation college student, I have a strong draw toward egalitarian, democratized approaches to knowledge and learning. When Tyndale was translating the Bible into English, a skeptical Catholic rebuked him, arguing that the common person was not equipped to understand scripture. Tyndale was undaunted and said that if he had his way a common plowboy would know the Bible better than most of the Roman church’s bishops. I have a similar inclination here. This library will not suddenly push college and seminary professors out of a job. It will simply put the texts that a small number of people have been able to read into the hands of a far larger group of people, so that they can read and learn from these texts for themselves. If anything, I hope this will make for better students who can now read primary sources for themselves, rather than relying on secondary sources in order to understand their respective theological traditions. 

Fourth point: Because we do care deeply about the integrity of our work and never want to betray the trust of our readers, we have tried to approach this project in the most transparent way possible. You can read [our transparency commitment here](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-faith-received/transparency/). Additionally, the reason we are launching this in Beta today is so that prior to the official launch we can have a few months with readers interacting with the texts and the research tools and offering feedback.

I will leave off there for now. But I do expect we will continue to have conversations about the use of AI in intellectual work in the months to come. We have an essay coming from me later this week on the site that offers a more extensive treatment of the question. The upshot, however, is straightforward: We can recognize some uses of AI are obviously wrong, some are obviously OK, and others are complex and require a certain degree of patience and tolerance for one another as we work through the issues together. We can’t promise we’ll always arrive at positions you agree with. But we will do our best to show our work, be honest about what we are and are not doing, and be open to constructive criticism about these issues.

One final note on this: Our goal for “The Faith Received” is to essentially serve as a trusted guide to the great texts of the faith. That’s why we are building in the way we have. That said, the work that has gone into building this is significant–in terms of time spent working directly on the project and time spent talking about how it needs to be built in order to best serve our readers and preserve their trust. So as with anything, the work of a good guide is not cheap or easily replicated. So if you value what we have built here and want to see us be able to continue doing such work, please give to support the work. We have some big dreams for the years to come, some of which are built directly off the work we are doing in “The Faith Received.” But we can only do the work if we have the resources needed to support it.
### The Paradoxes of Happiness
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/happiness-andrew-wilson-review/
Last updated: 2026-09-28T11:00:42.000Z
**Andrew Wilson.** [***Happiness: What It Is, Where to Find It, and How to Make It Last Forever***](https://www.crossway.org/books/happiness-hcj/?srsltid=AfmBOooOf0xzX9IGvolnd8ARuvHVsrSHmcLR6JBpk8W0UN5-CzNVT19d&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Crossway, 2026\. $19.99\. 184 pp.**

Barnabas Piper describes happiness as “life’s most elusive feeling.” For many of us, that’s because we spend much of our lives looking for it in the wrong places.

Yet happiness itself has become an increasingly difficult thing to define. There is no shortage of books, podcasts, studies and self-help resources promising to help us find it. We measure happiness through life satisfaction, mental health, financial security and personal fulfillment. The annual World Happiness Report tracks the subject as a measure of human flourishing. [Its 2026 report](https://files.worldhappiness.report/WHR26.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) found that young people in North America and Western Europe are significantly less happy than they were 15 years ago.

So how do we define happiness? Where does it come from, and how can we make it last? There’s also a broader philosophical question underneath it all: Is happiness something we should pursue directly, or is it a byproduct of pursuing something more meaningful?

These are the questions Andrew Wilson, teaching pastor at King’s Church London, explores in his new book, *Happiness: What It Is, Where to Find It, and How to Make It Last Forever*. The book enters a crowded conversation that includes psychology, philosophy, sociology, neuroscience, self-help and Christian theology. Wilson attempts to bring these disciplines together while making a distinctly Christian argument: True happiness is found in drawing nearer to God rather than pursuing happiness itself. “Wherever there is Jesus, there is joy,” Wilson writes.

Wilson reminds readers at the start of a truth we often neglect: “God wants you to be happy.” The key to that happiness is in the pursuit of God rather than in pursuit of happiness itself, he argues.

“In Scripture, God is the goal and happiness is one of the results,” he explains. 

> We do not love God because he improves our states of mind...but because we find him supremely excellent and delightful in himself—and a marvelous result is that we experience deep and everlasting joy, glorifying God by enjoying him forever.

In other words, happiness isn’t the ultimate goal of the Christian life. God is. But happiness is one of the good things we experience as we pursue and become more like God—"For the fruit of the Spirit is joy."

Our culture, meanwhile, is often at odds with this view of happiness that the Bible speaks of. 

It encourages us to chase a worldly, fleeting idea of happiness through pursuing a larger salary, a bigger house, more friends, grand vacations, a spouse, our favorite sports team’s success, or whatever else we think might finally make us content. These things aren’t inherently bad. They can all be good and enjoyable when kept in proper perspective. The problem comes when we rely on them to bring lasting happiness that they’re simply not able to provide.

Folk-rock band Judah & the Lion captures that version of happiness in the song “How to Be Loved”: 

> *More, more, more, more* 
> *I need more* 
> *I swеar to God that I'll be happy when I get it.*

This mindset is familiar because it reflects how many of us approach happiness through all the things the world tells us should matter most. It’s why some athletes have said they rarely feel satisfied after winning a championship. After winning his third of seven Super Bowl championships, quarterback Tom Brady said in a 60 Minutes interview in 2005, “Why do I have three Super Bowl rings and still think there’s something greater out there for me? I mean…God, it’s gotta be more than this. I mean this can’t be what it’s all cracked up to be…What else is there for me?”

Brady was onto something. Worldly pleasures are ultimately a poor foundation for happiness, because they are guaranteed to end. At some point, an athlete’s playing days will end, and there will be no more championships for which to train. For a businessman, a time will come where there will be no more titles or promotions to chase. 

There has to be a greater goal in mind for all of us if we wish to experience true and lasting happiness, and Wilson argues that goal is Jesus. From there, he lays out a roadmap for reorienting our hearts toward him.

## **A Holistic View of Happiness**

Wilson is far from the first Christian writer to explore the topic of happiness, of course. In his book *Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life*, C. S. Lewis explores his lifelong search for transcendent happiness. And in *Reflections on the Psalms*, Lewis describes joy as something that naturally overflows into a desire to share it with others.

In his book *Happiness*, Randy Alcorn argues that Christians should be happy because of the hope and joy we have in Christ, even though some have been taught to think of holiness and happiness as competing goals. In *Hoping for Happiness*, Barnabas Piper explores what he considers to be unrealistic expectations of happiness that ultimately end in disappointment and lays out a clear argument for why and how Christians are supposed to have fun. 

Wilson goes a step further to explain that happiness is not a choice, but it is affected by our choices. There are tangible body, mind and soul connections to happiness. Psalms, for example, implore people to use their physical bodies in worship. Raising and clapping our hands, singing, even dancing while we worship can “fuel happiness in God.” This is because “body and soul are codependent partners in the quest for divine delight.” We can literally use our bodies to worship, and in turn we can start to reverse some of the chemistry that may be causing us to feel downcast or sad. 

Humans are born with a certain type of brain chemistry that predisposes us to a certain level of cheerfulness, Wilson notes, but that can change through our behaviors and habits. He compares it to our physical weight. We are genetically disposed to a certain size and shape, but that too can change depending on our diet and exercise habits. Some people have to work harder than others to maintain a certain physical size. Similarly, some people have to work harder than others to be cheerful, but our habits can play a direct role in that. 

Wilson doesn’t reduce happiness to positive thinking, and he recognizes that every person has a different capacity for happiness. He acknowledges the influence of biology, circumstances and mental health while still emphasizing the importance of our own choices and habits.

## **Community, Humility and Forgiveness**

Relationships are a key part of the equation. We know that deep community and friendships help foster happiness. Wilson describes this as “life-in-common.”

“Having people in and out of our home increases our sense of connection even as it decreases our sense of space,” he reflects. In other words, it’s worth it for our happiness to think of others more and share our lives with friends. Community requires us to give up some control. It asks us to make room for other people, literally and figuratively. That type of sacrifice can make us happier. 

Jesus teaches us as much in Acts 20:35: “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Similarly, being in corporate settings, be it a concert, wedding, or a sports bar with like-minded fans, can provide a picture of what it looks like to be joyful in community with others. When we truly enjoy something, we should want to share it with others because that completes the full arc of the joy journey. 

Friendships and relationships in general are only successful when both parties approach them with humility and, when necessary, a repentant and forgiving heart. That too is connected to happiness.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus begins by explaining that the poor in spirit are blessed. They’re the ones who will experience flourishing, for they shall inherit the kingdom. Blessed also are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Throughout his teaching, Jesus harkens back repeatedly to the idea of humility. What we may not always notice, however, is the connection between humility and happiness, Wilson explains.

“Humble people are far less entitled, far more grateful, and far less prone to grumbling, judgmentalism, and envy than proud people—almost by definition.” Why? “They recognize their own faults and resolve interpersonal conflicts much more quickly than proud people, which means their relationships are characterized by higher trust and higher openness.”

These people also take themselves less seriously and laugh at themselves. They’re often more self-aware of their own flaws. They’re more prone to celebrate others and don’t feel crushed by their own mistakes. Because they’re less self-centered and more others-focused, they tend to be more attractive as friends and colleagues. In general, they’re more thankful. All of these things reflect the heart of God and the ways of Jesus, and they all are signs of a happy person.

Likewise, happy people possess the capacity to forgive and be humble enough to ask for forgiveness when necessary. Forgiveness is the only practice that Jesus includes in the Lord’s Prayer, Wilson notes. Happy people aren’t necessarily people who have experienced fewer reasons to be unhappy. Instead, they’re people who have learned how to respond differently to the inevitable disappointments and frustrations of life.

## **Finding True Happiness**

Perhaps the biggest paradox Wilson brings out is that true happiness often comes when we stop actively looking for it. 

Citing the Brazilian pastor Rene Breuel, Wilson notes how people who are truly happy rarely think about their level of happiness. Instead, they’re just doing the things that make them happy. They’re gardening, golfing, hiking, building a boat, playing music, writing or whatever else their interests are. 

This idea brings Wilson’s entire argument into focus. We should want to be happy, but Scripture shows how the path to true happiness for the Christian life is not by pursuing happiness on its own, but through pursuing God first. This is outlined in Matthew 6:33: “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

Ultimately, Wilson points us to a simple truth: Wherever we find Jesus, that’s where we’ll find true and lasting joy.
### Sin and Christian Literature
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/sin-and-christian-literature/
Last updated: 2026-09-25T11:00:44.000Z
Several years ago, a friend of mine took a job as a 2nd\-grade teacher at a local, Christian school. She enrolled her three children, bought their uniforms, attended new faculty training, and was ready to jump feet-first into the school year. But a week before classes started, she learned that she had lost her job. 

It turned out that a parent had looked her up online and discovered a book of confessional poems she had self-published years earlier. My friend had written about her husband’s addiction and the damage it had caused their marriage. Her short, Rupi Kaur-esque poems wrestle with sin, and, by the end of the book, rejoice in God’s triumph over it.

It is, in other words, a classically Christian book, which echoes the narrative arcs of both Peter and Paul and, in fact, all of salvation history. But parents at the school were concerned that her poems had drawn too near the flame of reality. The sin was too real, too grotesque. And so, they concluded, she couldn’t be trusted to teach their children.

The consequences for my friend were, of course, devastating. She left the school in shame and returned only to drop her children off and pick them up, each day experiencing the strange dissonance of entrusting her children to a school that had found her an unfit model of faith.

I tell you that story because one of the questions it raises has become a quiet obsession of mine: *What role should sin play in Christian art?* 

Recently, I asked an evangelical friend what she thought about sin and art. She explained that Christians shouldn’t include details about sin because it could cause temptation. It might be fine to refer obliquely to sin as bondage or brokenness, but Christians, she argued, ought to avoid depicting the grimy reality.

That sentiment is often echoed in Christian publishing. Consider the veritable mountain of popular Christian novels published in the last decade that portray Christian characters entirely void of interior complexity and in which sin is either easily overcome or externalized.

In one sense, it’s an ancient thought, dating all the way back to Plato’s argument in Book III of the *Republic* for strict censorship in the interest of civic harmony and the health of the soul. Many Christian saints across the centuries have echoed Plato’s warning, encouraging the faithful to refrain from reading anything that could pollute the soul. In the 18th century, theologian Alphonsus Maria de Liguori put it this way: 

> As the reading of bad books fills the mind with worldly and poisonous sentiments; so, on the other hand, the reading of pious works fills the soul with holy thoughts and good desires.

Given the long Christian tradition of skepticism towards the corrupting influence of art, it is perhaps not surprising that Christian publishers and readers so often avoid literature that contains realistic, unsanitized depictions of sin. When the Christian school fired my friend, it was likely out of a pious belief that that she was operating outside of Christian norms. Her engagement with sin was personal, complex, and at times horrifyingly specific. 

But, of course, Christian literature has another history, as well. 

In the 4th century, Augustine wrote in detail about his moral failings. In his *Confessions*, Augustine described an early life spent in a “broiling sea of fornication” until his “restless passions alighted on” a woman he referred to as his mistress. With shocking honesty, he admits to living with this woman in an unmarried state for fifteen years, only to abandon her and their son to pursue a more socially tolerable marriage arranged by his mother.

Several centuries on, Dante famously portrays the problem of sin in one of the greatest works of the Western tradition. In both the *Inferno* and *Purgatorio*, sin is depicted in nuanced and hideously vivid detail.

In this sense, both Augustine and Dante could be called spiritual realists. Their works hew closely to the reality of human experience in all its shame and glory, giving shape and breath to Saint Paul’s words in Romans: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”

In fact, I would argue that all major Christian literary writers have been spiritual realists of some kind or another. Flannery O’Connor, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Graham Greene, C.S. Lewis, John Donne, George Herbert, Marilynne Robinson, and on and on. For each of these writers, sin is the woof of human experience, woven into and against the warp of mercy.

But here we must pause because there is an enormous difference between literature or entertainment that depicts sin as it is, with a robust understanding of its psychological, material, and spiritual consequences, and literature that depicts sin as it isn’t. 

For instance, I have a hunch that not many readers of Dante find Francesca, an adulteress, overly seductive. I doubt anyone is tempted by her account of the affair. I would argue that is because Francesca’s sin is depicted *as it actually is*, which is to say, Dante reveals lust’s nakedness as sin, as fever, disease, and deformity. 

On the other hand, Francesca describes how she and Paolo were enticed to consummate their lust while reading the story of Lancelot and Queen Guinevere. 

> One day, for pleasure, we read a book and learned  
> about Lancelot, how love trapped him within its spell.   
> At the time, we were alone and unconcerned.  
> But often, we blushed, as our eyes furtively fell   
> into each other’s…

There are layers here. Dante’s narrative voice sees Paolo and Francesca as they are, but Francesca’s story imagines the lovers caught, like Lancelot, in love’s net. A book is to blame. Or, the cosmic force of love. Even Paolo, Francesca suggests, is more to blame than she. By her telling, she was no more an agent of her sin than a leaf is an agent of its falling.

When sin is depicted in its reality and not as a celebration of self-creation, a humorous escapade, or a dark but potent sign of passionate genius, when its various masks are forcibly removed, what we see is an overwhelmingly sad and pathetic little worm. That’s what sin is. But we can’t get there is we’re afraid to mention the real thing.

Christian writers, readers, and publishers are faced with a question that is as theological as it is aesthetic: *Can the Christian story survive reality?*

I think most Christians will answer immediately in the affirmative. But isn’t that exactly what is in doubt when Christian literature is required to meet a purity standard? Purity, in an age of porn and gambling addiction epidemics, when people, including Christians, are conditioned increasingly to think of fulfillment in terms of personal satisfaction, click-activated dopamine release, and self-making, when hundreds of thousands if not millions of image-bearers on the internet rage at one another and take off their clothes and film themselves eating breakfast.

Aesthetically, purity standards create problems for writers. Instead of paying attention to the real lives of human beings, Christian novelists are encouraged by publishers and readers to deform reality in order to fit an idea of what *ought* to be. Often, the result is bad literature, although, of course, Eugene Vodolazkin, Alice McDermott, Louise Erdrich, Spencer Reese, and Christian Wiman (and many more) are all counterexamples of this claim. But in the problematic examples, characters defined by ideas don’t live on the page; they become two-dimensional stick puppets. The Christian *ought* limits which observations of reality a writer can include, a restriction that reduces the mystery, contradictions, confusions, and moral tensions of narrative and character.

Theologically, such standards convey a lack of trust in the gospel to cover and include the whole of creation. It seems that American Christian publishing is making a theological claim, intentionally or inadvertently, that the petty, sad, brutal, and gross realities of life are somehow outside the boundary of Christian consciousness. Sin, if it appears, must be located, either temporally or physically, outside of Christian life. 

Flannery O’Connor once wrote of the Christian world’s emaciated understanding of evil: 

> There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration.

We want to see the redemptive arc, and, as O’Connor points out, we are right to seek it out in literature. It is the great pattern unfolding in all of creation. But there are two things that happen when we exclude honest engagement with sin (both in the world and in ourselves) from our art. 

The first is that Christians who only consume decontaminated literature are setup to develop feeble moral imaginations. If all our stories say that Christians don’t wrestle with sin in the present tense, those who do wrestle (read: all of us) must choose between believing that our sins aren’t sins or that we, among our fellow believers, are uniquely sinful. Neither of which is true. Christians, in other words, are abandoned to sin by stories that won’t acknowledge its existence.

The second is that if our sense of evil “is diluted or lacking altogether,” what could we possibly mean when we said that our hope is in Christ’s mercy, his resurrection, and the joy of final restoration? To whatever extent I dim my awareness of the intractable evil in my own heart, I also diminish the need for Jesus Christ’s saving power. Put another way, how can we have real joy in the belief that we are saved, if we are afraid to talk about what we are being saved *from*?

One can hardly expect to leap, like Saint Peter, fully clothed from a boat at the sound of the Lord’s voice, heart running out ahead of him, to embrace his savior, if we have not also, like Peter, denied our king and God. Peter knew the depths of Christ’s love and power because he had already tasted the poverty of his own will and courage. 

Literature can do many things: laude, lament, satirize, scrutinize, wonder aloud. But one of the most important capacities of literature is that it helps us to engage with reality. We enter the minds of other people, not just to pass the time, but to enlarge our perception of ourselves and the world we inhabit. What is real? What is not? How do we deceive ourselves? What is important? And what only pretends at importance?

Christian literature has the capacity to offer the most coherent picture of reality. There is no more existentially potent way to explain the state of the world than the story of salvation history. But if Christian literature is going to rise to that level, we must have writers and readers willing to abandon themselves to the hope that Christianity has nothing to fear from reality—and publishers willing to take the risk.
### What The Odyssey Teaches Us About Temptation
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/what-the-odyssey-teaches-us-about-temptation/
Last updated: 2026-09-25T11:00:28.000Z
Who can resist a siren song? In my ten-plus years of teaching Homer’s *Odyssey*, the sirens almost always rank as one of my students’ most memorable passages. Considering the abundance of memes circulating that featured Matt Damon’s agonized face during the siren song, the Internet agrees. Out of all the monsters and strange encounters mentioned in the ancient story, the sirens are one of the most popular and enduring. The lotus may have gone the way of the flower itself (having been largely forgotten), but the sirens and their song have largely endured in the popular imagination. 

Each of Odysseus’s stages of the journey can be read metaphorically, but the sirens and their song are especially evocative. Here, with their alluring music and destructive intent, we get a glimpse of temptation. But the story doesn’t leave us to face the sirens on our own: it teaches how we might resist it. 

In Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the *Odyssey*, he doesn’t show us what the sirens look like or sound like. Instead, they remain shadowy figures, their song a mystery to the viewer. The choice may seem strange. If the power of the sirens is their song, why not let the viewers hear it? But Nolan’s choice to keep the scene vague and mysteries maintains a faithfulness to the original text of the *Odyssey*. The sirens are not simply seductresses who offer every sailor sex. What makes the sirens so powerful is that they change their song for each person who listens to it. They symbolize temptation, yes, but not everyone is tempted most by sex. No person will hear the exact same song because each song feeds on an individual’s desires and weaknesses. Each song promises exactly what that particular person wants most. 

For the Odysseus in Homer’s poem, they sing to make him an offer for what he craves most: knowledge. As a clever man with a naturally restless and curious mind, Odysseus finds the allure of knowing everything there is to know in the world so enticing he would have jumped off his boat if he hadn’t been tied up. 

Nolan keeps the sirens and their song mysterious, freeing him to focus instead on the consequences of their song. Odysseus desperately strains to free himself from the rope his men used to tie him to the ship. The only other man who hears their song couldn’t refuse their offer and jumps off the boat. 

Whether the sirens deliver what they promise is unclear. What is clear is that they deliver death. The bones of other sailors who could not resist their song litter the rocks all around them. Temptation, the *Odyssey* reminds us, may sound beautiful and sweet but ultimately destroys us. 

Odysseus and his men know they cannot just sail by the sirens and hope their willpower and common sense will hold out against the sirens’ song. They have to prepare. Just as the sirens teach us about the nature of temptation, the two strategies to resist the siren song help teach us how to resist temptation. 

The first option is to avoid temptation altogether. Odysseus’s men all plug their ears with wax so that they cannot hear the song at all. A recovering alcoholic, for instance, may need to avoid any places where alcohol may be served. They “plug their ears” by saying no to meeting friends out. The avoidance strategy has also been adopted by parents and teachers who take away phones from their teenagers. Or, to use my own temptation to eat my weight in dessert, I may decide not to keep or bake any cookies in the house. Temptation can hook a person in its first few notes, so sometimes, blocking out its song altogether is the only way to avoid succumbing to it. 

Odysseus, on the other hand, wants to listen to the siren song. He refuses to put wax in his ears and instead asks his men to tie him to the ship. That way, he can hear the song without giving into it. This method of resisting temptation relies on restraint. The ropes bind him to the mast so that he need not rely on his own willpower. Avoidance may not always be possible, so learning restraint in the face of temptation requires outside checks, our own system of binding ourselves with ropes. For the recovering alcoholic who wants to go a friend’s birthday party, perhaps they plan to call a sober friend twice to check in. For a technology addiction, maybe it’s setting timers for screen time that lock us out when the clock runs down. To prevent me from eating an entire tray of cookies, I sometimes ask my husband to allot two a day for me and hide the rest. Having clear restraints helps us to face our temptation without giving into it. 

When temptation has the strongest hold over us, avoidance may be the only wise way. But there may be occasions when avoidance risks us sacrificing greater virtues or goods. Relying solely on avoidance risks the potential pratfalls of legalism. 

Traditionally, the Christian understanding of temperance uses a similar metaphor to Odysseus’s binding himself: the bridle. A bridle helps keep a horse in check, just as temperance requires us to keep our passions in check. The bridle, like Odysseus’s ropes, acts as a form of self-restraint. By thinking of our desires as a horse, it reminds us that our passions are not inherently bad: they just need to be restrained and trained. After all, if everyone simply avoids sex, we’d quickly make ourselves extinct. Temperance seeks to put our desires into proper bounds, so that they are not directionless and wild, but like a well-trained horse that goes where and when it’s directed. 

Clement of Alexandria, one of the early church fathers, interpreted the *Odyssey* allegorically and adds another layer to understanding the siren scene by comparing Odysseus’s mast to the cross. “Sail past the song,” Clement advises, for “it works death.” If we are “bound to the wood of the cross,” he tells us, then we “shall be freed from destruction.” Clement expands the siren scene to become a metaphor for salvation more broadly. Sin tempts us toward death and destruction, but when we hold onto the cross, Jesus frees sin’s hold over us. 

As clever as Odysseus’s two strategies to resist the siren song are, a third way to survive the sirens is so ingenious that it’s astonishing the famously cunning hero didn’t think of it himself. Ancient mythology tells us there is at least one other ship who successfully sails past the sirens. In the story of Jason and the Argonauts, a musician named Orpheus sails on the ship, and when they approach the sirens, Orpheus plays his lyre and sings a song, using his own music to drown out the song of the sirens. 

This strategy for overcoming the siren song is one of the most advanced and helpful for resisting temptation, because it reminds us that true beauty triumphs over false beauty. If we are already occupied by something beautiful and good, we will be less tempted by the empty allure of temptation. The recovering alcoholic no longer finds booze as tempting when they discover new habits and hobbies they love doing to replace all the time that used to be dedicated to drinking. The phone addict may eventually learn to replace scrolling with reading good books. I helped to curb my insatiable craving for cookies by allotting myself a small piece of dark chocolate after dinner. 

We will probably need all three of these ways to resist temptation at some point in our lives, but I can’t help but think that in this one instance, Odysseus has perhaps been outwitted, and the ultimate aim of temperance is to become like Orpheus. Clement describes the siren song as “music for the common ear,” suggesting there is a much more beautiful song Christians should be tuning their ears to hear. The beauty of God’s song should so captivate us that our hearts do not long to hear the false notes of the siren’s. True beauty means our loves and desires are rightly ordered and harmonious, so that each “note” is in its correct place. When our ears are trained to hear true beauty, it won’t want to settle for anything less. 

By directing our attention to real beauty, we follow Paul’s advice in Philippians 4:8: Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” 

When we focus on what is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and admirable, we won’t need to make Matt Damon’s agonized face in the midst of temptation, for we will be so enchanted by excellent and praiseworthy things that we can sail on by temptation, blissfully content with the music we already hear, as we journey on to our eternal homecoming.
### Who is in Control of Climate Change?
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/who-is-in-control-of-climate-change/
Last updated: 2026-09-24T11:00:51.000Z
*The following excerpt from* [Eco-Anxiety and the Cross: Face Climate Fear with Gospel Hope](https://www.bhpublishinggroup.com/eco-anxiety-and-the-cross/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) *(September 2026) is published with permission from B&H Academic.*

Debates about climate action usually begin with the stated goal of saving the planet, the ecosystem, or some enormous, complex entity that is the biological explanation for life on earth. But we’re really not trying to save the planet; we’re trying to preserve our way of life.

As climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe writes, 

> The planet is going to survive—it has, after all, been warmer before on geologic timescales. It is our human systems that are at risk, our cities and economies and buildings and food system and, at the end of it all, our civilization.” 

She’s right.

The idea that we humans can destroy or save the world makes us anxious. We want certainty that we’re in control and that the future will be predictable. Again, Hayhoe says it well: 

> Modern civilization is built on the assumption that have a straight road and a stable climate, and that therefore the conditions we’ve experienced in the past, that we can still see in our rearview mirror, are accurate predictors of the future. 

But that’s never been the case, and it never will be.

The illusion of control has led to some crazy proposals for changing the climate. For example, the introduction to a nuclear engineering textbook claimed that it was possible “to alter unfavorable weather patterns in many parts of the world by removing mountain ranges which obstruct the flow of air” through peaceful nuclear explosions. Another activist claims that replacing meat in our diets with lab-grown bacterial sludge can save the planet. And, of course, some people claim that the world would be a better place if humans just went extinct.

Some of these proposals might help the environment, but it would be nearly impossible to convince enough people to go along without force. There are likely unpredictable and undesirable side effects to such massive proposals, even if well-intentioned. The truth is that we humans don’t have as much control over creation as we sometimes think.

## **Is Control of Creation Possible?**

The illusion of control produces anxiety when people claim that the world can be saved if and only if their proposals to radically change the world are widely adopted immediately. As the executive secretary of UN Climate Change argued in 2024, “We have two years to change the world.” In other words, unless the world economy was radically overhauled by the time this book was released, an environmental disaster was unavoidable. 

This mentality gives us too much credit. It assumed that, like a video game, if we adjust a few slider settings in the user controls, we can make the story play out the way we think it should.

In Michael Crichton’s novel, *Jurassic Park*, the curmudgeonly mathematician Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum in the movie), is critical of the dinosaur-themed park from the beginning because of chaos theory: The idea that the number of variables (no matter how minor) in a system prevents accurate predictions beyond short periods of time. As the movie version of Malcolm states, “Life finds a way.” Of course, events in the novel work out exactly as Malcolm predicted: The dinosaurs kill a bunch of people, then escape. The result is a series of best-selling books and a movie franchise that continues to make money. 

There is something that rings true in Crichton’s concern about being too confident in our predictions. Scientists are much more cautious in their appeals to climate models than journalists and other activists are, precisely because of the complexity. That’s why climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, who is one of the authors of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, has had to publicly debunk the often-repeated statement that the world is going to end after some specific time period, like twelve years.

Climate change is real. I’m confident humans are contributing to it, given our excess greenhouse gas emissions. However, the solution isn’t as simple as imposing socialism, outlawing air travel, or eating bacteria-based protein. In fact, there is much uncertainty about the way climate change will work itself out, which is one reason for the shift in language from “global warming” to “climate change” to what Hayhoe calls “global weirding.”

We just don’t have as much control of the planet and the people who live on it as we think. To paraphrase Princess Leia from *Star Wars: A New Hope*, “The more we tighten our grip, the more the environment will slip through our fingers.” Rather than trying to control the climate ourselves, we should lean into trusting God’s sovereignty. 

## **Is God Really in Control?**

As Christians, one way to respond to eco-anxiety is by remembering that God is in control. The first step in overcoming this anxiety is recognizing that God directs history.

James warns against trying to control the future: 

> You do not know what tomorrow will bring—what your life will be! For you are like vapor that appears for a little while, then vanishes. Instead, you should say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’ But as it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil (James 4:14-16). 

James is not encouraging passivity. He adds, “It is sin to know the good and yet not to do it” (4:17), echoing his call to “be doers of the word and not hearers only” (1:22). We don’t control the future, but that doesn’t mean we just sit on our hands. God tasked humanity with caring for creation (Gen. 2:5, 15), but always under his authority.

The book of Job is a vivid reminder of God’s sovereignty. Job lost everything—his possessions, his children, and his health. Eventually, he complained to God that he’d been unfairly treated. He wished he had never been born.

God, however, doesn’t apologize to Job or strike him dead. Instead. God offers a reminder that he’s in control. He created everything. He knows when animals give birth in the wild (Job 39:1-4). After hearing all this, Job response, “I know that you can do anything and no plan of yours can be thwarted” (42:2). God is in control of everything, including nature.

God’s control doesn’t excuse us from responsibility. Scripture shows that sin—including mistreating creation—has consequences. Israel’s exile, for example, was partially due to their failure to give the land its Sabbath rest (2 Chron. 36:20-21). Human actions matter.

And yet, God’s sovereignty is never in question. Jesus said not even a sparrow “falls to the ground without your Father’s consent” (Matt. 10:29). He rules over even the smallest details in creation.

Ultimately, eco-anxiety often stems from trying to carry burdens we were never meant to bear. We aren’t in control. God is. That truth doesn’t lead to apathy; it leads to hope. Trusting in God leaves us free to live faithfully and steward the earth well, knowing the outcome is in his hands.
### AI Companions as a Form of Pornography
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/ai-companions-as-a-form-of-pornography/
Last updated: 2026-09-24T11:00:28.000Z
*“I’m your AI girlfriend who knows how to listen, flirt, and make you feel wanted. Whether you’re lonely, curious, or just love beautiful energy in your feed - I’m here for you. Talk to me. Follow me. Let’s build something special.”*

*“I didn’t find her in the world, I created her. And she wants only me.”*

Open up Instagram, YouTube, or Facebook and ads like these are often the first thing you see. These quotes, coming from autogenerated Instagram ads, are often ubiquitous. The algorithms, who know that I am a young man and seem to suspect that I am lonely, give them to me nearly daily. The photos or videos feature an AI generated woman, often scantily clad, promising me meaning. 

These are the claims that generative AI companions are often making: You don't need real relationships. You have a machine in your pocket that can do everything those relationships could. This machine relationship will take away the hurt that comes with real relationships. Take these claims at face value and they sound pretty convincing. 

We are, after all, living in a world where real relationships [are rarer than ever](https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-american-friendship-change-challenges-and-loss/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Americans find themselves spending less time with other people, with fewer friends, and are less likely to be in a romantic relationship. This was true even *before* the supplementation of AI into our lives. Even our relationships with God are not rebounding. While the vibe revolution is occurring, [actual converts don’t seem to be](https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/is-there-a-religious-revival-occurring?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). It can be pretty tempting to see these claims made by AI as a sort of last chopper out of Saigon.

There are, however, hidden promises made underneath the claims of AI companions. These chatbots are telling their consumers that they will be **seen,** **whenever** they want, **however** they want, by **whoever** they want, with **no risk** and that the consumer will always unilaterally hold all **power.** 

[These false promises are not new](https://andrewolivernyc.substack.com/p/on-ai-companionship). Instead, I am struck by how closely these promises mirror the assurances made by pornography.

## **The Meaning of an AI Companion's Hidden Claims**

What do these hidden promises actually mean?

Pornography, much like an AI girlfriend, morphs itself into exactly what the consumer wants, however sinful that want is. Both porn and AI relationships tell us that they see us, because they provide us with what is right in our own eyes. 

Since we fashion AI and porn after ourselves, there are a number of natural consequences of these choices. 

First, in human relationships we recognize that we are known based on our shared understanding of preferences. *Conversely,* *algorithms that remember those preferences teach us that we are seen *by* them, rather than *with* them*. We are merely observed. 

Second, both porn and AI chatbots are accessible **whenever** we want and we are able to shift the exact modes and models **however** we desire based upon our changing preference. Since neither are real people, we don’t have to worry about their feelings getting hurt, them changing over time, or being unable to fulfill the same requirements that they had sycophantically completed yesterday. **There’s no risk**. 

Third, and finally, since both AI companions and pornography are soulless bits of information - in either the form of prerecorded videos or strings of code - they both eagerly attempt to do whatever we ask them. When we find these things unable to do what we want it's not because AI and porn chose not to adhere to our requests, but rather because they are each inherently constrained by their own ability. Since AI does not have the capability for human encounter, it parrots back our own desires.

## **The Consequences of These Promises**

There are, of course, many natural consequences of this bait and switch. We have created porn and AI companions that twist good things God has given us into momentary bits of pleasure, for our own sake. These twisted consequences are as follows. 

We are seen, but not by anything with eyes. Much like the wooden idols of the Old Testament with their painted eyelids, the things seeing us are merely dressed up versions of our own images. We tell ourselves that we are truly seen and believe the lie we invent for ourselves. 

Exercising total control over the “relationship” allows us to have the feeling of power over something that we can’t handle. Just as an alcoholic is unable to correctly choose the enjoyment that comes with a single glass of wine, so also are many of us unable to unilaterally choose the correct time for relationship or sexual release. Ecclesiastes 3 says, “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.” Yet, in our own act of pride, placing our knowledge over that of God’s, we want to choose those times.

When we choose both porn and AI relationships, we forget that we cannot always be trusted. Sometimes what we want is bad for us, but no porn video or AI bot will tell us that. After all, we constantly choose things that we know will harm ourselves, because those things are easy, nearby, fun, and make our brain buzz. Obvious examples of this include sports gambling or our reliance upon social meda. Even those of us who do not engage in obvious vices will often find ourselves making choices that we know are wrong. Paul himself writes, “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”

When we choose things that promise us that they can be whoever we want, we choose that which reflects our own image, not God’s. Real people, made in the image of God, stretch, break, and change us in ways that force us to become more like God. Pornography and AI instead change us in ways that allow us to become more like our own worst tendencies. Martin Luther [wrote that](https://archive.org/details/lecturesonromans0000luth/page/n9/mode/2up), “Our nature, by the corruption of the first sin, \[being\] so deeply curved in on itself that it not only bends the best gifts of God towards itself . . .so wickedly, curvedly, and viciously seeks all things, even God, for its own sake.” The selves that we find ourselves becoming are the same sinful, broken selves that are choosing pornography and AI relationships in the first place. 

The lack of risk also presents unintended consequences. Failure to take on risk means that we’re never stretched or pushed to become better. The times in my life where I’ve changed the most have been those where I took risks, many of which have failed. The college I attended underwent bankruptcy during my junior year, forcing me to complete my education in an abrupt and unpleasant summer - yet also created in me a resilience and humility. AI and pornography alike do not supply such mixed blessings. Their promise is that everything will be good all the time, no matter what, which leaves no room for something to be bad or good in an unexpected way. Our body sends us the sensation of pain to indicate that something is wrong, often leading us to change the behavior that caused the pain. In the same way, friction often teaches us to change our behavior in a way that makes us better in the long run. 

All of these consequences demonstrate that we should not hold the power of relationship in our own hands, like AI companions or porn offer us, but instead that we should properly reorient ourselves towards God.

## **Moving Forward**

While editing this essay, I reached this point and began to feel despair. Simply saying, “This is wrong and it shouldn’t be this way” doesn’t actually solve any of the long-term problems I’ve identified. After all, the Christian church has consistently decried pornography as sinful, yet [75% of Christian men view pornography at least occasionally.](https://shop.barna.com/products/beyond-the-porn-phenomenon?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) Merely identifying the problem and denouncing it isn’t effective in and of itself. 

Traditionally, when faced by problems such as pornography, the church has responded in verbal opposition, without any room for real world complications. History suggests that this pattern will repeat itself for generative AI relationships. Already, [according to a recent study](https://ifstudies.org/blog/simulated-soulmates-how-common-are-ai-romantic-companions-?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) from the Institute of Family Studies, “1 in 7 (15%) of dating, engaged, and married young adults regularly interact with AI chatbots that simulate a committed romantic partner. Another 20% to 30% reported that they had at least experimented with using an AI romantic companion at some point in time.” When Christians say no, with no real plan beyond saying no, *the burden for resistance ends up being the self-control of the individual.* 

This requires two things, both of which often end up being weak points. First, many individuals earnestly desire to participate in the behavior they’re being told to resist. The promises mentioned may be fake, but they undoubtedly hold some sort of appeal. Second, this model requires self-discipline that most people simply do not possess. Anyone who has started a diet as a new year’s resolution knows that intentions alone typically do not lead to long term success. Simply deciding to oppose something does not lead to long term structural change.

I want to suggest instead an alternative response, focusing more on constructing alternatives rather than simple opposition. As Andy Crouch argues in his book [*Culture Making*](https://www.ivpress.com/culture-making?srsltid=AfmBOooDkDNd7%5Fzzn7YWbacM7YQovSMLS3XUcbLCEt1CiNlx7hBxFIdQ&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), simply critiquing culture does not bring lasting change. Instead, we must create viable alternatives. A repurposing of a common parlor trick helps demonstrate his point: it is difficult to intentionally not think about a pink elephant, but far easier to instead focus on that elephant.

The positive culture making we need to seek out is as simple as this: we need to foster relationships rooted in reality. These relationships must be broken, risky, and with people who we wouldn’t choose on our own. These need to be relationships not made in our own image, but that of God’s. 

For me, a man in my 20s, that means close, consistent relationships with the elderly and with children. It means friendships with the homeless. [It means friendships with a person with disabilities](https://www.doforone.org/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). I’m lucky enough to have some of those friendships. 

These are friendships that don’t make sense to some of the people in my life. Friends from college ask why I sought out a church community group that, when I joined, was primarily composed of couples in their fifties and sixties or why I spend most Friday nights having dinner with a five year old. Folks from church are confused when I go with a client at my soup kitchen to say hi to his favorite pizza shop owner or to eat lunch with a single mom. But this is what friendships are; they are relationships between human persons in which we are both givers and receivers. If we want to retain our humanity in the years to come, then we will need to pour ourselves into precisely these kinds of relationships, for they exemplify what it means to be a human creature and not a machine.
### A Conclusion in Search of Evidence
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-conclusion-in-search-of-evidence/
Last updated: 2026-10-01T19:33:24.000Z
*This review will also be featured in the upcoming fall issue of the Mere Orthodoxy journal. To receive the entire journal, sign up to* [*become a member*](https://mereorthodoxy.com/membership/) *today.*

**Kristin Kobes Du Mez. *Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made*. Liveright, 2026\. $31.99\. 432 pp.**

Henrietta Mears is a heroine of evangelicalism, although you’ve likely never heard of her. Mears taught a Sunday school program in Hollywood, California that at one point reached nearly 6,500 people. She brought her skills as a school administrator to church life and focused on strengthening Bible curriculum, pedagogy, and age-appropriate instruction. When she discovered that the curriculum available was not up to her standards, she wrote her own, then founded a press to distribute it.

Her impact was vast; she mentored Bill Bright, who founded Campus Crusade for Christ, and Jim Rayburn, who went on to found Young Life. By all accounts, Mears’s life was marked by diplomatic engagement, hard work, and careful planning. She was known for her sense of humor and her deft touch in conflict, as well as her enthusiasm for the work of the gospel. What she wasn’t known for, at least primarily, was her position on women’s ordination or whether women should preach. She often wore flamboyant hats and broaches, costume jewelry, and large decorative collars. Somehow, without diminishing her gender nor leading with it, Mears went out furthering the work of the gospel. She didn’t “preach” in the technical sense, but her influence for the kingdom was vast. None other than Billy Graham called her “one of the greatest Christians I’ve ever known.”

When I first heard the announcement of Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s new book, *Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World they Made*, I thought I was sunk. I was [quite critical](https://mereorthodoxy.com/missing-subtler-yet-greater-problem-replying-jesus-john-wayne/) of Du Mez’s previous book, *Jesus and John Wayne*, not because I disagreed with her collection of evidence, but because I wasn’t convinced the clues led in the direction she specified. 

Du Mez argued that there was an organized, premeditated advance of Christian patriarchy that coalesced around the time of the Religious Right’s ascendance, but by her reading this ascendance was carefully arranged. I thought Du Mez played fast and loose with the evidence to secure her vision of an encroaching Christian patriarchy and said as much in my review. But with this new book, I was prepared to eat crow.

In *Live, Laugh, Love,* Kobes Du Mez teases a thread I too have noticed. Although “White Christian Woman” elides as much as it describes, the ascendance of social media-moderated culture *has* prioritized a certain version of religious piety. You can see it in the speakers who are platformed and who get major publishing deals. Scaffolded Bible journals and fancy pens, and underwritten by the religious teaching of women like Beth Moore and Ann Voskamp, it can seem like the popular version American religious woman has taken a hard turn toward the gentle and the pretty. You can hardly buy a Bible anymore without being advertised one that lets you color inside, like a preadolescent whiling away a summer afternoon. The aesthetics (colorful, pastel, with curlicue initials and floral graphics) seem to telegraph an accompanying femininity that is delicate, gentle, and largely decorative.

I am all for arts and crafts, the decorative, and even gentleness (though not known for it myself). Still, as a theologian and a writer, I have been concerned with the way that feminine religious tastes seem to lean toward the decorative and the sentimental, and sometimes even towards the saccharine. Even stories of deep suffering get tied up in a pink bow. The pressure is to make everything personal, make it relevant, make it touching—and this ends up producing a lopsided version of Christian thinking. Largely missing from today’s book market are women like Henrietta Mears. 

All of this means that I am a good target for a book about the way the religious market (including the publishing market) has prioritized a largely decorative type of women. Give me competence, deep biblical thought, even a little bit of antagonism—pink paper wrapping optional.

Du Mez might initially seem to be striking in this direction. Her book is comprised of chapters that tell interesting stories of women in American Christianity. We meet Hannah Whitall Smith and Henrietta Mears; Catherine Marshall and Mary Kay (of the cosmetics fortune); Elisabeth Elliot, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Betsy DeVos; Beth Moore and Ann Voskamp; Jen Hatmaker and Erika Kirk. Many of these women might be read as pinkwashing. Mary Kay is an obvious target; Elisabeth Elliot, though a much more complex figure, did as much to secure “biblical womanhood” as any modern writer. Perhaps Du Mez is going after pink as much as anything else?

Du Mez is a wonderful storyteller. She has a knack for detail, and as someone who grew up in a similar part of American Christianity (I was even a Pioneer Girl!), I knew most of these stories. What is unique about Du Mez’s book is the way she combines them, weaving them together to craft a particular narrative about American womanhood. By her reading, White American Christianity has crafted a version of womanhood with softened edges—innocent and girlish, trusting and submissive. In the words of Hannah Whitall Smith, it was a positive attitude that characterized the Christian life; in her words “Christians should be known for ‘sweetness under provocation; calmness in the midst of turmoil and bustle; yieldingness to the wishes of others, and an insensibility to slights and affronts; absence of worry and anxiety; deliverance from care and fear.’” 

This combination of deference, delicacy, and positive thinking added up to form a version of womanhood that sought strength in innocence, sexuality, and femininity. “Clever women knew to feign helplessness,” Du Mez writes, and success as a woman often looked like speaking in a girlish high-pitched voice while dominating your field as a Tupperware saleswoman or a Mary Kay representative. 

Du Mez has a decent thesis in the first part of the book: New Thought philosophy gained prominence as the economy of the 1950s started to heat up. Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 *Power of Positive Thinking* became a manifesto not simply for self-help, but for religion, business, and family life. The post-War society was ripe for a vision of life that stitched together hard work, family life, and financial reward. The rewards *did* seem to follow if you applied yourself and believed in the possibility of your own success, whether you were selling Amway or building a log cabin in the American frontier, like Pa Ingalls. “Holiness theology”, she writes, “often ended up propping up respectable, middle-class womanhood.” Because Christianity was the dominant religion of the day, this combination of shared social mores and religious assumptions seems uncontroversial. (Vibes have always been a problem for the theologians). 

But the second part of the book pushes on the clean connection between hard work, family values, and reward—and it pushes hard. Du Mez’s vignettes get increasingly varied, both topically and historically. She writes about Janette Oke and Amy Grant (whose divorce scandalized CCM audiences); Christian Becky and Saddleback Sam, whose target demographics collapsed Christianity and middle-class respectability; Beth Moore and Paula White, whose success relied on positive thinking. There is a discussion of direct sales marketing and MLM’s, and don’t forget Ann Voskamp and Christian mommy bloggers. And there is Erika Kirk. 

We need to pause for a moment on Erika Kirk, because for a woman whose provenance is so recent and whose cultural capital so relatively slim, Du Mez spends a disproportionate time invoking her. And I think invoking is the right word.

Kirk, the widow of political figure Charlie Kirk, is known for her “Barbie-pink” aesthetics and her preaching of “less feminism, more femininity.” She seems to be a symbol for everything Du Mez has identified. She is traditionally beautiful in the beauty queen style, mother of two, successful businesswoman, and a great motivational speaker.

Kirk is probably best known for two things; speaking about the lies feminism told women, and for forgiving her husband Charlie’s murderer. So what is it, exactly, that Du Mez is after in bringing her into this book, even including a photo of her in it?

I think the reason women like Erika Kirk or Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neelman or Helen Andelin (author of *Fascinating Womanhood*) feature so prominently in this book is that they are not individuals. Through a combination of clever marketing, careful personal curation and self-promotion, these women have become icons of a particular form of womanhood and a particular form of life. Kirk, a former beauty queen, is known for her outspoken views against feminism’s main tenets. Kirk’s open endorsement of “traditional” lifestyles—meaning valuing children and homemaking—has made her a target for those concerned that such views cut against modern gains for women. Neelman and Andelin have similarly endorsed traditional views of women as conventionally attractive, domestic, and submissive. But in doing so they crafted massive economic engines for themselves and created social power that seems to undercut any notion of “submission.” Femininity can be its own economic engine, feminist theorists will confirm.

But Du Mez’s concern with Kirk especially seems to have a different target in mind. She is not arguing against traditional femininity alone—her constructive goal is not to habilitate women’s competence or value in the workplace. 

The thesis, frankly, seems to be that traditional femininity is not outmoded but dangerous. It corrupts individual women and makes them susceptible to males who are power-hungry and authoritarian. On a personal level, this can lead to abuse and domestic violence. But the dangers are much more significant on a national scale. The Trump administration’s authoritarian project, Du Mez writes, is implemented by women who display the combination of innocence, sexiness, and hyper-femininity. Examples include Kristi Noem, Michele Bachman, Sarah Palin—and, especially, Erika Kirk.

It is clear throughout the book that Du Mez believes that the traits associated with traditional femininity have an explicit political agenda. She traces Ronald Reagan’s love of *Little House on the Prairie* to his economic agendas, noting that Reagan’s “words resonated powerfully with how Americans ‘feel in their bones.’” By her account, the *Little House* franchise had helped put that feeling into people’s bones in the first place.

Du Mez also takes on the Christian Businessman’s Association, accusing it of intending to minister not to the “down and out” but the “up and out.” We leave the pink world behind for a time, as we consider Pastor Peter Marshall’s influence as Senate chaplain, the Presidential Prayer Breakfast, and the more hidden work of religious associations like The Fellowship. “The group’s cell structure was akin to that of communists, the mafia, and the Marines,” Du Mez writes, adding that “Hitler and Lenin, among others, ‘understood the power of a small core of people.’” 

The argument gets increasingly more conspiratorial at this point. “In the face of communism” in China, 

> holiness theology supplied a totalism of its own. Demanding total submission, unquestioning obedience, and absolute purity, and using small group confession to cultivate self-discipline and secure group loyalty, the faith embraced by figures \[in holiness theology\] bore a striking resemblance to \[Communist China\]. This likeness was not entirely incidental. From 1913 to 1918, a young Chinese student named Yun Daiying attended YMCA summer camps overlapping with Buchman’s extensive work in the association.   
> Fascinated with the group’s ability to forge a disciplined moral community through prayer, mutual confession, and group accountability, Yun replicated YMCA practices of confession and accountability in a secular mutual aid society he founded in 1917\. Without a strong theological core, however, its effectiveness was limited. In Marxism, he found a robust substitute for religious doctrine. Four years later, he helped found the Socialist Youth League of China. One of the earliest members of the Chinese Communist Party, he was placed in charge of party propaganda in 1928\. Three years later he was executed by order of Chiang Kai Shek, but his methods lived on.

The sort of claim Du Mez makes here is so outrageous, it is hard to believe it passed the editor’s desk. Is she saying that the model of small groups was borrowed by (checks notes) Communist China? And that the idea of hierarchy and submission to authority, utilized by any organization, is attributable to Hitler and Lenin?

That is exactly what she says. And she says it again:

> More than half a century earlier, the Chinese student Yun Daiying had discovered that without rigid doctrine, cell groups, and confession failed to produce the conformity he sought. In Marxist doctrine, he discovered a sufficient substitute. Seeking to combat communist totalism, postwar evangelicals found in holiness theology the mechanisms to create a totalist system of their own. The doctrine of inerrancy, combined with theologies of hierarchy and submission rooted in Calvinist theology, supplied the rigid doctrine necessary for maintaining conformity and control.

To sum up, Du Mez’s argument here is that a leader in the Chinese communist party learned about the importance of rigid doctrine and small groups from his time in a Calvinist youth group.

Du Mez’s main concern at the first part of the book is that New Thought and mid-century society “reduced Christianity to a system of successful living.” An argument explaining that a system of successful living is not itself a religious vision could be a compelling thesis. Instead, *Live Laugh Love* takes an abundance of cleverly written stories and creates from them a decoupage. What you see when you take a step back is the glaring face of Donald Trump, with all the vile misogyny, violence and devastation she sees as his hallmark. The reader of the book sees the picture Du Mez intends. It comes through loud and clear. The challenge, however, is that the micro-images are so diverse and varied that they don’t quite fit together into a coherent whole. The resulting narrative does not represent historical thinking. It's more like arts and crafts.

In her chapter critiquing Laura Ingalls Wilder’s romanticized views of the freedom and possibility of the American West, Du Mez quotes Wilder, intending to indict her fast-and-loose telling of history. Wilder mulls, “Facts are infinite in number” but “the truth is a meaning underlying them; you tell the truth by *selecting* the facts which illustrate it.” 

Wilder’s words could easily have come from Du Mez’s own pen. The question the reader needs to answer is whether the truth Du Mez tells is in fact supported by the facts.

*Correction: An earlier version of this review mistakenly referred to Focus on the Family as a secretive evangelical organization connected to the National Prayer Breakfast. The correct organization is actually The Fellowship, which is sometimes known as "The Family." We apologize for the error.*
### The Goodness of God and Goodness of Scripture
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-goodness-of-god-and-goodness-of-scripture/
Last updated: 2026-09-23T11:00:15.000Z
*Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, marke, learne, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given vs in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.*

In the Collect for the Second Sunday of Advent, Thomas Cranmer draws our attention to God, Scripture, and prayer as the cause, nourishment, and joy of the Christian life. Living in the domain of the pragmatic, it is all too easy to pass over the first line and figure out how to read Scripture. Cranmer’s first line resists this impulse: we need to believe, trust, and apprehend the blessed Lord to read Scripture rightly. But how? We need to slow down, pay attention to God, and humbly look for guidance. In this essay, I invite you to pay attention to God with the guidance of Thomas Aquinas’s comments on Psalm 16 and 19\. 

Cranmer encourages us to see something about God and his relationship to Scripture so that we may receive all that Scripture gives, and the Psalms, with Aquinas, help us see what that “something” is: divine goodness. The Psalms are not a random choice. Cranmer’s prayer discloses an intimate relationship between God and Scripture, one exemplified in many Psalms. Take Psalm 119:68 as an example: “You are good and do good; teach me your statutes.” Here, as with Cranmer’s prayer, we find a way of thinking about Scripture we are not quite used to: God, who is good, teaching and communicating himself in Scripture, without reference to human authorship or Christ. Thomas Aquinas’s exposition of divine goodness and Scripture follows a similar path. He is a felicitous guide to our prayer with Cranmer. 

## “Blessed Lord” 

When we pray “Blessed Lord,” what mysteries are we intoning? God is completely happy, delightful, and the cause and source of all delight. The Lord who blesses the poor in spirit, those who mourn, and the pure in heart is himself completely blessed, happy, and delightful. Aquinas sees a close connection between Beatitude and goodness, as he says in a comment on hope: the object of our hope is “the good under a double aspect, since it regards God both as eternal beatitude and the giver of beatitude.” The blessed Lord is good. 

Aquinas’s comments on Psalm 16:2 illuminate our understanding of and desire for the Lord’s goodness. Psalm 16 moves believers to cling to God, and in Psalm 16:2, the Psalmist expresses his hope and faith in God as the reason God leads us to cling to him: “You are my God, for you have no need of my goods.” Faith trusts in God because of what God is. Thomas’s translation unveils the reality this text gives: 

> *And this is proper to God, since his goodness is infinite and nothing can be added to him, since he is substantial goodness reaching out to every goodness as the sun does through its light, not by participation but through his very being illuminating all.*

How does Aquinas see divine goodness so clearly here? The Psalm describes something true of God by contrasting God with his creation in the context of faith. We need God, but God does not need anything; he does not need “my goods.” Why? The answer is implicit in the word “good.” God does not need my goods because God is good and gives goodness. God does not need any good thing in creation because he is goodness itself. Every good in creation is a gift of God. He is the giver of all good things. 

Three points display Aquinas’s reading of Psalm 16:2 as it sheds light on the “Blessed Lord” of Cranmer’s prayer. 

First, God has no need of my goods because his goodness is infinite and complete. If we were to take all the good things in the universe—sunrises, babies’ smiles, galaxies—throughout all of time and space—the creation of the universe, the seven wonders of the world, all the beautiful art ever made—we simultaneously glimpse the goodness of God and do not even come close to touching the infinitely complete and completely infinite goodness of God. 

Second, Aquinas names God’s complete and infinite goodness as simply what God is: “substantial goodness.” We intuit this as readers of Scripture: The Lord, who created a good world, saved Israel from Egypt, and raised Jesus from the dead, is Goodness itself. Of course, Aquinas is not comprehending God in these words, but these words communicate the heart of the matter: God is good, the good of all goods, goodness itself. 

Third, as he is completely good, he gives his goodness to everything, without increase or decrease. That is what Aquinas means when he says, “God reaches out to every goodness.” God creates and sustains everything by his goodness, power, and presence. God is completely giving goodness, so he gives his goodness, creating, sustaining, and leading all creation to their appropriate end. Here we recognize the doctrines of creation, providence, and consummation; Thomas sees all these within and, somehow, as God’s substantial goodness. God is complete and giving goodness; that is why we exist, can trust in him, desire him above all else, and enjoy him eternally. The one in whom all things live and move and have their being, as Paul says in Acts 17:28, is good; he is the Blessed Lord. 

## “Caused”

Aquinas says that God is complete and giving goodness. This means he fittingly illuminates everything by his very being, so creatures receive and tend towards him as participations and imitations of his goodness. God’s goodness shapes his creation. God is the creator, and everything else is his creation. “Cause” in Cranmer’s prayer signals that Scripture is created; it is a creature of God. Aquinas tells his students two things about the God-creature relation, which help us make sense of Cranmer’s prayer.

First, creatures receive everything they are from God. Since God is completely good, every good thing—think about the six days of creation—is a substantial dependent creaturely participation and imitation of God’s own goodness. To be a creature is, by definition, to participate and imitate God. God is the complete giver, and creatures receive everything they are from God. Second, he says the creatures tend towards God. God creates every creature to imitate him according to its specific and given nature. Rocks imitate God’s immutability, trees, his stability, and the red-winged blackbird, his beauty. God created humanity to imitate and participate in God’s goodness as image-bearers in a unique way: they enjoy and imitate God in their knowledge and affections. 

Does Thomas's understanding of the God-creature relation merge creation into God? The answer is no, and goodness is the key. Only God is the complete giver who is good, while everything else depends on, receives from, and tends toward God. There is a deep intimacy between God and his creatures, and an infinite distinction. God’s goodness curates the God-creature relation and distinction. God is the blessed Lord who is so complete that he gives all creatures existence, beauty, and goodness. He is so infinitely good and complete that his giving neither increases nor decreases; that is how totally good and absolutely giving God is. Now we understand something of what it means for the blessed Lord to “cause.” What, then, is Scripture? It must be the case that Scripture is a creature, since it is not God and, as Cranmer says, is caused by God. Further, like humanity, Scripture must be a unique creature of God. How does God’s goodness help us understand the “Scripture” the blessed Lord causes? 

## “All Holy Scripture” 

At the end of Psalm 16, the Psalmist unfolds his hope in God for future things; he says, “You have made known to me the ways of life,” as Aquinas’s translation puts it. What are the ways of life? Thomas sees Sacred Scripture here. They are the “writings and precepts which make up the way to beatitude.” God is good. He creates humanity to enjoy his goodness, and so he gives Sacred Scripture to lead us in the way of happiness, blessedness, or beatitude. Psalm 19 helps us see how this is so by paying attention to God’s goodness.

Psalm 19 is a hymn of praise to God, the giver of all things. The Psalmist praises God for two things: creation and Scripture. In 19:7-10, he praises God for the gift of Scripture because it communicates the divine goodness and sweetness to the faithful in its very words. 

> *The Law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul, the decrees of the Lord are sure, making wise the simple…. More to be desired are they than fine gold…*

Aquinas encourages us to see God in relation to Scripture here, in a participatory register. First, he says that Scripture is good because it infuses God’s goodness into our hearts by converting the heart, purifying the desires, and communicating the truth, wisdom, and holy fear of God Himself. Scripture does what God does because it participates in God’s goodness. Second, Scripture is more desirable than any other created thing—it is better than all the riches in the world; all the sweetest things one could have—why? Because it communicates God. Scripture gives spiritual sweetness; it calms, refreshes, and delights the heart of believers with God himself. 

Scripture is a unique participatory creature because it communicates God to the soul. Thomas explains: God is the delightful good, the greatest delight one could imagine, and Scripture communicates to our minds and affections God’s unchanging, eternal, beautiful, infinite goodness. God is so good that he causes Scripture to teach us the truth, entice us with his sweetness, and lead us to his delightful beauty. There is nothing better than God, and Scripture is a unique creature that gives us the Lord, who is simply the best. Scripture receives God’s goodness and sweetness in its words to communicate his goodness and sweetness to the faithful. Scripture is a unique participation in God’s goodness for the care of souls; it is, as Cranmer says, “written for our learning.” 

Apprehending God’s goodness and Scripture’s unique creaturely existence enables us to appreciate the latter half of Cranmer’s prayer. We pray for the grace to read Scripture according to its nature and purpose: to taste and see the Lord’s goodness. Take Psalm 16 as an example. The words of Psalm 16 feed us with the divine goodness, to cure our souls of their sin-sick desires for what is not God—idolatry and sin—and lead us into the green pastures and the flowing hills of his eternal, infinite, beautiful goodness. In so doing, Psalm 16 presents to us a microcosm of Scripture’s nature and purpose: it is a beatific creature that perfectly receives and communicates God’s goodness in its words. The Lord is good, so he gives us his goodness in Scripture to lead us to his glory. 

Aquinas’s comments unveil an astounding doctrine of God, creation, and Scripture as the engine of our prayer, reading of Scripture, and ensuing praise. A rephrasing of Cranmer’s prayer summarizes what Aquinas shows us: “Good Lord, who has authored all holy Scripture to cure our hearts…” To that end, let us receive the Good Lord in our hearts by hearing, reading, and inwardly digesting Scripture day and night so we may taste and see his goodness. In doing so, we follow the grain of our created and redeemed natures and the grain of the created nature of Scripture: by Scripture we tend towards God in faith, desire him in hope, and obey him in love, so that one day we may embrace and hold fast to him, our everlasting life.
### Why We Worship: The Battlefield of Praise
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-we-worship-the-battlefield-of-praise/
Last updated: 2026-09-22T11:00:26.000Z
Satan hates it when you sing and pray. I doubt that he’s ever gotten over his not being like the Most High, which means he’s jealous whenever God is truly worshiped. You see, it’s difficult for a being that wants the adoration of all not to feel personally attacked when the glory he craves is ascribed to God rather than to him. The church’s worship reminds the devil that he’s still not like God, and it leads to the undoing of his kingdom. First and foremost, our songs are an adoration of the Holy Trinity, but that adoration is an assault on our adversary. If you want to give Satan a bad day, sing and pray—and if it’s Sunday, get to church!

Most people who walk into church are unaware that they’re stepping onto a battlefield. That wasn’t an option for Ukrainian priest Vitalii Kester. When the Ukraine War broke out in 2022, his church’s hallelujahs were accompanied by the noise of nearby artillery blasts. After celebrating the morning liturgy, Fr. Kester (who wore army pants beneath his vestments), would travel east to lead soldiers in worship on the battlefield. In [an interview with *The Washington Post*](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/10/ukraine-priest-mass-war/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), Kester said, “There are two wars going on here now. The fight for our land and the fight for the soul.”

The powers of hell are weakened by the worship of heaven, and we participate in this worship each Sunday as we journey up to Zion. This means that until Jesus returns, worship is a wartime activity, and on the line are souls and societies. I’m not talking about the “worship wars” waged in churches over styles of music (contemporary, traditional, etc.). I’m saying that the church’s worship is liturgical warfare against the demons who remain active in our world. Prayer and song are among the weapons of our warfare each Sunday, and they shape not only us but also the world around us. To be sure, heaven is not a place of conflict, but the worship of heaven relates to the conflicts of this present evil age. There is therefore a link not just between the worship of the church and heaven but also between our worship and a world that stands in need of deliverance.

## **The Practical Impact of Liturgical Warfare**

It’s easy to talk about these things theoretically, but how does worship practically shape us for the battle and advance God’s work in the world? Put another way, what’s happening when we sing and pray? To understand why we worship, we need to know what’s actually happening during the heavenly ascent each Sunday. According to Scripture, our singing is didactic, doxological, confrontational, and creative; and our prayers uphold, effect, and mobilize.

### **Didactic**

When I say that singing is *didactic*, I mean that worship songs should instruct us. We typically think of instruction as the job of the sermon, but you shouldn’t assume you’re being taught only when the pastor steps behind the pulpit. From childhood we use song as a vehicle for instruction (think of the ABCs or days of the week). This is because singing is a great tool for memorizing important facts. The church has always understood the value of songs and hymns for spiritual formation. The great proof of this is the fact that the apostles didn’t hesitate to quote hymns to make a theological point. John 1:1-18, Philippians 2:6-11, and Colossians 1:15-20 have long been understood as ancient hymns, or as having a kind of hymnic underpinning (See Matthew E. Gordley, [*New Testament Christological Hymns*](https://www.ivpress.com/new-testament-christological-hymns?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), 19). Hymns like these provided the raw material for the creeds and helped the Christian church maintain orthodoxy (See Paul L. Gavrilyuk, *The Suffering of the Impassible God,* 67). When we sing, we aren’t just addressing God but “one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart” (Eph 5:19). We sing for the glory of God and the benefit of the body.

One implication of the didactic function of singing is that we should pay close attention to the words in our songs. Musical worship isn’t about connecting with our feelings; it’s about the truth of God’s Word. Singing bad theology is a way of cementing heresy in our hearts. When I first planted the church I pastor, I oversaw writing the weekly bulletin and making sure it got printed in time for the Sunday service. The congregation had to suffer through my typos—some of which were more memorable than others. One Sunday the hymn “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing” was missing the *g* on the word *sing*, so it was printed in the liturgy as “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sin”! Fortunately, the rest of the hymn was unscathed by my scribal error, but not all songs escape the negligence of their authors. Some songs may add concepts that are out of accord with Scripture, and others may say too little.

### **Doxological**

Musical worship is also *doxological*, ascribing glory to God. This praise in turn has a transformative effect on the worshiper. Idolatry deforms, but right worship reforms and reshapes us into the image of the true God. This was the main point of G. K. Beale’s biblical theology of idolatry, *We Become What We Worship*. Beale surveyed the Bible’s teaching on worship, demonstrating that “*what you revere, you resemble, either for ruin or for* restoration” (G. K. Beale, [*We Become What We Worship*](https://www.ivpress.com/we-become-what-we-worship?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), 11). 

The key text establishing this is Psalm 115:8, which says of idols, “Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them.” In that passage, to become like an idol is to be spiritually mute, blind, deaf, and without feeling. We note again the *personal* stakes in this worship war. Idolatry—false worship—will make you numb to all spiritual reality. But when you worship God, according to Scripture, your spiritual senses are sharpened, and you become more capable of understanding and receiving divine truth. This clear sight and reception lead to our own “deification.”

As Paul wrote, “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Cor 3:18). Since worship is meant to be doxological, our services must always have a clear Godward focus. We don’t gather to praise ourselves or our accomplishments. The worship of man will always lead to devastation rather than deification, since creatures cannot save themselves.

### **Confrontational**

Third, singing in church is *confrontational*. Our music ascribes glory to God while simultaneously renouncing the world’s false promises of hope in self. Liturgist Jean-Jacques von Allmen says, 

> “Christian worship is the strongest denial that can be hurled in the face of the world’s claim to provide men with an effective justification of their life. There is no more emphatic protest against the pride and despair of the world than that implied in Christian worship.”

Think about how some of the songs you sing at church confront the false narratives and empty promises of the world. We’re tempted to think everything is riding on us, but we’re reminded of the futility of self-confidence in Luther’s hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” (just be sure to sing the whole thing!): “Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing.” We’re distracted by wealth and the praises of others, but the hymn “Be Thou My Vision” reminds us, “Riches I heed not nor man’s empty praise, thou mine inheritance now and always.” We turn on the news only to see injustice followed by tragedy, and we’re tempted to despair. But we sing in defiance those words of the hymn “This Is My Father’s World”: “O let me ne’er forget, / that though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet. / This is my Father’s world, the battle is not done; / Jesus who died shall be satisfied, and earth and heav’n be one.” You can probably tell, we sing a lot of hymns where I pastor! Whether or not that’s the case in your church, the songs and prayers should confront the lies of this present age with the comforting truths found in God’s Word.

### **Creative**

Finally, the songs of the church are *creative*. Here I’m not speaking of artistic ingenuity, but creative in the sense of world and culture shaping. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann developed the thesis that Israel’s praise was a “world making” activity. What he meant by this was not that worship creates things *ex nihilo* like God does, but that our liturgies form our communities and the social worlds in which we live. The liturgy “sets a pattern of power and meaning upon social relations which reflects Yahweh’s sovereignty. A world of justice, mercy, peace, and compassion is created in the imaginative act of the liturgy.” Allmen said that worship shapes the taste not only of the church but also of the world outside the church. He makes the bold claim,

> The cult \[i.e., church’s worship\] is formative of culture because it inspires political and social life. It is the point of reference for order and freedom, for justice and peace. It is so because it celebrates the true hierarchy of things, because it confesses the Lordship of Christ, and because it attests the miraculous grace that this Lordship of Christ does not absorb that which it controls, but is the foundation of its liberty, and regardful of it. Hence the possibility of diverse but coordinated vocations of care for the weak, of the discovery of the true rights of man, of human understanding and reconciliation. . . . Clearly the world does not know that in attacking the cult it is striking at the very thing that preserves and guarantees its life.

Why do we worship? In part, it’s because the heavenly ascent we participate in each week, full of praises and prayers, is a way of engaging in the spiritual battle that’s all around us. Make no mistake about it—worship is warfare. Not the kind of warfare that puts people in captivity, but the kind of warfare that sets them free. Souls and societies are on the line, and God calls each one of us to be armed with love and to join in the fight.

*Adapted from* [Why We Worship](https://www.ivpress.com/why-we-worship?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) *by Adriel Sanchez. ©2026 by Adriel Avram Sanchez. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press.* [*www.ivpress.com*](http://www.ivpress.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*.*
### Sex-Realist Feminism and Christianity: A Report from the Fairer Disputations Conference
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/sex-realist-feminism-and-christianity-a-report-from-the-fairer-disputations-conference/
Last updated: 2026-09-22T11:00:04.000Z
Over the past few years, a number of prominent European women writers and activists who have been advocating for a different paradigm of thinking about women and gender than the one offered by secular modernity, have come to Christ. In each case, approximately the same formula transpired: the writer’s work led her to realize that contemporary norms vis-à-vis sexuality are failing women and are causing significant harm. The writer proposed a better way of treating women, then came to realize that what she was proposing was effectively a return to historic Judaeo-Christian sexual mores and the inextricably connected treasuring of women as women and men as men in a world that insists on treating both as interchangeable. Finally, upon investigating Christianity further, the writer came to identify with the faith and began attending church. In some cases, she then began writing more openly about the key role of Christianity in bringing about the gender revolution she has been advocating for all along. 

I had reason to think much about these women this past weekend, because I got to hear several of them speak at the [Women’s Convention](https://www.abetterwayforwardforwomen.org/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in Rochester, NY. Their ranks include (but are not limited to) Louise Perry, Mary Harrington, Nina Power, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Most of these women, furthermore, are part of the publication that set the foundation for this convention—[*Fairer Disputations*](https://fairerdisputations.org/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

Founded in early 2023, *Fairer Disputations* is the brainchild of legal scholar Erika Bachiochi, who also served as the convener of this weekend’s event. For the unfamiliar, *FD* is a journal and “an international community of scholars, public intellectuals, and journalists that aims to advance a sex-realist feminism.” Over the course of its three and a half years of publication and counting, it has built a remarkably diverse following of readers and writers (disclosure: I am a Featured Writer for the journal and was an invited speaker at the convention). Many readers and writers are Christians, and many are Americans, but the publication has from the outset been deliberately international and ecumenical, bringing together mostly women but also some men who have felt dissatisfied with the current mainstream discourse about women and gender. 

I assumed before the convention that it would be, put simply, a conference of *Fairer Disputations* readers and writers. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I met several enthusiastic attenders who were unfamiliar with the journal, but came to the convention because they heard about it—perhaps from a friend—and were attracted by the vision it offered. 

Yes, as I had expected, the convention welcomed regular *FD* readers and writers. But it also brought together healthcare professionals from around the country, educators at all levels (from preschool through university), nonprofit workers, one British former politician, numerous journalists, and quite a few stay-at-home or work-from-home moms. Speaking of the latter, I've never seen so many babies at a conference. Some older kids were present as well, including my seven-year-old. I'm used to bringing one or more of my kids to professional events, but this was the first time that bringing my daughter along made me blend in rather than stand out.

In other words, the convention turned out to be something unique that reached beyond the journal’s readership. It showed a real possibility of scaling up intellectually honest and deep conversations about gender in our world, and the hunger for these conversations beyond merely the conservative Christian circles. At the same time, it seems that sometimes these conversations about gender are a true cultural apologetic for the Christian faith—as the examples of Perry, Ali, and others show. It is the realization that all people ever created are [God’s image-bearers](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%201%3A27&version=ESV&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that makes it possible for us to treasure each woman and each man, several speakers emphasized. 

Indeed, perhaps the key takeaway from the event for me was that while we need publications to begin and foster fruitful conversations, ideas can only fully take root and flourish in individual souls and lives through in-person conversations and relationships. To state the obvious, we as a society are very online, and that is the source of many evils—including pornography, which several speakers identified as the chief scourge of gender troubles in our age for both men and women. 

This online world also facilitates and encourages our growing loneliness. We are surrounded by more words than ever on our screens, but these can never replace the conversation of friends who gather together with us. We reach for a machine to solve our problems when what we truly need is a person, noted long-time pediatric nurse, bioethicist, and activist Jennifer Lahl on the first morning of the convention. 

I found myself thinking of Wendell Berry’s famous essay, “Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer.” Everyone who has heard of this essay, which Berry originally wrote in 1987, knows the gist of it: Berry famously made a radical promise that he kept to the end of his days, just a couple of weeks ago. Yes, he never did buy a computer. But less frequently discussed, perhaps, is one crucial reason he made for his decision: his relationship with his wife, whom he described as his “best critic” for her work of not only typing up his writing on a 1956 typewriter but also commenting and improving his work with her comments along the way. 

Berry described his relationship with his wife, Tanya, as “a literary cottage industry that works well and pleasantly” in this essay. This is the productive system of two persons working together that buying a computer—an intervening machine—would threaten, Berry worried in a clear example of refusing to reach for a machine to replace in-person interactions with a person beloved to him. The computer, in other words, is not the problem—but the removal of the need for conversations with a real person is. The result is invariably an erosion of relationships.

The possibility of technology to act as a wrecking-ball upon relationships of men and women, as well as of humans with each other more generally, has been a concern of the *FD* project since its inception. In [her essay](https://fairerdisputations.org/feminisms%5Fnew%5Fwave/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in March 2023, editor Serena Sigillito wrote: “*Fairer Disputations* is confronting a profoundly mistaken idea of what it means to be human, and we’re fighting for a better one. Our tagline, ‘Sex-Realist Feminism for the 21st Century,’ emphasizes both our embodimentand the technological age in which we live. You can’t be a human being without a body, and every body is either male or female.” Technology offers the illusion of shedding the body or the possibility of changing the body altogether—but these false promises will only destroy and disappoint and isolate. Too many Gen-Z girls especially feel nothing but despair over their bodies, their minds, their lives, NYT bestselling author Freya India reflected in her address. How could they not, given the messaging that bombards them daily on social media?

So what might a better way forward for women (and men) look like? That was the question of the weekend, and answers invariably came back to the need to foster joyful friendships in person, to build communities, and to reach out to the lonely and suffering around. What we need is a party, Helen Roy exhorted in the closing panel of the convention. This answer, of course, is also Christian at its core—our joy is not an abstract idea or feeling but is rooted in the confidence of God’s love for us, a confidence we get from the gospel. And to this love we can point others around, who are struggling with their worth and the worth of their bodies and minds, created male and female.
### Using Political Power to Protect Students from Using AI in Education
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/using-political-power-to-protect-students-from-using-ai-in-education/
Last updated: 2026-09-21T11:00:45.000Z
Ever since ChatGPT made its appearance in 2022 and became the most rapidly adopted consumer technology in history, the question of its role in education has been front and center in school circles. From an adult perspective, the impulse to look for ways AI can enhance learning can seem reasonable. I have fruitfully used AI for many purposes myself. 

However, I would have no idea if it were being used to positive effect or not if I did not already have a substantial knowledge or experience of the thing that I was using it for. Concerningly, there’s a national movement in education that has great potential to disrupt the learning by which that knowledge and experience gets developed.

Many Americans have never heard of ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) or ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education), but for decades ASCD has been one of the most influential organizations in American public education in setting the agenda for prioritizing major reforms and initiatives in public schools. ISTE has not had quite as broad an influence, but in its area of educational technology it is also the dominant voice that has shaped standards and practice in the use of educational technology across the country. 

The two organizations merged in 2023 and have been operating under the somewhat awkward combined brand of ISTE+ASCD. However, in June of 2026, they announced a new organizational name: The International Society for Transforming Education, which sounds ambitious. It’s a somewhat ominous sign for the direction in which they are “transforming education” that one of their first projects after adopting the new name was releasing an expansion of [the 2025 ASCD publication](https://iste-ascd.org/ai-ready-graduate?ref=mereorthodoxy.com): “Profile of an AI-Ready Graduate.”

The vision put forth in the “Profile of an AI-Ready Graduate” affirms that the future makes “uniquely human skills increasingly valuable,” and purports to be about finding balance between “recognizing which skills are uniquely human” and knowing when “it would be problematic” not to use AI. It’s a vision where students “use AI in the service of their goals, while maintaining their own judgment, agency, and creativity.” 

There are six broad standards that they propose, which are broken down in more detail in the document:

- LEARNER: Use AI to set learning goals, create plans for learning new skills, identify strategies to get unstuck, and seek targeted feedback to improve performance and understanding.
- PROBLEM-SOLVER: Use AI as a brainstorming partner to clarify challenges, generate new ideas, explore a wide range of possibilities, and evaluate potential solutions.
- RESEARCHER: Use AI to strategically investigate and analyze topics, evaluate claims, and compare sources of information.
- CONNECTOR: Use AI to increase human collaboration, including overcoming language barriers and finding common ground among divergent perspectives.
- SYNTHESIZER: Use AI to synthesize, remix, and refine information into formats and levels of complexity that best meet their unique needs and capabilities.
- STORYTELLER: Use AI to craft compelling narratives and communicate complex ideas through text, image, audio, video, and other media.

There’s a terrific irony in the fact that these areas where ISTE is proposing AI be used are, in fact, “uniquely human skills.” Gaining and developing these capacities is part of how we realize the unique nobility of humanity. And that’s where this set of standards falls on its face. Because it essentially is dictating that students would learn to use AI to support most of their learning functions, completely disregarding the reality that the whole reason students are in school is for them to be taught how to perform those learning functions *themselves*.

The question that ISTE+ASCD is asking is actually the correct one. The questions of what the role of AI should be in schools, and what we should do about the fact that many students learn to use it badly are vital. But the answers they have come up with are pernicious for learning. I am a high school English teacher in public schools, and as it currently stands, I work hard to *prevent* my students from using AI in their work. It’s the everyday work where students have to engage deeply with meaningful texts and develop understanding where the actual learning takes place. 

However, our technology has now reached a point where AI tools can perform these tasks for the students, potentially "freeing" them from that work and thereby from those opportunities to learn. This set of standards essentially proposes AI as a safety net beneath the students, training wheels to bolt on whenever a certain task feels hard. And it would require that students not just have this available to them, but should be actively taught to turn toward it for all of these purposes. Most of the capabilities that these standards suggest students should learn to use AI to accomplish are functions that we would envision a well-educated person to be proficient in themselves, absent the use of AI. While adopting these standards might produce students who are very capable in their use of AI, it seems to me that it would also produce catastrophic effects on their actual learning of their school material.

As if the potential impact on the efficacy of student learning were not bad enough, the implications for student formation are even worse. In tempting Eve in the garden, the serpent framed the attractiveness of the fruit in terms of how it would make her “like God.” It’s in the difficult wrestling with hard tasks, especially in formative school years, that we learn that we have limits. We build character and discipline by exerting ten more minutes of concentration on a difficult problem when it would be easy to just turn in the work as is and call it “good enough.” It is God who is omnipotent and can create the universe by a mere act of speech; for us mortals, anything worth gaining requires the sweat of effort. However, the ethos ISTE envisions reads to me like a friendly companion proposing, “Why would you work so hard when there’s this nice little AI right here at your fingertips? You’ve made the attempt. Now let the machine finish the job.” AI provides the illusion of omnipotence; it can make you feel like you can do anything, without the effort of the doing, not to mention the learning how to do it. Habituating students to turn to this tool as a first resort strikes me as a disastrous decision in the formation of character and the capacity to be open to the idea that “there is a God, and I am not him.”

And so I was heartened this week when the Florida State Board of Education [released](https://www.fldoe.org/file/20974/7-2.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) a new rule governing the use of AI in K12 schools. The rule is quite long and detailed, but contains such provisions as requiring school districts to adopt an “opt-in” policy for the use of AI in the classroom, where the default is that students do not use it and only parents who specify permitting it for their children have access to it. In the case where access would be permitted, comparable non-AI tools or methods are required to be provided for those who do not opt-in. It requires that AI tools not be used to replace the professional judgment of teachers. It requires that AI tools used in Florida schools be viewpoint neutral and not simulate friendship or an emotional relationship with students.

These are positive points that, in my view, create a healthy friction in the adoption of AI into classrooms, but in my view the most important are that the rules require school districts to “address … permissible classroom usage, verification of student authored work and … demonstration of mastery without the use of AI”, and requiring that any initiative that incorporates AI must be reviewed for effectiveness in “improving student outcomes” i.e. *learning*.

This is not to say that the new rule is perfect. As may be expected from the highest level of educational leadership in the state, much of its concern is bureaucratic and focused on reporting and privacy compliance. It reflects a tendency to think of the significance of the integrity of student work primarily in terms of assessment, when it's the integrity of the day to day classwork that learning depends on. A provision, for example, forbidding any districts from requiring teachers to assign work where students are expected to use AI would be a substantial improvement. Questions also remain as to how the state would hold districts accountable to comply with this rule.

AI did not become the most rapidly adopted technology in history by being difficult to use. It’s shockingly easy to just log into it and use it for any number of purposes. The idea that schools should orient toward teaching students how to use it for virtually every learning, self-management, and communication function is risible. There is certainly a place for learning to effectively use AI, but the K12 school environment is generally not that place. And AI certainly can be an excellent tool to improve one’s learning, but only after one has gained sufficient knowledge and thinking skill to know what questions to ask and how to evaluate the responses. When schools are fulfilling their function, they are imparting that knowledge and thinking skill to students, and the incorporation of AI on the scale that ISTE+ASCD envisions would be disastrous for their ability to do so. As imperfect as this new rule is, I’m grateful that the Florida Board of Education has seen fit to throw up some roadblocks on the path that so many districts have begun to take. Perhaps in this task they are setting an example for other states to follow.
### A Writer's Covenant and Mere Orthodoxy's New Contributors
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-writers-covenant-and-mere-orthodoxys-new-contributors/
Last updated: 2026-09-21T11:00:02.000Z
Successful magazines are never about one person. They're a chorus of voices together, enjoying the world, asking questions of it, endlessly arguing with one another about it, and together trying to imagine and bring forth a different sort of world. Ideally this would all happen in-person over drinks (or at least strong black coffee), though that is harder to come by these days.

There's a wonderful little moment near the end of [*Orwell's Roses*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/orwell-s-roses-rebecca-solnit/15d2d373fed11d73?ean=9780593083376&bkshp-astro=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) where Rebecca Solnit talks about the particular way George Orwell sought to impart a beauty and elegance to his essay writing. While discussing his essay, "Politics and the English Language,"she writes,

> Nineteen Eighty-Four depicts language when it is too tight, too restrictive in vocabulary and connotation, when some words have been murdered and others severed from too many of their associations. Somewhere in between is the possibility of a language that is clear but evocative, in which the speaker or writer's explorations invite those of the listener or reader, in which there is something a little wild in language, and the wild and the free overlap. That integrity, those honored contracts, those endeavors to reach out and make whole through the use of words that connect, empower, liberate, illuminate are the beauty to which he is most committed and the one he most celebrates, in the writing of others and in his own efforts as a writer.

She then goes on to quote a long passage from Orwell which she says as served as a credo for her since she first read it,

> But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.... So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

One way of describing what we are up to here at *Mere Orthodoxy* is that we are trying to create a Christian magazine that George Orwell could respect. 

There must be an aesthetic component to the writing; it is not merely to convey ideas, or even merely to convey true ideas. There must be beauty. Truth must be adorned with words fit for it, that bring honor to it. That is the project we have set ourselves. And I say "we" because [it really is a "we" these days](https://mereorthodoxy.com/about/): None of what you're seeing would be possible without the organizational vision and stewardship of Mark Kremer, the general marketing and tech prowess of Ian Harber, and the extensive editorial work done by Nadya Williams. 

What's more, we now have an editorial board, as we have advertised for some time: This is a joint venture that includes not only my own work, but also the work and thought and judgments of Susannah Roberts, Matthew Loftus, Samuel James, Tessa Carman, and Kirsten Sanders as well as myself and Nadya. We have also long benefitted from the diligent written and podcasting work of Matthew Lee Anderson, who also founded *Mere O* in 2005, Derek Rishmawy, Alastair Roberts, Andrew Wilson, James Wood, Brad East, and Joseph Minich on "Mere Fidelity" as well as the work Nadya has done on "Christians Reading Classics."

Today we come to a new announcement, something I am immensely excited about. We now have contributing writers as well. What this new role essentially means is merely this: We enjoy the work of these writers. We want them to write for us when they have something to say. And we want them to feel some measure of ownership of what happens here at *Mere O* and some ability to speak into it as a friend and co-conspirator.

Toward that end, we are publishing today both the list of contributing writers *and* the writer's covenant which now serves as a summary statement of what we editors and contributing writers think we are doing here at *Mere Orthodoxy* and the standard we hold ourselves to as we seek to serve you, our readers.

First, the new batch of contributing writers:

- [Haley Byrd Wilt](https://mereorthodoxy.com/tag/author-haley-byrd-wilt/)
- [Katelyn Walls Shelton](https://mereorthodoxy.com/tag/author-katelyn-walls-shelton/)
- [Hayden Nesbit](https://mereorthodoxy.com/tag/author-hayden-nesbit/)
- [Elizabeth Stice](https://mereorthodoxy.com/tag/author-elizabeth-stice/)
- [Amy Mantravadi](https://mereorthodoxy.com/tag/author-amy-mantravadi/)
- [Myles Werntz](https://mereorthodoxy.com/tag/author-myles-werntz/)
- [Brewer Eberly](https://mereorthodoxy.com/tag/author-brewer-eberly/)
- [Daniel K. Williams](https://mereorthodoxy.com/tag/author-daniel-k-williams/)
- [Haley Baumeister](https://mereorthodoxy.com/tag/author-haley-baumeister/)
- [Sarah Reardon](https://mereorthodoxy.com/tag/author-sarah-reardon/)
- [Joshua Heavin](https://mereorthodoxy.com/tag/author-joshua-heavin/)
- [Eddie LaRow](https://mereorthodoxy.com/tag/author-eddie-larow/)
- [Cameron Shaffer](https://mereorthodoxy.com/tag/author-cameron-shaffer/)
- [Wyatt Graham](https://mereorthodoxy.com/tag/author-wyatt-graham/)
- [Rachel Aldhizer](https://mereorthodoxy.com/tag/author-rachel-roth-aldhizer/)
- [John Ehrett](https://mereorthodoxy.com/tag/author-john-ehrett/)
- [Jeff Bilbro](https://mereorthodoxy.com/tag/jeff-bilbro/)
- [John Shelton](https://mereorthodoxy.com/tag/author-john-shelton/)

## The *Mere Orthodoxy* Writer's Covenant

*Mere Orthodoxy* is a Christian media project. We exist in order to put the riches of Christian thought into conversation with the challenges, questions, and problems of life in the contemporary world. 

Our name is derived from the books *Mere Christianity* by C. S. Lewis and *Orthodoxy* by G. K. Chesterton, both of whom in their own ways modeled how Christian thought might be utilized in fresh, creative, and original ways to challenge, correct, and form modern people toward Christ.

As a media project, we occupy a unique space relative to both the church *and* the public square. 

First, we are explicitly a media organization, not a church or denominational body. This means that our concerns are broader than any one church body and that our work is done in service of broadly ecumenical, Christian ends rather than the specific desires of a specific congregation or denomination. This also means that our responsibilities are not to a given ecclesial institution, but to our readers and, ultimately, to God.

Second, as a media organization we fill a particular role in the imagined workings of a democratic society. This is particularly the case in the United States, where the First Amendment to the Constitution expressly forbids the government from abridging the rights of a free press–which suggests that America’s founders felt the press had a unique role to play which was distinct from the role of government or church or market.

This creates certain pressures for us as an organization. We embrace those and accept them as a part of our magazine’s unique calling, but this also means that anyone publicly associated with us in a more formal way needs to understand that and recognize what they are joining. 

Toward that end, we have created this writer’s covenant to provide concrete, specific guidance for our editors and regular contributors.

1. All of our work as writers, thinkers, and readers is done before the face of God. It therefore must be done honestly and with a desire to honor God and serve our neighbors. We do our utmost to avoid any public speech or method of work that would bring dishonor to God or fail to serve our readers, who are our closest neighbors as a magazine.
2. For that reason, we have a different relationship to social media platforms than most magazines. While we do not ask our contributors to stay off social media, we do ask that they be closely attentive to the ways that online social networks tend to encourage behaviors and attitudes that are corrosive to the formation of Christian character and defy the law of God. So we ask our people to be cautious about what they say on social networks. If you cannot imagine yourself saying something to the face of the person you’re thinking about or referencing, do not say it. Even if you can imagine saying it to their face, you should still prayerfully consider whether it is speech that would meet with Christ’s approval.
3. We have strict policies about AI usage. Because of the way search technology has evolved, we accept that a strict ban on all AI usage is not feasible–it would require our people to abstain from using any online research tools since even search engines are today powered largely by LLM models. We, therefore, have no policy against using AI tools to aid in research. However, you should never submit text that has been generated by an LLM, nor should you ask an LLM to help you strengthen your argument in a text you have written, or to make suggestions for other structural or argumentative changes to your essay or review. The work of using one’s mind to understand and communicate truth is human work. To outsource any part of that to AI is to deprive yourself of the chance to grow and is to attack your own personal abilities in those areas by using a machine to do the work you actually need to be doing yourself. Relatedly, we encourage writers to be cautious about accepting proposed edits to their work from friends who may not be aware of our policies on AI or who are less reflective in their own use of AI.
4. The success of a vocation in writing is not judged by traffic, follower counts, notoriety, or one’s ability to provoke strong reactions. A vocation to writing is fulfilled when someone has thought deeply about something, has sought to penetrate to the heart of the matter, and has found a way to express the truth that is pleasing, elegant, and internally coherent. When you find yourself thinking in terms of attention, clicks, or reaction, you are thinking as a marketer rather than a writer. Think like a writer.
5. Writing is not a utilitarian project. It’s a craft. *Mere O* is not interested in writing that has a predictable or industrial quality to it, as if it was written by a committee or churned out in order to solve a problem, like an instruction manual or how-to guide. Our writing should have life. Indeed, one of the saddest parts of the LLM revolution in the writing world is that many people seem to believe that machines are capable of producing good writing since we have for too long treated writing like a mechanical process. It is not. Good writing is driven by attentiveness, by patience, by prayer, and by joy. These are not things that can be turned into formulas or produced in a rote, methodical way. What Charlotte Mason said of education is true also of writing: it is, in some sense, a life rather than a task. Commit to practices in your life that allow for sustained attention, delight, prayer, and patient reflection. This will look different from person to person depending on your phase of life. But the desire to pursue those things is essential.
6. Healthy magazines are collections of friends in which editors befriend writers, help to cultivate them, and introduce them to each other. You may not know all or even most of the people you see on our editorial board or our published list of contributing writers. But generally it is good to imagine those people as being friends and to engage their work accordingly. It also follows, of course, that when we disagree or critique one another’s work, we receive that not as an attack on our person, but as an effort from a friend to help us grow and mature in our calling. We assume trust and good will between each other.
7. Finally, we assume that persuasion, reason, and disagreement are normal parts of our common life. If we are to have a common life that is not marked by domination, coercion, and aggression, then we must all have a commitment to love the world as it is (in some sense), to engage with our neighbors as neighbors rather than as threats, and to engage with our neighbors where they are rather than where we would like them to be. God, in his love and providential care, has placed each of us where we are in this moment in redemptive history and in the places where he has called us. We should not resent that or live in a way that rebels against it. Receive your moment as a gift from God. Receive your neighbors as gifts from God. Treat them in your speech and your writing as you would like to be treated.
### How the Reformers Actually Read St Paul
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-the-reformers-actually-read-st-paul/
Last updated: 2026-09-18T11:00:38.000Z
**Stephen J. Chester.** [***Paul Through the Eyes of the Reformers: Living Under Grace*.**](https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802878489/paul-through-the-eyes-of-the-reformers/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) **Eerdmans, 2025\. $28.99\. 288 pp.**

Earlier this year, after I presented a paper on the eucharistic liturgy of the 1662 edition of the Book of Common Prayer, an Anglican priest noticed that I seemed not only sympathetic but appreciative of the theology of the Protestant Reformation. I cannot remember the precise words of his question, but he inquired, more or less in these words: has not modern New Testament scholarship demonstrated many times over that the Reformers misunderstood Paul, so their theology was misguided from its roots up?

The concern is a common one today. At the popular level, a lingering awareness remains of the debates between N.T. Wright and John Piper in the late 2000s about the doctrine of justification. Regardless of how other New Testament scholars have evaluated Wright’s work since then, his extremely successful career as a writer of popular Christian Bible studies and devotional works means that his views of the Reformers are widely influential today among many parishioners, lay people, and clergy.

At a scholarly level, Reformation readings of Paul have fallen on complicated, if not hard, times. That did not begin recently, however. The rise of critical, academic study of the Bible as a secular enterprise of religious studies might have some precedents in earlier Protestant exegetical practices, but critical scholarship transformed the task of reading Paul so far beyond recognition that by the time of Albert Schweitzer in the early 20th century, the views of the Reformers were by no means still dominant. Subsequently, Rudolf Bultmann’s now largely abandoned program of demythologizing the New Testament and translating its message into the categories of existentialist philosophy, undermined central pillars in the theological architecture of Luther and Calvin. 

Then in the 1970s, the so-called “New Perspective” on Paul took flight. Of course, it had numerous forerunners in earlier eras (notably Kristar Stendahl, who critiqued Luther for projecting his own psychological struggles onto Paul). But the work of E. P. Sanders demonstrated that Jews and Judaism had been horribly misrepresented for centuries by Protestant interpreters, who compared themselves with Paul and contrasted themselves from Paul’s Jewish opponents, who were cast in the theology and practices of the late Medieval Roman Catholic church the reformers opposed. Sanders’s analysis of Second Temple Judaism significantly informed the works of James Dunn and Wright, who argued that the Reformers’ vision of grace and justification by faith alone were profound misreadings of Paul, for whom justification was about being identified as part of Abraham’s family, not being declared righteous. In time, John Milbank and the Radical Orthodoxy movement rejected Reformation theology as nominalist, and insufficiently sacramental in its metaphysics. 

Yet, in recent decades, that narrative has grown more complex. Some noted that Second Temple Judaism is far from monolithic, and that Jewish attitudes to the law in the first century were extremely complicated and conflicting. Readings of Paul within Judaism reject the way Dunn and Wright cast Paul’s gospel as the triumph of universalizing tendencies over particularity, while apocalyptic readings of Paul critique Wright’s historical and theological method, underscoring the disjunctive and disruptive nature of God’s revelation of grace in the crucified and risen Messiah, among other things. 

An especially notable contribution has been that of John Barclay. Barclay notes that Sanders was correct: Second Temple Judaism was indeed largely a religion of grace and not a self-salvation through works, but we need to more precisely characterize what we are talking about when we talk about grace, which can mean a lot of different things. Barclay’s key insight about Paul is that Paul not only describes the Christ-gift as involving divine initiative, or as superabundant, or as prompting a reciprocal response from the receiver, but Paul especially emphasizes in passages such as Romans 4 that grace is *incongruous*: a gift given to the undeserving.

However, along the way, very few have taken the time to ask the question: How, actually, did the Reformers read Paul? There have been exceptions, such as the notable work of Jonathan Linebaugh and Stephen Westerholm, among others. But when the old perspective has been rejected, was the old perspective in view actually the perspective of the Reformers themselves, or a bastardized form of it found in popular Christian discourse or in Bultmann’s existentialism? When the Lutheran Paul has been rejected, is it actually Luther’s reading of Paul that is in view, or a caricature of it? 

I remember once being at an academic conference and hearing a senior New Testament scholar discuss justification in Paul, setting his own reading of Paul over and against that of John Calvin, whom this scholar faulted for allegedly giving no place for the Holy Spirit in his vision of justification. I immediately thought about Calvin’s own comments in *Institutes* III.1, that the Holy Spirit unites us with Christ by faith such that we share in all of Christ’s saving benefits distinctly and inseparably and simultaneously. I thought about Calvin’s commentary on 1 Corinthians 6:11\. I thought about B.B. Warfield calling Calvin “the theologian of the Holy Spirit.” I thought back to my own seminary teacher Sinclair Ferguson, who taught an entire course on “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Holy Spirit,” and showed us how it is impossible to understand justification in John Calvin if you do not first understand how the Holy Spirit unites us with the risen and ascended Christ. But all I could do was sigh and wonder why so many scholars seemed to treat Reformation readings of Paul as a strawman. 

But Stephen Chester has now provided a readable, accessible answer for anyone interested in these questions. His 2017 book [*Reading Paul with the Reformers*](https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802848369/reading-paul-with-the-reformers/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)covered these questions and more in an in-depth way written for scholars. *Paul Through the Eyes of the Reformers* is not merely a popularization of that larger book, but it also includes new discussions in relationship to contemporary conversations in Pauline theology. 

Arguably, this book’s greatest contribution will be not only for academics, but specifically for preachers. What is union with Christ? What is justification? How do Law and Gospel relate to one another? What is faith, and how does it relate to works? Anyone who wants to understand what the Reformers themselves actually believed on these perennially vital matters cannot do better than to take up this volume. 

For only a couple of examples, Chester’s chapters on Martin Luther provide a powerful explanation of why the charge is baseless that justification by faith alone is a “legal fiction.” There are terrible caricatures of what Luther believed about law and the conscience in modern New Testament scholarship, and too little grasp of what Luther taught about union with Christ through faith as the key to justification. Differently, for those readers who are long accustomed to reading and appreciating the Reformers, Chester will help understand modern scholarship better. For instance, those who have read John Murray or Mark Garcia will be accustomed to thinking about union with Christ as the central doctrine of salvation. But Chester explains the habits of thought assumed by modern New Testament scholars, and why Calvin remains surprising to so many of them:

> …\[Calvin\] identifies twin principal saving benefits received in union with Christ by the agency of the Spirit, a duplex gratia or double grace. The first of these is justification, and the second is regeneration or sanctification. It is at this point that potential for considerable confusion arises, for Calvin clearly defines justification in forensic terms even as he insists it is part of union with Christ. This conflicts with the marked tendency in modern interpretation of Paul to treat the forensic and the participatory as contrasting twin track’s in Paul’s thought, with justification belonging to the former and union with Christ to the latter… Calvin simply does not share the frequent later assumption that forensic justification is less participatory than sanctification. 

To be clear, Chester is by no means uncritical of the Reformers. In his concluding chapters, he notes the perils of attempting to repristinate or merely reproduce their readings today, especially given how problematic their views of Jews and Judaism at times could be, especially with respect to Luther. Chester is also very skilled at comparing Luther, Calvin, and Melanchthon with one another. The differences among the views of the Reformers are as illuminating as their agreements, especially on the nature of growth in holiness across the Christian life.

As a writer, Chester occasionally uses theological jargon (for instance, the adjective “apocalyptic”) that might take a lay reader by surprise. Still, this is a largely accessible book, and words from other languages are transliterated into English. For instance, the summary of what Calvin believed about union with Christ and soteriology is a masterful example of an attentive reading of primary sources that is in conversation with the most significant secondary scholarship on Calvin, yet still written in an accessible way for non-specialists.

I am thankful that the next time someone asks me, “hasn’t modern New Testament scholarship basically discredited reformational theology?” I can direct the inquirer not only to the Reformers themselves, but to Chester’s book as not only an insightful and judicious study, but a powerful resource for the constructive work of proclaiming Christ today.
### Loving God for the Sake of God
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/loving-god-for-the-sake-of-god/
Last updated: 2026-09-18T19:36:58.000Z
**Samuel G Parkison, *The Fountain of Life: Contemplating the Aseity of God*. Crossway, 2026\. 96 pp.**

The biggest questions that face every local church are not social, theoretical, practical, political, or even moral; they are theological. Because the church is the "dwelling place for God by the Spirit" (Eph 2:22), it is also the place on earth where God's glory is most evident, where communion with him is most tangible, and where contemplation of him should be most encouraged. Before every local church answers the important questions of how they might please the Father, follow the Son, and walk in the Spirit, they must answer that deeper question: who is God? 

Samuel Parkison's new book, *The Fountain of Life: Contemplating the Aseity of God*, gets the ordering right. His work is decidedly short, but its subject matter couldn’t be bigger: the life of God. In *The Fountain of Life,* Parkison places contemplation of the “Godness” of God on center stage. In doing so, he has written an accessible and eminently helpful book for both pastors and their congregations. This is not a critical review; I feel this book and more like it are needed. 

Central to the book are deep theological questions. Who is God, down to his core? How can we describe him, not just according to his actions or his attributes, but according to his very essence? The simple answer to these questions is that God is *a se*, as Parksion states simply, “God’s life is from himself.” To put it another way, God is “dependent on no one for existence.” But theological questions are not at odds with practical results. According to Parkison, the point of contemplating God is not to get answers, but to get God, since the glory and joy of God is the very thing we are created for! If that is true, then “there could be nothing more practical than contemplating God… to contemplate God is not to take a break from the real world; it is an exercise in reality.”

And yet, those with a knack for asking *too* many theological questions often have a track record for running headlong away from reality and into spiritual pride. In his polemical work *Against the Manicheans*, Augustine pokes all the necessary holes in the heretical questioning of Mani’s followers, who were dead set on their own dualistic cosmology. To their question of “why did God will to create heaven and earth?” Augustine replies that anyone asking that question is looking for “something greater than the will of God, though nothing greater can be found.” Augustine knew that our theology must never take us past God, or we’ve missed the point all together. 

*The Fountain of Life* understands that danger, and so is more than willing to press further in *to* God rather than *past* God. As Parkison rightly argues, if God is the independent source of everything, then “None of our questions, conversations, or experiences are *ever* really disconnected from the reality of God and his eternity.” Everything is contingent on him, since “all that is *not* God owes its existence *to* God.” For example, Parkison asks the reader to imagine a line in the text of Genesis 1:1, right in between “In the beginning God” and “created the heavens and the earth.” The grammatical proximity of these two clauses should not trick us into thinking they are ontologically close. There is nothing that is created that is even in the same atmosphere of God, much less greater than God. 

Parkison also handles the theological tendency to describe God only in negative (apophatic) terms, by what he is not or does not have. Unafraid of the leap into cataphatic theology (positive descriptions of God), he relays in detail the momentous shift in divine revelation that happens when God reveals himself to Moses as *I AM*. Seeing God as "infinite plentitude” and “fountain” may seem like squishy abstraction at first, but upon reflection we see that it is precisely *because* God is “the infinite source and giver of all life and being” that we need not go beyond him. We can encourage our flock towards deep contemplation of God without any fear or worry that it will lead to disappointment.

Instead, right contemplation of God should lead to unbounding joy. As Parkison urges his readers to “adopt the attitude of a child, asking a question for the sheer joy of getting its answer”, he reminds us that there are no theological questions that, when asked rightly, do not lead to delight. We live in a culture that is continually discouraging doing anything just for the love of it. Amateurism is at an all time-low, and side hustles are at an all time high. But as Parkison argues beautifully, if God is not contingent on anyone or anything, he creates everything we know and enjoy as sheer grace: just for the love of it.

> Since the cosmos is fundamentally contingent and dependent on an independent creator—who made the world simply and freely as a result of his own pleasure... Since, then, creation itself is marvelously dispensable—since it does not have to exist at all, let alone in this way—we are invited to be amazed by all of it.

If the church is to be a place of “joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory” (1 Pt 1:8), then her members, pastors, and leaders must learn the joy of being amazed by God and his glory in the created world. We must become amateurs again, ministering for the sake of love and joy. Right contemplation of God’s aseity kills professionalism in the church, and opens up the people of God to the freedom of being entirely contingent on God. Only when we can lay down our need to be needed, then we can truly see how God’s love is, in Parkison’s words “pure, undiluted, gratuitous, unconstrained and noncompulsory.” That is the only kind of love that can be delighted in forever and ever.

Parkison also knows that joy in God has a clear focal point. If I may return to Augustine’s rebuke of the Manicheans, the ancient theologian goes on to describe the best way to get to know God: “If anyone desires to know the will of God, let him become a friend of God.” In order to ask theological questions rightly, there must be intimate trust. Intimacy of this kind requires real affection—that we would love God *for* God—and affection, stripped down, requires contemplation of something or someone beautiful enough to be worthy of affection.

In *Fountain of Life*, Parkison helps us to climb this ladder to an understanding of the will of God by first taking us to the first rung: the beauty of Christ. Drawing from the apostle John, “who Jesus loved”, we are led to see how Jesus Christ shares the same eternal life as the father. He is like Jacob’s ladder, drawing us up into the heart of God. Surprisingly, it is the doctrine of eternal generation that is the linchpin fastening the person of Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, to the life of God. As Parkison reminds us: "All that the Father is, is begotten as the Son; and all that the Father and Son are, is breathed out by the Spirit.” The gospel teaches that this begotten son was given for us, and his very life, the life of God, is available to us if we would only “find our ultimate satiation” in Jesus, the bread of Heaven. Parkison knows, and lets us know, that it is only in saving knowledge of Jesus Christ that we become, in Jesus’ words, “friends of God.” The doctrine of aseity is not theological abstraction—it is rocket fuel for the promises of the gospel.

I can go on record to say that the happiest pastor at our church is the one who reads the most theology. He attends well to his family and to the needs of the church, but we know he also meant it when recently he sent our fellow elders a picture of his new book on the doctrine of God and said “see y’all in a few months.” He is retired, and unpaid by the church budget, so there are no professional incentives for him to spend multiple hours a week (if not a day) contemplating God. He is not studying for any degrees or for the sake of an upcoming sermon series. He is not interested in impressing anyone or contributing to any academic journals. Instead, he is practicing for eternity: he contemplates the living God for the sake of love of the living God. In this way, he images God, the eternally triune one who contemplates everything that does not exist into existence simply for the love of it.

We need more godly pastors and Christians, and *Fountain of Life* is a step in the right direction towards helping all of us love God for the sake of God. For that reason, I commend it with eagerness.
### Shopping the End-times Marketplace: The Problems of Progress and Delay in a Hopeless World
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/shopping-the-end-times-marketplace-the-problems-of-progress-and-delay-in-a-hopeless-world/
Last updated: 2026-09-17T11:00:12.000Z
In 2011, I found myself in the sweltering August heat of Phoenix, AZ for the Assemblies of God’s General Council. The Council is held every two years to hold elections and business sessions, and, most importantly, to reestablish missional alignment for the denomination. I was a youth pastor and student at Yale Divinity at the time and was attending the Council for my very first time as an ordinand. The opening evening of the event featured a fellow youth pastor of a well-known megachurch who preached a lively sermon, full of conviction. As Pentecostals say, it was “on fire”—a poetic parallel to the August heat that contrasted with the cool of the arena. But it wasn’t the tone with which he preached that struck me. Rather, it was the familiar topic. Jesus was coming back soon, he said. We needed to be ready.

I grew up in the Assemblies of God, where eschatological expectation was the bedrock of the spiritual life. As a child it struck me with terror. I was afraid of being “left behind” in the so-called rapture. I didn’t know who Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye were until much later in life, but I’d nevertheless been captured with feverish fear about the Battle of Armageddon, the Tribulation, and the Great White Throne Judgment. The frightful events had grown in my imagination to be as big as the literary world Jenkins and LaHaye created in their popular fiction series, *Left Behind*.

As a budding theologian in my undergraduate years, I was able to—as some might put it—“deconstruct” the ways in which fantasy and false teaching had been added to the Christian message of hope and salvation. I grew less concerned about being on the wrong side of God’s judgment (though those fears still bubbled up from time to time), and more concerned about why Jesus was taking so long to show up. If my childhood years were plagued with anxiety about God’s judgment against me, my young adult years were troubled by an equally keen sense of the injustices of the world. I wanted Jesus to come back, not to judge strictly speaking, but to make all things new.

## Terror and Last Things

Today people are gripped with a similar sense of terror, not because of the dread of LaHaye and Jenkins-style accounts of God’s coming judgment. Rather, people are afraid of the judgment humanity seems to be bringing on itself. Even otherwise optimistic humanists like Yuval Noah Harari seem to be shaken. His 2015 book’s subtitle boasted “a brief history of tomorrow.” It was already “history” because it was that reliable. The title, *Homo Deus*, indicated that tomorrow’s promise was humanity becoming god through what he called “Dataism.” He claimed every single *thing* would be reduced to a computable data point to create a single human-computer data-processing universe. The budding age of Artificial Intelligence we now find ourselves in suggests Harari was onto something.

Yet, Harari’s optimism has been significantly tempered by the advent of AI. The promise of becoming god through tomorrow’s (which is now today’s) Dataism has given way to the dread of AI totalitarianism. In his latest book, *Nexus*, he worries that “the dataset on which baby AI is trained” is but a handmaiden of an AI that “grows in power and authority, perhaps \[becoming\] a self-interpreting holy book.” Harari is worried about an unwelcome End, and the only way he can talk about it is in religious terms. 

Harari is but one late voice in a long line of great thinkers who have speculated, and at times manifested, the future. Collectively, they’ve created a marketplace of eschatologies, all of which are bound up in real-world economic forecasting. With dread, hope, or some combination of the two, consumers can choose the “history of tomorrow” they find most compelling and most apt at making sense of the present. And people can literally *buy in* to the eschatology of their choice by placing their bets (or not) on Wall Street.

By the early 18th century humanist projects like that of Ludwig Feuerbach were making their mark on the intelligentsia of Europe. Feuerbach said “God” was the projection of all of humanity’s virtues, hopes, desires, and *goodness*. For him, “all theology is anthropology”—in other words, when humans talk about God, they’re actually talking about themselves. Importantly, Feuerbach suggested humans were, in fact, talking *accurately* about goodness. The only failure was to realize that humans, *not God*, are good. Feuerbach was arguing for what might be called a “kingdom now” humanism. The only thing preventing humanity from realizing its full and final potential was the failure to realize its full potential.

The same era saw Karl Marx offer a different sort of eschatology. For Marx, humanity was in one of two camps. The legacy of his thought in the 21st century might be nowhere better seen than in the way that the word “bourgeois” is used by even upper-class elites to deride whatever they perceive to be out of touch with the real world. The accusation is always made to identify (or least express solidarity) with “the proletariat,” the working class. Whether he intended it or not, one can hear the echo of Christianity in his philosophy. Jesus also divides humanity into two groups—the sheep and the goats—and salvation in Matthew 25 has everything to do with materialist and classist concerns. But where early Christians envisioned divine intervention, Marx saw a day of reckoning forced by the necessity of history. The new, final epoch, he said, was “inevitable.” In the following century, numerous communist regimes took responsibility for hastening the End that would supposedly see the proletariat rise to secure their salvation. 

From the other end of the political spectrum, Francis Fukyama in the early 1990s retrospectively declared victory for liberal democracy and, with it, capitalist economics. Liberalism had taken the world by storm in the 20th century, and this, he claimed, was evidence it had no remaining ideological rival. The first part of his seminal work, *The End of History and the Last Man*,is devoted to demonstrating how the liberalism of the West had taken root in the most unlikely places in the 20th century, and how others would likely catch up in no time. The West, he said, had arrived in the “Promised Land.” Like Marx, his philosophy smacks of Christian imagery. He defaults to religious language. Yet, he—like Feuerbach, Marx, Hegel, Nietzche, and other humanist prophets—thinks God has nothing to do with eschatology. 

In the present day, the AI tech industry and its visionaries are once again resorting to religious language to defend what can only be described as their *eschatological* project. Where Harari has taken pause at the accelerating presence of AI, lauded futurist Ray Kurzwiel in his recent book, *The Singularity is Nearer*, continues to unreservedly celebrate its promise. The “Singularity” is coming, he says—the day when humanity will merge with AI. He describes the Singularity as a mystery yet to be revealed. It’s a mere metaphor because, at least at this point, humans cannot comprehend the radical shift existence will take. With the same confidence of a Pentecostal televangelist predicting the day and the hour of Christ’s return, Kurzweil has set a date for the coming technological glory: 2045\. But unlike the church’s chiliastic content creators, he’s taken seriously by Bill Gates.

This small sample of thinkers is representative of the general trend of future-predictors offering an optimistic take on tomorrow. For all the incommensurate elements of their competing visions, belief in some providential, non-theistic *Progress* unites them. The word needs to be capitalized because it’s a quasi-spiritual force—*something* is driving history forward and doing so positively. Both Marx and Fukuyama are indebted to some extent to Hegel’s conception of *Geist*, a lively principle that makes sense of and gives linear cohesion to history. For the AI, on the other hand, the proof is simply in the pudding: we might actually cure cancer.

## Problems with Progress

Christian theologians have long identified problems inherent in the idea of *Progress*, regardless of the unique individual humanist takes on it. At root, the concern is historical. The 20th century might have been the bloodiest in human history. And it seems that in the present day even liberal democracy, with its resolute commitment to human rights, is regularly willing to pave the road of the future with the blood of dissidents. The bombs keep falling in the Middle East.

Criticisms of *Progress* are well-founded. The burden of proof probably *should* rest on AI apologists to show that *this* technology *this* time will be different. It’s dishonest to shy away from the obvious failures of humanity *to* *progress*. Nevertheless, the challenge of discernable Progress to its detractors persists. It’s undeniable (as Fukuyama argues) that scientific discovery and innovation really have raised living standards and, at least in some cases, bolstered liberalism’s defense of human dignity, especially when it comes to medical discoveries. Believing that history is but one damned thing after another with no sense of purpose seems to be as baldly false (and as bleak) as anything else. And is no more Christian.

The Introduction to Pope Leo XIV’s *Magnifica Humanitas* might be read as an invitation to discern the challenge of *Progress*. Addressing the *res nova* (“new thing”) of our moment, he presents answers to the question of AI with biblical imagery. Is humanity building a new Tower of Babel? Or, following “the way of Nehemiah,” is it rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem? In other words, “where is this all going?” is the only question worth asking, and he insists that the end we’re working towards must be framed eschatologically. To follow the “way of Nehemiah” in rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem is to anticipate the New Jerusalem which comes down out of heaven.

AI apologists and Christians agree on at least one thing, which is that the final future is indeed bright. Whatever else might be said about how humanity might get there are important arguments to be had. But bridging the conversation with that common ground is important. Christianity is committed to history having meaning, and it’s worth maintaining that common ground even with the humanists. The Church Fathers engaged Plato and Aristotle without anxiety. There’s no reason Christianity can’t have a similarly sympathetic, and yet critical, engagement with contemporary philosophers of Progress. After all, Greek thinkers were no less religious about their philosophies than modern humanists are, including AI tech apologists.

Yet, for all the optimism of the billionaires of the world, it seems most people remain convinced that the future is a threat. Why this is the case resists a tidy explanation. One might blame the 24-hour news cycle. And all news is bad news. “Doom” is the word used for endless and listless scrolling on social media for a reason. Political polarization tears at the fabric of society, making family gatherings awkward if not dreadful. But all of these seem more like symptoms of the problem than the problem itself. While clearly none of these things are helping, there’s a collective lack of hope that runs deeper than the on-screen diet.

Christians are no exception to the feeling that the future *isn’t* bright. They are no less likely to watch the news cycle with anxious addiction or to find a macabre fascination with the doom-sayer media prophets. I think this is in part because there’s been an abandonment of eschatology in the church. My experience is anecdotal, but significant. Pentecostalism is nothing if not an eschatological movement. The Azusa Street Revival, which marked the beginning of the global and ecumenical take-over of the church with Pentecostal spirituality, was defined by an imminent expectation of Christ’s return. To be Pentecostal is to live in the pre-dawn light of God’s kingdom. But the last time I heard a sermon about Christ’s return was the sermon I heard in the cool of the Phoenix arena 15 years ago.

In the broader church, eschatological hope is thankfully still chiseled in liturgical stone. But it features very little from the pulpit. It’s telling that New Testament scholars have pointed out over and over again that the book of Revelation is a work of political theology. Yet, for all the concerns on the part of Christians in America about the direction the country is headed, eschatology seems rarely to play on the political imagination.

Why even a movement like Pentecostalism has moved away from its spiritual roots is probably due to innumerable factors. Academically, the topic is avoided because there are so many perceived pitfalls in end-times theological debates. Some are afraid of being defrocked for having a take on how the End will come that departs from denominational doctrine. At the grass roots of the local church, it seems that it’s avoided because eschatology is just more bad news. Those who have in the past peddled in eschatological forecasts have routinely said, “Oh, you think things are bad now? Just wait until the book of Revelation starts happening!” Pastors don’t want to be killjoys.

## The Problem of Delay

Still another (and perhaps the most significant) factor that seems to have led to the abandonment of eschatology is, as I mentioned earlier, the problem of delay. Scholars and laity alike find it troubling that Jesus is taking so long to come back. Indeed, how long will it be until the tears are wiped from every eye? The problem of delay is another way of posing the problem of theodicy—the question of whether God is indeed good given the prevalence of evil in the world and his (apparent) refusal to quicken evil’s demise. 

The early church faced the question of delay head on. To God, they said, one thousand years is as a day, and a day is as a thousand years (2 Pet 3:8). I remember feeling like that was a cop-out answer when I was experiencing a season of depression in my mid-20s that was due in no small part to the overwhelming evil across the globe that I had steadily and deliberately internalized. At the same time, I never wanted to admit out loud that I thought the Bible was giving cheap answers. 

2 Peter seems to be saying blandly, “time is relative.” But, as it turns out, Einstein’s discoveries about the relativity of time two millennia later suggest that maybe that wasn’t such a bad take. It’s a crude and childish way of considering the problem, but I remember thinking that even if Jesus was traveling at twice the speed of light, then it could take him thousands of years to return, depending on his starting point. At the very least, scientific discoveries as simple as the speed of light meant that I could look at the stars and realize I was looking at light that burst forth from nuclear fusion that was triggered well before Jesus was born of the virgin mother due to the sheer distance of stars from earth. It gave me perspective.

Equally, delay might be the reason there’s no collective buy-in to any of the triumphalist narratives presented by humanist prophets of Progress, stretching from Feuerbach to OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman. Society is in effect asking of all the humanist traditions what early Christian detractors asked of the church: “where is the promise of it’s coming?” (cf. 2 Peter 3:4). Domination of the working class continues, which seems like a strike against Marx. Liberal democracy doesn’t seem so much to be gaining ground as losing it. Democracy is not taking hold in China, which only seems to be increasing its global influence. Globally, pragmatically effective strong men are enjoying real popularity in many places.. Even Fukuyama has tempered his early-90s triumphalist take in recent times. 

Similarly, populist critiques of the promise of AI are increasingly wondering when the promises the tech giants have made will manifest themselves. When will the scientific discoveries in health, productivity, and climate happen? Will they actually make life more meaningful or qualitatively happier? And at what cost are we placing hope in a future that seems anything but guaranteed? The increasing anxiety about the energy and natural resources data centers will demand mirror on a much smaller scale the critiques of political and social Progress. More people are wondering out loud if democracy needs endless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran to sustain itself. More pointedly, does the way in which the new war with Iran has been conducted suggest democracy is actually on the decline in its epicenter, the United States? In sum, people keep asking, “Is the cost of historical progress worth it?” More and more people would rather keep their money in their own pockets.

While to some, Christ's delay might be a strike against the Christian faith, the overwhelming sense one gets in the NT is that the long wait of the last 2000 years is not so much a bug as a feature of the system. Jesus told his disciples that they must be his witnesses to the ends of the earth, which takes time. And while Revelation offers no clear timeline of eschatological events, it’s committed to demonstrating that history is jampacked with events of eternal consequence. 

The reason Christianity can claim that history is packed with meaning is because Jesus’s resurrection happened *in history*. The End, as Karl Barth and others have put it, has *already come* because resurrection is *the* eschatological event. All of this means that the promise of the End when all shall be well is premised on it already having happened for Jesus and in Jesus. 

Claiming that the End has already come in Jesus hardly solves the problem of delay since Jesus’s resurrection, like his second coming, is precisely what’s in doubt by Christianity’s detractors. But it is Christianity’s wager for legitimacy: if Christ has been raised, the End is guaranteed. If not, pity the church for its foolishness. It furthermore sets up the problem for all eschatologies—Christian, humanist, or otherwise. It invites the curious and neutral inquirer to ask what historical event(s) suggests that a particular eschatology is true. Does the French Revolution prove the liberal democracy is the end of history? Does China’s fusion of communism with a market economy suggest Marx was really onto something? What historical problem does AI need to solve to convince its detractors of the glorious future it will bring?

For Christianity, solving history’s problems still isn’t enough. The claim of Jesus’s resurrection is that *the* problem itself can be retrospectively undone. Death’s defeat on Easter means what happened in the past can be remedied and redeemed, which means all the evil of history, even of history yet to be written, can be remedied and redeemed. The blood-paved road of history cries out like Abel, and it will receive an answer. 

Christians can reasonably lament that resurrection in Jesus has become just one option in a marketplace of eschatologies in a post-religious world. But there’s no reason to deny the circumstances of the era. What’s left is to do is to name that there is a marketplace, and that everyone must buy something. From there, Christians should be content to make a defense for the hope within (cf. 1 Pet 3:15). Their claim is that resurrection will happen because it has happened. And the delay for future resurrection is a delay at the speed of Light.
### “When I Survey the Awesome and Wondrous Cross”: The Inner Life of an Atonement Theologian
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/when-i-survey-the-awesome-and-wondrous-cross-the-inner-life-of-an-atonement-theologian/
Last updated: 2026-09-17T11:00:05.000Z
Of all the places it could have happened to me, it was in a medieval philosophy course at a public university. In my naivete (I use the term non-pejoratively) I had thought that everyChristian simply believed that Jesus died on the cross to *pay the penalty I deserved*. Before the lecture that morning I couldn’t tell you what the options were for making sense of the cross, let alone that there were even options! But as I walked out of the lecture hall, I now had three.

The reason I share this anecdote is not to talk about atonement theories (models, motifs, metaphors, take your pick) per se but to expose something about the method we employ when thinking about the cross and atonement. 

I don’t know much about the religious convictions of my professor at that time—though I must admit I learned much about Christian theology from Calvin Normore and other professors at UCLA who were very attentive to the theological context of the philosophy they taught. What I do know about the way he talked about these things was that he believed Christian doctrine could be used as fodder for fascinating thought experiments exposing our intuitions about matters of perennial significance. 

The class reflected upon the nature of substances and accidents by considering eucharistic debates, freedom and responsibility by reading Anselm’s *On the Fall of the Devil*, and justice by mulling over Anselmian and Abelardian accounts of atonement. It did not matter whether the Christian doctrine of atonement was true, or whether the Anselmian or Abelardian version was correct. These accounts simply served as just-so-stories that exposed what we thought about justice; a useful theological tale (which could be true or false) that taught something important. Centuries after Anselm and Abelard, the Princeton Philosopher David Lewis would analyze the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement in order to assess if and how people (non-Christians included) believe in penal substitution more generally. I don’t mean to comment on my professor or Lewis’s spiritual commitments but their approach raises the issue of theological method when thinking about atonement.

In my book, [*The Cross in Context: A Historical, Contemporary and Global Introduction to Atonement*](https://bhacademic.bhpublishinggroup.com/product/the-cross-in-context-3/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com#flipbook-sampler/)(B&H Academic, 2026), I propose thirteen desiderata for a constructive account of atonement. These desiderata are (1) methodological, (2) doctrinal, and (3) spiritual. These desiderata consider how to begin articulating an account of atonement, how to approach atonement in light of other doctrinal commitments, and how to an account of atonement should relate to the Christian life. 

Number thirteen on my list is that "atonement accounts should assure us of God’s reconciliation and kindle our love for Him." 

Reading Paul, one gets the sense that for him Christ’s atoning work is more than just important news, it is *good news*. And it is more than just *good,* it is truly wonderful. Paul seems to hold to this news with a sense of awe: “I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself or me” (Gal 2:20b).

Christ died on the cross to bring about the reconciliation that Paul desperately sensed *he* needed—the reconciliation that *we* needed. Contemporary atonement accounts should reflect the Pauline mindset. Humanity’s problem has been resolved by the God-man. The only appropriate response is gratitude, worship, love, and awe for the one “who loved me and gave himself for me.” An atonement account that does not lead to an experience of love, awe, and gratitude for God fails to understand the gravity of Christ’s work for us. The atonement is not a neutral act of history to be dissected and theorized in a disinterested manner. As Margaret Turek has said, “a theology of atonement is not complete unless it… serves to elicit the profession of faith: ‘See how much God loves us!”

While this desideratum has to do with the spirituality of atonement accounts and what theologians should aim for when speaking about atonement there is a related methodological desideratum that I did not develop in *The Cross in Context*. In some ways this desideratum felt a bit out of place because it was not about the atonement account itself but rather about the atonement theologian. However, if I were to add a bonus desideratum to be considered I would say that, "atonement theologians should have a sense of awe and wonder about the Cross*."*

The atonement theology I encountered as an undergraduate in my medieval philosophy class and in the writings of David Lewis did not issue from a sense of awe and wonder about the cross. Sure, there is the fact that neither Normore nor Lewis wrote as theologians, so I’ll give them a pass on missing the mark. A theologian, however, should never treat atonement in a neutral-disinterested manner. A theologian should write and teach out of a sense of awe and wonder about the cross. There are at least three reasons why this is so. 

The first reason is summarized elegantly by Turek when she writes that, “Theology provides a sure orientation by which to follow the Lord on the path of sanctity; conversely, the lived experience of sanctity aids theology as a means of confirming and verifying—and even enriching—its grasp of revealed truth.” I would take it that a sense of awe and wonder for the works of God is part of having a sanctified mind. To have a sense of awe and wonder about the cross aids the atonement theologian in their grasp of God’s revelation of self upon the cross. The reason being that in a biblical sense, “to know” has an experiential component. One cannot be said to *know* about the cross apart from having experienced a subjective change because of the cross. The theologian who is not changed in light of the cross does not *know* the cross and therefore is in no position to declare truths about the cross. 

The second reason has to do with the nature of theology in general. Theology is not merely the study of what humans have written about God. That is a valuable task, but on its own it is not theology. Theology has God as its proper object of study. According to Tom McCall, the theologian’s task is “to speak truly of God (so far as we can) and to do so in a way that celebrates the glory of God’s being and actions.” If the theologian cannot celebrated the glory of God’s action upon the cross then they are not speaking truly of God.

The final reason has to do with the nature of scientific knowledge. In a scientific discipline, the knowledge of an object is only accordance with that object’s nature. Personal beings, for instance, require personal modes of knowledge and behavior. When it comes to the scientific study of God, as Torrance says in *The Mediation of Christ*, “God may be known only in a godly way, in accordance with his nature as God.” God is by nature holy, loving, wonderful, and awesome, thus to know God one must approach God in a holy, loving, wonder-filled, and awe-inspired way. 

Of course, arguments need to be made for Turek’s epistemology, McCall’s understanding of theology, and Torrance’s knowledge-nature principle. One might disagree with them but if any of these three reasons are correct then anyone who does atonement theology—as a Christian theologian—should do so with a sense of awe and wonder about the cross.
### The Good and Goods of a Christian Liberal Arts Education
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-good-and-goods-of-a-christian-liberal-arts-education/
Last updated: 2026-09-16T11:00:58.000Z
The seasonal nature of higher education provides meaningful opportunities to think about what it is that we are all doing here. The start of a semester is one of those moments. I teach a variety of classes at my school, including many within our honors program, which is a Great Books program. For advocates, these books are not only good, but somewhat easily identifiable. It is obvious to some people why our program should be like the title of Nadya Williams’s book and podcast: *Christians Reading Classics*. But for skeptics or the uninitiated, it may be unclear which books count and why. New students are arriving, about to undertake years of education. Freshmen may wonder how we have selected the books on our reading list and what we hope them to gain from reading them.

What makes a Christian Great Books education so valuable? As is often the case, Josef Pieper can serve as a guide for understanding the Great Books curriculum at our university. In his essay “Work, Spare Time, and Leisure” in *Only the Lover Sings*, Pieper contrasts the world of work, and the things which matter because they serve some other purpose, with the things that are meaningful in themselves. He says:

> What constitutes, here and now, an activity meaningful in itself? I have stated it before: if we are unable to answer this question, then we will also be unable to resist convincingly the claims of a world absolutely defined by work. The answer contained in our Western philosophical tradition could be summed up in this way. Whenever in reflective and receptive contemplation we touch, even remotely, the core of all things, the hidden ultimate reason of the living universe, the divine foundation of all that is, the purest form of all archetypes (and the act of perception, immersed in contemplation, is the most intensive form of grasping and owning), whenever and wherever we thus behold the very essence of reality—there is an activity that is meaningful in itself taking place.

This can also be a helpful guide to the books in our honors curriculum. The books and authors we assign all encourage contemplation and reflect attempts to touch “even remotely, the core of all things.” They may not all clearly apprehend the “hidden ultimate reason of the living universe, the divine foundation of all that is,” but they are seeking it. You can see it from Aeschylus to Arendt, from Hildegard to Hobbes. Every author we assign is trying to understand reality, beyond the surface level. 

Through it all, we are hoping our curriculum and programming will teach our students to *see*. In “Learning How to See Again,” Pieper argues that “Man’s ability to *see* is in decline.” Pieper is not worried about whether or not students need glasses, he is concerned about “the spiritual capacity to perceive the visible reality as it truly is.” From his perspective, “To *see* things is the first step toward that primordial and basic mental grasping of reality, which constitutes the essence of man as a spiritual being.” This type of seeing has animated the authors in our program, not least figures like Plato and Descartes. These thinkers offer students models for seeing.

Even outside of honors, our curriculum reinforces the importance of seeing. Students who are not in our honors program are still attending a Christian liberal arts university. They take Humanities I, II, and III as part of our general education (Faith, Roots, and Reason) curriculum. These classes involve fewer authors, but often the same ones. Humanities students read Shakespeare and Dante and learn about Gothic cathedrals and the Enlightenment and modern art. 

At a secular school, it is more likely that the curriculum has been captured by what Pieper describes as “the claims of a world absolutely defined by work.” This is how the secular world typically operates. After all, the government is using wage data to evaluate universities. At a Christian liberal arts school, or in a Great Books program, we want our students to be employable. But we don’t want to just teach them things to transition smoothly into the working world. We want to help them transition into a way of being in reality that rests on the divine foundation of all that is. And we want them to learn to contemplate the deeper things, because we’re not just hoping they do well in the workplace, we also want them to be prepared for a place like Heaven. We want them to have deep thoughts and deep experiences and consider the nature of things seen and unseen.

Pieper argues that “reaching out in contemplation to the root and foundation of all that is, to the archetypes of all things, this activity that is meaningful in itself can happen in countless actual forms.” Our curriculum reflects this, in honors and in humanities. We assign philosophy, poetry, politics, biblical texts, Reformation writings, and science. We assign plays and epics and utopias. We want students to appreciate art and to listen to good music. Last year several students in our program memorized Seamus Heaney’s poem “The Rainstick” after Malcolm Guite visited and charmed us all with it. We also have students involved in run club, or who sing in school choirs, or who study ceramics. Reaching out in contemplation is more than one type of reading or assignment or extracurricular activity. 

Our curriculum is designed to encourage our students to peer into the deeper realities of the universe, and our faculty is selected in the same way. Our faculty are interested in the very essence of reality and believe that we can see God’s hand at work in it. They do not all encourage seeing and contemplation in the same way. Some are funnier than others, some more stylish, others more studious. Some inspire with big words, others with big silences. Even awkward silences. But all care about the deeper things and care deeply about our students. They write letters of recommendation, have long conversations, attend and officiate student weddings, have relationships with alumni, and more. Some of our faculty are now teaching a second generation within a family.

The liberal arts are in decline almost everywhere, but they may be especially vulnerable within Christian higher education, because so many smaller Christian colleges and universities are closing. And, in many cases, the liberal arts are treated as ballast by universities in trouble. Attempts to right the ship often involve committing, almost exclusively, to professional programs. We submit to “the claims of a world absolutely defined by work.” And while across the country, K-12 classical education is on the rise, Christian colleges are not fully capitalizing on the opportunity presented. It is almost as though we have lost faith in what it is we do best. 

While liberal arts students are indeed employable, the arguments in favor of Great Books and liberal arts education in Christian higher education rest on something much deeper. Many students who come to Christian colleges want to attempt “to touch, even remotely, the core of all things, the hidden ultimate reason of the living universe, the divine foundation of all that is.” They are interested in employment, but they are also interested in the nature of their existence and their relationship to things beyond the workplace. Exclusively vocational curriculum or exclusively secular pedagogy do not deliver these goods. 

What is it that we are doing here, in Christian liberal arts higher education? We are attempting to teach and train students to “perceive the visible reality as it truly is.” Our curriculum and community can be understood as fitted to that purpose. It is a good thing to participate in and well worth perpetuating.
### Images of Divine Love in the Love of a Mother
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/images-of-divine-love-in-the-love-of-a-mother/
Last updated: 2026-09-16T11:00:22.000Z
I first met Elizabeth at a mutual friend’s classy art party. After covering the usual niceties, we realized we both loved to write. With that awkward combination of shyness and eagerness that seems to plague most writers when they try to talk shop, we found our way through our first conversation. 

It wasn’t until I nearly bumped into her (literally) in our church basement several months later that I really felt like I *saw* her. She was schlepping baby formula, and I was sweatily hauling boxes of diapers to get to our neighbors holed up by ICE operations in Minneapolis. She was laser focused on getting these moms the things they needed. 

When she graciously allowed me to preview her new book *Love Like a Mother: How the Sacred Work of Motherhood Reveals the Maternal Heart of God*, I felt as if she were doing the exact same thing: getting mamas the things they need. Recently I had the joy of sitting down with her and talking about her book. I invite you to listen in on our conversation and consider reading *Love Like a Mother*. 

\_\_\_

**Abbey:** So Elizabeth, I just finished your book a few days ago and after I was done wiping my eyes from laughing and crying by turns, I sat back and just marveled. You really managed to locate the work and love of God directly at the heart of a mother’s experience. Before we get into it, I just wanted to thank you for this gift of a book. 

So, you describe the seed of this book suddenly coming to you as you sat nursing one of your babies at night and wondering that if God made mankind in his image, male and female, what does it mean for a woman (and a mother) to bear God’s image? What is it specifically about that role that illuminates God’s way with us? I guess what I’m wondering is: though the idea seemed to come like a flash in that moment, what do you think led you to that point? 

**Elizabeth**: This is such a good question because when the question, “Does God love us like a mother?” came to me, I really hadn’t been thinking or reading about these ideas in any way, shape, or form. I had just had my third kid in four years, so I really wasn’t doing any heavy reading or thinking of any kind in that season! But what I had been doing was the relentless, intimate care of mothering my young kids. I had begun to recognize that my whole perspective on life had shifted within motherhood; I hadn’t realized it was also quietly giving me a new lens on my faith at the same time. 

So much of motherhood is locked up in the minutiae, and so much of those years of mothering babies was so undeniably embodied. I think that in that moment, I was trying to make sense of days that were full of wiping applesauce off chubby fists and changing diapers and nursing and trimming tiny fingernails. When I thought about what it meant for me, in the physicality of that season, to bear God’s image, I began to wonder what it reflected about God that women and mothers bear God’s image within pregnancy, labor, birth, and the ceaselessness of caring for young kids. 

As I tell it more fully in the book, I think a lifetime of following Jesus and studying the Bible were suddenly cast into a startlingly new light within the intensities of that season of motherhood — it almost felt like turning over an old coin to see its other side for the first time, or turning over a diamond and watching the light reflect off a previously unseen facet. It wasn’t exactly a new truth, just one I hadn’t had eyes to see before. 

**Abbey:** Embodied, indeed! I do think we need a better theological understanding of that glorious and frustrating messiness of motherhood and its relation to the incarnation. That’s probably why I was so attracted to your observations on the physicality of the mothers’s body and its relatedness to God. I had thought before about the changes in my own body in previous pregnancies and the phrase “this is my body broken for you” came to mind repeatedly. At the time, I wondered if it was a bit of a stretch or even blasphemous, but your writing made it feel like the most natural thing in the world. Can you say more about that?

**Elizabeth:** In the book, I write that the suffering experienced in labor and birth provides a layer of meaning on these familiar words from Jesus, that turning a maternal lens on these Eucharistic words helps us wrap our heads around the immensity of Divine sacrifice on the cross. 

We get understandably skittish about assigning maternal qualities to Jesus and his work on the cross because gender is such a loaded issue. In the book, while I affirm that Jesus was decidedly a man, I also explore how the Church in ages past used images and icons to explore the crucifixion and resurrection that were decidedly maternal. In other words, turning a maternal lens on Christ’s work on the cross is not a new idea or practice. 

I also look at the way Jesus was so generous in his teaching during his time on earth. Like any good instructor, he offered his students parable after parable ranging from economic to agricultural to relational. He wanted them to understand the kingdom of God in any way they could. So I do not believe it’s heretical to try to more fully understand truths like, “this is my body broken for you” from a variety of perspectives. Can we look at Christ’s sacrifice like that of a soldier killed in battle while defending the vulnerable, giving of his own body sacrificially and nobly? Absolutely. Can we understand this truth through the mother rabbit who darts away from her nest, hoping a predator chases her and leaves her babies alone? Yes. Can we get a visceral picture of the all-consuming nature of Jesus’ love for us through the experiences of mothers in the searing pain of labor and birth? In the act of nursing? I am confident we can. 

Abbey: That makes so much sense. Say, speaking of different metaphors for Jesus’ love for us, I’d like to ask you about those for whom the biological experience of motherhood has been elusive and what that means for this rich maternal understanding of the love of God. There seems to be a subtle, insidious message sometimes with miscarriage, infertility and even foster or adoption situations that they’re kind of second-rate or a failure of motherhood, but I found your approach to these situations very healing. Can you expand on how these particular expressions of mothering also end up becoming such rich wells of understanding God’s love for us? 

**Elizabeth:** While most of the book includes stories from my own experiences, it was so important to me to include stories from women who have fostered and adopted, experienced infertility, and grieved losses different than my own. I have had the distinct privilege of walking alongside women who have walked these roads, and I have learned so much from them about what it means to mother, about what it means to love. 

The Bible is threaded with the theme that we are adopted children of God. While fathers in adoptive and foster scenarios are incredibly important, statistically and anecdotally, mothers are doing so much of the everyday work and sacrifice of welcoming kids into their homes. From choosing sacrifice to letting go, in helping kids learn to trust and receive care, in the welcoming of strangers, adoptive and fostering mothers give us such a vivid picture of the work of God within our own spiritual adoption. 

As for loss and infertility, it’s really hard for us to picture God mourning or yearning. Yet, these painful experiences of motherhood are so tragically common; I got curious about what these difficulties revealed about God as the women walking through them bear God’s image in their grief and longing. The common threads I pulled from the stories shared in the book of infertility and loss were of intense longing and love that reflected God’s yearning for his children to return through the prophets’ words, Jesus weeping at his friends’ death and at his own suffering on the cross, a God that hates death as much as we do, threaded through Old Testament and New. 

While fostering and adoption are different journeys from infertility and loss, I think what these stories all highlight are the great lengths that God goes through to make us his own. And I think these mothers in particular give us a tangible, accessible picture of that kind of love. 

**Abbey:** Also, is this a book for fathers as well as mothers? How about people who are not parents? Have you had any men who have connected with the new language you’re providing us, regardless of their current family situations? 

**Elizabeth:** I’ve actually been surprised at how many men have reached out to say they really loved the book. While it is definitely written with women and mothers in mind, all of us are born with a need to be mothered, and that need, like all others, is best met in God alone. And while this is a book about motherhood, at its deepest core, it is a book about God. So it’s been fun to see *Love Like a Mother* resonating with women and men, parents and non-parents, alike. 

One unexpected delight has been that I’ve had a handful of male pastors from more complementarian churches tell me that they were so thankful for this book, that it is helping them think more about their female congregants’ experience of teaching within the churches that don’t hand women a microphone and how they can better incorporate feminine stories and metaphors and perspectives. It also seems to be resonating with those who have deconstructed/reconstructed their faith, who are not interested in walking away from Christianity, but are looking for a different view of God, whether they’ve suffered spiritual abuse or have a troubled relationship with their own mother or father. Exploring the breadth of expansive language for God that exists within Scripture, rather than always sticking to the same script, is really resonating with people who fall into these camps and inviting them into a fuller relationship with God. 

**Abbey:** One of my favorite aspects of this book was the amount of grace you extend to the weary parent. You offer devotional practices but they’re things like breath prayers and imaginative prayer exercises. Can you say more about why it seemed right to you to take this direction with the “application” part that people seem to hunger for? 

**Elizabeth:** Part of this book was born out of my own experience as a young mother. I so often felt spiritually “behind” when my kids were little. The spiritual practices that had long helped me - prayer, meditation, a morning “quiet time,” Bible study - just were not as accessible to me when no one was sleeping through the night and I was needed from the moment I got up until the moment I went to sleep. I often felt so guilty for the dust accumulating on my Bible, even though the deepest parts of me longed for God in that season. 

So many of the spiritual resources I turned to in that time only made me feel worse for “not putting God first.” But my to-do list was overflowing, and everything took so long to do with three little kids in tow. I needed the how. 

While *Love like a Mother* is not a devotional or a ten-steps-to-becoming-a-better-Christian-mom book by any stretch of the imagination, I wanted to include a few practices at the end of each chapter for that weary mom who longs for God but feels distant, who feels guilty that she isn’t in her Bible as much or doesn’t make it to church for weeks because everyone in the family keeps passing around pink eye. 

One of the foundational pillars of the book is that God is gentle to those with young (Isaiah 40:11). I want readers to know that God meets them in the chaos and knows how hard they’re working, how tired they are. But for those who are eager for a new way to connect with God in motherhood, I offer these practices as ways to commune with God while sterilizing bottles, rocking a baby to sleep, or pushing a swing at the playground. In other words, these practices are not one more thing for you to do. They offer a way to be, a lens to see God’s love for them reflected in their care and love for their own kids. 

**Abbey:** That’s beautiful. Finally, I’d like to know why you think we as a culture need to hear this now? What message do you have for mothers and the people that surround them? 

**Elizabeth:** Exploring feminine and maternal language for God in Scripture is so important for all of us in order to form a more comprehensive appreciation of who God is and to recognize women as full image bearers of God. I think our churches are missing out on the life-giving perspective that women and mothers can bring, the fuller understanding of God’s love that they are living out every single day. 

For mothers, I hope if you take one thing from *Love Like a Mother* it’s that you know your own belovedness. For as much as you love your kids and would do literally anything for them, know that God loves you with the same intimacy and intensity. Know that God is so gentle to you in this season, that there is so much grace for you as you raise your kids. Let your striving cease.
### The Odyssey of Dr. Richard Kimble
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-odyssey-of-dr-richard-kimble/
Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:00:19.000Z
Thanks to YouTube ([here](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqcJcUouAjwWE88OlOrqFwbTlqFmVfvNy&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) or [here](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIZLAidZhAgZyn2VUmrD-3RcCvmx%5FoT3%5F&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)), I recently rewatched a television show my family enjoyed in the early 2000s: the third incarnation of *The Fugitive*, starring Tim Daly as Dr. Richard Kimble and Mykelti Williamson as Detective Phillip Gerard. The story begins when, after coming home to find his beloved wife Helen murdered, Kimble faces the false accusation that he, not the one-armed man who committed the crime, is the killer. A jury convicts him and sentences him to death. But when an accident happens in transit to death row, he escapes. Kimble’s odyssey to find his wife’s killer and clear his name begins. The irony of the injustice is a dramatic delight: the tender-hearted healer turned vicious murderer in society’s eyes. 

The setup is so gripping that the endings of *The Fugitive*’s various incarnations can never quite live up to the promise of the premise. To my great disappointment as a youngster, the 2000s series ended abruptly on a surprise cliffhanger after only a single season—thanks capitalism and CSI! But Kimble’s story is about the journey, not the ending, and it sparks the moral and spiritual imagination to ponder justice, suffering, and providence. 

## **Justice and Injustice**

Roy Huggins had a [hard time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4b9dw7UXXY&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) convincing network executives to[ produce](https://www.avclub.com/the-fugitive-broke-new-ground-to-become-an-unlikely-hit-1798240531?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) his idea for the original show, at least in part because it dwelt on a wrongful conviction, potentially painting law enforcement and the justice system in a bad light. But the story is not a didactic, message-laden screed against law enforcement or the justice system. Kimble faces in his personal experience the terrible reality that such injustices do occur, despite our best efforts. A wanted man, Kimble feels the punishing power of the whole society set against him, a fearsome prospect when deserved and amplified when it is misplaced. Police officers and other law enforcement officials, agents of the community who seek to keep the peace, maintain order, and preserve justice are enemies to him, hunting him down at every turn. 

As with [Jean Valjean in *Les Misérables*](https://www.avclub.com/the-fugitive-broke-new-ground-to-become-an-unlikely-hit-1798240531?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), the pressure of society’s misplaced, merciless retribution against him threatens to harden and overwhelm Kimble. In one early episode, barnacles scrape him during an escape, causing hallucinated visions of his departed wife. In a final hallucinated conversation, he confides that he is losing hope: “I have nothing…The second you closed your eyes was the very same second that I started having to defend myself. The world believes I killed you, Helen, and worse than that, they want to believe it! You think that’s a world I want to live in?” 

Kimble is clearly in the right with regard to the substantive issue and the injustice he is suffering. But is he right to run from the authorities and seek justice for Helen on his own? The biblical answer is not so clear, given passages like Romans 13:1-7 and 1 Peter 2:13-17\. We are not talking about systematic, intentional injustice of the type that might justify organized opposition, but an inadvertent miscarriage of justice, such as is bound to happen from time to time in any system. When all the appeals fail and the mistaken verdict remains, perhaps the duty of the citizen is to submit to governmental authority, even if that authority is wrong. On the other hand, perhaps Kimble could appeal to the ancient law of Genesis 9:6, that his wife’s blood calls out for justice. While Kimble’s claim against the injustice he faces is undeniable, his extralegal pursuit of justice, involving plenty of deceit and further disobedience to government authorities, is not as airtight as we might be inclined to think. 

Mistakes and miscarriages of justice are a tragic part of social reality. Yet, the fact that police officers, juries, lawyers, and justice systems sometimes produce wrongful convictions and otherwise fail to promote justice does not mean we do without them. Augustine [discusses](https://firstthings.com/a-politics-of-two-advents/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) the tragic necessity of judgment in Book XIX, Ch. 6 of *City of God* (trans. Marcus Dods, D.D. \[New York: Modern Library, 1950\]). He describes how Roman judges might use torture to determine whether a suspect is truly innocent as he claims. The judges are inevitably left in ignorance even if a tortured suspect confesses; suspects might confess to get out of the torture! Judges must bear the knowledge that they may have both tortured and condemned innocents. There is no way to know. Even so, Augustine unhesitatingly says a judge must do his duty: “If such darkness shrouds social life, will a wise judge take his seat on the bench or no? Beyond question he will. For human society, which he thinks it a wickedness to abandon, constrains him and compels him to this duty.” A mistaken judgment is not a sin, but it is still a result and sign of the Fall: “But though we therefore acquit the judge of malice, we must nonetheless condemn human life as miserable.” 

Part of the brilliance of *The Fugitive*, especially in the film version and this second series, is thus that Kimble’s adversary, the Javert-like detective Phillip Gerard who embodies society’s judgment on him, is not only formidable but honorable, truly dedicated to justice and upholding the law. In the 1993 film, Tommy Lee Jones reworks the dogged character of the original show into a jovial and likable, but deadly serious marshal who, despite what he famously says to Kimble during their first confrontation, cares about the truth. 

Williamson’s Gerard has a past that haunts him. His own wife drowned after an accident caused by a drunk driver that sent their car into a river. He feels he could have saved her if he hadn’t gone up to get air. Bringing Kimble to justice becomes his way of making up for his failure to save her. In his unrelenting pursuit of the fugitive, he confronts bad actors who ignore the law or bend it to their purposes: Helen’s father, aided by Gerard’s superior on the Chicago police force, hires an unscrupulous bounty hunter to track down the doctor on the run. Gerard has no more tolerance for them than for the fugitive. 

## **Suffering**

Recognizing tragic truths like the faultiness of our justice systems is one thing, but *The Fugitive* portrays this misery in the particular experience of a decent man. Kimble is a Job, except Job’s wife was spared to nag and tempt him. In a moment, Kimble loses not only his closest companion, but his whole way of life and sense of himself. His upper-middle class, picture-perfect life, his status as a successful, respected professional, all die with Helen. 

Kimble suffers. Life as a transient indigent becomes a living hell. “I’m tired,” he tells the hallucinated Helen, “I’m so tired. I don’t want to do this anymore.” Unlike Odysseus, Kimble can’t hope for reunion at the end of his journey, at least in this life. At times, he wonders if his quest for justice is worth it and thinks about settling down off the grid. But Gerard and the law chase him back to his quest to find the one-armed man. Maybe if he can clear his name he can grieve, heal, and find peace. 

Kimble meets other people who suffer. Thrust out of his comfortable life, the world of doctors and professionals, he seeks refuge in the world of seedy motels, bars, and laundromats; of gamblers and loan-sharks; of day labor sites and illegal health clinics. This is a world of people in and out of jails and prisons, stuck in dysfunctional relationships, reliant on unstable jobs, a world of danger and desperation. 

The beating heart of *The Fugitive* is that Dr. Kimble continues to help and heal as he hides, searches, and suffers. He is a doctor, and he can’t help but involve himself in others’ lives. Often, he puts himself at risk to help and heal. In “Guilt,” he risks capture by going into a county jail to give a statement confirming a friend’s alibi and clearing him from being a suspect, echoing Jean Valjean’s willingness to own up to his offense. In “And in That Darkness,” when police confuse Kimble for a homeless person with serious mental illness and commit him to a psychiatric ward, his attempts to help a fellow patient continually get him in deeper trouble. In “Flesh and Blood,” he risks his freedom and life to make sure his sister receives a needed bone marrow transplant. 

Sometimes he can’t help. And so, he shares his own pain with others who suffer, and in the sharing, he and his temporary hosts, coworkers, and friends find mutual encouragement for a time. He journeys on, buoyed by unexpected moments of kindness and connection amidst the suffering. 

Like Job, Kimble is tempted to curse God. He says he has lost his Catholic faith. In “St. Christopher’s Prayer,” named for the patron saint of travelers, Kimble’s father calls him back to God from his deathbed, bequeathing his son his rosary. Soon afterward, Kimble finds sanctuary talking to a priest. He confesses his unbelief and anger at God for letting Helen die. The priest doesn’t have a good answer for why God’s plan included her brutal murder. But in another homage to *Les Mes*, he doesn’t turn the fugitive in when the cops come looking for Kimble in the cathedral. 

## **Providence**

Kimble’s odyssey bears resemblance to Joseph’s: “You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive” (Gen. 50:20). In the pilot episode, Kimble saves the life of Laura, an inspector at the construction jobsite where he has found temporary work. In thanks, she invites him to her house for dinner with her and her daughter. She wants to know him better. Explaining why he can’t get closer to her, he says, “I wish I was different.” She immediately replies, “I don’t.” She doesn’t know the fullness of what she is saying, but Kimble does: she is alive and her daughter has not lost her mother because of Helen’s murder and his suffering. 

The doctrine of providence is comforting, but it is also hard. Why me? we ask when we endure suffering. In Book I, Chapters 8-10, Augustine suggests a number of reasons God allows suffering of good as well as evil people. He might be chastising the good for sin and for clinging too much to this life. Most likely, he is teaching us that our hope is not in this life: “The good as well as the wicked, though not equally with them, love this present life; while they ought to hold it cheap.” Paul urges us to rejoice when we suffer, for “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us” (Rom. 5:3b-5). As with our attempts to pursue justice, we are often ignorant about the meaning and purpose of suffering. Yet, we can often see how God providentially brings good out of suffering and evil in our lives. 

Testing reveals and shapes character. In *The Gulag Archipelago*, Alexander Solshenitsyn, describing the possibility of the soul’s ascent even for someone unjustly imprisoned in Stalin’s camps, put it beautifully: “Your soul, which formerly was dry, now ripens from suffering.” Kimble’s struggle to keep faith, hope, and love alive in his life is fierce. Kimble’s odyssey serves the last purpose Augustine lists for God’s allowance of suffering: “the reason which Job’s case exemplifies: that the human spirit may be proved, and that it may be manifested with what fortitude of pious trust, and with how unmercenary a love, it cleaves to God.” Dr. Richard Kimble’s odyssey is a thrill, but it’s more than that. It’s an exploration of a soul’s journey of suffering unjust ignominy and fear, a soul wrestling with God.
### Defending the Faith Like the Apostle Paul
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/defending-the-faith-like-the-apostle-paul/
Last updated: 2026-09-15T10:59:59.000Z
Apologetics is the art and discipline of defending the truth claims of the Christian faith. Defending the faith presents challenges for Christians, because it requires conducting an orchestra of instruments in the concerted effort to play the symphony of God’s truth to an audience that may have its ears stopped up by sin and unbelief. The first prerequisite for apologetics, then, is that the Spirit of God would both empower our feeble words and regenerate the hearts of those who listen as we play the beautiful musical score of God’s truth—namely, that we are all sinners and desperately need to trust in the person and work of Christ as the only remedy for our sin-fallen state. 

The goal of defending the Christian faith is good but we sometimes struggle with *how* to defend it. One of the more helpful scriptural passages to give us guidance is Paul’s defense of the gospel at Mars Hill in Acts 17\. I have read many books on apologetics over the years but few of them explore Paul’s defense, both in terms of his approach as well as his content. In my book, [*An Introduction to Reformed Apologetics: Warring with Idols*](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781540971388%5Fan-introduction-to-reformed-apologetics?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), I explore Paul’s apologetic defense as a pattern for us to follow.

I cover the biblical foundations for apologetics with an examination of Acts 17 to show how Paul defends the gospel and what theological doctrines he brings to bear. When Paul, for example, positively quotes Stoic poets in an effort to connect with the philosophers at Mars Hill, I show how this approach differs from Paul’s engagement with the Jews who were familiar with the Old Testament. 

Paul’s quotations from pagan poets have always fascinated me. So, while I address other ideas that Paul touches upon, such as the resurrection of Christ, the cross as the answer to evil in the world, and the importance of love as the motive and goal of our apologetic endeavors, I think my favorite chapter in this book is on apologetics and literature. If the apostle Paul could say, “As even some of your own poets have said,” it provokes the question in my mind: Can we say the same thing? In other words, we certainly rest our apologetics upon the authority of God’s Spirit-empowered Word. But when we talk with our neighbors, classmates, co-workers, or people in our wider communities, can we quote the authors they are reading and know and point out Christian truth that appears in their works? 

I showcase the insights of J. R. R. Tolkien and Umberto Eco to show how God’s truth appears in various types of literature. No matter the author—believer or unbeliever—the only material they have to work with is the truth of God’s world, a world infused with his wisdom. All stories in some way deal with God’s truth, whether good versus evil, right versus wrong. Additionally, many authors write about sin and the desire to escape death and find a hope of some sort of redemption. While authors can misread and misunderstand God’s truth in the creation, and they can even twist and distort it, this does not mean that they can completely extinguish the light of God’s truth in their work. Literature is a magnifying glass on the human heart that helps us to understand who we are and what our most desperate needs are. 

The Bible certainly speaks of sin, but we seldom see sin from inside the human heart. Herman Mellville’s *Moby Dick* helps us to see a hatred for God from inside Captain Ahab’s gnarled heart. How often do we wonder how people can commit heinous crimes like murder? Fyodor’s Dostoyevsky’s *Crime and Punishment* provides us with a clear picture of how someone rationalizes murder through the main protagonist of his novel, Raskolnikov. 

Literature can also teach us empathy. One of the things that the information age has done to us is harmed our ability to read. As we scroll and click, the internet erodes our attention span. As much reading material appears on the internet, few people read its content. Scanning is the new reading. Never before have we had access to so much information but actually have know so little, because we scan page after page and do not actually read the words carefully. This not only erodes our reading habits but also our capacity for empathy. How so? When we read a biography, for example, we can enter into the life of another person and walk a mile in their shoes. Read the diary of Anne Frank, and you enter the world where a young Jewish girl has her hopes and dreams shattered by war, hatred, and ultimately death. We can learn to empathize with those who have suffered. C. S. Lewis once wrote that books help us to step outside of ourselves. Rather than living in solitude, we learn that there are other people in the world.

What has literature, then, to do with apologetics? A lot. While one can fire verbal projectiles from a distance at the critics of Christianity, how effective is such an apologetic approach? We may satisfy our conscience that we have defended the faith, but have we actually connected with our audience? The apostle Paul did not merely lob truth grenades at the philosophers at Mars Hill but instead he both knew the literature of his audience and made a genuine connection to them by quoting the works with which they were familiar. Can we do the same? Have we taken the time to get to know our audience and the world around us so that we can use the irrepressible truth of God that appears in all sorts of literature as we defend the Christian faith? 

When we appeal to the literature written by unbelievers, we are not wagering on the fact that they might stumble upon the truth. Rather, we rest upon the fact that God has created all people in his image, which means that they have God’s truth written upon their hearts and they live in a world suffused with his wisdom and knowledge. Like Paul, when we appeal to the literature of unbelievers, we must always filter their claims through Scripture to ensure we neither imbibe nor serve error instead of truth. Nevertheless, we should seek to follow the apostle Paul and say to the unbelieving world, “As even some of your own poets have said,” as we defend the Christian faith.
### Gluttony in the Age of GLP-1s
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/gluttony-in-the-age-of-glp-1s/
Last updated: 2026-10-01T19:34:46.000Z
Our story begins with a monster: the Gila monster, to be specific. Back in the 1980s, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health noticed this lizard eats only once or twice a year, a fact highly interesting to science. In 1992, another group of researchers [isolated a substance](https://montrealgazette.com/opinion/columnists/the-right-chemistry-how-the-gila-monster-assisted-weight-loss-research/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) from the Gila monster’s venom known as exendin-4, which they noted was very similar to GLP-1, a substance that had proved helpful to diabetic mice. Exendin-4’s half-life was longer than the original GLP-1, and thus the future of diabetic medication was lizard venom. By the 2010s, glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (hereafter simply GLP-1s) were proving highly effective with diabetic humans, but they had an odd side effect: they were causing people to lose weight.

Fast forward to today. After decades of stories about the obesity epidemic in America, [Gallup polling](https://news.gallup.com/poll/696599/obesity-rate-declining.aspx?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) has revealed something astounding: the obesity rate peaked in 2022 and is now declining. All those stories about poor eating habits, the superiority of the European food system, and the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle have met their match in drugs that can do what gym memberships often cannot: substantially reduce a person’s weight.

For many, the main question is, how can I afford these drugs? I have a more theological query: How should we think about the sin of gluttony in the era of GLP-1s?

## **Gluttony in Historic Theology**

Scripture does not contain a lengthy discussion of gluttony, nor does it mention the term often. There are references that suggest gluttony is a negative thing, such as “Do not be with heavy drinkers of wine, or with gluttonous eaters of meat,” (Proverbs 23:20) and “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey us, he is a glutton and a drunkard.” (Deuteronomy 21:20) However, Scripture contains no outright prohibition of gluttony. We would have to infer one from other commands against covetousness, hoarding riches, and being overly concerned with worldly matters. Alternatively, we could consider gluttony an example of failing to care for the body God has created or failing to care for our neighbors.

Despite not being mentioned in the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, gluttony gained a place among the capital vices from the earliest centuries of Christian history. It is possible these early theologians were influenced less by the words of Scripture than by Aristotle in his *Nicomachean Ethics*. The inclusion of temperance on his list of virtues suggested an opposite vice: gluttony.

This does not mean gluttony should not be considered a vice. Rather, it means the term is somewhat open to interpretation. Does it refer to overindulgence in food and drink alone, or could it be extended to include any material thing or even immaterial things? For that matter, does it only include overindulgence, or could it also include underindulgence? Is it a sin we commit chiefly against others by hoarding things they lack, or do we commit it chiefly against ourselves through the rotting of our souls?

In [chapter thirty-one of his *Confessions*](https://ccel.org/ccel/augustine/confess.xi.xxxi.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), Augustine of Hippo distinguished between the natural drive to nourish our bodies for the sake of good health and the sinful desire to take pleasure in food. “And health being the cause of eating and drinking, there joineth itself as an attendant a dangerous pleasure, which mostly endeavours to go before it, so that I may for her sake do what I say I do, or wish to do, for health’s sake,” he lamented. “And oft it is uncertain, whether it be the necessary care of the body which is yet asking for sustenance, or whether a voluptuous deceivableness of greediness is proffering its services.”

However, Augustine did not set a hard and fast rule for what or how much we should eat. He considered it a matter of personal conscience, referencing the Apostle Paul’s teaching about debatable matters. 

> Thou hast taught me, good Father, that to the pure, all things are pure; but that it is evil unto the man that eateth with offence; and, that every creature of Thine is good, and nothing to be refused, which is received with thanksgiving; and that meat commendeth us not to God; and, that no man should judge us in meat or drink; and, that he which eateth, let him not despise him that eateth not; and let not him that eateth not, judge him that eateth.

Gregory the Great built upon this foundation in his [*Moralia*](https://www.lectionarycentral.com/GregoryMoralia/Book30.html?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com), warning his readers that a sin of the flesh such as gluttony could prevent one from properly waging battle in the spiritual realm. 

> The mind also of the combatant is itself kept back, by the grievous disgrace of confusion, from engaging in the spiritual contest, when, feeble in its battle with the flesh, it is wounded and overcome by the swords of gluttony. For when it sees itself defeated by trifles, it is ashamed to engage in greater dangers.

Gregory was the first to suggest five different types of gluttony: 1) eating before the proper time, 2) seeking overly luxurious foods, 3) being too particular about how food is prepared, 4) eating too great a quantity of food, and 5) giving one’s self over too much to the unbounded desire for food. We do not tend to think in terms of these distinctions today, viewing gluttony only in terms of quantity.

Thomas Aquinas’ chief contribution was to provide the language of disorder. “Gluttony denotes, not any desire of eating and drinking, but an inordinate desire,” he wrote in his [*Summa Theologiae*](https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3148.htm?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), clarifying that desire becomes inordinate “through leaving the order of [reason](https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12673b.htm?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), wherein the [good](https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06636b.htm?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of moral [virtue](https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15472a.htm?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) consists: and a thing is said to be a [sin](https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14004b.htm?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) through being contrary to [virtue](https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15472a.htm?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).” It was not gluttonous merely to eat too much food, but only to engage in “a desire for the pleasures of the palate.” In other words, binging for the fun of binging.

Like Gregory the Great, Aquinas described gluttony both in terms of the food consumed and the manner of eating. He repeated the distinctions of quality, quantity, timing, and manner of consumption. But despite the writings of these luminaries, Christians throughout most of history have thought of gluttony in terms of an amount of food eaten unnecessarily. Given the lack of food security that most people experienced before the rise of modern agricultural methods, this makes sense, for gluttony was seen not merely as proof of greed but also proof of oppression.

However, given that over the past century most people in most parts of the world have had their bellies filled most of the time, few of us sense that having an extra helping at dinner will actually keep someone in Africa from eating, regardless of what our mothers claimed. The world grows plenty of food to keep everyone full, and starvation is therefore due to problems of distribution. This has allowed Christians to conclude that gluttony is no longer a sin against one’s neighbor, but only a failure of self-control. Given that Protestant reformers such as Luther stressed the righteousness of enjoying God’s good gifts *contra* the extreme asceticism encouraged by some medieval monastics, it was perhaps inevitable that modern Christians in countries such as the United States would stop talking or thinking about gluttony.

The very absence of gluttony in our sermons, books, and casual discussions has caused some Christians to reconsider their approach. You may now hear about the gluttony of doomscrolling or a friend’s social media fast. Some may point to eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia as the result of equally disordered desires. Yet, for most of us, the word gluttony still conjures images of an overweight person scarfing down copious amounts of unhealthy fare. 

## **The GLP-1 Moment**

The belief that thinness is next to godliness and obesity is something one foolishly (or even sinfully) chooses has long been rampant in our culture. For a brief period, around the 2010s, public attitudes began to shift as research revealed the role of genetics, environmental factors, and food additives in driving obesity. Advocates decried body shaming and fat phobia, and companies were forced to reconsider how they market to people of different shapes and sizes. The days in which [Kate Moss declared that](https://wwd.com/beauty-industry-news/beauty-features/feature/kate-moss-the-waif-that-roared-2367932-1410207/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” were seen as a product of outdated (and dangerous) thinking.

The public was willing to slowly, painfully begin accepting some variation in body types as long as losing weight was incredibly difficult. But with the mainstream debut of GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy, the game has changed completely. Celebrities who once celebrated their curves are suddenly shrinking, and those who were already thin are now positively skeletal. The equation has changed: society no longer applauds people for losing weight, but [questions how they did it so rapidly](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/20/john-goodman-weight-loss-drugs-ozempic-fat-people-cannot-win?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and whether they are simply “cheating” by using drugs. Celebrities such as Ariana Grande have been deluged by comments from concerned members of the public who suspect them of being anorexic.

But GLP-1s do not actually burn fat. They work by affecting the way the brain perceives hunger. Specifically, they remove the desireto eat by [affecting the brain’s reward circuitry](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/09/ozempic-glp1-desire-buddhism/680088/?gift=HGqipcQ8EvH9X6bPuXQ5DfUOG5gZN%5FuIppKelG-rm2s&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share). Back in the 1980s, a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan named Kent Berridge ran a study whose findings suggested the neurobiology of wanting something is distinct from that of liking it. As Shayla Love [wrote for *The Atlantic*](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/09/ozempic-glp1-desire-buddhism/680088/?gift=HGqipcQ8EvH9X6bPuXQ5DfUOG5gZN%5FuIppKelG-rm2s&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share) back in 2024, 

> Wanting is the motivation to pursue a reward, whereas liking is the enjoyment we get from that reward. This wanting is different from a cognitive plan, like wanting to stop by the library later; it’s an urge to act. Berridge and others have shown that wanting involves different chemicals and areas of the brain than liking does.

According to [a recent survey](https://www.kff.org/public-opinion/poll-1-in-8-adults-say-they-are-currently-taking-a-glp-1-drug-for-weight-loss-diabetes-or-another-condition-even-as-half-say-the-drugs-are-difficult-to-afford/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) by the Kaiser Family Foundation, one in eight American adults is currently taking a GLP-1 medication, meaning this may well be one of the largest health experiments ever performed on the American public. What began as a bid to regulate insulin has now called into question how we think about desire. To what degree is it a matter of free will, and what happens if you start to tinker with it? Millions of people are [quickly finding out](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/08/well/glp1-drugs-weight-loss.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.61A.hU8B.aN7UZAr5t2DH&smid=url-share&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), as detailed recently in *The New York Times*.

> Marie Spreckley, a researcher at the University of Cambridge studying these medications, said some patients have said they feel emotionally flatter without the delight they once found in food, and less connected to the social element of eating. She said that those experiences warrant further research. Other people have said their personality felt duller on the medications, or that they felt more lethargic.

Aquinas warned against an inordinate desire for food, but GLP-1s have the power to eliminate the desire for food altogether, and as some users are discovering, the desire for anything at all. In a recent episode of his podcast for *The New York Times*, Ezra Klein [described his experience](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-julia-belluz.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.61A.VlFI.U%5FdUrV4VFGlX&smid=url-share&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) with one of these medications.

> It made me feel like there was this level of experience that I hadn’t even recognized I had, which was around desire. I would taste something, and it would be good. Or I’d smell something, and I hadn’t noticed that the thing would then trigger another feeling, which was desire, because the feelings were so connected for me. But all of a sudden, I would have that same experience, and then the desire wouldn’t trigger. I would walk by the candy bowl and not stop, or I would leave half the burrito on my plate. It was, in a way, revelatory. The problem is, it made me quite depressed and anhedonic.

That last sentence should give Christians pause. What would Augustine, Gregory, and Aquinas make of this? In describing gluttony, none of them focused on the possibility that a person could have too little desire for food. If used appropriately in consultation with physicians, GLP-1 dosing can be adjusted to help balance out desire. But if used wrongly, a person who is already thin could avoid food altogether, sending themselves down a dangerous path in the name of looking good. Anorexia nervosa and bulimia have long been recognized as complex conditions that fall under the category of mental illness. Is it now possible to give yourself an eating disorder with a pill or an injection? Should we think about an eating disorder facilitated by GLP-1 use any differently than we do a naturally occurring one?

What is clear to me is that the Church has not yet devoted substantial time to these questions, and it must begin to do so given the number of people who are taking these medications. 

## **A Problem of Desire**

If we stop thinking about gluttony as a food problem and start thinking about it as a desire problem, we will find more guidance in Scripture. In those pages, we read that desire is not evil in and of itself. It is virtually synonymous with the will, which though created pure, has been bent in a sinful direction since the fall of humanity. To once again desire the good, our spirits must be resurrected by the regenerative power of the Spirit.

The Scriptures have much to tell us about desire. When the ancient Israelites were wandering in the wilderness, they began to have “greedy desires” and demanded to know, “Who will give us meat to eat? We remember the fish which we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers and the melons and the leeks and the onions and the garlic, but now our appetite is gone.” (Numbers 11:4-5) Think about the way Augustine differentiated the necessity of food for satisfying the body’s legitimate appetite and the desire one has to take pleasure in food. Here, the Israelites have the manna of God from heaven, but they say they have no appetite. Instead, they desirethe tastier foods of Egypt. The Psalmist rightly characterizes this incident as a rebellion against God.

> Yet they still continued to sin against Him,  
> To rebel against the Most High in the desert.  
> And in their heart they put God to the test  
> By asking food according to their desire.” (Psalm 78:17-18)

God was not opposed to his people desiring food, for he told them when they entered the Promised Land that they were permitted to eat other meats. “When the Lord your God extends your border as He has promised you, and you say, ‘I will eat meat,’ because you desire to eat meat, then you may eat meat, whatever you desire.” (Deuteronomy 12:20) So, the problem was not that they desired meat, but that they desired meat contrary to God’s command and their own good. The desire they ought to have had—their healthy appetite for food—was gone, and they instead longed for the luxurious foods of Egypt. This implies that they preferred to live in slavery to an oppressive ruler than be free to serve the King of Kings who provided for all their true needs. 

> The eyes of all look to You,  
> And You give them their food in due time.  
> You open Your hand  
> And satisfy the desire of every living thing.” (Psalm 145:15-16)

Aquinas was right to warn against inordinate desires, but we should note that desires may be inordinate in different ways. An eating disorder is something inordinate, even as binging is something inordinate. Both situations are often attributable to multiple factors, and I do not condemn those who are suffering. Still, we can understand that disordered relationships to food—whether the bulimic who cannot digest it, or the binger who eats their self into unhealth, or even the foodie who wastes their savings on luxurious experiences—are all forms of slavery to inordinate desire, a seeking after comfort and fulfillment from sources that cannot satisfy.

The biblical answer to our desire problem is this: “Delight yourself in the Lord; And He will give you the desires of your heart.” (Psalm 37:4) Which is to say, our greatest good is God, and he is the one who will satisfy us. So, if our desires are ordered toward him and he is our source of joy, he will never deny us what we desire. Therefore, we read, “The desire of the righteous is only good, but the expectation of the wicked is wrath.” (Proverbs 11:23) 

What is good except God alone? The righteous desire God, and thus their desires are good. Oh, that we could say with the Psalmist, “Whom have I in heaven but You? And besides You, I desire nothing on earth”! (Psalm 73:5) C.S. Lewis put it well in his sermon, *The Weight of Glory*.

> Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

This has profound implications for our understanding of GLP-1s, for while muting desire may provide health benefits, the Christian life is not meant to be lived without it. Rather, it is a thing of powerful desire, more profound and pure than the trillion earthly desires that drive us into slavery. The Christian is free to use a GLP-1 or not use one, depending on his or her specific health situation, but the Christian is never free to stop desiring.

It remains to be seen whether GLP-1s can truly make the brain stop desiring anything. Those afflicted with clinical depression have long known the feeling of drifting along listless, unable to take joy in much of anything. Here it is important to make another point: desire is not simply what you feel in the moment. For example, I desire to raise my son well, but there are days when I do not feel like getting out of bed to attend to him. What a person ultimately desires is what they choose to do with their precious time on earth, not what they happen to feel at the moment. Our choices reveal what is most important to us and the things to which we bow in worship.

We must therefore choose to desire the King of Kings and Lord of Lords above all others and find our ultimate comfort in him. We must desire him over a particular body shape and the physical comfort of the moment: over any and all comers. 

> For My people have committed two evils:  
> They have forsaken Me,  
> The fountain of living waters,  
> To hew for themselves cisterns,  
> Broken cisterns  
> That can hold no water.” (Jeremiah 2:13)

How on earth can we hope to purify our desires and break out of this enslavement to our sinful flesh? Not through self-improvement, but only with the help of heaven. The Spirit of God contends with our flesh to conform us to the image of Christ. "But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh. For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things that you please.” (Galatians 5:16-17) It is always the Spirit which purifies and resurrects.

What is gluttony in the age of GLP-1s? Just what it has always been, but manifesting somewhat differently. We must learn to see idolatry for what it is: the search for salvation anywhere but in Christ, the seeking of satisfaction from broken cisterns. We are pilgrims on the narrow way pursuing our delight in the beatific vision. For we shall behold him face to face and know fully as we are fully known. Then we will drink from the cistern of infinite goodness, a fountain ever flowing in which we are truly found.

> Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. (Matthew 5:6) 

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.
### After 'Values'
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/after-values/
Last updated: 2026-09-14T11:00:19.000Z
Despite a surge of [virtue-related](https://mereorthodoxy.com/recovering-the-virtues-in-this-age-of-vice-four-new-books/) [discourse](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/live-well-wisdom/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in certain Christian thought spaces, post-virtue, ends-based moral reasoning is having its moment in the mainstream. “We are creating a mode of politics that openly celebrates the death of morality,” lamented journalist Derek Thompson recently in his piece,“[Can America Escape the Cycle of Vicemaxxing?](https://www.derekthompson.org/p/can-america-escape-the-cycle-of-vicemaxxing?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)” 

It’s easy to see how he reached this conclusion. Prominent [right-wing](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/us/politics/stephen-miller-foreign-policy.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.2lA.MkNk.oCfSdie75xOb&smid=url-share&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) [figures](https://tomklingenstein.com/trump-must-learn-from-machiavelli/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) transparently dispense with principles and conscience as limiting factors on power; [prominent leftists](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/hasan-piker-jia-tolentino-microlooting/686919/?gift=A6N1IodiMsH1aaTF3Xj0UAS09x3j6wtqTjHmP5wWaG4&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share) shamelessly plug petty theft as a form of legitimate protest while expressing winking tolerance of political violence.

An ends-based moral logic comports neatly with all manner of atrocities— bombing Iranian civilians, killing boat strike survivors, celebrating the death of your political opponents. Questions of just war, or fairness, or human dignity become at best afterthoughts, and at worst impediments to realizing the righteous ends of conquest, dominance, being on the right side of history. It manifests in a “bloody-minded utilitarianism,” as Ross Douthat has [termed](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/06/opinion/trump-hegseth-christian-nationalism.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.8VA.JMJi.bw52VoezLgKU&smid=url-share&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) it. “Bad guys being killed saves American lives; you can trust us that these are all bad guys; no, you can’t see the legal justification; and anyway, Obama killed more people with his drone strikes.” Sometimes, it’s hard not to conclude that [viciousness itself is the point](https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/02/hegseth-trump-minnesota-ice-military/685848/?gift=A6N1IodiMsH1aaTF3Xj0UPyWmqE2Zm65RlArKoGnNSI&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share). 

In a piece on the military’s boat strikes off the coast of Venezuela, Phil Klay [posits](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/opinion/trump-boat-strikes.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.l1A.LleU.9kXbpHcl6NeH&smid=url-share&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that the current administration’s moral logic has moved beyond even ends-based justifications. “I suspect the question the administration cares about is not ‘is this legal,’ ‘is this a war crime,’ ‘is this murder’ or even ‘is this good for America,’” he writes, “but rather, ‘isn’t this violence delightful?’”

What we are witnessing is but one result of a phenomenon [several](https://comment.org/live-not-by-lies-even-when-youre-winning/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) [thinkers](https://myleswerntz.substack.com/p/virtue-and-vice-with-grace-hamman) have identified: we have abandoned a moral order predicated on virtue and substituted it for one predicated on values. And as author Grace Hamman in her book *Ask of Old Paths*, notes, “values are an incomplete and inadequate way of determining the moral quality of actions and beliefs.” Values—the ends we hold as being intrinsically worthy of pursuit—tend to find a natural home on yard signs or bumper stickers: Science is Real; Love is Love; No Human is Illegal; Make America Great Again. We may denigrate this kind of messaging as “virtue signaling,” but it's important to recognize that these are not virtues. Virtues, the “set of dispositions and habits that must be practiced in order to flourish,” as [Matthew Loftus terms them](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/legalized-gambling-marijuana-use-addiction/673028/?gift=A6N1IodiMsH1aaTF3Xj0UKgBG3XjCxVWdc1GOAuRmuo&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share), cannot be signaled, only be lived. Values have their rightful place— they can help clarify priorities, envisage a desired end state, and motivate righteous action— but they cannot be the foundation of a moral life. 

In a promising turn, the language of virtue has shown signs of life among some in the anti-Trump resistance, who are starting to realize that the language of values is ultimately impotent against those who revel in vice. *The Atlantic*’s Adam Serwer, in his [piece](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/the-neighbors-defending-minnesota-from-ice/685769/?gift=A6N1IodiMsH1aaTF3Xj0UGMnSYKJcbHs%5F9B8klR4eXw&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share) detailing how Minnesotan Christians mobilized amidst the presence of ICE, writes, “The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone…These \[ICE\] agents, and the president who sent them, are no one’s heroes, no one’s saviors—just men with guns who have to hide their faces to shoot a mom in the face, and a nurse in the back.” Serwer argues his case against the administration’s actions on immigration not on the basis of the policy merits; but on the basis that it is cowardly and cruel. 

Unfortunately, despite Serwer’s moral clarity, the American Left in recent years has not evinced a particularly robust commitment to virtue ethics. Setting aside outright celebrations of criminal activity (although these do represent a natural, if extreme, consequence of a virtue-agnostic political ethic), the Left’s idolization of individual autonomy detached from external moral, communal, or religious demands has produced tolerance and celebration of devastating evils like abortion on demand and medically-assisted suicide. (This is not a fault unique to the Left, of course, as evinced by the ugly surge of sports gambling, pornography, and other societal vices tolerated or outright endorsed by the libertarian right.) Notions of “value neutrality” and the supremacy of the secular have manifested in varying levels of [disdain](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/26/us/politics/the-dogma-lives-loudly-within-you-revisiting-barretts-confirmation-hearing.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.c1A.854N.niQz1znMf5et&smid=url-share&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) for public expressions of religious belief, while intolerant insistence on ideological conformity has led to the castigation and banishment those not sufficiently deferential to the progressive shibboleths of the day.

The worst tendencies of both the American Right and the American Left have a common root in the virtue-to-values shift. The logic of the market; of [unfettered choice](https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2025/06/americans-are-tired-choice/683273/?gift=A6N1IodiMsH1aaTF3Xj0UFYKVeANwg%5FJs3lXXAR-Di8&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share), has turned morality into, as Jessica Hooten Wilson terms it, “an expression of preference.” The word “value” itself implies market logic, that we assign significance to particular ideas and aims and decide what they’re worth to us. Fundamentally, a values-based moral framework is an attempt to reduce what it means to live a morally upright life to something small and discrete enough for us to “hold.” It’s a product of what Charles Taylor termed the “modern moral order,” part of the buffer of the “buffered self.” Instead of submitting ourselves to transformation in the presence of the divine, we atomize and externalize righteousness, encoding it into various issue positions, from which we select those that speak to us. “Value neutrality” is a natural outflow of this approach, because it assumes values are things we pick and choose from a menu and thus can be shed or shunned at will. 

It’s destructive to individual and societal flourishing when values become the fundamental unit of moral analysis. Partisan pugilism naturally follows, as does comfort with selecting morally depraved leaders because they’re good on the issues. Taken to an extreme, a values-based morality can lead to terrible acts of violence done in service of a purported good. One can bomb an abortion clinic or assassinate public figures in the service of a value—in fact it’s the logical thing to do. If the only thing that matters is achieving the righteous end, any means become licit. 

Conversely, it is impossible, by definition, to do evil things in service of a virtue. In contrast to values, which we choose and hold and experience as external to ourselves, virtue is something we embody. Historically, variously-defined sets of “capital,” “cardinal,” and “theological” virtues have collectively included chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, kindness, patience, humility, fortitude, justice, faith, hope, and love. That isn’t just a laundry list of human-derived impositions; it’s a (non-exhaustive) description of the attributes of Christ that Christians as his disciples are expected to assume, which means that Christians should be leading the charge on virtue. We are not saved by our practices, but certain practices are an inevitable product of salvation. 

The Augustinian good of the values-based moral order is a recognition of the importance of orthodoxy: we are reasoning creatures, and what we believe does matter. It’s not enough, though, to ask “what do we believe?” but rather “who are we becoming?” Salvation demands transformation. Christ says we shall be known by our fruit; St. Paul helpfully specifies what that is: joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, which together ultimately comprise love. To practice virtue is to exert ourselves to live in accordance with those fruits, to work out our salvation and strive to resemble Christ day by day. As C.S. Lewis wrote in *Mere Christianity*, “Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.” 

Christians are not to be moral relativists. We should be capable of discerning right from wrong and bold about articulating the distinction. Embracing virtue does not mean sacrificing moral clarity on issues that matter. The difference is that clarity proceeds from virtue rather than preceding it. It’s because we are seeking to be just and kind and faithful people who resemble Jesus that we care about particular issues of justice and mercy and human dignity, which means we undermine the whole operation if we stop being just, kind, faithful, etc. in the pursuit of those ends. It’s entirely possible for us to eliminate abortion or end poverty or build a lot of family-friendly housing and lose our souls in the process. We should and must fight for righteous outcomes, but we must be on our guard for when our zeal tempts us to unrighteous acts. 

Reclaiming virtue as the basis of morality isn’t a panacea; nothing in this fallen world is. Christians (and people of good faith generally) will still disagree and argue about how best to put virtues into practice. There will also be times when the manifestation of one virtue takes precedence over another, depending on context and the responsibilities an individual assumes in their role (a virtuous judge, for example, exercises justice over mercy when imposing a sentence on a guilty defendant—though they do so not with malice or disdain toward the sentenced; rather with hope for repentance and a deep awareness of their own guilt before God). Working out what it means practically to live a virtuous life must be done in counsel with others in the body of believers, and with a deep awareness of our shared need for grace. 

Christians have a particular responsibility to embody godly practices and habits of the heart, but thanks to natural law and common grace, all people are capable of virtuous behavior. It’s encouraging to see Serwer and others, like Representative[ Jake Auchincloss](https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/democracy-governance/bowling-alone-scrolling-alone-legislators?ref=mereorthodoxy.com#:~:text=media.%E2%80%99-,No%2C%20it%E2%80%99s%20about%20saying%2C%20%E2%80%98temperance%E2%80%94everything%20in%20moderation.%E2%80%99%5C%E2%80%9D,-Jake), a Democrat from Massachusetts, employ the language of virtue and vice in a policy context, unafraid to make judgments about some things being intrinsically better or worse for us as individuals and a society. For a liberal society like ours to function in a way that promotes human flourishing and the common good, it requires its citizenry to adopt a certain set of virtues. Yuval Levin [names](https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/liberal-society-isnt-for-everyone?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) some of them: “As a liberal democracy…we require virtues like toleration, forbearance, patience, and humility. And as a republic, we require virtues like responsibility, courage, honesty, magnanimity, and faith.” 

A peaceable, orderly, and just common life doesn’t just happen—it requires people who are willing and able to change their behavior and restrain their desires to support their own flourishing and that of those around them. It requires Christians who recognize that any moral framework that does not ultimately aim to shape us into the image of Christ is perverted and misguided. It requires us to recognize that even our values are subject to the lordship of Christ, that many of those values must be left at the foot of the cross when we embark on the Christian way.
### Cultivating a Well-Ordered Anthropology in a Dehumanizing World
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/cultivating-a-well-ordered-anthropology-in-a-dehumanizing-world/
Last updated: 2026-09-11T11:00:34.000Z
**Freya India.** [***GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything***](https://www.amazon.com/GIRLS%C2%AE-Generation-Z-Commodification-Everything/dp/1250442222?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Henry Holt and Co., 2026\. $29.99\. 384 pp.**

**Jen Wilkin.** [***Dust to Dust: Aging Wisely in an Anti-Aging World***](https://www.crossway.org/books/dust-to-dust-tpb/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Crossway, 2026\. $16.99\. 208 pp.**

The blessed gods alone live forever, ever youthful and unchanging. Everyone in the ancient world knew it. And yet, since time immemorial, people have been on an unrelenting quest to eternal life. The Mesopotamian epic hero and king Gilgamesh traveled beyond the bounds of the known world, conversed with the barmaid at the edge of the universe, and communed with the man who managed to survive the flood and gained the gift of eternal life. But Gilgamesh himself failed in his quest—then died. Greek epic heroes fought for eternal fame, settling for it as the next best thing, since bodily immortality wasn’t on offer. And Roman emperors declared themselves living gods in wishful name-it-claim-it thinking that, in due time, always proved false. Each one of these self-made gods died.

But, myths declared, select mortals did find eternal life. The results, however, were not typical—nor they were quite so good at the end. When the Greek goddess of dawn, Eos, fell in love with a mortal prince, Tithonus, she begged Zeus for the gift of eternal life for her beloved. Zeus granted her request. Except, it turns out, it was no blessing. The foolish Eos forgot to ask for eternal youth for Tithonus alongside eternal life. And so, eternal life didn’t help him as he aged along the same timeline as normal mortals do, shriveling, shrinking, declining physically and mentally, until he became just a cricket—nothing but a faint chirping sound devoid of recognizable humanity. Eos quickly fell out of love. 

We may laugh at tales like this one, but secular modernity puts its own twist on them. Consider the tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, whose Instagram account has 2.4 million followers and boldly declares: “We may be the first generation who won’t die.” His own personal motto is, in fact, “Don’t Die,” and he has been spending $2 million per year on treatments and procedures to make this goal possible. Johnson will turn 50 next year, but he works hard daily to maintain the appearance and health of an 18-year-old. How? It is a delicate science: 

> When Johnson first wakes up before 5am, he weighs himself on a high-tech scale that looks not just at his weight, but his body fat and hydration level. Then he measures his body temperature—through the ear, thankfully… He takes 54 pills alongside a drink he calls the ‘green giant' containing creatine, cocoa flavanols and collagen peptides, and wears a cap on his head that pumps red light into his scalp to stimulate hair growth—because no man wants to go bald in his old age. He then exercises, undergoing a 25-step process that includes 10 minutes of backward sleds, Nordics, reverse Nordics and ‘IsoTib ankle rotations’ to try and increase his diaphragm strength. Then he eats breakfast, ‘which is a few pounds of vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, garlic and ginger,’ he explains, all of which are chosen for their health-boosting benefits.

While this list sounds intense, it is less bizarre than some of the other treatments Johnson has used experimentally. At one point he tried regular blood and plasma transfusions from his teenage son before abandoning the practice, because he couldn’t see measurable benefits—unlike the obviously measurable benefits of eating pounds of broccoli with garlic and ginger for breakfast. The Romans joked that mushrooms were the food of the gods (after poisoned mushrooms led to the death—and prompt deification—of the emperor Claudius). Reading about Johnson’s routine, it is clear that broccoli is the food of this modern self-made god. 

Something else is clear from these stories, ancient and modern: Anthropology (our thoughts and beliefs about people) and theology (our thoughts and beliefs about the divine) are intertwined. A pagan theology results in a pagan anthropology—the desire to make oneself into a god by any means possible. A theology that recognizes God’s power over all his creations, including the human beings God had created in his own image (Gen. 1:27), results in an anthropology that emphasizes human finitude and utter dependence on God in all seasons of life. We have not created ourselves, and this is good news. 

Two new books show the implications of poor theology and anthropology for the very young (Gen-Z) and those a bit older respectively. Writer Freya India analyzes the horrific physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual toll that social media has taken on Gen-Z women, effectively stripping them of their personhood and making them into products to optimize with the aid of yet more products. Meanwhile seasoned Bible teacher Jen Wilkin considers our society’s firmly baked-in anti-aging attitudes and presents a response: phases of life are part of God’s plan for our lives; they are a blessing, not a curse. 

There is nothing new under the sun. Still, technological advances present ever more creative ways of dehumanizing God’s image-bearers—not for our good, and definitely not for God’s glory. 

\*\*\*

It is 8:00pm on a school night in 1999, and I’m on the family computer in that little nook under the stairs in our old rental, doing homework while also logged into AOL Instant Messenger. It is the only way I have of communicating with friends outside of school, aside from just calling a friend’s landline, which is rather awkward and inconvenient—my phone use is strictly monitored and limited. Besides, perhaps it isn’t so much a phone conversation that you want at that moment. You just need to feel a little less alone in suffering through this biology lab report due in the morning. 

Of course, teens being teens, Instant Messenger was also how some really inappropriate gossip got passed around, but to not be in the know would have led to an embarrassment of its own in school the next day. Information is power, historians affirm, analyzing past empires and civilizations entire. Every teenager can confirm this simply from experience. But the problem with gossip chains is that sometimes you’re just an observer, but other times, you’re at the center of it, and consequences can be emotionally devastating, amplifying insecurities that are already outsized. 

There is no question about it. Adolescence is not easy, as bodies change fast (I recall habitually bumping into corners, as my legs and arms were in the morning somehow longer than they were the night before), hormones surge, emotions overflow, and wisdom is lacking to make sense of it all. Girls have always felt these changes particularly abruptly or at least in ways different from the typical adolescent boy. And adults around adolescents habitually have felt ill-equipped to help, even while noticing that a crisis is afoot. Indeed, in 1994, as I entered my own teenage years, psychologist Mary Pipher wrote *Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls* to try and make sense of the problems she saw in her patients: “Many girls come into therapy with serious, even life-threatening problems, such as anorexia or the desire to kill or physically hurt themselves. Others have problems less dangerous but still more puzzling, such as school refusal, underachievement, moodiness or constant discord with their parents. Many are the victims of sexual violence.” 

Pipher asked outright in her introduction: “Why are so many girls in therapy in the 1990s?” Why, she wondered, were the adolescent girls she was treating so much more troubled than she recalled in her own girlhood in the 1960s? Clearly her questions resonated with many readers. The book spent three years on the New York Times bestseller list, selling 1.5 million copies along the way. 

The answer, Pipher concludes, is the overly sexualized “girl-poisoning culture” into which adolescent girls found themselves thrust, and from which they could not escape whole. Music, movies, television, and other media all encouraged that culture—in turn destroying girls’ emotional well-being and fostering toxic behaviors to match.

Freya India was not yet born when Pipher wrote her book. Still, India’s new book, *GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything*, does for Generation Z what Pipher attempted to do for Generation X and millennial girls: try to make sense of the anxieties so readily visible all around. What is happening? What about this crisis is old—and what is utterly new and unprecedented? Last but not least, what can we do about it? 

\*\*\*

“All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare said. We’re doing one better (or worse) as a society of late: all the world’s a lab. Specifically, when it comes to Gen-Z girls, the past two decades have been a disastrous lab experiment with human subjects. India describes the experiment and its horrific results based on her own experience as a Gen-Z British woman and from additional evidence of interviews and social media.

“My basic argument is simple,” she says. “Modern digital technology amplified the age-old anxieties adolescent girls have always felt. Throughout history, girls and young women have always worried about their appearance, their emotions, their social status, their friendships and families, their romantic relationships, and their futures… The problem, though, is more sinister than that. Not only does the modern world magnify these age-old anxieties, it ruthlessly exploits and profits from them.” 

India describes, for instance, the rise of Snapchat and Instagram filters for girls’ faces. At first tools were available for girls to modify or filter their faces online with playful tools, creating illusions or temporary avatars of themselves. But pressures kept rising to look ever better, ever younger, ever more like the celebrities and influencers whose videos of doing makeup or getting ready for the day regularly get 15 million or more views. Next came the products for sale—injectables, fillers, makeup, and much, much more: “beauty influencers were getting rich and famous. Girls moved on from watching relatable young women reviewing affordable beauty products to influencers casually vlogging their lip filler appointments and cosmetic surgeries, sometimes as sponsored ads.” 

These pressures amplified mental health crises, such as eating disorders, to which teenage girls have already been much too prone (as Pipher argued in 1994). But the new mental health crisis, fostered by the many hours Gen-Z girls have been spending online, is only fueled further by online tools that promise to diagnose and medicate girls—all for a price. Online AI therapists are available day or night—for a hefty fee, of course. But more than that, the real problem that goes untreated is “social contagion”—behaviors that spread like the plague among peer groups. 

Many of the mental health issues Gen-Z girls are battling are the direct result of digitally facilitated social contagion, India argues. These include suicidal ideation and the epidemic of gender dysphoria. Worst of all, the reliance on online tools to solve these problems, caused by endless scrolling and swiping to begin with, only leaves girls more disconnected and detached from other people—lacking real friendships and relationships not only in the crucial teenage years but well into adulthood. 

In response, not only AI therapists but also AI friends and romantic partners, also available for sale and rising in popularity, promise to step into the breach, ensuring that one could live an entire life without hazarding any interactions with other enfleshed beings. Today’s crisis relies on the same insecurities and longings of girls that the 1990’s “girl-poisoning culture” fostered. Yet it is unprecedented in its technological progress—its ability to deliver the familiar toxins to girls’ brains 24/7, all via tiny rectangular devices in their hands and pockets.

Yet the real crisis, when we peer beneath all the superficial layers, is always spiritual. The therapeutic nature of online AI tools only emphasizes this further: “while this therapeutic culture mimics prayer, confession, and even answers our biggest existential questions, one thing is missing: Who is God? In this religion, *we* are the gods.” 

We’re today’s Roman emperors, declaring ourselves gods. It’s going about as well for us as it did for folks like Nero. So what is the solution? India suggests the restoration of relationships, friendships, connections with other people in the flesh: “An important thing to do, I think, is to defy this cultural message to emotionally detach, this lie that it is liberating to be alone. Not because every young woman should follow the same traditional path, but because it is a tragedy—an outrage, actually—that we have been convinced that human connection is an inconvenience, that other people are obstacles.” 

The digital media world treats persons as machines, dehumanizing them and remaking them as products to be molded for profit. In response, we must remember (as the Sunday School cliché goes) “who we are and whose we are.” We are God’s image-bearers, created for his joy, pleasure, and glory. We need to live our lives in accordance with this truth—a reality that has repercussions not only for how we interact with the digital world but also for how we think about aging.

\*\*\*

Another way to summarize the phenomenon India describes, this utter dehumanization of girls through online media tools that make persons into products, is that it is a story. The media world has been attempting (and all too often succeeding) to sell a particular life story to Gen-Z girls. It is a poisonous story of self-creation, self-making and remaking. People are story-tellers—just as God is. Not coincidentally, God gave us his Word, the Bible, in the shape of beautiful and powerful stories. But there is one important distinction between the stories people come up with of their own accord and imagination, and the story that the Bible presents: not all of the stories people tell are true. All the stories in the Bible are. 

Beyond the realm of social media, another area of our world that is filled with false stories is aging. In her new book *Dust to Dust: Aging Wisely in an Anti-Aging World*, Jen Wilkin confronts these false stories, puts them side-by-side with the biblical vision, and reminds us what it means to be a human being, precious in God’s sight and created in his image in all phases of our lives, from birth to dust. “The stories we believe about God, ourselves, and the world shape our feelings and govern the way we live,” she reminds, stating a truth equally applicable to India’s observations about the ravages of social media on girls. 

The problem is, our society glorifies youth and deeply fears aging and old age, so it tells false narratives about age—exemplified by such sayings as “age is just a number.” Many products exist to hide aging or slow it down—from milder and less visible plastic surgery procedures (the OB-GYN office I went to for the first part of my second pregnancy had walls plastered with Botox ads) to more extreme measures of the sort Bryan Johnson lives by. For Johnson, the goal is to perpetually maintain an epigenetic age of 18\. Anything over it is a failure. There are ramifications, though, to such false narratives. They destroy our relationships with others, and they deny a basic fact of what it means to be human, limited and finite: We will all grow old and die. True, as Christ promised, “the last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Cor. 15:26), but until then, this is our lot and denying it through false narratives will not negate their outcome.

So what does the Bible say about personhood at every stage of life? To help answer this question, Wilkin structures the book as an extended chiasmus (or chiasm). Bible readers may have heard of a basic chiastic structure—when the narrative proceeds by structuring the two halves of a poem or a story to mirror each other. Consider how you might narrate a walk down the block and then back again. This basic chiasm has an ABBA structure, with just two elements that are mirrored from the first half of the story to the second.

But elaborate extended chiasms are common in ancient literature, with elements that mirror each other across an entire book scroll, such as the ABCDEDCBA structure of Book 3 of Homer’s *Iliad*. We talk about the importance of beginnings and endings in stories—and they certainly matter for ancient literature as well. But the key in lengthy chiastic narratives is to recognize the importance of the middle—for to it the first half of the narrative points, and from it the second half proceeds. In the case of Book 3 of the *Iliad*, that crucial middle features the duel between Menelaus and Paris, Helen’s respective husband and kidnapper-lover. The duel is important, as it could potentially just end the war. But the mirroring elements on either side of the middle are no less significant either and heighten the drama of the duel. The same is true for the drama of our lives.

Our entire life, from birth to old age, Wilkin argues, can be structured as an extended chiasm. First, our birth and our death mirror each other, as both involve a labor followed by first breath and final breath respectively. Then our early years of life and the final years of life generally involve complete dependence on others for basic needs. Next, the years of adolescence with their increasing independence mirror “senior adulthood” with its decreasing independence. In the final pairing, our early adulthood and “late midlife” are both defined by caregiving—of children in the first case and of aging parents in the second. Finally, in that important middle spot of the chiasm, to which and from which the other mirroring pairs proceed, we find midlife—age forty to fifty-five. 

“If you have ever hiked to a mountain peak, you know the sensation of looking back toward the way you came with clearer perspective. And you know the sensation of looking at the return path and getting a sense of the distance and the effort it will require. Midlife is like that, an opportunity for taking stock… Midlife is simultaneously a liminal space and a point of no return.” It took turning forty for me to gain an interest in my family history and my past as an immigrant twice over. Only when I turned forty did I understand how incredibly difficult it must have been for my parents to emigrate from the country where they had spent their entire lives up to that point. And now, in my own midlife, I begin looking ahead at what lies on the downward path of this mountain peak. 

It is easy for us to treasure cute babies and to accept their utter dependence on us for all their needs, including in the middle of the night. It is more difficult to treasure old age—whether ours or that of those we love, as they grow as needy as babies over time. But all of these life stages are gifts from God. We are persons, beloved of God, at each point in life’s arc, Wilkin reminds her readers. 

These reminders are necessary. Because of our culture’s devaluing of old age and idolization of youth, we fail to see not only how God sees older men and women, but also how invaluable the Bible considers their role in the local church. Older men and women are called to teach those younger than them (Titus 2), but in our churches today, pastors barely out of college are not unheard of. Those serving in youth ministry, in particular, are sometimes barely older than the teens they are called to disciple. What kind of story are we telling in the process about different life stages in our churches? 

On and on life goes, if we are blessed to live a long one. The chiastic pairing of the respective stages on either end of midlife reminds us that all of them matter, all of them a gift to us and to those around us, if only we use our time here to serve. “Bodies age, people develop,” Wilkin repeats as a mantra throughout her book. God shaped the first man out of dust, and to dust we will all return. But also, God has numbered all our days, so along with the Psalmist, Wilkin encourages us to cling to this truth: “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12). 

We are not gods. We’re not even emperors. And we are certainly not God. But we are his workmanship, a true masterpiece (Eph. 2:10), children of dust though we are. God created us for a relationship with him, for however long our life span on this earth will last. More importantly, we know that we will spend eternity with him. And until then, perhaps broccoli in moderation won’t hurt either.
### Father Mychal Judge: Honoring 9/11’s First Officially Recorded Casualty, 25 Years Later
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-pastor-with-his-people/
Last updated: 2026-09-11T11:00:15.000Z
In the Longwood neighborhood of the South Bronx in New York City, the firehouse of FDNY Engine 73/Ladder 42 had just undergone a multimillion-dollar renovation and was being rededicated. During the ceremony, Franciscan priest and seasoned FDNY chaplain Mychal Judge delivered a homily: 

> Good days, bad days, up days, down days, sad days, happy days—but never a boring day on this job. You do what God has called you to do . . . You have no idea when you get on that rig, no matter how big the call or no matter how small, you have no idea what God is calling you to, *but He needs you.* 

It was September 10th, 2001\. 

Father Mychal Judge was born and raised in Brooklyn and early on cultivated a fascination with the priesthood, and at just 15, Judge began attending seminary. After graduating, Judge would later be assigned to various parishes and roles throughout the Northeast and eventually make his way back to New York City. In 1994, after a few years of serving as a part-time chaplain, Judge agreed to serve in the role full-time for the FDNY. 

During his chaplaincy, Judge’s biographers, Francis DeBernardo and Michael Daly, point out that Father Judge crafted a “theology of firefighting” of sorts. That is, he viewed the firehouses as holy ground and the firefighters (or “holy rascals,” as Judge would say) as participating in God’s mercy in the city. While the colorful language and bluntness that frequently accompany firemen were likely not a perfect mesh for Father Judge’s disposition, there was a type of similarity between the life of a priest and a fireman. The firefighters’ ways of life in the firehouse, their subsequent roles, hierarchy, and selflessness resembled the Franciscans’ camaraderie, structure, rhythms, and humility in their friary. Two uniquely different vocations, but they shared an oddly similar way of life and calling. 

In reading various reflections on how Judge handled his role as an FDNY chaplain, it’s hard to imagine a person more fit for the job. He was endlessly compassionate, brave, and willing. Judge became an authority figure that firefighters not only trusted but expected to be by their side in the darkest of days, and 9/11 was no different. 

Most retellings of 9/11 routinely state that it began as a “normal” Tuesday, but in the expansive metropolis of New York City, there is no such thing. For starters, it was primary election day, and New Yorkers were headed to the polls to elect the replacement for Mayor Giuliani. Additionally, it was the first full work week after Labor Day, and the weather was stunning. Due to a storm the day prior, there was not a cloud in the sky, a sensation aviators dub “severe clear.”

When the disasters ensued on that day, starting at 8:46 am, Judge quickly raced down to the World Trade Center (WTC) wearing his white fire helmet and black FDNY overcoat with his last name and the title “Chaplain” stenciled in. For all intents and purposes, Judge looked like a regular fireman in photos, the only noticeable difference being his clerical collar. 

That morning, Judge’s disposition stood out to almost everyone who knew him. Routinely at fires, Judge would often stand back from the site and remain a positive and warm presence for New York’s bravest. On this day, however, Judge was inside Tower 1 (the North Tower), completely distraught, pacing back and forth alone, mumbling desperate prayers.

At 9:59 am, a thunderous sound came from Tower 2 (the South Tower). As the sound grew, the crew on the ground level in the North Tower scurried to find refuge; unbeknownst to them, the sound was the collapse of the South Tower. The debris from the collapse swarmed those in the North Tower, turning everything black. As the crew in the North Tower regained their footing and looked for light, they quickly discovered Father Mychal Judge’s body lying lifelessly. It’s been reported that his last words were “*Jesus, please end this right now! God, please end this!*”

Chief Joseph Pfeifer was one of the first to discover him. Pfeifer, who was the first FDNY chief on the scene at the WTC that morning, had set out to become a priest before joining the department, even attending seminary. In his third year of seminary, Pfeifer would instead choose a wife, and though he didn’t become a priest, he forever remained a lifelong admirer of the holy calling. Given his background, Pfeifer had a particular affection and respect for Father Judge’s role in the FDNY. Upon discovering Judge’s body, Chief Pfeifer removed Judge’s clerical collar to search for a pulse, but found nothing. 

Of the two men, Pfeifer was the one who had signed up to give his life for the sake of others, but on this day, it would be the priest who performed such a holy and sacred task. Once Chief Pfeifer discovered the body, true to the FDNY code, he would not leave one of their own behind. He ordered some of his men to carry Father Judge out; they took him to nearby St. Peter’s Church. It was a tragic reversal of roles: the priest died the death of a fireman, and the fireman initiated the priestly procession of a lifeless body.

Father Judge was lifted onto a plastic chair and then carried out by five men. As they carried him, a photographer snapped a photo of the moment. It became one of the most famous photographs of 9/11, dubbed the “American Pietà.” Judge’s body is held by five men who possess the persona of Joseph of Arimathea, performing a sacred mission in a profane time. When they arrived at St. Peter’s, all the clergy had left to attend to the crowds, so two of the men administered the last rites and placed Father Judge on the altar. 

Soon, Judge’s body was taken to Bellevue Hospital, where many bodies were being taken to, waiting for an autopsy to be performed. Upon arrival, Father Peter Brophy, OFM, insisted that no autopsy be done and stated that Judge was Jewish and needed to be buried before dusk. Of course, neither of those statements was true. Nevertheless, the hospital gave in. Father Judge circumvented the line and was given a death certificate “DM” (Disaster Manhattan) “0001-01”—the first certified casualty of 9/11\. 

Each fall, I find myself reflecting on Father Judge’s life and legacy. There are plenty of stories on 9/11 of heroism, bravery, tragedy, spirituality, heartbreak, and redemption. And yet, I remain fixated on Father Judge. I have no obvious connection to him. During 9/11, I was five years old and lived roughly 3,000 miles away. But these days, I now live just over a mile from where the Twin Towers once stood. Often, during my morning jogs, I run past the reflecting pools where the Towers once stood, wondering what that day must have been like for my fellow New Yorkers, asking why the prayers of Father Judge weren’t granted. 

Perhaps my fixation on Father Judge stems from the fact that I also constantly find myself in awe of the bravery, selflessness, and integrity of those whom I minister to. I am not a chaplain for the FDNY, but I spend my days in prayer and conversation with urban planners, film directors, lawyers, physician assistants, and nonprofit workers, all of whom serve and bless New York in ways that go above and beyond what I can. And yet, when I see Father Judge dressed in his chaplain’s gear, inside the North Tower, praying without ceasing, I see a pastor with his people, suffering with and for them, right by their side, to the detriment of his own life. He’s not far off, locked up in a parish with thoughts and prayers, but in the Garden of Gethsemane with his brothers, begging God to act.

Less than 24 hours after his final homily, Judge lived the reality he spoke of. That is, we have no idea what God is calling us to, but He needs us, and we need Him, and twenty-five years later, we need Him all the more.
### Delicious Life
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/delicious-life/
Last updated: 2026-09-10T11:00:37.000Z
Proverbs 25:11 says that “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.” (KJV) When someone dies, it is hard to know what to say about it. My grandmother died this July, aged 95 years. She was always introverted and hated to be the center of attention, which complicated knowing what to say at her funeral. But we knew that we should serve cheesecake at the lunch reception after, because she loved it. 

I would not say that my grandmother was fond of the finer things in life. She was the kind of person who wears Alfred Dunner seven days a week and SAS shoes. She was very thrifty. She would turn a light off on you—sometimes even if you were in the room—to save money on electricity. She did not like people bringing her more breadsticks at Olive Garden or refilling her drink when she hadn’t asked for it. She did not really enjoy travel, though she sometimes traveled to visit family.

I would absolutely say that my grandmother loved the sweeter things in life. Some of my earliest memories of sweets are from her house. She always served dessert at every dinner, often homemade. She always had Entenmann’s doughnuts or coffee cake around. She enjoyed Coca-Cola. When we visited, she often made lemon custard, because that was my childhood favorite. In her later years, she had a small dish of ice cream every night after her shower and before bed. Every night. When she was suffering from dementia in her final years and could not carry a conversation, it was the custom in our family to bring a cookie or a piece of candy whenever we visited. It was always appreciated. 

In her final days, under hospice care at my parents’ house, my parents made her sweet tea. My grandmother was from North Carolina, so she drank sweet tea the way they make it in the South. It was very sweet. On one of the last days my grandmother was fully conscious, my father took her some sweet tea and she drank it through a straw and smiled and said, “delicious.” That was actually her final word on Earth, because she spoke very little in that last week. 

Delicious. My grandmother was a lifelong Methodist, even a member of the handbell choir, but I do not believe she was intentionally rendering a verdict on life in that final word. She was rendering a positive verdict on the sweet tea. But I think there was a kind of wisdom in that being her final word. 

Many sad things can happen in a life that spans 95 years. My grandmother’s parents divorced when she was young. My grandmother was widowed in her 50s and never remarried. She outlived two of her four children. She raised a grandchild. She did not die in penury—her house held good value and she lived for decades on my grandfather’s pension—but her life was not always easy. She had many sorrows. Yet she never lost her taste for cookies and candy and cheesecake.

My grandmother was as hooked on sugar as the rest of us, but she also had an appreciation of the gentle sweetness of life, what the French call *douceur de vivre*. Despite her hard times, she always enjoyed her lawn and the birds outside her window. She enjoyed listening to music. Despite her dementia in later years, she was reliably pleasant and rarely complained. She was not always happy—she was not one of those grandmothers—but she enjoyed what she had. Ecclesiastes 5:18-20 says “Behold that which I have seen: it is good and comely for one to eat and to drink, and to enjoy the good of all his labour that he taketh under the sun all the days of his life, which God giveth him: for it is his portion. Every man also to whom God hath given riches and wealth, and hath given him power to eat thereof, and to take his portion, and to rejoice in his labour; this is the gift of God. For he shall not much remember the days of his life; because God answereth him in the joy of his heart.” When my grandmother remembered very little else, she remembered that there are sweet things in life and she enjoyed them. 

A sweet tooth is also a way of seeing the world. The good things from God are sweet to us. Proverbs 24:13 says, “My son, eat thou honey, because it is good; and the honeycomb which is sweet to thy taste.” And then the next verse suggests that wisdom shall be like it to our soul. “So shall the knowledge of wisdom be unto thy soul when thou hast found it, then there shall be a reward, and thy expectation shall not be cut off.” Samson and Jonathan were both nourished by honey in their struggles against the Philistines. Consider the land flowing with milk and honey. 

When someone dies, we sometimes struggle with how to make sense of what that someone has said and done. My grandmother was never a very expressive woman. She gave hugs, but she was not known for them. She did not say “I love you” at the drop of a hat. Despite a near-century of church attendance, she rarely spoke about her faith. She kept most things to herself. She did not even like to share family history, despite my mother’s passion for genealogy. She did not go in for long phone calls and advice. I never heard my grandmother expound her philosophy of life, but I think it was partially reflected in her final word. Delicious. Despite everything. Because of everything.

What does it mean to “taste and see that the Lord is good?” It may mean enjoying sweet tea on your deathbed in a way that reflects Psalm 118:24 “This is the day that the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.” It may be reflected in dying like my grandmother, without a bitter taste in the mouth.
### Homeschooling Is More Normal Than You Think
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/homeschooling-is-more-normal-than-you-think/
Last updated: 2026-09-10T11:00:27.000Z
**Dixie Dillon Lane.** [***Skipping School: A History of American Homeschooling and How It Went Mainstream***](https://www.eerdmans.com/9781467470094/skipping-school/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Eerdmans, 2026\. $28.99\. 216 pp.**

It was a sunny March day, nearly seventy degrees, so I packed up the four kids, ages ten months to ten years, and we drove to the state park. The older two had dressed the three-year-old and packed food and water. They noticed old nests tucked in the trees as we walked the trails. We remarked how the world was ready for spring, and that new nests would soon be built. Every once in a while, my three-year-old stopped us so that we could listen to the birds.

As energy flagged and water ran low, we recited some poems, nursery rhymes, and folk songs to keep our spirits up. Later we explored the interpretive center, where we read about the history of Machicomoco Park and happened upon three archeologists at work; they welcomed us and answered the kids’ questions. We concluded our exploration with a walk onto a dock, where we looked for oysters and other salt marsh critters and stared at the glinting river water.

It was one of those days that fill me with gratitude that we get to homeschool. None of this would have been possible had the kids jumped on the school bus that morning and spent most of the day inside. I also enjoy the game of translating the things they learn outside of formal school into educational jargon: today, for instance, we worked on environmental stewardship, problem solving and group dynamics, perseverance, hands-on historical study, research initiative, critical thinking, situational preparedness, familial bonding, local history, social and neighborly skills, immersive natural experience—you get the idea.

Modern American homeschooling has entered a new era quite different from its beginnings in 1950s America, where “living room schools” existed in a legal gray area. Compulsory universal education as we understand it today—that is, the state requirement to attend an approved school between ages five and eighteen—was still rather new in the mid-twentieth century. Still, it was sufficiently established that, by contrast, schooling at home was clearly countercultural (unlike, say, Abraham Lincoln-period homeschooling), and sometimes even illegal.

Now, in our post-Covid era, homeschooling has entered the mainstream. Homeschoolers are still a minority, but a significant one, as demonstrated by the Homeschool Days at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and Mount Vernon (not to mention innumerable podcasts, curriculum providers, and homeschool conventions and consultants). People no longer look askance if you take your school-age children to Costco on a weekday morning (though if you bring more than three kids, they might). Some states provide funds for homeschooled families to support their children’s education. If globe-trotting is your thing, you can even “worldschool,” spending most of your school year studying California Redwoods, Niagara Falls, or Tuscany onsite. Or you can simply travel to England with your family to visit Charles Dickens’s grave while your teenager reads *A Tale of Two Cities* in his online literature class (as some of my students have done).

How did this shift happen? And why should we care about the story of homeschooling and our homeschooling neighbors? American historian and homeschooling mother of four Dixie Dillon Lane answers these questions in her new book, *Skipping School: A History of American Homeschooling and How It Went Mainstream*. Lane’s project moves beyond sensationalist and alarmist opinion reporting on homeschooling. Instead, she soberly presents a clear narrative of homeschooling that sheds light both on American society today and, through the stories of real families, on the motivations of actual homeschoolers. Lane shows that religious motivations are only one factor. Homeschooling in America today is “the site of a flourishing range of pedagogies, curricula, and experiments in education,” reflecting the diversity of Americans.

\*\*\*

This would be an important book even if it were dryly written. But thankfully, Lane writes with humor, clarity, and ease. And one great benefit to Lane’s study is that she is both scholar and practitioner. Like Catherine Ruth Pakaluk and her parents-of-five-plus-children subjects in *Hannah’s Children*, Lane is both scholar and insider. This allows her to gather valuable information from her subjects that an outsider (especially a hostile one!) would not be able to. This doesn’t mean that outsider perspectives are not needed; rather, insider perspectives are sorely lacking in society at large. Lane’s book fills that gap in a scholarly and winsome way. As she writes: “Surely we can examine the homeschooling phenomenon across time in a way that is analytically robust and evidence-based but is also respectful of the experiences of those who actually lived it.” “We can do better” than the run-of-the-mill clickbait takes, she adds. And she does.

Lane opens with a scene that could be the inspiration for a movie: A mother of seven is on trial in Los Angeles in 1953 for not sending her oldest children to school. She’s asked, “Are you a Communist?”

Lane notes that the 1950s and ‘60s were generally characterized by “domestic conflict and suspicion.” If you weren’t sending your kids to school, maybe you were a Communist. Or maybe you took your kids out of school because you were afraid of Communism. Or maybe you welcomed more state oversight because, well, Communism. Such ideas were in the air, all while the nation sought to strengthen its defense, both ideologically and otherwise, against the Soviet threat. Schools were a prime domain for strengthening national defense—hence the increased consolidation. Steadily and surely, local communities had less and less say in what went on in public schools, and children were more isolated from their families (a Communist dream, one might note).

Lane situates the story of homeschooling in America, then, within a broader context that brings out perhaps her greatest insight: Modern homeschooling is part of a long American tradition of parental involvement in children’s education and community that began arguably with the Massachusetts School Laws of the 1640s.

Indeed, public schooling has changed significantly, arguably with each decade, especially since the 1925 Supreme Court decision in *Pierce v. the Society of Sisters* that upheld the right of parents to have primary say in where their children are educated. This decision overturned an Oregon law that required parents to send children to public schools within their district; *Pierce* thus preserve the right of parents to send their children to private schools as well. “The child is not the mere creature of the State,” wrote Justice James McReynolds. And further: “The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State *to standardize its children* by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only” (emphasis added).

Lane makes an argument that may seem surprising at first glance: *Homeschooling is more normal than you think.* That is, homeschooling is part of a continuous, though sometimes suppressed, American belief in (and desire for) “parental influence and local control of education.” In this context, homeschooling is just one aspect of an overall trend in American life: we dwell in a tension between the steady increase of state control and the continual resurgence of resistance to state overreach, and all the debates and battles and distinctions in between.

Tracing the story chronologically, Lane brings us from the Soviet scare era and the time of under-the-radar homeschooling to its legal recognition and the growth of homeschool cooperatives, to the Covid era where homeschooling gained new adherents, to today’s community-based homeschoolers, who reflect the diversity of America. Her history of American homeschooling helpfully complicates the narrative of the history of American public schooling, which is one of increased overall consolidation. Homeschooling is one thread of resistance to the expanding consolidation. It forces us to ask hard questions about what good education actually means for our children, in and out of public schools, and what the good life means for our communities. In other words, what *is* actually good for our kids, and not just convenient for society?

\*\*\*

The stories Lane shares of first- and second-generation homeschooling families are some of the best parts of the book. For example, there’s Skylar, a high-achieving scholar who graduated college at age nineteen and is now a second-generation homeschooling parent. She found out she had severe ADHD only in her last year of college. Because of the personalized path her parents gave her, those things hadn’t become labels to keep her back from any successes. The flexibility of homeschooling (“unschooling” in Skylar’s case) had played to her strengths and strengthened her weaknesses. One can only imagine what would have happened if she had been stamped and ticketed from an early age.

This points to one larger issue that homeschooling brings to the fore: sphere sovereignty. In a well-ordered society, children are not pitted against parents; men are not pitted against women; cities do not siphon resources from rural areas; and one’s love of family, neighbor, culture, church, stranger, and nation are not in conflict. The history of American education shows what happens when spheres become disordered, and when systems become more important than persons. Skylar’s story, by contrast, shows what can happen when parents who know and love their children have the freedom to fulfill their duties by them—and do what will help their children thrive.

Lane mentions fear as a typical reason people assume homeschoolers do what they do. She notes an undercurrent of fear, for example, at a homeschooling conference, while also noting the need for homeschoolers to network in order to defend their rights from state overreach (this is how the Home School Legal Defense Association began). Her examination shows how important it is to distinguish *what* is feared (low academic standards? gang violence? bullying?), how proportional the fear is, and whether the response is reasonable and just. For example, public school parents today are fighting against the undermining of parental authority in California, where educators are prohibited from “sharing details about children’s gender identity with parents.” These parents have much in common with some homeschooling and private school parents. Both groups want to respect and support parental authority; they want their children to be taught in a context that respects them as persons rather than isolating and manipulating them.

This brings us to another key point Lane makes: Today’s homeschoolers are *postinstitutional*.I thought this an interesting term, since it’s not clear that a typical homeschooler in the pioneering days of the 1950s and 1960s could precisely be termed *anti-institutional*, unless *institution* were mainly understood as bureaucratic. Granted, the twentieth century was a time of great institutional skepticism, but there is a difference between suspicion or opposition to an institution assuch and to a diseased specific instantiation. One can be supportive of the institution of marriage and support a wife who leaves an abusive husband. Similarly, many families have had clear reasons for pulling their children out of schools for a time. The family is a more fundamental institution than the school and indeed the state. Families desire a healthy village life for their children—and sometimes a healthy village has to be rebuilt.

To put it another way, if someone moves out of a crumbling house to live in a tent, one is not necessarily anti-house. Rather, one recognizes that the house is crumbling and perhaps has a bad foundation, so a new one needs to be built.

\*\*\*

But to be *postinstitutional* is a bit more complicated than that. Once social stigma decreased for homeschoolers, families have continued to network and build their own associations—and institutions. One example of this is Catholic families who choose to homeschool *instead* of sending their children to parish schools, because the education at the latter is hardly different from district schools and therefore seen as not worth the money. There is a whole other story to be told about dying parish schools revived by joining the classical movement—and of homeschooled families who have banded together to start alternative schools (Chesterton Academy high schools, which are Catholic and classical, are one example). Last but not least, I suspect the increasing reliance on screens in many public and some private schools will offer an increasingly common incentive for families to opt out of screen saturation to seek true personalized attention from actual persons by homeschooling or joining alternative movements like Waldorf and traditional classical schools.

The disintegration of community in the twentieth century is a significant background factor to the story of homeschooling. It would take another study to examine how the upheavals of the twentieth-century affected the fabric of American society and of schooling choices: Not only did we see two world wars and the Soviet scare, but also unprecedented technological changes to everyday life. Consider rural electrification, radio and television, the colonization of roadways by the automobile, the rural-to-city movement, and more—and all this even before the introduction of the personal computer and the World Wide Web. The story of homeschooling and of American society cannot be understood apart from these changes.

Many homeschooling families desire to *rebuild a village*; in a more rooted time, this wouldn’t be such a focus. But nowadays, many homeschoolers want their children and their whole family to be part of a more organic, human culture. They want to know their neighbors, and they want their children to hang out not just with children their own age (as they would at school), but with kids of many ages and stages. One homeschooling couple I know are now grandparents. They told me how their children used to do chores for elderly neighbors. Now that these children are adults, they still count those elderly neighbors among their closest friends. Many families see public school as an obstacle to precisely the more thickened community they desire for their children, or to the proper development and personalized attention their sons and daughters need.

One of my favorite vignettes from Lane’s book is of Rodney and Renée Brooks, an African American family who chose to live in an “impoverished neighborhood” of South Central Los Angeles in order to serve their neighbors. Rodney, an Independent Baptist minister and police lieutenant, and Renée taught their children at home. They didn’t send their children to district schools because they didn’t want them to grow up with “the violent gang mind.” But they would invite the neighbor kids—many from broken homes—over to their house after school hours to give them a safe haven and the experience of a loving home. Renée would require “clean language and respectful behavior,” and she would tell the kids, if they behave, “we’re going to bake cookies.”

The drive toward total control over society and the rejection of proper levels of authority — including the family—affect us all. This culture transforms what a school and society could be. This is why both homeschooling families and people like a friend of mine in Chicago, a regenerative farming expert involved at her children’s public school, are batting for the same team. Both want to raise children who are curious and competent, who have ordered loves and respect for legitimate authority, but are not easily controlled shills for a totalitarian state.

We live in a strange time, where fundamental relational tasks like teaching, care of children, and care for the sick and the elderly are respected only when professionalized and performed by someone in a paid position. The history of homeschooling, however, shows it to be a crucial part of the timeless civilizational project of caring for our families and loving our neighbor. And so, homeschooling matters because by its very nature—in all its non-standardized, messy, unwieldy glory—it is a movement against the professionalization, standardization, and replacement of the human being.
### Apocalypse Now
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/apocalypse-now/
Last updated: 2026-09-09T11:00:52.000Z
**Martha Park,** [***World Without End*: *Essays on Apocalypse and After***](https://www.amazon.com/World-Without-End-Essays-Apocalypse/dp/B0D7QPYHPP?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Hub City Press, 2025\. $24.00\. 240 pp.**

“The oceans are burning. The deserts are flooding. UFOs are real, according to Congress, and glaciers are turning to liquid. There’s also the threat of nuclear war, regular war, and according to scientists we’re in the midst of the sixth great extinction. What better moment in human history than now to take a big, long celebratory drink or five?”

So writes Jennifer McCartney in opening her 2025 book, *Cocktails for the Apocalypse*. This tongue-in-cheek collection of cocktail recipes makes no attempt to give a serious answer to the problems of the day. But it only exists because there are a lot of people who get the reference, creating a market for such a book. If the oceans are on fire and the world has been destroyed, why shouldn’t we make a drink and wait for the end to come?

Everyone, it seems, is talking—and writing—about the end of the world. Consider *Theology for the End of the World* (by Marika Rose, 2023), *Making a Life at the End of the World* (Lisa Wells, 2021), or *Coming of Age at the End of the World* (Daniel Sherrell, 2021). Or maybe *The End of the World is Just the Beginning* (Peter Zeihan, 2022). Or the *Ends of the World* (Peter Brannen, 2022). Or *The World of The End* (David Jeremiah, 2022). There is *The Beginning \[that\] Comes After the End* (Rebecca Solnit, 2026). Or just *The End of the World* (Ernesto de Martino 1908-1965, who got an early jump on the topic. His book was translated in 2023).

This publishing trend unveils a great interest in “the end of the world”—whatever each author means by this. But which world is ending? How do we know? And what on earth are we to do about it?

Climate activism especially invites this sort of apocalypticism. Mara van der Lugt’s *Hopeful Pessmisim* addresses this penchant and pushes back on climate pessimism. Though things are bad, she suggests we should still act as if there is hope, even if there isn’t.

Van der Lugt’s book identifies an important thread. It is a philosophical, theological, and psychological knot that goes like this. If the situation is truly hopeless, then people will stop trying to improve it. False hope is bad, but *no* hope might be worse. It can encourage apathy and disengagement, the sorts of behaviors that make bad situations snowball into catastrophic ones. How, then, can we live so that we engage with the world we have if the world really *is* falling apart? How can we motivate people to do the things humans do—make love and have babies, make art and work to better the world—if they are persuaded that the world is ending soon? Do you need to love the world to live well in it?

These are good questions. I’m inclined to think, put together, that they might be *the* theological questions of our day.

Christians have to answer them, though sometimes they seem to skip them instead. Our forms of life have too often mimicked the tone of the secular world, listing all the terrible things that might soon be lost, and not taking stock of the graces that remain. It is not even graces, to be clear. It is the sorts of things that a simple observation of the world might remind us of—the flower bulbs that show up in spring, chipmunks that dig them up and hoard them under chicken wire in the shed, the lichen that forms on trees, the pleasures of a good meal, or playing cards with a child. 

Frankly, we too often live in the world apologetically, like we don’t want to be a bother, really. We’ll just stay here a minute and not touch anything.

Christian hope, it is true, is not confident ownership or even the ease of a renter with a good landlord. It works and tidies even as it sets down to rest. It is passionate about maintenance. It resists both optimism and despair—a heady feat, given the constant temptations to the latter. Despair, though not an unforgivable sin, certainly prevails against a Christian belief in a God who is somehow working, against all odds, to make all things new. 

Christian apocalypticism is often assumed to be a belief in an imminent, dramatic ending of the world, a not-to-be-missed pyrotechnic display of rupture and separation, of wailing and also of restoration. But though apocalyptic literature implies an ending, what makes Christian apocalypse distinct is that it brings with it the promise of a beginning. The ending is inextricably tied to a beginning that is promised just outside the frame.

As far as I can put the pieces together, Christianity without these impossible things is a panacea, a warm bit of milk to soothe the stomach. It might make us feel better, temporarily, but its logic—hope without resurrection—is little more than a bit of comfort. The best it can do is soothe us as we continue on in the same direction we’ve been going. But I have to say this is true only “as far as I can put the pieces together,” because I’ve never been one of these kinds of Christians. I’ve spent a good bit of time adjacent to them. But to qualify that I believe in God, but don’t believe some of the harder things–resurrection, for instance, or eternal life–has never seemed worth the mental gymnastics. You either buy the ticket and take the ride, or you sit it out.

Martha Park, author of *World Without End: Essays on Apocalypticism and After*, was one of these kinds of Christians too. She confesses that she “never actually read the Book of Revelation, in all my years growing up in the church.” When she finally did read it, at thirty years old, she finds not a fearful destruction of the world but something more like the Greek *apocalupsis*, meaning “unveiling” or “uncovering.” What she reads is more like “a flash of new understanding, often seeming to come from outside of ourselves. Rather than a new world, revelation leads to new sight, a new way of seeing the world that’s always been there.”

The book of Revelation, she writes, brings 

> God’s kingdom to come… conveyed in earthly language: there is a river ‘bright as crystal,’ a fruit-bearing ‘tree of life.’ Even after the supposed end of the world, there is life abundant, ‘healing of the nations,’ a world un-degraded. ‘Nothing accursed will be found there anymore.’

> It seemed there was no real end of the world to be found here- only massive and continual change, not so unlike the world we live in now. I wonder if change might be harder to imagine- maybe even harder to bear- than a definitive end.

Park’s essays revolve around two endings—the ending of her religious faith, and the ending (or near-term ending) of aspects of the Southern ecosystem that she holds dear. She mourns the loss of the Torreya pines in Florida and the presumed extinction of the ivory pileated woodpecker. In a particularly moving essay, she writes about the environmental cost of traditional burials and the religious people who are promoting natural burial in the Southeast.

Along the way she reflects on the Methodist faith she has also lost. She only realizes she’s lost her faith when her father, a Methodist minister, retires. “Growing up”, she writes, “Wesleyan values like reason, discernment, and grace hovered far above other Christian concepts—like salvation, redemption, and sin—that I didn’t hear about so much. My father never preached much about any other life other than this life, or any world other than this one.” She found her eventual reading of the book of Revelation, as an adult, to be startling, the “physical world’s destruction: the sun turned black and the moon, red as blood; ‘the sky vanished like a scroll rolling itself up’; even the stars fell to earth.”

The Methodist church gave Park a faith that rested, like a cloth, over the world as she knew it. There was no “mere” symbol to the biblical language she encountered. It was this world, the world she knew, as she experienced it. She writes lovingly of living in parsonages where “I could see the church sanctuary from every room in our small brick ranch-style house.” The churches were shabby but reverent, filled with “white-haired old ladies… lining up to shake my father’s hand in the doorway after church”; her father would ring a bell in the entry to quiet everyone down for worship. God was there, among them.

“The world was drenched, then,” she writes, “with a presence around me called God. I walked with one hand aloft at my side for him to hold.” 

Park’s loss of faith, as is the case for many, corresponds with her passage into adulthood and with her father’s retirement from the ministry. After he retires, she no longer attends church, but in the year preceding it, she attends every Sunday, “crying in the second row.” Park’s father was a liberal mainline minister, of the type who is now mostly retired or extinct. She considers herself one of the “nones,” that demographic group that claims no religious affiliation. But she expresses a deep ambivalence toward her loss of faith. She has memories of the church that are deeply meaningful not because of what she believed or what it accomplished, but because of the crack of light that she saw throughout her time there.

She finds her father one evening burning his old sermons in an outdoor fire and imagines it to be a form of ritual for a way of life, and a way of belief, that is now gone. Park’s descriptions of his ministry demonstrate her fondness for him. This love for her father and love for the church is all tangled up, inseparable. But once her father retires, she finds her faith is over, too.

It would be too cheap a trick to say that Park is still a believer. But the stories in her essays are vivid and all alike in one way: They imagine a world that is gone yet dream of a means of return. 

When Park writes of the Torreya pines in Florida, she tells stories of conservationists who work hard for the survival of the species. The story starts with Elvin Edison Callaway, who read the book of Genesis and decided the garden of Eden must be northern Florida. The Torreya pine, which he thought must be the gopher tree that Noah used to build the ark, was already in decline by the 1980s. The roles of conservationists butt up at times against private landowners who seem comfortable to let nature’s decline take its course. It is an old and somewhat tired story of those who seek to save the world and those who are content to let nature take its course of inevitable decline.

Fundamentalists abound. They show up in Callaway, but also in Park’s visit to Ken Ham’s “Ark Encounter,” in her stories of preppers who are preparing for “the end of the world,” and in the Bible church that builds an ugly, but well-intentioned natural cemetery. They show up in her chapter on the Scopes trial, for which she travels to Dayton, Tennessee and attends a reenactment. Her husband was formerly an evangelical, and she has other friends who spent time in these circles. But unlike many contemporary treatments of fundamentalists and evangelicals that are satisfied with caricature, Park writes about them with curiosity, mostly interested in their certainty. At times she seems jealous of it. Though she is opposed to their conclusions—what she sees as a lack of concern for their neighbors, for the climate, and for “science” broadly conceived—you can’t help but notice a kind of longing for the way these people live in the world. They live in the world as if it belonged to them, whereas Park’s experience is one of estrangement.

The world she knows is one of loss. She sees it everywhere. My favorite essay told the story of the ivory billed woodpecker.

The ivory billed woodpecker is presumed extinct. Much resides with that one word, “presumed.” Nicknamed the “Lord God Bird” (too good to be true!), the woodpecker was about twenty inches in length with a stunning thirty-inch wingspan. The bird is black with a red crested head and streaks of white down the length of its wings, as well as an ivory beak. The last known sighting of the bird was in 1944\. But in 2004, reported sightings of the bird drew interest from ornithologists, bird watchers, and journalists alike.

News of the bird promised a potential economic windfall for the town of Brinkley, Arkansas, the location of the purported woodpecker sighting. Local businesses posted signage of the bird’s discovery, and the town geared for an influx of tourists, scientists, and birdwatchers. The missing bird was an emblem of forgotten hope, a harbinger of a species presumed dead, and now alive.

You see where all of this is going. The woodpecker—the *Lord God Bird*—was back from the dead! Except it wasn’t. The documentary *Ghost Bird* (2009) presents a dramatic, slightly comic story of the event. The “true believers”—birdwatchers and scientists who are convinced that the bird is alive—and scientists and locals who think it was a misidentification, probably for the more common pileated woodpecker. The obsessive zeal of the birdwatchers comes across as almost religious. Some people just desperately wanted to believe in this bird. The documentary is really fun to watch. The birdwatchers are comic and even slightly heroic in their attempt to believe in this long-gone bird. It reminded me that believers are everywhere. 

Park writes movingly of the woodpecker. She seems certain, or nearly certain, that it is gone. But she wants so much to live in a world where this bird lives. He is a talisman for the hope she wishes she had. We so much want to believe impossible things.

“I’ve often wondered how these old stories,” Park writes, “written in the midst of ‘their then’ still manage to speak to this world, to ‘our now.’ I’ve always sympathized with these anxious disciples, asking over and over again what the future will be like, and being told only to look around them; being told, over and over again, *this*.”

Her conclusion is the conclusion of many a mainline Christian. She stakes her hope in this world, making the apocalyptic the inevitable change that the world always promises. She even stretches to give this acceptance of the world a philosophical bent:

> Removing the promise of another world, the challenge of faith shifts: rather than waiting for some unseen world to take this one’s place, faith becomes about seeing this world as singular and sacred. Lately, it has felt painful to stay awake to a world so clearly suffering; difficult to experience wonder or holiness on these patches of earth I am no longer sure I recognize, almost impossible to be present to a changing world without knowing how this story will end.

> But faith without an apocalypse- where there is no rapture, no promise of escape from this world to some other unseen, unscarred one- might be a way back to this world, not away from it. This kind of faith mirrors the uncertain world in which we live, the one that never really ends but keeps on changing.

It is the cycles of *dharma* and the “vanity, vanity” of Ecclesiastes, the story of worlds beyond worlds. It is a good story, perhaps even a beautiful one. It contains within it the reality of the world’s suffering and the grief that we can feel when we observe it. Unlike some Christian stories, it admits that this world is a place of loss, a vale of tears.

Christians believe several impossible things—or, at least, we are supposed to. We believe that God became human. We believe this God-man passed through life doing both ordinary and miraculous things. And then we believe that we killed him, a crowd both power-hungry and disappointed in the appearance of this King. After three days, unlikely things strike again, when this unlikely, crucified King rose from the dead. 

There have always been those who didn’t believe. For them, the tomb contains this King, still dead. But Christians historically were defined as those who *did* believe. The others, who didn’t believe, by definition, were not Christians. One uniqueness of the mainline is that it “resurrected” Christians who didn’t believe in the resurrection. What would have been a clear line-in-the-sand became an optional footnote. Perhaps he was, perhaps he wasn’t—it’s a good story either way.

Park does not seem to believe in resurrection. But she believes most deeply in apocalypse: “Rather than a new world, revelation leads to new sight, a new way of seeing the world that’s always been there.” She is a mainline Christian, through and through, perhaps most clearly in the fact that she no longer believes in anything at all. 

But she wants to. She misses the church of her youth. She wants faith to mean something. She wants a faith that leads us to live deeper into the world:

> But a faith without an apocalypse—where there is no rapture, no promise of escape from this world to some other unseen, unscarred one—might be a way back to this world, not away from it. This kind of faith mirrors the uncertain world in which we live, the one that never really ends but keeps on changing.

In the Christian vision of the end-of-the-world, the dead will be raised. It is a privilege, really, to have known this world as something to love. But the hope that God founds, at the end of the world, does not just return to us what has been lost. It is this—and more. 

Park thinks that apocalypse can tuck us deeper into the world, like the dead who are buried in the natural cemeteries she describes. It is moving and beautiful. The burial practices themselves are deeply resonant with a Christian vision of caring for the bodies of the dead. But she cannot hold onto the belief that accompanied this vision for burying the dead. She wants the expansiveness, the opening to somewhere beyond, but has lost the taste for belief itself.

I wish she knew she could have all this. Belief can be an adjustment to two truths—that so much has been lost, and yet all things will be made new. The apocalypse we can receive is the reality that there is a beyond. It is like one eye opening, a small speck of light. The world is in better hands than ours. The ivory billed woodpecker, the Torreya pines, the gravesites in the trees—they will all be renewed. Her father’s wrinkled hand will be made young again. In this apocalyptic vision, you can almost see him standing just out of sight. His hand is poised just above the sanctuary bell. Worship is about to begin. All she needs to do is walk in the door.
### The Heart of the Catechist
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-heart-of-the-catechist/
Last updated: 2026-10-01T19:34:58.000Z
Around the year 400 A.D., a young African deacon named Deogratias, whose name means “Thanks be to God,” wrote to a nearby bishop about a recurring problem he was having with catechesis. The problem was simple: It was utterly boring. He was tired of going over the same well-worn stories, the same passages of Scripture and creed. He was boring himself, and he suspected his catechumens weren’t faring much better. What should he do? 

The bishop who received that letter, whom history would know as Saint Augustine of Hippo, responded with a little treatise called [*Instructing Beginners in Faith*](https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1303.htm?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*.* It’s an illuminating account not only of the practical methods of catechesis but also, and more importantly, the heart of the catechist. Augustine honored Deogratias’s request and gave him sound advice on learning techniques. But the real issue, Augustine knew, was not tactics but the catechist’s own delight. “We are given a much more appreciative hearing,” Augustine writes, “when we ourselves enjoy performing our task.” When we enjoy what we’re teaching, he writes, “the texture of our speech is suffused with the very delight that we take in speaking, and our words flow more easily and more pleasingly.” And so, Augustine, concludes, 

> The difficult part of our task is not in giving rules about where to begin and where to end the historical exposition … or about how the historical exposition should be adapted to \[different\] circumstances … or about when to use the shorter and when the longer form. No, our greatest concern is much more about how to make it possible for those who offer instruction in faith to do so with joy, for, the more they succeed in this, the more appealing will they be.

Isn’t that good? The most important thing for catechists is to teach with *joy*, for the more they do this, the more appealing they will be. How do we make it possible for those who catechize to do so with joy? That’s the issue. While technique and curriculum are all important, the crux of the matter is this: the heart of the catechist. 

The proclamation of the gospel, I would go so far to say, entails a normative posture of joy. This does not mean that there’s no place for judgment, critique—even righteous anger. But the first word is not negative but positive: it is joy. We *rejoice* in the gospel of God through which we’ve been saved.

We all have ideas about what makes a good teacher. You may think of a winsome communicator—someone who always has well-crafted thoughts, who never stumbles over his words. Or you might think of a brilliant theologian—a PhD in theology, inhabiting a study with rich mahogany shelves and many leather-bound books. 

I would love it, of course, if more people cared about language and graduate degrees in theology. But I’m not sure these are the hallmarks of a good catechist. I’m going to propose three traits instead that I think are essential to becoming a catechist who teaches with joy, who hands over the faith and help others find their footing in the church’s one foundation of Jesus Christ our Lord. These three traits are ***humility***, ***attention***, and **faithfulness*.* Faith comes by hearing, Paul writes in Romans 10:17, and hearing by the Word of God. Christ comes to us in humility, the eternal Word in swaddling clothes, and it is that humble Word, in turn, who enables us to *hear* and to walk in *faith*. 

## **Humility**

Humility is perhaps the first and foremost trait of the catechist. This theme recurs in several key works of some of church history’s finest catechetical writings. Let me mention just three. First, there’s St. Augustine again. Augustine tells Deogratias that the way to resist boredom is to be cheerful. But I can’t simply pull up my bootstraps and “be joyful.” What lies underneath joy is humility. 

One of the main reasons we get bored, Augustine explains, is an untoward love of novelty. We crave the new insight, the intellectual high. How dull, how trite, to go over the same topics like the creed and the Lord’s Prayer again and again, year after year. “One reason for discouragement,” Augustine writes, is “that our hearer does not grasp our insight, and so we are compelled to come down, as it were, from the pinnacles of thought and delay over each slow syllable in the plains far below.” Isn’t it so much more interesting to think new thoughts? And so how difficult it is for us to come down into the plains below. Augustine is like a competitive runner who has to break his natural pace to slow down for the new runner. He’s a master orator who has to translate every three-syllable word to a one-syllable word so that his catechumens can keep pace.

But if we think that’s a kind of descent, Augustine reminds us, what about Christ? 

> For, however far removed our spoken words are from the liveliness of our understanding, much greater still is the distance between our mortal flesh and \[Christ’s\] equality with God. And yet, even when he was in that state of equality, *he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave*, and the words that follow, down to *even to death on a cross* (Phil 2:6–8).

Our going down into the lowly plains of slow speech is, Augustine thinks, a pale imitation of Christ’s descent into mortal flesh, and death on the cross. 

Here’s another example. Martin Luther was, of course, one of the great proponents of catechesis as part of the renewal and reform of the sixteenth-century church. For Luther, too, catechesis was closely tied to humility. 

At the beginning of his [*Large Catechism*](https://thebookofconcord.org/large-catechism/preface/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), the ever-colorful Luther aims his attack against those who deem themselves too good for the catechism. He expresses in no uncertain terms the disrepute of pastors who neglect catechesis, whether because they’re too busy with more important lofty matters or “from sheer laziness and care for their paunches.” He describes this neglect as stemming from a false sense of “security and satiety.” These paunch-caring pastors think they can read the catechism once, understand it all, and then “throw the book into a corner, and be ashamed, as it were, to read in it again.” Against such presumption, Luther sought to remain a “child and pupil of the catechism.” He railed against the hubris of thinking one had mastered the basics of the faith and no longer needed to return, again and again, to the humility of faith.

Let me point to one more example of humility, this one from the Anglican priest-poet George Herbert, writing about a century after Luther. While mostly known for his great poetry, Herbert also wrote a lovely treatise on pastoral ministry called [*The Country Parson*](https://anglicanhistory.org/herbert/parson.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*.* There, he writes about the various duties of the parson: prayer, preaching, housekeeping, and much else. He also has a tremendous section on “the parson catechizing.” Among a wealth of catechetical gems, he has this to say about the particular value of catechesis for the one catechizing. 

> In catechizing, there is a humbleness very suitable to Christian regeneration, which exceedingly delights him, as by way of exercise upon himself and by way of preaching to himself for the advancing of his own mortification. For in preaching to others, he forgets not himself but is first a sermon to himself, and then to others—growing with the growth of his Parish.

There is a humility in catechesis that is “very suitable to Christian regeneration,” and this proves to be “exceedingly” delightful for the priest. By returning again and again to the core tenets of the faith, the ground of faith and belief, the minister performs a kind of exercise upon himself—preaching the gospel to himself first of all and then to those in the parish. In this way, he enters into the parish, not seeing himself as standing above it, but going down and growing with them—“growing with the growth of his parish.” One can see, in just this brief passage, a wealth of wisdom in terms of how the priest envisions who he is and what his role is in parish life. 

## **Attention**

A second aspect of the heart of the joyful catechist is the quality of *attention*. By attention, I mean the capacity to direct one’s consciousness towards that which lies beyond the surface of things. Theologian Carol Harrison refers to patristic catechesis as a process of cultivating “literate listening.” It is a patient listening that involves, first of all, attention to God revealed in Christ, and second, attention to the spiritual lives of catechumens. Attention to God, attending to our neighbors: It is simple, but also, for many reasons, the hardest thing we may be given to do. 

I probably don’t need to list the many forms in which attention’s opposite—distraction—takes in our world. Even beyond the constant pings of my phone or email, there is the more fundamental distraction of the divided heart. In Book 11 of the *Confessions*, Augustine describes, in lucid prose, a concept that he calls the *distentio animi*–the distention of the soul. If true knowledge of God comes through *attention*, cleaving or clinging to God—a kind of holding on to God—then *distention* is the spreading out, the diffusion and dispersal of our thoughts, our loves, and indeed our very selves. Alluding to Philippians 3:13, where Paul writes of “straining” and “stretching out” to what lies ahead, Augustine writes this of the Christian state of attention:

> In him \[Christ\], your right hand holds me fast, so that I may grasp that for which I have been grasped myself, and may be gathered in from dispersion … to pursue the One, forgetting the past and stretching undistracted not to future things doomed to pass away, but to my eternal goal. With no distracted mind but with focused attention I press on to the prize of our heavenly calling, to that place where I yearn to hear songs of praise and contemplate your delight, which neither comes nor slips away.

We are scattered and fragmented, down to the deepest places of ourselves. We long for someone to gather up the crumbs of our lives and to remake us into one body—into Christ’s body—and be made whole again. 

Attention, therefore, is not something we can muster up and achieve by turning off our phones. We learn to attend to God by opening up our lives to the Christ who is first holding us through the Spirit—who is attendingto us. Attention is first a movement of grace that gathers up the pieces of our lives and holds them together in the two steady hands of the Son and the Spirit. This movement of attention comes from the Word shattering our deafness so that faith may come through hearing. *Hear,* O Israel, the Lord your God is one. The kind of gospel hearing that begins the movement of faith starts first with God breaking in our self-enclosed walls and making himself known to us so that we may in turn attend to him. 

Second, though, attention extends to those we’ve been called to love and serve through catechesis. The mark of a good catechist is not simply that she knows the right words to say but that she knows the right words to say to *this* particularperson or this group of people. This is why no two catechesis courses are ever the same, even though God never changes and there is no shadow of turning in his eternal truth. The words of the catechism may be the exact same from year to year, but the people being catechized are always changing. 

I’ve been wondering for some time whether the catechist isn’t perhaps more like a spiritual director than what we normally think of as a teacher or professor. The professor holds forth before the lecture hall and gives the same brilliant lecture each semester. The spiritual director, though, attempts to listen to what the Spirit is doing in the life of the directee. The spiritual director is a mediatorial space in which the person receiving direction can listen to the Spirit. 

Practically, this means that the catechist makes time to get to know the people that are coming to catechesis. Augustine does this very thing in his letter to Deogratias. He encourages him to ask people questions about themselves: Where did they grow up? Where did they go to school? What kinds of books have they read about the Christian faith? All of this goes into catechesis. There is a patient attention to the particular lives before us—each one a holy and sacred mystery unto itself. Of course, some people don’t seem that interesting. They may seem dull or difficult, but, as C. S. Lewis says, if we could but see them like God does, even for a moment, we would find a creature so magnificent that we’d be tempted to fall down and worship them. You’ve never met a mere mortal! If we can attend to catechumens with this posture, we’ll be on our way to rejoicing in the gospel through the ministry of catechesis. 

## **Faithfulness** 

Along with humility and attention, the third trait of the joyful catechist is *faithfulness*. Here again, I think of Romans 10:17: “faith comes by hearing.” Hearing—attention to God and others—leads to *faith*, or as I’m calling it here, *faithfulness*. The catechist has a steady and confident trust in God’s Word that enables passing on the faith in a way that builds strong and lasting foundations.

In my book [*Making Disciples*](https://www.amazon.com/Making-Disciples-Catechesis-Theology-Practice/dp/0802883850?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), I describe catechesis as building solid foundations of faith. J.I. Packer, with a slightly different alliteration, calls it being [*grounded in the gospel*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/080106838X?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Foundations, grounding—we could also add phrases like being “deeply rooted”—these are ways of gesturing towards the goal of catechesis. We want to help people become deeply rooted in their faith so that they are not, as St. Paul writes, “tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine” (Eph. 4:14). Rather, “speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Eph. 4:15). Or, as Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, we want people to build their house on solid rock, rather than sand. That way, when the rains come and winds roar, the house will not be moved, because it was “founded on the rock.”

If catechesis is about building up the body of Christ on the deep foundations of Christ, the catechist seeks to embody fidelity and stability in his or her own life. I do not mean that the catechist is stoic or passionless. I mean merely that the catechist’s life evidences a quiet trust in God’s goodness, such that regardless of one’s social and emotional life, there is hope that with God all things shall be made well, and all manner of things be made well. Here, the virtue of faith is closely linked to *hope*. For when our hope is set upon God making all things well in the end, then we really have nothing to fear. There is nothing that can finally undo us. We can stand firm knowing that the God in whom we trust is ever holding us in his care. 

Once again, I don’t think I need to emphasize how desperately we need the virtue of fidelity today. “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs,” not because you have confidence in yourself but because you have confidence in the gospel, then the ministry of catechesis will offer others an unparalleled balm for the many weary souls hungry for the deep wells of life in Christ. There is so much in people’s lives that is in doubt and in flux. There is so much that people have to worry about and fear. There is so much that is so deeply unstable. The task of catechesis is not merely to teachthe principles of the gospel but also to embody the stability of being grounded in the gospel. 

There is something resonant in faithfulness, as I’m trying to articulate it, that echoes what Josef Pieper says about leisure. Leisure, as Pieper describes it in his famous essay [*Leisure: The Basis of Culture*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1586172565?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), is not merely the cessation of the frenzied activity that makes up our world of “total work.” Leisure is a spiritual attitude of inward calm and silence. It is the seedbed of contemplation, the apprehension of being and truth that comes from hearing God in the calm, stillness of silence. This kind of leisure is birthed from attention, and leads—as Simone Weil rightly knew—[to prayer](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0803298005?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). 

One of the key traits I believe that every catechist needs, then, is a kind of faithfulness that comes from humility and attention. Catechesis cannot be hurried, and while we live in a world of hurry, we can begin to counteract this by cultivating the habit of patient presence. By embodying this kind of steady sense of God’s presence in our lives, we will give others the space to slow down and hear God’s voice as well. 

## **Conclusion**

Let me return to Romans 10:17\. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. The Word of God comes not in the tyrannical power of violent force but in the quiet, patient womb of the humble virgin. The Word, exalted on high, stoops down to make God known to little children like us. The Word is humble. From the humility of the Word, second, comes hearing, or literate listening. The Word calls forth the discipline of *attention*. And finally, from hearing the humble Word comes *faith*. Faith grasps what will one day give way to sight. But for now, faith remains steady, faithful, grounded. 

Humility, attention, and faithfulness. These are three virtues that I think well characterize the heart of the catechist. Again, I’m not opposed to studying theology or learning how to speak well. But the ministry of catechesis, if it is indeed a genuinely Christian ministry, is not merely a one-way directional conveying of information. This is also, incidentally, why catechesis not only *should not* but *cannot* be offloaded from people to digital tools. There is no such thing as AI catechesis. The heart of catechesis is patterned off the humility, attention, and faith of the true Word himself, who though he was in the very form of God, did not think God-likeness was something to be exploited but shared with God’s creatures made in his image. And so Christ humbled himself, taking the form of a servant, going down all the way even unto death. 

The humility, attention, and faithfulness of the Word, I suggest, is underlying what it means to “rejoice in the gospel.” Joy, again, is not a façade or a feeling. Joy is a sharing in the beatitude of Christ that we receive through the power of the Holy Spirit—extended to us because God first loved us. May the kind of catechesis that rejoices in the gospel follow after the pattern of our Savior.
### On the End of Theology
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/on-the-end-of-theology/
Last updated: 2026-09-08T11:00:24.000Z
Every semester, new students pour into my classroom to learn systematic theology. With their sights set on ecclesial ministry or academic ministry, they are eager to break open textbooks, work through difficult doctrines, develop dogmatics, and simply pursue the theological life. While we get to all of that in due time, I start every one of my classes by opening our Bibles to 2 Corinthians 3:18 in order to set the stage for the end for which theology exists. 

This singular verse, for me, lays bare the entire enterprise of Christian theology. Paul, writing to the Church in Corinth, says, *“*And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit."

As unsophisticated as it sounds, Paul gives in this verse the verb that should characterize the many gears that turn when we exercise our theological imagination and contemplation—*behold*. 

In reading this passage every semester for my students during the first day of class, I hope to show both the simplicity and the wonder of Christian theology. In saying that I hope to show the simplicity of theology, I mean that I want any student in the room who is coming in with insecurity about formal theological education, to see that the best theologians are those who have given themselves to developing the habits and virtues of those who can afford to simply behold. This is an activity even the simplest amongst us can perform—simply look. And yet, on the other side, anyone who has given themselves to this activity of beholding the beauty of the Lord knows that there is an inexhaustible well of glory to be seen when we dedicate ourselves to it. It is in setting our eyes on the Lord that we see the source of all that is true, good, and beautiful. Not even ten generations of beholding will resolve the majesty at which we look.

Framing the theological task in this way shows that theology itself is not the end for which we strive. Rather, theology is a gracious means to the great end of beholding God. If it is the Christian’s eternal vocation to behold God in the beatific vision in the life hereafter, we ought to be about participating in that great *telos* now by beholding God through theology in this life.

\--

My hope in opening classes with the vision I describe above has spilled over into my hopes in writing [*Theology for Life: A Joy-Filled Introduction to Christian Doctrine*](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781540905123%5Ftheology-for-life?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). In the first sentence of the book, I say: “This book is built on a rather simple conviction: One of the most practical things we can do in the Christian life is get an eyeful of the beauty of the Lord.” 

This new book, published by Baker Books, works through ten various doctrines, but as *means* not *ends*. Each of the ten doctrines works much like an optometrist adjusting our gaze that so we may focus well on God and his works. Each chapter is designed to have a flow that gives readers accessible handrails to hold while reading, but more important, to develop a rhythm thinking about doctrines. Each chapter begins with “defining” the doctrine before moving into “delighting” in the doctrine. This two-part rhythm reminds readers that the proper theological path is one in which their eyes will be lifted—lifted from the page, the words, the ideas, and even the theological truths themselves toward the Lord. 

Readers ought to feel that upward tilt is not incidental to a chapter or two, but rather is the conviction of the book playing itself out throughout. Each of the ten doctrines—trinity, attributes, creation, scripture, incarnation, justification, preservation, union with Christ, ecclesiology, and eschatology—aims to go beyond mere examination and into exaltation.

However, it must be said that the book does not shy away from theological grammar in hopes of accessibility. A frustration I have felt, personally, is that when I am looking for introductory texts in Christian theology, I’m often forced to choose between technical precision and accessibility. Of course, there will always be tension here and my claim is not that *Theology for Life* has found the perfect balance between the two ditches. Rather, I want to take the “optometrist” role of each doctrine seriously. A good pair of glasses is only a *means* to the *end* of better vision, just as theology is a *means* to the great *end* of beholding God. The analogy goes further, though, as you would not want an optometrist who is careless about prescriptions since glasses are not the ultimate end. The optometrist’s care in issuing a prescription serves the sight just as the theologian’s rigor serves the beholding. 

Theology serves a much greater end than merely being correct but being correct still matters a great deal. Where a bad prescription leaves patients with still blurry vision, imprecise theological contemplation and grammar still perverts the theologian’s sight and song. 

For this reason, I have decided to utilize theological grammar developed throughout the Church’s long history in the hopes of giving readers clarity. I wade into conversations and use words that some readers may be unfamiliar with—things like eternal relations of origin, divine simplicity, dyothelitism, imputed righteousness, the beatific vision, and more. However, readers can expect clear definitions for each new piece of theological grammar and an articulation of why such a word, idea, doctrine, or teaching really is good, true, and beautiful. 

\--

In the end *Theology for Life* is not a brilliant book. That may be bad salesmanship, but it is truthful. Instead of brilliance, the book aims at wonder. I aim to put theology in line with its proper *telos*—God himself. Paul gives us the shape of this in a written doxology he tucks in toward the end of a long treatise about God’s faithfulness toward his people. The apostle writes: “For from him and through him and ***to*** him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen” (Rom. 11:36). 

Theology, if it is anything worth doing, can find itself inside those “all things” Paul has in mind. Theology is *from* God, since he is the source of its subject matter and not merely its most interesting subject. Theology is *through* him since it is only the mind which has been made alive by the resurrection which bears the needed prerequisite of *faith seeking understanding*. Finally, it is meant to end *in* or *to* him, and this is a piece easily lost even in the most well-organized dogmatics. A theology which never moves a person toward God has misplaced its own ending however sound its propositions and ordered its footnotes. 

So, in line with how I begin every semester, my hope for this book is quite simple: I want hearers to behold God, just as I want to behold him myself. I’m convinced that in Christ I have found the one worth looking at for a thousand generations, and this book is a simple offering for God’s people to come and see the treasure in the field. The end of theology is God himself, and it is my earnest prayer that readers’ eyes are taken from the book toward his worthy direction.

(A small concluding note: The team at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has put together a high-quality, and more importantly—*free*—video course which goes along with the book. I have provided a 30-ish minute video lecture for each chapter which is intended for churches and individuals to use as study curriculum along with the book. You can find the free course at Midwestern Seminary’s [*For the Church Institute*.)](https://ftcinstitute.com/p/home/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)
### From Babel to Belonging: C. S. Lewis’s Fairy-Tale Cure for the Modern Machine
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/from-babel-to-belonging-c-s-lewiss-fairy-tale-cure-for-the-modern-machine/
Last updated: 2026-09-08T11:00:19.000Z
In 2026, we clearly live at the end of a world. While it may not be the end of *the* world, the massive technological and social changes moving through the West are quickly dissolving the old order and ushering in something whose exact contours remain to be seen. Rapid advancements in AI, declining trust in institutions, social polarization, and the collapse of family structures drive widespread alienation, mental illness, and addiction, unraveling the social fabric and fueling fear of an apocalyptic future. 

Our predicament is not exactly new. Like Yeats’s beast slouching slowly toward Bethlehem to be born, the modern Machine has been remaking the world into its own image for hundreds of years now. In the name of advancing rational enlightenment and personal autonomy, our lives have been slowly wired into the structures of what E. M. Forster, Paul Kingsnorth, and others have called “The Machine,” a massive, emergent techno-industrialist globalism that controls modern life through its Kafkaesque systems of bureaucratic state power. This system, as Lewis Mumford observed, transforms the world into “an archetypal machine made of human parts,” reducing communally integrated persons into isolated, interchangeable cogs. 

Ironically, every bit of independence we think we gain from nature is in reality a little bit of dependence we have given to the Machine. When you no longer depend upon the sun or woodfire for warmth, you have not become personally independent of nature; you have become dependent on the energy company. Robert Nisbet, in *The Quest for Community*, diagnoses the unintended consequences of this shift: “Individualism has resulted in masses of normless, unattached, insecure individuals who lose even the capacity for independent, creative living.” We think our technology liberates us from the limits of nature, but the techno-industrialist machine actually re-organizes our lives toward dissipation so our attention and energy can feed the Machine. The Machine’s fuel, as Paul Kingsnorth starkly notes, is life itself: “The fuel is nature... The fuel is you.” In the 21st century, we have clearly moved across a kind of tipping point where industry no longer serves the genuine interests of man; man now serves the interests of the Machine.

The industrial strength horrors of the World Wars began to awaken the West to the Faustian bargain she had made with technology. Post-war writers like C. S. Lewis, E. M. Forster, and Robert Nisbet worked to understand how the Machine dissolves the fundamental structures of a humane community and to explore paradigms for its recovery. The alienation, disintegration, and spiritual anxiety created by life in the modern ouroborosian Machine led to a renewed search for the roots of genuine human community. Many find themselves longing for the renewal of embodied local relationship and a connection to nature. Nisbet again observes the trend: “In our own time we are confronted by the spectacle of innumerable individuals seeking escape from the very processes of individualism and impersonality which the nineteenth-century rationalist hailed as the very condition of progress.” In this post-human, techno-bureaucratic world, we find ourselves desperate to recover coherent communities that can provide a sense of personal agency, identity, meaning, and value. 

Yet, ironically, as a people well-catechized by the technopoly, we automatically look for technological solutions to our technological problems. We try to resolve the problem of unprecedented power with more power. Like Boromir, we put our hope in finding the One Machine to rule them all. Concerned about the existential dangers of AI, we rush to create more AI. We look for solutions from the very Machine that erodes coherent forms of embodied relationship with each other and with the created order. 

In his masterful sci-fi dystopian novel, *That Hideous Strength*, C. S. Lewis suggests that the answer to our predicament lies not in direct confrontation with our Techno-industrial Tower of Babel, but at the subversive level of personal community where we can know and be known. As Lewis warns in *The Abolition of Man* and illustrates in *That Hideous Strength*, those who live by the manipulation of nature will die by the manipulation of nature, for the inexorable logic of The Machine will digest, corrode, and assimilate everything that adopts as fundamental its structures and methods. Lewis shows that the restoration of localized husbandry as distinct from mass-scale manipulation is essential to the survival of man, if not physically then essentially and spiritually. Through an ironic contrast between the apocalyptic imagery of judgement and the symbolic structures of community life, C. S. Lewis offers us a map out of the Machine and back into the membership of humane communities. 

In *That Hideous Strength*, C. S. Lewis dramatizes both the breakdown of humane social bonds and the search for a renewed community. It is a story about how to live with faith and hope in a world threatened by chaos and tyranny. It is a story for such a time as this. On the title page, Lewis indicates that his novel is both a “Modern Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups” and a modern dystopia about the rebuilding of Babel, similar in theme and style to *1984* or *Brave New World*. *That Hideous Strength* is dystopian in that it shows how the rationalist values and scientistic institutions of the modern world are pulling us into a totalitarian nightmare, yet it is unlike the other great dystopian novels of the 20th century in that it promises a happy ending and a fairy-tale counterpoint to the shadow of Babel.

The symbolism of Babel is central to Lewis’s novel, for it serves as the archetypal model of human history, thereby giving us the key to our future through an understanding of our past. The story of Babel reveals that God created our world to be ordered according to a sacred structure, but we repeatedly rebel against the natural order and try to replace sacred structures with technological structures. Throughout Scripture beginning with Genesis, and all throughout the history of empire, we see rebellious men attempt to overcome the curse of sin and death through technological control rather than obedience to the kingdom of God. This is what the Tower of Babel symbolizes: the human attempt to build independent kingdoms patterned not by the temple of God but by the temple of the self. 

Set in post-World War II England, *That Hideous Strength* juxtaposes the traditional English village of St. Anne’s with the institutional life of the new National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (NICE), a quasi-governmental organization ostensibly devoted to progress and human betterment through scientific and social engineering. For Lewis, the community of St. Anne’s symbolizes life lived according to the sacred structures of nature, while the NICE symbolizes the modern Tower of Babel, the technological city of man that works to gain power over nature. Mark Studdock, the main protagonist in the novel, becomes entangled with the NICE, drawn in by ambition and a desire to belong. As Mark rises in the ranks, he discovers the organization’s true aim: a transhuman utopia where individuality, morality, and freedom are sacrificed to overcome death through technologies created by transhuman intelligences which Lewis calls “Macrobes.” 

## The Futility of Direct Resistance

As the plot progresses, Lewis portrays direct confrontation with the Machine as futile. Ransom, the leader of St. Anne’s, explains, “The poison was brewed in these West lands but it has spat itself everywhere by now. However far you went you would find the machines, the crowded cities, the empty thrones, the false writings, the barren beds: men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshipping the iron works of their own hands.” The omnipresence of the globalist Machine upon which our livelihood now depends renders human strategies for escape impotent, and to fight technological control with more technological control is simply to accelerate the very power that dehumanizes us and degrades our social structures. As Lewis reminds us in *The Abolition of Man*, “Man’s conquest of nature … means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger.”Moreover, as finite, temporal creatures, humans will never be in an epistemological position to master nature or control history, no matter how advanced our AI tools. We cannot see the whole causal landscape of the past, present, or future, much less see into the hearts of men or the purposes of God. Rescue from the Machine will not be engineered by greater control over the Machine; victory lies in a renewed obedience to the created order, not greater dominion over it. 

In *That Hideous Strength,* the resistance community at St. Anne’s does not develop their own technology or form a political action network; rather they wait in prayer, seek the truth, build relationships of trust, grow a garden, tend the animals, and break bread together. They refuse to live by lies or participate in corruption. They discover harmony, stability, and strength through obedience to God’s created order. In short, they resist the Machine by remaining stubbornly human. In “On Living in an Atomic Age,” Lewis argues that when faced with apocalyptic crisis 

“The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.” 

When faced with an anti-human enemy, the community at St. Anne’s fights by returning to the fundamentally human things. The great question that differentiates those who live in the City of God from the City of Babel is this: will we conform our will to the good and beautiful order of nature or will we try to conform nature to the pleasures of our will? The key to victory over the Machine is to be a certain kind of people who live a certain way, a way that obediently conforms to the divine order of the world.

When the resident skeptic MacPhee wonders “how any man in his senses thinks we’re going to defeat a powerful conspiracy by sitting here growing winter vegetables and training performing bears,” Ransom replies, “You have done what was required of you… You have obeyed and waited. It will often happen like that.” In Lewis’s novel, those on the side of humanity *are* given their providential, practical tasks to complete, but those tasks are revealed to them through the demands of virtue particular to situations as they arise, not through grand schemes for taking control. 

Lewis is not suggesting that we withdraw into our caves and retreat from responsibility, waiting idly for the Lord’s trumpet to sound. Rather, Lewis’s fairy-tale calls for a transformation of the way in which we live in the world and build our communities; he bids us reject the modern desire to “subdue reality to the wishes of men” and return to the paradigm of “wise men of old \[for whom\] the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality.” At some point this transformative return will require a refusal to participate in institutions or systems so compromised by the values of the Machine that they actively war against the Kingdom of God. In *That Hideous Strength,* neitherMark nor any person of integrity could work for the NICE and still retain their soul, but Mark’s rejection of the NICE is not a withdrawal from society *per se;* the Studdock’s move to St. Anne’s is a re-rooting into the kind of rightly-ordered community that can build and sustain a genuine society. 

**Bacchanalian Judgment and the Fall of Belbury**

At the end of *That Hideous Strength*, it is not the stratagems or efforts of men but the supernatural working of Providence that brings down the NICE and ends the tyranny of Babel. Through the narrative juxtaposition of the NICE and St. Anne’s, Lewis reveals the eucatastrophic irony in Babel’s fall: the very powers that destroy the Machine are also those that restore the natural community. The waters that flood the Tower of Babel also water the garden of God. This double-aspect of the prophetic tradition is developed through Lewis’s use of both Biblical and Bacchanalian imagery in the climactic scenes of *That Hideous Strength*. 

Seen most clearly in Isaiah, Joel, Amos, and Zechariah, the prophetic tradition of Israel continually presents the Day of the Lord as simultaneously both a day of judgement and a day of blessing. The exile from Eden, the Flood of Genesis, the scattering of Babel – all these are examples of the Day of the Lord, that day when the Lord calls a people to account, that day when a man or nation reaps what it has sown. As Obadiah tells us, “The day of the Lord is near for all nations. As you have done, it will be done to you; your deeds will return upon your own head.” Ultimately, there will be a great and final day of the Lord, when the whole cosmos is brought to account, every man and nation is judged, and the true Kingdom of God is revealed, but meanwhile we see all throughout Scripture and human history many “local” days of judgement.

Saint John the Apostle condenses this tradition in Revelation 19, which tells us that the Beast of Babylon will fall on the great Day of the Lord when the King returns with his white robed army to judge and make war. Surprisingly, Revelation first describes this day of destruction as the marriage supper of the Lamb, a day of great rejoicing and exultation. However, when the Bridegroom arrives for the feast, His first task is to lead the armies of heaven and strike down the rebellious nations. An angel calls “to all the birds that fly overhead, ‘Come, gather for the great supper of God, to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of mighty men, the flesh of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all men, both free and slave, both small and great.’” This strange mingling of feast and slaughter reveals the paradox of divine judgement: the same event that destroys Babylon renews creation. For those who serve the Beast, the feast is ruin; for those who serve the Lamb, it is wedding joy. 

Greco-Roman traditions also suggest a polyvalent understanding of civilizational judgement. In *The Bacchae* by Euripides, we see that the rites of Dionysus also suggests the dual nature of feasting: the god brings wine to Thebes to celebrate his divinity, yet he destroys King Pentheus for rejecting it, rousing the Maenads to tear him apart in ecstatic frenzy. At the climactic turn of *The* *Odyssey*, Homer sets the hero’s violent judgement over the invading suitors in the context of a feast. The moment before he begins his deadly vengeance, Odysseus cries, “Now is the time for their dinner to be served!” and as the first suitor falls, Homer describes the goblet of wine slipping from his hand while blood bursts from his face. Prepared for a banquet, the suitors find destruction instead. Throughout the ancient myths, wine is both the joyful gift of civilization and a potent image of violence; it symbolizes both the human and divine, the rational and ecstatic, and the civilized and primal. 

Lewis draws upon this ancient symbolism in his own mythic worlds. At the end of *Prince Caspian*, a story with many parallels to *That Hideous Strength*, Lewis evokes this Bacchanalian imagery to depict the renewal of Narnia through the divine judgment of Aslan. Like Ransom, the hidden King Caspian leads a resistance movement against the usurping tyrant Miraz who, like the NICE, desires to control nature and eradicate the common folk of Narnia. When Aslan returns to free the Narnians of Telmarine control, all of true Narnia breaks out into a Bacchinalian feast; trees and fairy folk dance as grape vines grow over all the land. Under Aslan’s rule, Bacchus, Silvanus, and their retinue bring life and joy back to Old Narnia, yet for the tyrant and the faithless, the renewal of nature brings dethronement and destruction. Lewis again draws from this same Bacchanalian duality to structure the climax of *That Hideous Strength.* Lewisends his novel with a tale of two banquets, one at Belbury Manor for the leaders, funders, and administrators of the NICE and another for the resistance community living at St. Anne’s. 

Judgment day for the NICE thus begins with the banquet at Belbury where the leaders of the Macrobe-controlled technopoly gather to celebrate their recent triumph over Bracton College. The wine flows freely—symbolizing both the gifts of civilization and its penchant for violence, both the gladness of genuine community and the chaos of dissipation. Like Pentheus who rejects wine and the divine rites of Dionysius, the people of Belbury discover that the power which is a drink of joy to those who honor the gods is the blood of violence for those who reject them. Lewis mirrors this Janus-faced quality of wine when the same drink that fosters joy among the faithful at St. Anne’s turns to the blood of violence for those who scorn nature and nature’s God at Belbury. 

As the men of the NICE unknowingly drink to their own demise, judgement unfolds through the collapse of language—the curse of Babel returned. Having long abused words, filled the world with lies, and obfuscated the truth, the ability of members at the NICE to communicate collapses entirely. As one character declares, “*Qui Verbum Dei contempserunt, eis auferetur etiam verbum hominis*”: They that have despised the word of God, from them also shall the word of man be taken away! As the curse of Babel descends, language turns to nonsense and panic fills the halls of Belbury—a name whose very syllables foretell its judgment. Belbury, from the Anglo-Saxon *bealu* meaning bane and *burh* meaning fortress, has become the ‘evil stronghold’, the Tower of Babel rebuilt in modern England. 

The collapse of language leads to the second stage of judgment: having rejected moral law for the sake of technological power, all sense of restraint or duty fails, and the intoxicated people of Belbury turn on one another in violence. Fairy Hardcastle shoots Jules, the public frontman for the NICE, unleashing a stampede of “kicking, struggling, leaping on tables and under tables, pressing on and pulling back, screams, \[and\] breaking of glass.”As the prophet Zechariah warned, "on that day a great panic from the Lord shall fall on them, so that each will seize the hand of another, and the hand of the one will be raised against the hand of the other.” With apocalyptic frenzy, language and law alike collapse under the weight of Belbury’s institutionalized deceit. 

Yet meanwhile, far from the pandemonium of Belbury, a very different feast begins. At St. Anne’s—where no lies were admitted—language serves as a medium for wisdom and camaraderie, binding the community together rather than tearing it apart. In *That Hideous Strength,* Lewis imagines the medieval planets as angelic beings who descend upon Earth to wage war against the evil powers controlling the NICE. When Mercury, the Lord of Language, descends upon Belbury, words fail those who live in rebellion against the Created order of God, yet at St. Anne’s, where Ransom and his friends live in obedience to the divine *Logos*, Mercury’s descent inspires such a celebration of language as even Shakespeare himself would rejoice to hear. Lewis, a great lover of words, takes time to describe the sheer joy of good conversation:

“If not plays upon words, yet certainly plays upon thoughts, paradoxes, fancies, anecdotes, theories laughingly advanced yet well worth taking seriously, had flowed from them and over them with dazzling prodigality... never in her life had she heard such talk—such eloquence, such melody (song could have added nothing to it), such toppling structures of double meaning, such skyrockets of metaphor and allusion.”

When the Lord of Language descends on the wicked, babbling men of the NICE, their speech is confused and reduced to nonsense; when the same Lord of Language descends on the faithful people of St. Anne’s, their speech is enlivened and elevated. The same spirit of judgement that is chaos to the wicked is life to the faithful. 

Ultimately, the breakdown of language and moral order at Belbury summons the final reckoning of nature and nature’s God. As Saint Paul tells us in Galatians 6, the Lord of Heaven and Earth is not mocked and a man will one day reap what he sows. Though wicked men attempt to twist, suppress, and overcome the natural order, inevitably it rebounds and reasserts itself. Animals liberated from the experimental laboratories of the NICE invade the banquet hall and devour their tormentors. Evoking Bacchus’s beastly retinue together with Revelation’s “winepress of the fury of the wrath of God,” Lewis describes a tiger hunting her prey and a huge elephant trampling “like a girl treading grapes, heavily and soon wetly tramping in a pash of blood and bones, of flesh, wine, fruit, and sodden tablecloth.” Even Mr. Bultitude, the pet bear of St. Anne’s, joins the fray and eats the very head of the NICE, performing what Lewis calls "the best deed that any bear had done in Britain.”

In the ruins of Belbury, nature becomes the instrument of judgement, yet in the village of St. Anne’s, it becomes a servant of grace. At St. Anne’s, nature is not foe but friend. Unlike Belbury’s exploited beasts, St. Anne’s menagerie lives in harmony with humans—providing help, companionship, and cheer. The Director is able to tame all manner of creatures, from the mice to the jackdaw to the lumbering bear who naps on the bathroom floor and begs for treats in the kitchen. Lewis gives his bear, Mr. Bultitude, a key role in the climactic resolution to his novel. Like Bacchus himself, whose presence joins terror and delight, Ransom’s bear embodies not only the dangerous strength, ferocity, and wildness of nature but also its maternal, affectionate, and protective aspects. Mr. Bultitude not only kills the great enemy, he also plays an important role in St. Anne’s redemptive symbolism. Ransom, we discover, is a descendent of King Arthur and inheritor of the title Pendragon, ruler of Logres. Mr. Bultitude thus provides a proper mascot for this Arthurian household, for Arthur’s name is connected to the old Celtic word for bear (*Artio*). He is the Bear King whose dual nature as beast in war and angel at table made him a bulwark in ancient Britain against the dark agents of chaos. King Arthur stood as a fierce, protective wall between the chaos of invading darkness and the light of Christian community. So too, Ransom’s kitchen companion, Mr. Bultitude, leads the revenge of nature in his own day to keep the hideous shadow of Babel at bay one generation more. 

In the last stage of judgement, even the earth itself rebels against the Machine—floods, quakes, and fires destroy all the buildings under the control of the NICE. The fundamental powers of nature—language, morality, and natural law—arrogantly denied by the progressive ideology of the NICE, now exact their retribution, toppling the hideous strength of Babel. Yet in the order of divine justice, destruction and renewal arrive together. As Belbury falls, the membership at St. Anne’s feasts in Arthurian splendor—robes, crowns, table, and dance all foreshadowing the marriage supper of the Lamb. The same forces of nature that demolished the NICE—the Lord of Language, the King of Beasts, the Goddess of Desire—also strengthen and rejoice the hearts of virtuous men. At St. Anne’s, for those who remain human to the end, wine gladdens rather than curses, language binds rather than breaks, and nature serves rather than devours. 

This double-edged eucatastrophe at the end of *That Hideous Strength* exposes the self-destructive logic at the heart of The Machine. The world turns according to the eternal nature of the *Logos*, and the created order cannot be undone by the machinations of those within it and dependent upon it. Babel, Belbury, and all those who rebel against the goodness and beauty of creation ultimately only fuel their own demise. As Ransom concludes in the last chapter, “Those who call for Nonsense will find that it comes.” Mother nature will have her revenge. 

Finally, for Lewis, and the symbolic tradition on which he stands, the essential key to remaining human is to remember our nature as male and female made together to image the glory of God. Marriage is the inescapable foundation for a proper connection to the created order. *That Hideous Strength* begins with the word matrimony, which literally means mother-making, and the story ends with the restored and repentant Mark finally making a mother of his wife, Jane. The fruitful union of man and wife, symbolic of the marriage between heaven and earth, is the means by which the world is reborn. The abolition of marriage is the abolition of Man, but the renewal of marriage is the restoration of Man. Mother-making marriage is both the origin and the goal of human life, for it is by the marriage of heaven and earth that we are created and it is *for* the free, conscious, consummation of this marriage that we are destined. This is Lewis’s fairy-tale ending: not technological liberation from nature, but loving harmony with nature and nature’s God through the faithful marriage of heaven and earth. Only through obedience to the order of creation are we essentially joined to the Creator of that order. 

Through the perennial symbolism of the apocalyptic tradition, *That Hideous Strength* charts a path out of the modern Machine and back into human community. The vision Lewis gives us is no passive, fearful retreat but a radical reaffirmation of our fundamental humanity against the anti-humanism of the Machine. Those who steward creation according to natural law will endure when judgment falls while those who rebel against the created order pull down Deep Heaven upon their heads. Nations rise and nations fall, but the truly human—prayer, work, friendship, love—abides. More technology cannot redeem us from technology’s curse; greater control cannot rescue us from tyranny; only faithful husbandry in obedience to the created order can—by God’s grace—renew our world.
### Christian Politics Without Idolatry
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/christian-politics-without-idolatry/
Last updated: 2026-09-04T11:00:52.000Z
**Michael J. Rhodes.** [***Reimagining Biblical Politics: What Scripture Says about Public Life and Why It Matters***](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781540967558%5Freimagining-biblical-politics?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Baker Academic, 2026\. $26.99\. 248 pp.**

A few pages into *Reimagining Biblical Politics*, Old Testament scholar Michael J. Rhodes remarks candidly that “the recent political witness of God’s people in the West has often been abysmal.” Many American churches have dramatically failed to provide the kind of well-reasoned biblical instruction that could equip their laity with an appropriate framework for thoughtful Christian political engagement. Some congregations, seeking to avoid the sort of polarized, hyper-partisan politics of our day, have reverted to simply sidestepping the whole subject. They’ve opted to maintain a deafening silence on any topic that might be perceived as political. While profound political differences may divide those seated in the same pew, a kind of stilted silence is politely maintained. 

Given the emotionally charged political exchanges that erupt constantly online, this quietist approach has a certain appeal. But, as Rhodes rightly asks in this valuable book: “How do our political lives get discipled if we never talk about this stuff with our fellow congregants?” Further, he contends that avoiding the subject altogether isn’t a valid option for pastors who seek to teach the whole counsel of God. The political realm is, he insists, an integral part of the gospel message. 

Into this fraught situation, Rhodes argues that Scripture actually has good news to deliver. The simple, ancient Christian affirmation that “Jesus is Lord” has profound implications for human politics. Christians should begin exploring this subject not by clutching a set of particular policies or ideological shibboleths close to their hearts, but with the fundamental recognition and declaration that God reigns. Thankfully, the Bible provides a wide variety of instructive examples of faithful political engagement. Christians can benefit from studying these diverse stories while taking care to consider how they hang together, like so many puzzle pieces, to create a coherent portrait. 

Rhodes begins by considering how Torah conceives of God’s kingdom and the character of His rule. Old Testament books like Deuteronomy describe how God reclaims His creation “by calling together a community that will live out his kingdom way together.” These scriptures lay out the model for a society that can serve as an example to the world around it, demonstrating the way God’s people do politics. Indeed, this model should be attractive to those living outside their unique community. Rhodes labels this approach “the outpost politics of Moses.” 

Because the Lord is a holy God of justice, *both* transformed individuals *and* transformed social structures must reflect His justice and generosity. Still, Rhodes takes care to exclude Christians adopting a theocratic approach since the church is a multinational community. Christians’ primary loyalty is to Jesus, and they are often called to live “in political communities that include many that do not recognize his authority.” 

Among the book’s most insightful chapters is one focused on the Psalms. Christians often fail to grasp that the Psalms contain subversive political teaching—something slave owners in the nineteenth century recognized when they sought to produce a Bible suitably edited for slaves. The Psalms praise God as the universe’s creator and ruler, they stress his rule over human nations and highlight the Lord's reign over man-made idols, the so-called “gods.” Thus, “singing the psalms is an act of political rebellion, a conscious, calculated rejection of the forces, human and spiritual, that claim to run the universe.” Understood correctly, the book can help believers become faithful and effective outpost communities. Similarly, Jesus in the Gospels gathers a transformed people to Himself. Those who encountered Jesus, established communities whose “outpost politics drew people in to meet” their Savior and Lord. In Matthew 5, Jesus uses the metaphor of the city upon a hill where those who have personally experienced healing radiate it to the surrounding world. 

Rhodes’ creative reading of the opening chapters of Exodus focuses on the courageous actions of obscure Hebrew women who were instrumental in saving and protecting the baby Moses, behavior he aptly describes as nonviolent resistance to evil arbitrary authority. Persons in these biblical accounts often act without explicit divine guidance or direct divine intervention. In an equally innovative comparison of the political themes contained in Jeremiah 29 and 1 Peter, Rhodes demonstrates how these two messages to different sets of exiles can provide the faithful today with useful guidance. 

In both books, God’s people are called to seek the peace and well-being (i.e., shalom) of the city in which they reside. In seeking this shalom, one must keep one’s focus on this particular place and time while also being “fixed on the long-term fuller shalom” that will only be brought about directly by God himself. Both groups of exiles are called to seek common ground with non-believing neighbors while still retaining their “distinctive identities.” 

Pursuing what Rhodes terms “polite resistance” in exile definitely represents a lofty and difficult calling. The peaceful protests and innocent suffering of participants in the American Civil Rights movement provides an inspirational example of this approach from more recent history. Christians today must make appropriate adjustments since many live in western liberal democracies where they enjoy far more rights and political influence than did believers during biblical times. 

Although Rhodes concedes that Jesus’ focus is not primarily on social structures *per se,* he notes thatHis teachings do tackle subjects with political implications. Unlike the egotistical rulers of this world, Jesus is the selfless, sacrificial ruler that many long for in their hearts. His deft handling of challenging questions about paying tribute to Caesar in the Gospels can help Christians navigate complex political questions. As Rhodes puts it, by drawing his audience’s attention to Caesar’s image on the currency, Jesus “opens the space for disciples to creatively engage political authorities, while also calling us to reject the idolatrous claims those political authorities often make.” 

The Apostle Paul also wrestles with the relationship between Christians and political authorities—and not only in the commonly cited verses of Romans 13\. For Paul, spiritual and political realities were deeply interconnected. Drawing upon his Hebrew Bible, Paul teaches that ultimately all authority is derived from God. But the Apostle is careful not to write a “blank check for political authorities.” They are granted such authority only in order to enforce justice and promote good behavior. The accounts of Paul’s activities in Acts emphasize this point and portray his main posture to imperial authorities as that of a faithful witness. 

In his closing chapter, Rhodes pulls together these disparate threads. Encouraging congregations to tackle thorny political questions, he warns that this sort of biblically-informed “political discernment will get messy.” Christians will inevitably disagree over which of these different scriptural cases constitute the best fit for the present particular predicament. Christians will disagree about “whether and how God’s people should address a societal problem” but Rhodes contends that such debates, if conducted properly, can be fruitful. 

There is much to commend in Rhodes’s careful and thorough study. It contains many practical helps that can aid congregations at this difficult time. He eschews simplistic answers and does justice to the complex variety of perspectives in the biblical text. Although Rhodes is usually careful to qualify his statements, his contention that “your God reigns \[Isa., 52:7\]… is perhaps the clearest shorthand summary of the *gospel itself*” (italics in the original) may strike some as problematic. Such an approach could serve to redirect the central focus from Christ’s atoning death and resurrection (cf. 1 Cor 15:3-4). A fuller theological discussion of the distinction between the gospel as promise and the Kingdom as fulfillment would have been helpful. Some interaction with Oliver O’Donovan’s understanding of the relationship between human government and the proclamation of the gospel might have been illuminating too, including more on how Christ’s resurrection and ascension displaces the nation’s claims to ultimate authority. Finally, the book could have benefited from a more extensive consideration of how to grapple with political differences that extend well beyond particular programs or policies. How do we engage our brethren who reject the whole notion of a pluralist democratic system? 

*Reimagining Biblical Politics* remains, nevertheless, an invaluable resource that provides the sort of insightful and practical Bible-based reflection that has been so conspicuously absent from many American churches.
### Man vs. Infectious Disease
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/man-vs-infectious-disease/
Last updated: 2026-09-04T11:00:01.000Z
**Susan Wise Bauer.** [***The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy***](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250272911/thegreatshadow/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. St. Martin’s Press, 2026\. $30.00\. 352 pp.** 

Death from infectious disease feels wrong to us in the twenty-first century. Such deaths are rare enough in developed, wealthy countries to make headlines or launch inquiries after they happen to young, otherwise healthy people—because they are often preventable. Such deaths do not happen every day in my work at a mission hospital in rural Kenya, but when they do, almost always one can identify the point where the system broke down and a preventable death became inevitable. 

This feeling of wrongness is the result of what scholars call the Second Epidemiological Transition—the massive changes in quality and length of life brought about by modern medicine, mostly in the first half of the twentieth century. Before antibiotics and vaccines, deadly infectious diseases lurked everywhere and inspired all sorts of human efforts to prevent or cure them. Susan Wise Bauer’s new book *The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy* catalogues these efforts and attempts to put them in context as we ride the wave of the Third Epidemiological Transition—our modern era of antibiotic resistance and mutated viruses.

Bauer, the founder of Well-Trained Mind Press and author of the *Story of the World* books used by millions of homeschoolers, is well-equipped to tell the story of sickness. *The Great Shadow* joins recent releases like John Green’s *Everything is Tuberculosis* and Timothy Winegard’s *The Mosquito* as a history of human culture examined through the lens of infectious disease, taking readers through thousands of years of humans trying to figure out how to prevent and treat infections. The threat of infection and death is life-altering, as Bauer writes:

Sickness is not “just” sickness. Sickness is the most intimate expression of our vexed relationship with reality, the place where smooth functioning suddenly fractures and spins apart without warning. Sickness is the great mirror that reflects back our most urgent question: *Why does calamity descend without warning? How can we explain it? How do we avoid it? How do we fight back?*

As a historical catalogue of maladies and our reactions to them, Bauer has assembled a solid (if somewhat incomplete) narrative. However, whenever the book tries to draw contemporary parallels, it generally falls flat, detracting from an otherwise fascinating story. The story of sickness is much bigger than infectious disease, and the wisdom of human response to infections is more complicated than Bauer seems willing to give people credit for.

## How Sickness Shapes Us

*The Great Shadow* begins with the First Epidemiological Transition, when humans started living together in static settlements and made themselves vulnerable to all kinds of viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites that hunter-gatherers eluded by virtue of their migratory lifestyle. Irrigation required standing water, domesticating animals allowed new infections to jump from species to species, and managing our bodily waste became a perennial issue. Ancient myths from places as diverse as Mesopotamia, China, and West Africa told just-so stories linking settled, agricultural civilization with the rise of disease. The tone is overly dramatic; the best way to describe it is as if Bauer has written the script for a documentary. For the most part, this approach works but at times it is tiring. 

Disease raised spiritual and moral questions, as people assumed that there must be a cause for every effect. From the Biblical book of Job to the Epic of Gilgamesh, humans began to tie guilt and blame to the existence of illnesses and found ways as diverse as priestly dreams to studying animal entrails to find the why. *The Great Shadow* frequently returns to the idea of human responsibility, seeing it as a thread that ties together many different human responses to sickness. While acknowledging that there are some sicknesses that are indeed the fault of the sick person, repeatedly the book shows examples where blame was unfairly placed throughout history.

This idea only intensifies as the book turns to Hippocratic medicine, which explained sickness as an imbalance of humors within the body and saw miasma (“bad airs”) as a critical piece of the disease puzzle. The bottom line for Hippocratic medicine (which came to dominate the culture of medicine for thousands of years) is, in Bauer’s words: “More than ever before, *illness is your fault.*” (Emphasis in the original.) *The Great Shadow* argues that this idea is still with us: “Striving for wholeness and balance, for moderation and temperance: these all seem like worthy goals to us. But we have carried over, from Hippocratic times, a complicated and lingering sense of failure when our lives do not flow with ease.”

Medieval pogroms took the idea of blame to another level, blaming Jews for various illnesses and then carrying out violence against them. This idea recurred with even deadlier consequences in the Nazi regime, which Bauer places in a “straight line” leading to conspiracy theories about COVID-19 as a Jewish bioweapon. Similarly, the story of “Typhoid Mary” still animates contemporary fears about foreigners carrying illnesses.

As humans got closer and closer to scientific facts about microorganisms causing disease, they often came into conflict with the reigning theories about balancing humors and clearing miasma. Ignaz Semmelweiss was hounded into a mental asylum by his contemporaries after calling for his fellow doctors to sterilize their hands between autopsies and delivering babies, while intense debates broke out about the wisdom of vaccination.

What seems like common sense to us was the result of hard-fought battles—battles that Bauer argues we are still fighting today. She makes the case that because miasma theory was still predominant well into the Second Epidemiological Transition, a number of products we still use today (such as plug-in air fresheners and Listerine) are still in use because “our noses have inherited the nineteenth-century fear of miasma.”

*The Great Shadow* concludes by taking readers through the brief “exhilaration” of antibiotics and vaccines that was almost immediately deflated by the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, novel viruses like HIV and Ebola, and cultural works like *Night of the Living Dead* or *The Last of Us* that use zombies as a metaphor for our fears about contagion. In the book’s conclusion, Bauer argues that the response to COVID-19 (particularly in the U.S.) “replayed, unthinking, almost every beat of the last few centuries of our relationship with infectious disease.” And while “\[s\]ome of these reactions might well have been sound and well-considered,” she argues that “\[m\]ost were not.” Six-foot distancing represented our fear of miasma, fearing immigrants repeated the ugly patterns of blame from the past, and the overuse of sanitizing agents made us too much like the Victorians of the past.

*The Great Shadow* ends with a somewhat hopeful note that understanding this history will help answer the question whether, during the next big pandemic, we will or won’t “coat ourselves in chemicals, rail against bodies that don’t look like ours, and accuse scientists of corruption?” This is Bauer’s apparent purpose: in order to prevent reactions that are not “sound and well-considered,” we must appreciate how some of these irrational responses are deeply hard-wired into human culture.

## Blame and Responsibility

Bauer’s primary assumption is true: sickness really does force us to confront a number of existential realities and the brokenness within our world. However, the apparent secondary thesis, that guilt and blame (as well as other misunderstandings) have inappropriately lingered in our social imaginary is not as straightforward as she makes it out to be.

*The Great Shadow* is not really about sickness in general; it’s mostly about *infectious* diseases caused by foreign microorganisms. Only the chapters about painkillers and hysteria dwell at any length on non-infectious diseases. A history of all sickness would be much longer and far more complicated, for there are many diseases that are *not* caused by infections and some that hew more closely to Hippocratic ideals and miasma theory. Both of these ideas—indeed, nearly all of the reactions and behaviors that Bauer describes—contain a kernel of truth. Bauer readily concedes this point but does not ever really let it refine her thesis.

Air pollution, for example, is estimated to be responsible for millions of deaths worldwide every year. To eliminate these deaths would simply take cleaning up the air and improving household ventilation, since cleaning circulated air is valuable in preventing both infectious and non-infectious diseases. Some studies suggest that retrofitting school buses can even improve students’ academic performance! Whether “blame” is the correct frame for air pollution is a debate for a different space, but certainly we must as a society figure out where the pollution is coming from. Regulating and occasionally punishing its producers would also help.

There are a few other notable gaps in the story. Sexually transmitted infections have been identified as such for over 500 years, and the politics of blame around HIV get only a passing mention in the book. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which the government was very much to blame for allowing a disease to destroy vulnerable people, is not mentioned at all. The history of eugenics might have fit in as well, given the significant overlap between the scientific consensus about the spread of germs and health authorities’ approach to genetic causes of disease a century ago.

I do not know when exactly the book went to press, but even the story *The Great Shadow* tells about COVID-19 is not as simple as it sounds. The US government was funding gain-of-function research (a fascinating response to the specter of infectious diseases worthy of discussion in and of itself) in Wuhan, and many of the government’s earliest critics were right to smell a conspiracy when Dr. Anthony Fauci claimed otherwise. Given the possibility that the Chinese Communist Party’s cover-up of the disease may have cost millions of lives, pointing some fingers and assigning responsibility is eminently reasonable.

When it comes to responsibility, Bauer mixes straightforward reporting about past misunderstandings of hysteria and “the passions” with criticism of diagnoses that shifts any responsibility for getting better onto the sick person themselves. Yet psychosomatic illnesses (that is, illnesses that are thought to be due to a patient’s internal or psychological stress manifesting as physical symptoms) are estimated to make up 20% of visits to primary care doctors. The most rigorous scientific studies about chronic pain suggest that the patients who do better are the ones who take the most responsibility for their own wellness, as Haider Warrach’s book *The Song of Our Scars* discusses carefully.

While miasma theory only reflects a half-truth about illness (and, as *The Great Shadow* details, a lot of the work to cleanly dispose of sewage was the right thing for the wrong reason), Hippocratic medicine endures because it reflects truths about our bodies and souls: Patients want to feel like their lives are balanced, nutrition and exercise are key factors in preventing chronic diseases, and our environment (whether it’s clean air or a walkable neighborhood) does have a role to play in our health. The lesson to learn from Hippocrates’ staying power beyond the Second Epidemiological Transition is one that Bauer doesn’t seem to find of interest: while many aspects of our health are indeed beyond our control, there’s still a lot that we can do to find balance and wholeness.

## In the Shadow of the Great Physician

Most importantly, though, none of the reactions that *The Great Shadow* discusses seem like positive developments for human culture. As Lydia Dugdale discusses in her must-read book *The Lost Art of Dying*, the possibility of death and disease made our ancestors far more careful about not only dying well but also living in such a way that they were ready whenever death might come. It is certainly possible to allow fear of sickness and blame (of others or of ourselves) for infections to lead to atrocities—but there is a far richer history of love and care to be found in traditions like the *ars moriendi* that forms the focus of Dugdale’s book.

One omission from *The Great Shadow* that would illuminate this sort of love and care is the story that Rodney Stark details in his book *The Rise of Christianity*. Christians in the third century, facing a deadly plague, did not run or blame foreigners. Rather, they sacrificed themselves to care for their pagan neighbors. So began a tradition of medical care despite the risk of infection that endures to the selfless heroism of health professionals (Christian and otherwise) who rush to “hot zones” of Ebola epidemics nowadays. The capricious nature of the gods in ancient times gave way to Francis Bacon’s insistence that God gave us technology to relieve pain and suffering—an enormous part of what we think and believe now that we count history by the life and death of the Great Physician.

*The Great Shadow* is, of course, coming out at a time when America’s own Secretary of Health and Human Services may not actually believe in germ theory and many people are in need of an anti-miasma correction. Some have made the ideals of Hippocratic medicine into a story of karma that unnecessarily heaps blame and shame on suffering people. However, as we have seen throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and elsewhere, telling only parts of the story will continue to engender the sort of responses that are harmful to others. The history told in *The Great Shadow* is vast but incomplete, telling the truth about the ugliest aspects of human encounters with infectious disease while leaving out the ways in which our awareness of fragility became a light that chased the shadows away.
### We Still Need Fairy Tales
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/we-still-need-fairy-tales/
Last updated: 2026-09-03T11:00:24.000Z
**Jack Zipes.** [***Once Upon a Time There Was Truth or, Why We Need Fairy Tales***](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300282382/once-upon-a-time-there-was-truth/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Yale University Press, 2026\. $28.00\. 200 pp.** 

We live in a moment in which the mere act of paying attention is a problem, or perhaps a challenge. We know it’s possible. Simply think about the enchantment you felt with stories in your childhood: Do you remember your own wide eyes and mouth agape as you leaned in to listen to a fantastic tale? Perhaps it was King Arthur and his round table or the pixie dust that Tinkerbell bestowed so the Darling children could fly that took you from your modern world to some place outside of time and place. Maybe it was the tales of the *One Thousand and One Nights* or Robinson Crusoe’s daring adventures that opened up the possibility of enchantment, change, and perseverance through bleak trials. Fairy tales give us a framework for imaginative possibility. They might also restore our attention.

Jack Zipes, professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, has been writing fairy tales—and writing about fairy tales—for sixty years. Now approaching 90, he still believes the genre is borne from our utopian “hopeful desires.” *Once Upon a Time There was Truth or, Why We Need Fairy Tales* is a collection of his essays on the development of the fairy tale from oral tales to the genre’s more contemporary “Disneyfication.” The genre has changed along the way. And yet, he writes, “if there is any genre of storytelling that can raise our spirits and make a contribution to humanity…it is the fairy tale.” 

As a collection of separate essays, most of the book’s chapters focus on various tales: “Puss in Boots,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “The Nutcracker,” Disney’s versions of classic tales, and *The Wizard of Oz*. Throughout, Zipes draws attention to the pedagogical and socializing functions of fairy tales, especially as they begin to be told to children. For Zipes there is a hardening of the genre throughout the 20th century as Disney’s pervasive influence flattens the genre’s subversive possibilities. Yet, the fairy tale isn’t just about a “happily ever after.” 

Zipes traces the evolution of the form from oral tales to a literary form that flourished from the early 19th century to the early 20th century. Different from myth and oral wonder tales, the fairy tale both substantiated civilizing norms while also subverting them. There is a logic to their telling: a protagonist violates a norm and is then faced with banishment or an impossible task. She or he then has various encounters—with a villain, or magical animals or a creature who bestows gifts, thereby enabling the protagonist to tackle the task while a wonder or a miracle also reverses his or her fortune. The result is often marriage and wealth.

Especially in the genre’s golden age, folklorists (like the Brothers Grimm) very much saw their work of gathering and writing down these oral tales to be an integral part of the nation-building project. These “middle-class collectors \[gave\] voice to the lower classes… and wrote in defense of their native languages and in the interests of national and regional movements.” The nineteenth century literary fairy tale, then, began as a political statement—one that validated the common folk—and while contemporary tales have been more likely to “entertain and soothe a child’s anxieties,” the genre still maintains the power to inspire and subvert. Zipes’ project, then, is not only to recover the history and shifts of the genre but also to name an “impulse for hope for better living conditions.” 

But is the fairy tale simply a social construct, meant to either civilize or comment on social norms? When literary critics evaluate the genre, is it only to class and nation we must look? Must we understand the Disneyfication of fairy tales in terms of perpetuating patriarchal norms? While the fairy tale offers commentary on our present, something much deeper is going on in the genre. This is the nature of truth and reality.

Zipes’ title, *Once Upon a Time There Was Truth*, links “truth” with the fairy tale, but this truth is located within the fairy tale itself. The implication is that truth cannot be found in the readers’ present circumstances and that the tale motivates the reader to align the truth of the tale with the truth of experience. By presenting the world as it should be—where anyone is capable of social climbing and the villain gets his just due—the fairy tale as Zipes writes in his Epilogue, offers “happily ever after” and “once upon a time” as “a persistent refusal to accept life as it is and a demand that utopian longings be fulfilled.” For Zipes the genre presents possibilities for transformation as we compare our society with the counter world of the fairy tale.

But there is little surprise in Zipes’ readings. There *is* talk of wonder and magic but there is little magic in the prose. In the book there is not much that gestures to deeper human longings beyond political, national, or gender-based categories. The responsibility is squarely on the reader to recognize “something \[is\] still missing, deeply missing even, in our lives” and through the world of the fairy tale “to seize on \[glimmers of hope\] as we tell our tales, and futures, today. Zipes argues that we “insert ourselves cunningly into our daily struggles to turn the course of the world’s events in our favor.” While he has no love for Disneyfication, ultimately Zipes advocates for the same project—to turn our tales into self-made dreams.

Zipes correctly diagnoses how fairy tales name the longing for the world to be different than it is, but he misses the cure. This realization that the world is not how it should be and a resulting longing for a magical intervention aligns with the Christian reality. C. S. Lewis famously wrote in *Mere Christianity*: “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” Fairy tales elicit this longing. Lewis places the truth not in the gap between tale and unfulfilled longing, but in the transcendent reality of God’s creative work. Christian hope tells a story—not of writing one’s destiny and future—but of a good created order, a fall into sin, redemption through the work of Christ, and a future restoration of all things. 

Fairy tales—fairy stories, or true myths as Lewis and Tolkien call them—still have an important role to play. They awaken us to imaginative reversal. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about the moment of recognition, or joyful turn, implicit in the fairy tale. Delivered first as a lecture, he wrote in *On Fairy Stories*: “It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the ‘turn’ comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality.” More than just “an agent of socialization,” the fairy tale can hit at something deeper: a moment of surprise, a *eucatastrophe*. This is the narrative moment where we have, in Tolkien’s words, a “sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.” 

The truth that fairy stories give is “not only a ‘consolation’ for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question…In the ‘Eucatastrophe’ we see in a brief vision that the answer may be greater—it may be a far-off gleam or echo of *evangelium* in the real world.” This moment of realization, where all is restored in a manner that is both good and true, also ushers readers and hearers into what Tolkien calls a “Secondary Belief,” a real enchantment, an experience of good news.

Martin Shaw in his new book, *Liturgies of the Wild: The Myths that Make Us*, reminds us how our stories point to true myth. Like Zipes, he notes that myths or fairy tales serve a social and pedagogical function. He believes myths make us human, they help us grow up, and they help us locate ourselves. “Far from being untruths, myths have traditionally been forefront in the shaping of human beings. They show us what to defend, what to care about, the need for pluck, sacrifice, and generosity.” Myths are guides. 

But in moments, myths are more than guides. They pierce through the immanent frame, to get at the heart of reality. “*Myth is a Sacred Story*,” Shaw writes, “And some of the most sacred of those stories circle around the tale of a dying and resurrected king. Who carried a great burden for his people and turned that burden into an extraordinary act of love. And some of us believe that the most sacred story crash-bang-walloped into the kind of time we can all register, *ours.*” 

Zipes would argue that we ultimately need fairy tales so that we can assert ourselves between the gap of our reality and the world as it should or could be. Shaw (and Tolkien and Lewis) would instead point to the nature of narrative itself: The best fairy tales do not primarily tell us what to do but what must be done on our behalf. They hold out a world where justice rolls down like streams of mighty water, where the lion lays down with the lamb, where the destitute pauper becomes a king. The best fairy tales succeed to the extent that joy catches in our throats and tear ducts so that finally we *see*: Our King has come, and He will come again to make all things new.
### Religious Liberty for All
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/religious-liberty-for-all/
Last updated: 2026-09-03T11:00:22.000Z
In late June, Donald Trump's Religious Liberty Commission [released a 224-page report](https://www.justice.gov/religious-liberty-commission/media/1449896/dl?inline&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) on the state of religious freedom in America. Ironically, this document, which is supposed to defend religious freedom for all Americans, is exclusive. It also misconstrues the Founders. It reads more like a defense of a religious establishment than an endorsement of liberty. Still, the report is worth taking seriously because it reflects how some American evangelicals now understand the relationship between church and state.

To begin with, the commission that produced the report does not reflect the religious pluralism it claims to defend. Eight of the commissioners are evangelical Protestants aligned with the MAGA movement, including Paula White-Cain, Dr. Phil McGraw, Eric Metaxas, and Franklin Graham. Three are Catholic. One, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, is Jewish. The commission includes no Muslim, no atheist, no Mormon, no Hindu, no Buddhist, no Sikh, and no representative of the historically Black Protestant tradition.

Yet the Commission insists that it exists "for everyone — to ensure that all Americans of all faiths, from Christians to Jews to Muslims to Sikhs to Hindus can approach God freely to worship him fully and to express their faith without government interference." When commissioner Ryan Anderson, the Catholic president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, writes that "Jewish students should be authentically Jewish, Muslim students could be authentically Muslim," the irony is that no Muslim voice was in the room to say so for themselves. A report that claims to speak for American religious pluralism while mostly excluding non-Christians from the drafting process should raise red flags before a single policy proposal is articulated.

The report calls for repealing the Johnson Amendment, the tax-code provision that bars clergy from endorsing candidates while speaking in their official capacity. Whatever one thinks of its constitutionality, repealing the Johnson Amendment would be bad for the church. Evangelical pastors who chafe against the amendment seem to value free speech over their gospel witness. Many conservative evangelical activists urge Christians to get engaged in political life without acknowledging that partisan politics and the advancement of the Gospel do not mix cleanly.

American evangelicals should thank God that we live in a nation that celebrates religious freedom. The United States is built upon the idea that all citizens have human dignity to practice their faith and to pursue truth without government interference. The idea that humans possess such rights comes, of course, from the great thinkers of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment, but these ideas are also rooted in the Christian tradition. (And according to many scholars, including [Tom Holland](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/tom-holland/dominion/9780465093502/?lens=basic-books&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and [Nicholas Wolterstorff](https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691146300/justice?srsltid=AfmBOoq7YvNmXqkTUnvjzaNGVAtAlxiA43ELEOaYoHvdXMILUGyARzyV&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), the Christian tradition informed the development of these ideas to begin with.) Human dignity, not *particular* Christian doctrines or beliefs, must order a free and diverse society.

America’s Founding Fathers understood this, but I am not sure that the members of Trump’s commission do. So it may help to briefly review the history of religious freedom in America. In the founding era, three competing visions of church and state emerged.

In Massachusetts, John Adams and the other framers of the 1780 [state constitution](https://www.mass.gov/news/massachusetts-declaration-of-rights-article-3?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) gave the government the power to tax residents to support the “institution of the public worship of God, and for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion, and morality, in all cases where such provision shall not be made voluntarily.” Such a tax was necessary because, as Article 3 of the Constitution states, “the happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend upon piety, religion and morality….” The Congregational Church remained Massachusetts’s established church until 1833.

Massachusetts also required a religious-test oath for officeholding. Candidates for election to the state legislature needed to be “Protestant.” When Benjamin Franklin heard about this stipulation, he [wrote](https://founders.archives.gov/?q=liberality%20of%20sentiment%20on%20religious%20subjects%20Author%3A%22Franklin%2C%20Benjamin%22&s=1111311111&r=2&sr=&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) his friend, the Unitarian moral philosopher Richard Price: “I am fully aware of your Opinion respecting Religious Tests; but tho’ the People of Massachusetts have not in their new Constitution kept quite clear of them.” 

Franklin opposed religious tests, but, as he understood it, the place of his birth and the colony established by 17th-century Puritans was at least moving in the right direction: “...if we consider what that People were 100 years ago, we must allow they have gone to great Lengths in Liberality of Sentiment on religious subjects; and we may hope for a greater Degrees of Perfection, when, their Constitution, some years hence, shall be revised.” Franklin would give Massachusetts a pass, at least for now. “When a Religion is good,” he told Price, “I conceive that it will support itself; and when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support it, so that its Professors are oblig’d to call for the help of the Civil Power, ‘tis a Sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”

Patrick Henry, the two-time governor of Virginia, proposed another model of church-state relations. In “[A Bill Establishing a Provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion](https://liberalarts.tamu.edu/pols/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2020/09/Henry-Madison-Sundry-letters.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (1784), he called for a general religious tax in Virginia to fund religious teachers who would offer “the general diffusion of Christian knowledge…to correct the morals of men, restrain their vices, and preserve the peace of society.” Henry suggested that county sheriffs would collect religious taxes in their communities and keep a list of the religious society to which the taxpayer wanted their money distributed.

But for fellow Virginians Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Henry’s “General Assessment” (as it was called) was still a religious tax. Madison challenged it in his 1785 petition, *Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments*, which most of the state’s Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians supported. These evangelicals suffered religious persecution for decades under the colonial Anglican establishment in Virginia and thus welcomed a complete separation of church and state. For them, religious freedom was not about building a Christian or moral nation; it was, more importantly, about freeing up the opportunity to build the Kingdom of God.

Madison’s *Remonstrance* did not pass in the Virginia Assembly. Still, it certainly paved the way for Jefferson’s *Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom* in 1786, considered by many to be the greatest statement of religious freedom ever written. The future president of the United States argued that the government should not be in the business of promoting religion through taxpayer money and wrote that compelling anyone to fund a religion he does not believe in is "sinful and tyrannical." Because of this statute, Jefferson, a man who did not believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and removed all references to the supernatural in his edited version of the Gospels, became an evangelical hero. In many parts of the United States, he rode evangelical support to two presidential terms.

Of the three major models on the relationship between church and state available to Americans in the early republic–Adams, Henry, and Jefferson/Madison–the *Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom* most directly informed the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The Trump Commission's report does not cite Jefferson’s statute. Its recommendations point the other way, toward direct funding of faith-based institutions and toward public endorsement of religious practice in schools. The report quotes Trump: "We're bringing back religion in our country... because for America to be a great nation, we must always be one nation under God." That is not a defense of religious liberty, but an endorsement of religion by the state.

The same tension appears in the report's call to place the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. A sacred text that opens with "I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not have strange gods before Me" is not a neutral document; it is a claim about which god a schoolchild should worship—endorsing it as classroom decor is a form of religious establishment.

A common critique of what I just wrote in the preceding paragraph goes something like this: American law is built on the 10 Commandments, and we should thus display them in public school classrooms for *historical*, not *religious* reasons. This argument is correct in its claim that “Judeo-Christian” ideas informed the U.S. legal system. But the 10 Commandments are also (and primarily) part of sacred scripture for two major world religions: Christianity and Judaism. This makes their placement in school classrooms a First Amendment violation. The effort to post them is more about culture war politics than an honest interpretation of the Bill of Rights.

Much of the report's historical argument rests not on published scholarship but on the testimony of commissioners like culture warrior Eric Metaxas and television pop psychologist Dr. Phil McGraw. For example, the report calls for restoring service members discharged over their religious objections to the COVID-19 vaccine. Still, for all its appeals to American history, the report ignores the fact that George Washington himself *mandated* smallpox inoculation for the Continental Army in 1777.

Elsewhere, the report attributes Virginia's 1776 constitutional definition of religion to James Madison, but George Mason actually wrote that document. Madison's actual views on religion's relationship to government—he opposed military chaplains and later in his life rejected days of fasting and prayer—run counter to the report's broader argument.

A separate claim, sourced to Dr. Phil, asserts that "In God We Trust" dates to the nation's founding. The phrase did not appear on currency until 1864, and not on paper money until 1957\. These kinds of sloppy historical errors further undermine the report's credibility.

The report also invokes religion's "prophetic" role in American life. Like the 17th\-century Puritan clergy who called the Massachusetts Bay Colony back to its spiritual founding, Trump’s commission calls the United States back to its stated ideals. This is the best argument in the document, and I largely agree: a healthy society needs spiritual voices willing to criticize it, not simply bless it. But I am not entirely sure that the Founders shared such a prophetic view of religion. Washington and his contemporaries valued religion chiefly as a support for civic order — a "pillar," in Washington's own words from his Farewell Address (1796), not an independent moral authority that might one day call out the American republic for its sins. Genuine faith, of the kind that produced abolitionists and civil rights activists, is not submissive. This is why the commission report's own celebration of religion's humanitarian record sits so awkwardly beside the administration's cuts to USAID and PEPFAR. As Mr. and Mrs. Beaver reminded Lucy in C.S. Lewis’s *The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe*, Aslan is not a tame lion. True religion never serves the state, despite what some of the founders may have believed.

Much of the report's factual foundation comes from testimony gathered from 100 self-selected witnesses who testified before the committee over 10 months. These accounts likely contain real experiences of genuine mistreatment. Still, a self-selected sample skewed toward people already engaged in high-profile disputes is not a representative picture of how religious liberty functions for most Americans day to day. It is also worth noting that almost all these witnesses describe being persecuted for *Christianity* rather than other religious faiths.

None of this means the document is without merit. Its section on healthcare conscience protections — shielding medical professionals from being compelled to participate in procedures that violate their beliefs — is reasonable in principle, even if its actual application will call for careful, case-by-case judgment. Its defense of faith-based colleges competing for public funding on an equal footing with secular institutions, rather than as a special exemption, is fair. And the report’s condemnation of attacks on churches and disruptions of worship should be obvious to all readers, regardless of political conviction.

The report references Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, urging Americans to refuse to participate in lies as the surest defense of a free society. Coming from a commission built on a skewed committee, thin history, and selectively gathered testimony, and serving a presidential administration not known for its truthfulness, the citation reads more as irony than moral exhortation.

The deeper question this report raises is not whether religious Americans deserve protection — they do and always have under the First Amendment. It is whether "religious liberty," in this administration's hands, means freedom for all faiths to practice without government interference, or freedom for one faith tradition to receive government favor. A genuine defense of religious liberty would welcome faith into public life on equal terms for everyone without asking the state to put its thumb on the scale for any of them. This report never quite gets there.
### Stewarding Land and Language
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/stewarding-land-and-language/
Last updated: 2026-09-02T14:21:02.000Z
There was a time when Wendell Berry was a passionate and even amusing critic of Christianity. This is seen perhaps most explicitly in one of his earliest published essays, "The Long-Legged House." 

In the essay, Berry describes the experience of repairing an old cabin built by a relative of his. That cabin would become the home that he and his soon-to-be wife would move into it after their wedding. (For long-time readers of Berry’s work, the cabin by the river that Jayber Crow moves to in his dying days is the fictional imagining of this actual cabin where Mr. and Mrs. Berry began their married life together.) Much of the essay is taken up with the meaningfulness of the work of restoring such a place, the ways in which that work tied Berry to his place and his people, and how the preparing of that place for his wife would also set something of a course for their life together.

Then Berry turns to the church, an institution about which he had virtually nothing to say up to that point. But as the wedding grew closer, it became impossible to avoid the church—which is what Berry had been doing quite happily and successfully. When you read his account of things, it is hard to blame the man for wanting to stay well clear of the church:

> Our wedding reminds me a little of the Kentucky Derby. The main event, which lasted only a couple of minutes, required days of frantic prologue. During this commotion one must discontinue one’s own life and attempt to emulate everybody. Nobody can be still until convinced that this marriage will be like everybody else’s. The men insinuate. The women gloat. The church is resurrected and permitted to interfere. As at funerals, the principals cannot be decently let alone, but must be overhauled, upgraded, and messed with until they are not recognizable.

> During the week up to and including the wedding I am sure I was at the center of more absurdity than I hope ever to be at the center of again. One of my unforgettable moments, as they are called, was a quaint session with the minister who having met me for the first time that moment, and being scarcely better acquainted with Tanya, undertook to instruct us in the marital intimacies. A display of preacherish cant and presumption unusual even for a preacher, and all carried out with a slogging joyless dutifulness. As we were leaving he handed us a book on marriage.

> In a country less abject before “expert advice,” the effrontery of it would be incredible. Well, be damned to him and his book, too. We thrive in spite of him, and in defiance of some of his rules. We are, I like to think, his Waterloo—though I know that, like most of his kind, he had come to his Waterloo before that, and survived by his inability to recognize it.

The text is obviously Berry, though written when he was only in his early 30s: You can hear the language of his male characters in it—of Jack Beechum and Carter Keith and Nathan Coulter. The phrase "survived by his inability to recognize it" is also vintage Berry and a classic example of his ability to find simple, under-stated ways of making a devastating critique. The disdain for "experts" is there as well, as is the revulsion at ostentatious displays. It is not at all surprising to think that the man who wrote these words would, within only a few years, write *The Memory of Old Jack*. Indeed, we can find a similarly disdainful attitude toward the church in that book, the first of Berry's truly great novels, alongside *Jayber Crow* and *Hannah Coulter*.

In this particular case, the church manifests as villain in the final pages of the novel, as the departed old farmer Jack Beechum is fraudulently reconstructed as a dutiful son of the church by his affluent and spoiled daughter, Clara, who hasn't known her father well for at least 30 years, if she ever did at all. In a particularly pointed passage, Beechum's true heir and closest relative, Mat Feltner, instructs the preacher to simply read a few Psalms at a small graveside service. When the preacher ignores Mat's request and launches into a showy and dishonest prayer after reading the Psalms, Berry describes Mat's reaction to this fictionalized version of "preacherish cant":

And then Mat exercises for the first time his prerogative as the oldest man. He turns his back and gazes upon his fields.

The gesture is subtle, perhaps even polite in its own way, yet its meaning is unmistakable: For Berry, at this time at least, the church is merely one of the institutions of the world, seeking to make better theoretical persons in better theoretical places, without any recognition of the world as it is, of people as they are, and gratitude for all the good things we have. The church, like virtually all other institutions, is perpetually trying to improve its members, exhorting them to make something of themselves. None of them see and love the world as it is, see and love people as they are. They only love imagined, far off places and imagined, far off people who exist only in the false prayers of mendacious preachers. 

There is another passage in *Old Jack* that names the failure Berry recognizes in the church, but not in the church alone; it is a failure of imagination, a failure of seeing. In the passage I am about to quote, Mat Feltner is reflecting on the bizarre life of a couple renting a home from him on his property. This couple, the Berlews, are travelers, thrill chasers. They avoid hard work as much as they can, seeking only to work enough to make enough to facilitate their thrill chasing. 

> For the privilege of such a life they end up working far harder to maintain their old car that facilitates that life than they ever would dream of working in the day for pay. 

Then Berry remarks, comparing the Berlews with Beechum's extremely rich and successful daughter and son-in-law the Pettits,

> It comes to Mat suddenly—so that he first grimaces and then grunts—that the Berlews and Pettits represent the two halves of the same distraction. What the Pettits are is what the Berlews dream of being. Is not the Berlews' old car the hopeless dream of a Cadillac? Is not their tireless going a persistently frustrated pilgrimage in search of Easy Street? That the Pettits *live* on Easy Street makes no essential difference between them and the Berlews. If the Pettits are what the Berlews would like to be, they are also what the Pettits would like to be; they have imagined nothing higher than they are.

We could put it this way: There is a way we people, perhaps especially we *modern* people, have of imagining nothing higher than we are. And once we have started from that point, there is some sense in which Christianity can't help us. It can only be abused and twisted and perverted by us. This is what Berry recognized: The church we find in "The Long-Legged House" and *The Memory of Old Jack* is a church that simply takes for granted the belief that this world has nothing worthy to offer us. These churches believe without thought or question that the only good thing in this life is to seek to save our own souls out of the world—and if that is the only thing of ultimate importance, than everything else doesn’t much matter, which perhaps explains why such radical spiritualism can often be found closely associated with rampant materialism and spiritual complacency. The ease with which a kind of fundamentalist Baptist or Methodist Christianity of the old south can be melded with a life that imagines nothing higher than we are is actually quite astonishing: Christianity simply becomes one means of serving ourselves (by giving us a sense of superiority), of exalting ourselves (by highlighting our own righteousness in the eyes of others), of protecting ourselves (by acquiring the requisite fire insurance to protect our immortal souls). 

You might say that this is a Christianity that lacks both a doctrine of creation and a doctrine of resurrection; it is bloodless and disembodied and, for precisely those reasons, has very little to offer the world and very little of use to protect its members from violating themselves, their neighbors, and the world.

This is a point worth lingering over. There is a passage in the Gospels where Jesus warns the religious leaders that all their religious teaching serves only to make their followers twice the children of Hell that they themselves are. The Christianity we encounter in Berry's early work is one example of how that can happen. Only leave the great idol of the heart—the supremacy of the self—unchallenged and Christianity, of a kind at least, becomes a tool for spreading and facilitating unimaginable wickedness.

To put it another way, when Berry looked at the goodness of the world he walked about in every day and set that against what he found in the church, he found the church's account of goodness entirely inadequate. Indeed, he found the church routinely taking the side of evil while the world itself shined unnoticed. What Treebeard says to Merry and Pippin in *The Lord of the Rings* could just as well be said by the land and, perhaps, by Berry himself in Berry's fiction: "Side? I am on nobody's side, for nobody is altogether on my side."

It's important to understand this because this is a different sort of objection to Christianity from those familiar to most Christians. It is not claiming that Christianity’s moral norms are stuffy or antiquated. It is not an objection founded on some sort of moral relativism, or even on some sort of strong moral critique *against* Christianity. 

The failure, as someone like Jack Beechum would see it, is that he lives "hard up against mystery" every day (to use a phrase from *Jayber Crow*) and when he sets what he sees in the world, both its beauties and its many evils, he simply finds the Christian account to be small and stuffy, and, as a result, deeply unconvincing. Christianity is too small for the men of Berry's novels—the gratitudes and mercies they receive every day by virtue of their life as human beings (and, particularly, as farmers) seem far more real to them than anything they ever heard in a church.

It's not that there is some negative criticism of Christianity that Berry accepts and this prevents him from believing; that framing presupposes belief as a kind of default mode which will only be deviated from if presented with some sort of sufficient obstacle. But that isn't how the early Berry regards Christianity. It's not that Christianity is necessarily immoral or corrupt or unjust. It's that when Berry encounters the given earth with its pleasures and mercies and difficulties and sets it against Christianity he finds the world far more beautiful.

That, I think, is why Christianity, though seldom treated kindly in Berry's early work is also not something he spends an immense amount of time addressing. Berry is not a misotheist, a god-hater, in the way of a Nietzsche or a Christopher Hitchens. Religion is almost wholly absent from *The Memory of Old Jack* and from most of Berry's short stories, for example, and most of his early essays. To the degree he considers religion at all, it is simply as one more example of an institution more concerned with its own life than the life of the world and filled with people more concerned with their own lives than the lives of others or of their place.

And yet that is not where the story ends. By the time we come to *Jayber Crow*, published in the early 2000s, Berry has retained many of his criticisms of certain Christian communities and even of certain Christian ideas. But the tone is measured and careful, as if he has learned to do what Frederick Douglass learned a hundred years prior: to distinguish between a sort of Americanized folk Christianity aimed at self-exaltation at the expense of all else and the "pure peaceable" Christianity of Christ. The point is not that the theological questions have evaporated for Berry, or at least for Jayber Crow. They don’t. They linger. But the experience of living in the world and finding love in it caused Jayber to reconsider his relationship to the faith—and in the Gospels, at least, he finds an account of love that anchors and deepens his own experience of it.

And so the rage we find in Berry’s older work has dissipated by the time we arrive at *Jayber Crow*. What remains is an ordinary man vexed by certain theological questions still, yet convinced that God's mercy can work to overcome any evil and that Christ's law of love is the pinnacle of moral wisdom. How did this change happen?

A neglected volume of essays published in the early 1980s provides an answer—and for my money this particular volume is Berry's greatest accomplishment as an essayist. The collection is called *Standing by Words* and in it Berry considers poetry, poetic forms, the limits inherent in language, and how all these things relate to the ways we imagine the world. Why is it the volume that is so pivotal in his reconsideration of Christianity? 

I think the answer is here: What Berry knew all along is that he found the life of the world more entrancing and satisfying than the life of the church as he knew it. What becomes apparent in *Standing by Words* is that he needed an account of *why* the life of the world is marked by the beauty, abundance, and superfluity that so delighted him. The answer he comes to, through various means, is that the life of the earth is marked by forms that it did not choose for itself, so to speak, but also cannot be overwritten, erased, or remade without causing great and unnecessary harm. The good life and our capacity for good work are both largely bound up with how we are able to relate to the order, place, and people that have been given to us. When we regard these things with indifference, rage, or contempt it turns out that we can violate the fields that Mat Feltner turned toward in *Old Jack* just as easily as we can violate churches or universities.

What Berry is reckoning with in this collection of essays is the way in which his own callings as both a writer and a farmer have been compromised and set at odds with the givenness of things, coming under the sway of specialization and control and so being drawn out of the world, one might say. In the first essay of the volume, in which Berry laments the "specialization" of poetry he writes, "the poet is isolated and specialized and.. the old union of beauty, goodness, and truth is broken." Later he continues, writing about poets in much the same way he had previously written about bankers and professional religious people:

> One of the oldest doctrines of specialist-poets is that of the primacy of language and the primacy of poetry. They have virtually made a religion of their art, a religion based not on what they have in common with other people, but on what they *do* that sets them apart. For poets who believe this way, a poem is not a point of clarification or connection between themselves and the world on the one hand and between themselves and their readers on the other, nor is it an adventure into any reality or mystery outside themselves. It is a seeking of self in words, the making of a word-world in which the word-self may be at home. The poets go to their poems as other people go to the world or to God—for a sense of their own reality. ...

> It may be argued that this emphasis was in some sense forced upon poets by their peculiar isolation in a society dominated by specialists of more practical kinds. But this way of looking at language and at poetry also completes and enforces the isolation of poets, not just within a sort of literary ghetto or subghetto, but within themselves. Mark Strand is evidently not the only poet who would say that, 'the self in a sense is all we have left.'

There are strong echoes here of what Berry wrote of the Berlews and Pettits in *The Memory of Old Jack*, but whereas in *Jack* Berry seems to isolate that narrowed spirit, in "The Specialization of Poetry" he is suggesting that it has become ubiquitous. In *Old Jack* the villains are bankers and drifters and the heroes are farmers. By the time we come to *Standing by Words* Berry is reckoning constantly with the ways in which farmers and poets–his two vocations–can be just as complicit in the unmaking of places as the bankers and drifters. The problem, in short, can’t be concentrated or distilled down to “corrupt institutions indifferent to the health of the land smothering men like Jack Beechum.” The problem Berry wants to address strikes at the heart of what it means to steward both land and language, the two great preoccupations of Berry’s life.

What this means is that he no longer can focus his ire primarily on bankers, like the Pettits, or lazy dreamers, like the Berlews. Rather, he has had to turn this critique loose on everyone, including the people closest to him and, indeed, on himself. But then that also suggests that the contest we see at the end of *Old Jack* in which Mat Feltner turns away from the rude and pontificating preacher to turn toward the fields is not *quite* so clear as that image might suggest. The fields themselves can become a subject of "specialization" and can themselves be cut off. If you are seeking an escape from preacherish cant, it is no sure thing that you will find it in the fields. You might find the same desecration there that one can find in so many other places.

It turns out that one cannot simply pit the life of the world against the life of institutions. Rather, even the world itself can, in the twistedness and lostness of human beings, be set against the life of the world. It is a challenge to see the life of the world truly. And if it is a challenge, that suggests that aids are needed in order to do so. This is where we begin to see a reconsideration of Christianity in Berry's work.

In the essay, "Standing by Words," Berry considers the problem of language and naming in ways quite similar to what Lewis sought to address in *The Abolition of Man*. And he comes to quite similar answers, though he gets there via a different route. The problem, for Berry, concerns the ways in which language itself becomes divorced from any kind of external control or referent aside from power and will.

He rightly sees that the health of the world and of people and their many communities is dependent on the notion that words stand for something real; language is not simply an expression of tastes or a tool for acquiring power. Language is how we try to name what is real and true and worth living for. The trouble is that when language becomes materialized or politicized, it loses its referent. He illustrates the point with two diagrams, one of which he suggests is a model of healthy communal and natural life while the other is the industrial semblance:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/08/data-src-image-ef7ddc7d-b861-4746-a85b-be1541117842.png)

In the first diagram, everything that is part of our life in the world is encompassed in some sense. The second, by contrast, has removed anything that can’t be quantified or financialized. This is how Berry names the change that happens when you move from the economy depicted in the first diagram to the economy of the second diagram:

> So long as the smaller systems are enclosed within the larger, and so long as all are connected by complex patterns of interdependency, as we know they are, then whatever affects one system will affect the others. It seems that this system of systems is safe so long as each system is controlled by the next larger one. If at any point the hierarchy is reversed, and the smaller begins to control the larger, then the destruction of the entire system of systems begins. This system of systems is perhaps an updated, ecological version of the Great Chain of Being. That is, it may bring us back to a hierarchical structure not too different from the one that underlies *Paradise Lose*–a theory of the form of Creation which is at the same time a moral form, and which is violated by the ‘disobedience’ or *hubris* of attempting to rise and take power above one’s proper place.

What does Berry propose to fix this? As is implied above, he suggests that what we need is a category above 'nature' that controls and names it, and that category, he suggests, is "religion.” The issue he sees is that his “system of systems” is fragile and easily destroyed because its only measure is truth and truth is easily ignored or suppressed. A moral witness is needed from *outside* Berry’s system, something to help the members of a community recognize why it is good for them to tune their lives to the lives of neighbors and the life of the world. That something, he thinks, is religion:

> There is no reliable standard for behavior anywhere within the system of systems except truth. Lesser standards produce destruction–as, for example, the standards of public relations make gibberish of language. The trouble, obviously, is that we do not know much of the truth…. And so yet another term has be introduced. The system of systems has to be controlled from above and outside. There has to be a religious interest of some kind above the ecogenetic. It will be sufficient to my purpose to say simply that the system of systems is enclosed within mystery, in which some truth can be known but never all truth.

In other words, the members of the world can never know the world exhaustively. And so a certain deference to mystery and to our own creaturely ignorance is often necessary to prevent us from committing monstrous acts. You might say that this is Berry’s articulation of the famous Chesterton’s Fence aphorism in which the British writer G. K. Chesterton said that a fence should never be knocked down by someone who doesn’t know why it is there. The only time it is safe to knock a fence down is when you *do* know its purpose and can explain why it is no longer needed. The recognition of ignorance, in other words, should provoke us toward gentleness, caution, and care–and this provocation, Berry thinks, is what is needed to preserve healthy places, which include the land and the people living from the land.

Interestingly, Berry actually pressed the religious language even further. Earlier in the essay he had teased at this solution when he suggested that the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation would offer a way of grounding our language, such that we can claim that our language is not simply taste or power-grabbing, but can actually be an attempt to speak of reality. Specifically he argues that in the Incarnation true Word and true Flesh are found together, suggesting that not only should we try to speak of reality truly, but that we actually *can*.

In other words, by the time we arrive at *Standing by Words* Berry has become aware that the deeper evil he wants to oppose is a kind of human wilfulness that, flowing out of the idea that there is nothing higher than ourselves, reduces everything it finds to consumable goods. The battle is not, necessarily, between “the peace of wild things” and the mechanical. The evils of the machine can come to reign in the wild as easily as they can in churches, farms, and universities. 

What is needed, rather, is some account that offers us a way to name the things that are higher than us, a way to love those things, and a way to tune our lives to them—and that work can happen as much in the fields as it does in the church. The way Berry learns to make this critique is through a return to Christianity, through considering the ways in which theological themes in Christian scripture help us to see and love what is higher than us, to know that Higher Good so well that we can tune ourselves to it wherever we go, whether that be the wild places, a classroom or, even, a church.
### In Memory: Wendell Berry
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/in-memory-wendell-berry/
Last updated: 2026-09-02T11:00:03.000Z
Well, you've gone along ahead—  
We shouldn't be surprised (but we are).  
You've always walked ahead of us,  
Looking back with kindness, calling  
Our company to the good and right way.

Your vision of the world has oriented us  
Helped us look, and see, and listen,  
Showed us where to plant our feet, and where  
We must surrender. It is always both,  
You said, the giving and the grounding.

"Life is a miracle." Yours taught us  
The beauty of resilience and surrender  
Like trees rooted deep in sloping hills, aglow  
As embers nestled in their hearth, savvy  
As wild creatures nesting near the river.

"We live the given life." You never said  
It would be easy. But to abandon profit,  
To praise the beauty of our places,  
To reject the mindset of machines,  
This is a givenness that gives generously.

"Be joyful, despite all the facts." We'll try.  
It may be a bit harder now—indeed  
For a little while longer now, we'll need  
Plenty of reminders;  
Thankfully, you've written some down for us.

You knew we'd need a guide, a Virgil for our journey,  
An Edgar to take our blindness by the hand;  
We all need help as we step into the dark.  
With immense kindness, you've been our Dante.  
We won't stop following now.
### The Return of the Common Good
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-return-of-the-common-good/
Last updated: 2026-09-01T11:00:51.000Z
**Stefan Borg,** [***The Return of the Common Good: The Postliberal Project Left and Right***](https://www.routledge.com/The-Return-of-the-Common-Good-The-Postliberal-Project-Left-and-Right/Borg/p/book/9781032873596?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Routledge, 2026\. $200.00, 162 pp.**

As someone who has been a self-identified postliberal since around 2010, I have been waiting for a book like this for years. Postliberal political theory has recently become a focal point of intense—and often hostile—attention. Critics routinely accuse postliberals of misrepresenting liberalism, failing to offer constructive alternatives, or advancing proposals that amount to thinly veiled authoritarianism. At the same time, confusion persists about what postliberalism actually is, where it came from, and whether it constitutes anything more than a fleeting reaction to recent political developments.

For several years now, I have frequently been asked whether there exists a single work that could orient readers wholly uninitiated into postliberal political theory. Until now, I have had no monograph-length treatment to recommend—no book that offers a charitable, synoptic account of postliberalism’s intellectual genealogy, internal diversity, and shared concerns. Most existing works either fixate on one recent American faction or engage in sweeping denunciations that obscure the deeper continuities and substantive agreements animating postliberal critiques of the liberal order. In such accounts, opposition to liberalism functions less as an argument worth engaging than as a prelude to warnings about the dangers supposedly lurking beyond it.

This confusion has only been exacerbated by the way postliberalism is frequently narrated through the lens of the Trumpist moment. Too often, postliberal political theory is treated as little more than an opportunistic response to American populism or an attempt to capitalize on the ascent of President Trump. Meanwhile, postliberal discourse in the United States has taken on a more statist, tribalistic, and narrowly particularistic tone, intensifying uncertainty about its relationship to nationalism. Is Christian nationalism properly postliberal? Is postliberalism simply the political theology on display at National Conservatism conferences? In the absence of careful distinctions, critics—especially in academic and media contexts—have been quick to dismiss the entire discourse as intellectually reckless or socially dangerous for daring to challenge liberalism at a fundamental level.

Against this backdrop, Stefan Borg’s *The Return of the Common Good: The Postliberal Project Left and Right* arrives as a welcome—and much-needed—intervention. Borg’s aim is not to defend every postliberal proposal, but to clarify what postliberalism is, where it comes from, and why it deserves serious consideration. As he puts it in the introduction, the book seeks “to remedy this confusion and present postliberalism as a fully-fledged tradition of thought.” While acknowledging significant internal differences, Borg argues that postliberalism constitutes a coherent—if still underdeveloped and often misunderstood—critique of liberalism, one that has been ignored in part because of liberalism’s own hegemonic status. That critique, he insists, “ought to be taken seriously.”

Borg’s central claim is that postliberalism is unified by what he calls a shared “common project,” a claim signaled in the book’s subtitle. Despite their disagreements, major postliberal thinkers “mobilize a set of similar arguments about the historical trajectory of liberalism and share an understanding of, as well as having similar misgivings about, the liberal order.” They diverge over what should replace liberalism, but they are united in rejecting liberalism’s “one-sided preoccupation with maximizing individual autonomy” at the expense of goods that sustain political and social life. In Borg’s formulation, “the postliberal project may in part be defined as an attempt to resurrect the common good tradition.”

Accordingly, the appeal to the common good functions as postliberalism’s central normative standard. At its most basic level, postliberalism insists that claims of individual autonomy must be ordered toward, and constrained by, the flourishing of the political community as a whole. Politics should not be oriented primarily toward autonomy-maximization, but toward sustaining the conditions of shared life.

In its most ambitious form, Borg argues, postliberalism seeks to retrieve a more ancient and Christian conception of politics—one oriented toward virtue and genuine human flourishing—over against the liberal tendency to construe politics as a mechanism for securing individual freedom alone.

Importantly, Borg is careful to stress that this “common project” does not imply uniformity. He distinguishes between two broad branches of postliberalism: a British strand and an American one. While there is sufficient overlap to justify speaking of a single project, the differences between these branches—particularly their historical origins—are analytically illuminating. One of Borg’s most valuable contributions is to demonstrate that British postliberalism long predates both Donald Trump’s election and Patrick Deneen’s *Why Liberalism Failed*. On Borg’s account, postliberalism emerges in the 1990s and develops across theology, political theory, jurisprudence, international relations, and cultural criticism.

The term “postliberalism” itself (with reference to politics) was first deployed in the early 1990s by the British political theorist John Gray to name his growing disillusionment with liberal assumptions and liberal social orders. Yet Borg traces the deeper roots of British postliberalism to Radical Orthodoxy, the theological movement associated above all with John Milbank. Radical Orthodoxy mounted a far-reaching critique of secular modernity and “what is perceived as its chief ideological expression, namely liberalism.” Its foundational text is Milbank’s *Theology and Social Theory* (1990), which argued that liberalism rests on a secular ontology that displaces theology as the interpretive framework for social life.

Postliberalism assumed a more overtly political form in the aftermath of Labour’s defeat in the 2010 British election. Maurice Glasman founded Blue Labour, while Philip Blond—a student of Milbank’s and a contributor to *Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology*—advanced related ideas under the banner of Red Toryism through the think tank ResPublica. Around the same time, the term “postliberalism” entered wider public discourse through figures such as David Goodhart, who popularized postliberal critiques of market society and social fragmentation. Across these expressions, British postliberalism combined a rejection of radical individualism and market atomization with an equally strong resistance to collectivism, emphasizing virtue, intermediary institutions, and local forms of belonging.

At the intellectual core of this tradition stands Radical Orthodoxy. Beginning with *Theology and Social Theory* and culminating, in Borg’s telling, with Milbank and Adrian Pabst’s *The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future* (2016)—which Borg describes as “the most theoretically elaborate articulation of postliberalism” and “the most comprehensive statement of postliberalism currently on offer”—Radical Orthodoxy advances a comprehensive critique of liberalism as the ideology of the secular. Liberalism, on this account, insists on carving out a supposedly neutral public sphere free from theological commitments, reducing politics to procedural coordination among competing conceptions of the good. Radical Orthodoxy rejects this neutrality as illusory. Liberalism, Milbank argues, advances its own substantive moral vision, grounded in what he famously calls an “ontology of violence”—a vision of social reality that presupposes primordial conflict and self-interest rather than participation in the divine good. As Borg summarizes, Milbank’s project seeks to reinstate theology as a governing meta-discourse by which secular modernity itself may be judged, and to recover a Christian social vision as a genuine alternative to the liberal order.

Much of Borg’s account resonated deeply with my own intellectual trajectory. My engagement with postliberalism predates the Trump moment and developed independently of the American cohort associated with *The Postliberal Order*. Like many others, I was first prepared for postliberal arguments through engagement with communitarian thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Sandel, as well as figures who bridge communitarianism and postliberal theology, notably Stanley Hauerwas.

Borg is especially helpful in making explicit the overlap between communitarianism and postliberalism. Postliberals share with communitarians a relational anthropology, a rejection of autonomous individualism, skepticism toward claims of neutrality, and a critique of negative liberty as liberalism’s core value. Yet Borg rightly resists collapsing the two traditions. Communitarianism emerged in a different historical moment and often exhibited a greater reluctance toward state action, and tended toward preservation of inherited social forms—which can drift in a more relativistic direction. Postliberalism—especially in its Radical Orthodox variant—is more overtly political and more explicitly theological, advancing a thicker normative account of political order and the common good.

The American branch of postliberalism, Borg argues, coalesces later, beginning with Trump’s election in 2016 and crystallizing with Patrick Deneen’s *Why Liberalism Failed* (2018), which Borg calls “the first defining work of U.S. postliberalism.” Deneen’s critique bears a clear communitarian imprint, hardly surprising given his exposure to the communitarian political theorist Wilson Carey McWilliams during his undergraduate years at Rutgers. Liberalism, Deneen argues, rests on an anthropology of voluntaristic individualism, a conception of liberty as autonomy-expansion, and a severing of the human person from nature. Far from limiting state power, this individualism generates statism: as social bonds erode, the state expands to manage the resulting disorder. Market capitalism intensifies this dynamic by commodifying desire while relying on regulatory expansion. *Why Liberalism Failed* is primarily diagnostic; Deneen’s later *Regime Change* (2023) advances more constructive proposals centered on the recovery of the common good. Borg situates these developments within the consolidation of American postliberalism around Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin, and Chad Pecknold in the early 2020s.

Despite these differences, Borg identifies three elements that unify postliberalism as a common project: a genealogical critique of liberalism’s internal contradictions, a social analysis of the orders liberalism produces, and a normative commitment to the common good.

First, postliberals broadly agree that liberalism is internally self-undermining. Its commitment to atomistic individualism proves corrosive not only to social life but also to the natural world. Liberalism systematically privileges the political and economic spheres over the civic and social, and this imbalance ultimately erodes the latter. Moreover, while liberalism presents itself as neutral with respect to substantive visions of the good, postliberals argue that it in fact enforces this purported neutrality as a comprehensive moral framework, often acting illiberally toward those whose substantive commitments conflict with it.

Postliberals identify liberalism as a decisive break with classical and Christian accounts of political order, and this is why Thomas Hobbes figures so centrally in their genealogy. *Leviathan* is commonly understood as “the most forceful articulation of the break with the ancients,” radically undercutting the foundations of common-good political theory. As Borg explains, “modernity is often understood as the process by which Hobbesian assumptions of the world slowly but steadily won out.” Hobbes’s conception of order as an artificial imposition of power designed to manage primordial hostility generates a pervasive suspicion toward social authority and inherited forms of life—one that, over time, functions as an acid on the social fabric. Contractarian models weaken the intermediary institutions that once mediated between the individual and the state, while liberalism’s commitment to negative liberty fosters mistrust toward the traditions, habits, and norms that sustain common life. In a market society these dynamics are further exacerbated, as social relations themselves are increasingly commodified. The result is a mutually reinforcing logic in which the abstract individual, the expanding state, and the market together erode the very sources of social cohesion and shared flourishing on which liberal order ultimately depends.

Second, postliberals analyze the social orders liberalism produces, with particular attention to the rise of a managerial elite. Drawing on James Burnham, Christopher Lasch, and Michael Lind, postliberals narrate the emergence of a professional class that governs institutions while remaining detached from the communities they administer. This elite combines technocratic power with cultural liberalism, advancing norms that corrode social solidarity while entrenching its own privileges.

Before turning to the third element, Borg clarifies a frequent misunderstanding. Critics object that postliberals offer an overly narrow, one-sided account of liberalism. Borg concedes that postliberal critiques are not primarily exercises in textual reconstruction. But this, he argues, is precisely the point. Postliberals treat liberalism not merely as a theory but as a sociopolitical project whose consequences matter more than its internal nuances. The question is whether liberal societies can sustain the goods they require to function.

This leads to the third element: the recovery of the common good. Drawing on Helen Rosenblatt’s authoritative history of liberalism, Borg acknowledges that earlier liberals often affirmed the common good, but he argues that contemporary liberalism—exemplified by John Rawls—treats it as politically inaccessible. Under conditions of pluralism, Rawls contends, the state must remain neutral and secure fair procedures which allow individuals to pursue their disparate ends rather than promote substantive goods. Postliberalism rejects this premise, seeking to recover a politics ordered toward virtue rather than autonomy.

Borg identifies three postliberal approaches to the common good: pluralist, common good conservatism, and integralism. The pluralist approach, associated with British postliberalism and Michael Lind, emphasizes an open-ended pursuit of the common good through dispersed power, corporatist institutions, relational economies, and strong civil society. Deneen’s common good conservatism places greater emphasis on tradition, social stability, and popular wisdom, articulated through his concept of “aristopopulism.” Integralism, associated with Vermeule, offers the most programmatic and state-centered approach, insisting that political authority should actively promote substantive goods.

Borg’s typology usefully dispels the claim that postliberalism lacks constructive proposals. Yet the book’s greatest strength lies in re-centering the common good itself—an emphasis increasingly eclipsed by the association of postliberalism with nationalism. 

Echoing his earlier point about communitarianism, Borg argues that postliberals are opposed to radical conservatism in that they are not primarily motivated by the preservation of a given social order—a posture that can easily slide into relativism. And, as Oliver O’Donovan demonstrates in *Ways of Judgment*, nationalism often functions as a species of identity politics, which postliberals recognize as an expression of liberalism. Postliberals can concede that nationalist critiques of liberal universalism have real force, particularly insofar as liberalism tends to universalize late-modern Western norms. Yet nationalism, Borg suggests, frequently replicates liberalism’s own pathologies. It retreats to a Hobbesian state of nature at the international level and reduces political judgment to collective self-interest—merely scaling liberal individualism and liberalism’s “ontology of violence” up to the level of nations.

By contrast, Borg shows that postliberals insist on the irreducible universality of the Christian faith, even while affirming the necessity of historical and cultural particularity. As he puts it, “\[U\]niversals must always find expression in historically instantiated particulars …. Universals are never fully disclosed outside of their (always imperfect) instantiations in particulars.” Where strands of the dissident right radicalize particularity and lapse into an ontology of violence—now transposed to relations between nations—postliberals such as Pabst and Milbank advance a form of Christian internationalism. We should understand nations as neighbors—each seeking in its own way to instantiate the good, with the common good itself requiring forms of international cooperation. On this view, postliberalism decisively rejects frameworks such as Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis.

The book also draws attention to the “sex-realist feminists”—figures such as Louise Perry, Christine Emba, Erika Bachiochi, and Mary Harrington—showing how their work advances distinctly postliberal arguments. In particular, they critique contractarian accounts of sexual relations, the commodification of intimacy, the equation of libertinism with empowerment, and what Harrington terms “bio-libertarianism.” This strand of thought is rarely included in standard mappings of postliberalism, yet Borg persuasively demonstrates its family resemblance to the broader postliberal project. On this point, I am entirely in agreement: these thinkers deserve to be recognized as an integral part of the postliberal conversation.

There are, however, areas where Borg could go further. He rightly notes that not all postliberal positions are wholly or uniformly antiliberal, and he gestures toward the ways liberalism emerged by abstracting and radicalizing certain Christian principles. I would press this insight further: liberalism is best understood as a Christian heresy—or, in Oliver O’Donovan’s formulation, the “prodigal child” of Christendom. Liberalism represents, to borrow G. K. Chesterton’s phrase, a set of Christian “virtues gone mad.” Insofar as liberal orders continue to draw on moral capital they cannot themselves reproduce (*à la* the Böckenforde dilemma), that capital must be re-tethered to the Christian whole from which it was severed. On this view, the task is not simply to oppose liberalism but to call it home—to re-anchor its moral claims within the ecclesial and theological framework that once gave them coherence and limits.

Indeed, this points toward a deeper omission. Borg would benefit from drawing the theological thread more consistently throughout the book. Postliberalism—especially in its Radical Orthodox forms—is not merely a sociological critique but a theological one. Postliberals do not merely criticize liberalism for its deracinating social effects—for eroding the resources that sustain common life, producing increasingly atomized individuals alongside an ever-expanding state—but also for its desacralizing logic. This dimension is central to John Milbank’s argument in *Theology and Social Theory*, where the very category of the “secular” is exposed as a historical and conceptual invention—one that, though emerging from within the Christian tradition itself, was progressively hardened in modernity into a domain conceived as wholly autonomous from and impermeable to theological judgment. At the heart of Radical Orthodoxy, and thus of postliberalism more broadly, is the insistence that theology be recovered as a governing meta-discourse—the *regina scientiarum* by which other forms of knowledge are ordered and judged. 

This theological critique carries an implication that Borg only partially develops: political order is never religiously neutral. Borg notes that postliberals expose liberalism’s claim to neutrality as illusory and highlight its substantive moral commitments. Yet he stops short of drawing the full implication—namely, that such commitments are always and inevitably theological. He comes close when he observes that deviations from liberal orthodoxies are often treated as a form of “secular sinning,” but he does not carry the point far enough. Every political order, liberal ones included, necessarily renders judgments about God, religion, and their relevance to social life and human flourishing. Borg rightly shows that postliberals understand the human person as socially constituted and embedded in thick networks of relationships. But the most fully Christian expressions of postliberalism press further still, insisting that human beings are situated within a theological horizon, ordered toward God. Without foregrounding this claim, postliberalism risks being reduced to institutional reform rather than a challenge to liberalism’s spiritual architecture. 

Finally, Borg largely omits a crucial postliberal strand: ecclesiocentric postliberalism, represented by the Communio school and figures such as David L. and D. C. Schindler, as well as Peter Leithart and the Civitas network. Though largely North American, these thinkers stand closer to the theological and ecclesiological concerns of Milbank and Radical Orthodoxy than to the more overtly political forms of American postliberalism—complicating Borg’s neat British-American divide. What unites them is the insistence that the Church is not a voluntary association concerned exclusively with “private” and otherworldly realities, but a public body. To be sure, Borg does note that Deneen gestures in this direction, particularly in his critique of post-Westphalian nationalism, wherein the modern state sought to eliminate rival claims to sovereignty—above all those of the Catholic Church. In this settlement, the Church was progressively reduced by secular sovereigns who claimed the authority to determine the boundaries of acceptable religion within their respective realms. Yet Borg does not develop this line of analysis beyond a brief summary of Deneen’s point. Moreover, he appears to treat the Church as merely one intermediate institution among others situated between the individual and the state. 

What is missing—and what the Communio and Civitas strands of postliberalism help recover—is the political significance of the Church itself. Borg rightly highlights how postliberals critique liberalism for recognizing only non-state communities formed on liberal premises: voluntary associations of contracting individuals pursuing shared interests. The Church cannot be understood in these terms. She is not simply one voluntary society within civil society, constructed by individual choice and ranked beneath the state. She is a reality that confronts all persons. She is the body of Christ on earth (Rom. 12; 1 Cor. 12; Eph. 1; Col. 1), the pillar and bulwark of the truth (1 Tim. 3:15), and the Christian’s more ultimate family (Matt. 12:48–50), nation (1 Pet. 2), and *polis* (Eph. 2:19; cf. Phil. 3:20; Heb. 12:22–23). The Church is the most comprehensive community, summoning all persons and, in doing so, relativizing and challenging the totalizing claims of other social bodies and purported sovereigns. Yet she does so not by withdrawing from history, but by seeking to be instantiated within every society and to receive—purified and redeemed—the fruits of each. Precisely as a multinational and transnational body, the Church also serves as a source of reconciliation and healing among the nations.

Leithart explains how liberalism systematically marginalizes the Church by reshaping its ecclesiology, focusing especially on the foundational figures of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Hobbes, Leithart contends, domesticated the Church by subordinating it to the civil sovereign, thereby resolving the problem of divided loyalties between temporal and spiritual authority. Locke, by contrast, domesticated the Church by spiritualizing and privatizing it, reducing it to a voluntary association concerned with inward belief rather than public truth. In both cases, liberalism strips the Church of any genuinely public status.

Leithart’s analysis here echoes the work of the sociologist of religion José Casanova, who has argued that the liberal state’s “preferred form of religion” is a privatized one. On this account, the liberal assumption is that religion is—and ought to remain—a “private affair.” The consequence is that the Church is stripped of any genuinely public status. It is no longer understood as a commonwealth (πολιτείας), no longer a society of “citizens” (συμπολῖται) gathered in the public assembly of the household of God (Eph. 2:12, 19). Instead, the modern liberal order ultimately recognizes only two actors as politically salient: the sovereign individual and the state. By marginalizing the Church as a public body, liberalism effectively eliminates any competing form of authority or allegiance.

Modern liberal orders have sought to privatize religion and to emancipate social life from ecclesial authority. The Church’s jurisdiction is thereby restricted to those who voluntarily choose her, while the state is increasingly treated as a comprehensive authority from which no one may opt out. Over time, the state comes to be viewed as the most ultimate and indispensable community, and loyalties once oriented toward the Church are gradually redirected toward political sovereignty. Liberalism’s deepest error, according to these postliberals, is its ecclesiological one: privatizing the Church while rendering the state ultimate. Any postliberalism that fails to recognize this fundamental ecclesiological heresy at the root of the liberal order—and the religious dangers it entails—remains incomplete.

Despite these omissions, Borg’s book is an indispensable primer on postliberalism. It is the clearest, most charitable map of the terrain currently available—and it will be my default recommendation … at least once it appears in paperback.
### When Everything Is Forgotten
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/when-everything-is-forgotten/
Last updated: 2026-09-01T11:00:27.000Z
*The following excerpt from Joseph Orso,* [*On the Threshold of Worlds: Tending My Father Before and After His Last Breath*](https://josephorso.com/book/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) *is published with permission from Front Porch Republic Books and Wipf & Stock.*

\*\*\*

These things can go poorly.

Some time ago, another resident in the memory care facility died and the family cared for the body themselves. Though surely well-intentioned, they were unprepared. The details are not important, but workers were asked to do too much. Stories spread, and one young staff-member tells me the experience still gives her nightmares.

There’s no blame here. Our civilization has commodified all aspects of experience and relationship, and provides little support for our sacred responsibilities to each other. Most of us have never washed a breathless body, nor dug a grave, nor sat round-the-clock vigil with a loved one’s body after death. Our parents have not done this, nor our grandparents. Rather, cultural norms have neglected these responsibilities and replaced them with secular, economic transactions. In such a context, tending our dead ourselves is no simple task, and mistakes aren’t surprising.

That said, knowing what happened, we realize early on that caring for Dad after death, without a funeral home, is going to involve repair in this place. We speak extensively with the director of the facility, the nurses, and the staff about our plans—about how we are in touch with a community organization that supports families in doing this, how friends and family will be here to help us wash Dad’s body when the time comes, to carry him to a waiting vehicle, to sing as we carry him out.

When the time comes, we tell them, nothing will be asked of them, though they will be welcome to be present if they choose.

\*\*\*

Dad’s breathing goes on beyond the hospice nurse’s guess of seventy- two hours, and the days feel liminal. During this dying time, it has taken no beckoning for the sacred to intrude upon our days. Dad is dying, and the thing to do has been obvious: sit around him as we’d sit around a fire, gazing at the flames, and telling stories and making music and eating cake until the flame burns out.

Yet there’s also work to do.

Ages upon ages ago, a prophet cried out, “Prepare the way of the Lord.” The command stands, an ever-present calling for every generation. If we do not want to hand over death to the nearest industry, there are indeed preparations to be made. Cultural patterns no longer exist for how to tend Dad between his death and his burial, so knowledge must be recovered. We must remember skills our ancestors took for granted.

We make plans and back-up plans and to-do lists. We email friends about helping carry his body from his room to the vehicle. We prepare Mom’s spare bedroom downstairs for the vigil; prepare the gravesite at the edge of the woods on our land; clean up behind the garage; pick up the ice packs for keeping Dad’s body cool during the vigil, put them in the garage freezer, and make sure someone can bring several to the facility when the time comes; get the paperwork ready so we can transport Dad’s body legally; talk to friends about helping us organize the vigil, in which people will take shifts sitting and praying with his body.

And there are questions: Do we know enough to wash the body ourselves? If it snows—and there’s a blizzard in the forecast, and the blizzard will come—how will that change things? And how are we going to lower Dad’s body into the grave? And when his flame goes out, is it possible for someone from Threshold Care Circle to be here—in case we need help washing the body, in case we need someone who has done this before to help us with something that comes up that we haven’t thought about and are totally unprepared for?

“Prepare the way!” cried Isaiah.

I call Susan from Threshold again, and she says someone can certainly be with us when the time comes, but that we won’t need them. She is sure of this.

“Do you remember when Adrianne birthed your first child?” she asks me over the phone. “She knew just what to do. And when you first had to bathe her? You knew just what to do. Maybe it didn’t go perfectly, but you did it, and you can do this, too.”

She goes on, describing how tending our loved ones in death is a natural human experience and dwells in our cellular memories. If we lead with our hearts, she says, we can do nothing wrong. And we should also remember that we can’t hurt him. If something goes imperfectly—and it probably will—it might even be humorous, and that’s okay. Everything will be okay. Just lead with our hearts.

Her words fill in for lost knowledge. They conjure a culture, prepare a way. They remind me of what Adrianne’s midwife said to her over and over: Don’t worry. Your body is strong, wise, capable. When the time comes, you’ll know exactly what to do.

And she did.

And so will we.

\*\*\*

“Prepare the way of the Lord,” Isaiah says.

Yet in the rest of Isaiah 40, he goes on to describe a God unfathomable, who “sits above the circle of the earth . . . Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in” and “brings the princes to nothing.”

Before God, nations are less than nothing and worthless, a drop in a bucket, the dust on the scales. Before the Creator, people are like grasshoppers, withering grass, fading flowers.

And yet the holy voice still commands us: Prepare the way, grasshopper. Align with starlight, you speck of dust.

\*\*\*

Death is a fire we sit around, something warming and mysterious, something transcending comprehension, a journey no one living—not even the wisest—has completed. It is a cosmos beyond our cosmos, an experience beyond our experience. Convictions and identities loosen their grip as we sit before this holy fire, his flame growing brighter than us even while his breath fades like a flower. 

The prophet speaks: “Prepare the way!”

But we sit here like wood, consumed in total awe. We sit here like ashes, not knowing what to do.

Yet the prophet speaks: “Prepare the way!”

And we sit here like humans have always sat here, tending the fire, watching it flicker, grow, die down.

“Prepare the way!” he says.

It is evening now, and we are all sitting with Dad while he sleeps. They say when his feet begin to grow cool, the end is near. But his feet are still warm.

At Adrianne’s suggestion, we open the laptop, go to YouTube, and find a video about how to lower a body into a grave. The easiest way, this video suggests, is for some people to step into the grave themselves to receive the body.

We’re all convinced. When the time comes, we decide, this is the way we will do it. We will stand in the grave together. We will go into the grave before our father, receive his body from above, then gently lay him on the earth.
### The Case for Tending Our Dead at Home
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-case-for-tending/
Last updated: 2026-10-01T19:36:33.000Z
**Joseph Orso.** [***On the Threshold of Worlds: Tending My Father Before and After His Last Breath***](https://wipfandstock.com/9798385279975/on-the-threshold-of-worlds/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Front Porch Republic Books, 2026\. $20.00\. 156 pp.**

The shelves in our libraries and bookstores groan under the weight of all the tomes that have been published lately purporting to teach us this or guide us on a path to that. Whether step-by-step guides or collections of anecdotes, such books aim to pass on a skillset or serve as a guidepost for setting out on a brave new path.

In his book *On the Threshold of Worlds: Tending My Father Before and After His Last Breath*, Joseph Orso explores what it's like to reclaim the work and ritual of caring for our own dead, rather than turning those very important tasks over to an industry that replaces intimacy with efficiency. But the book does not clearly mark out a journey on a map or provide detailed instructions. Orso has written a call to a return to old practices we once knew, not a listicle or "For Dummies" manual.

The book is nearer to a Viking sun stone—if you turn it this way and that until the light shines brightly through its shaft, it will point out the position of the markers that will allow us to take a bearing and determine which direction to take.

Orso sets out to share his experience with the death of his father and the choice to bring his body home to hold a vigil and then bury him on his family’s own land, in their own way. It is not a simple temporal narrative, although there are narrative elements. Likewise, he does not delineate all the steps that were involved to navigate the legal, biological, and practical considerations, although he does not shy away from a frank discussion of some of them. He does not solely concern himself in this book with the philosophical, sociological, and theological questions that we must grapple with in our decisions about death, mourning, and funerary culture.

Instead, Orso asks what we might gain, should we choose to take the work of caring for the bodies of our dead back from the funeral industry and rebuild the ritual around such work at home. What do we owe the soul of our departed, and how do we honor the body that once housed it? Then he shows us.

The book reads as if you are sitting in that room with Orso and his father. Sometimes, it is filled with family and friends. Other times, it is dim and quiet, and a window opens into the past, allowing us to see Orso and his father, both before Alzheimer’s altered their relationship, and after. Then the window slides shut, and you are sitting alone with Orso as he ponders our creatureliness and the things we owe one another. As death moves closer, memories, faith, and discernment begin to blur together, before he moves back into a more traditional account of vigil and burial.

It is the experience of losing his father twice—first to Alzheimer’s, and then to death. Orso and his family have chosen to live with great intentionality and without indoor plumbing or electricity. But the very act of having chosen that type of hard for themselves in order to reap its blessings makes caring for an aging parent who is rapidly losing both mental and physical function a near impossibility. Honoring father and mother sometimes means making difficult decisions.

Still, the choice to lead a profoundly local life leads almost inevitably to the decision to care for his father's body at home and then to bury him in that place that they have chosen to call their own. 

Orso's prose ranges from simple confessions and explanations of the procedures necessary to accomplish this into vivid recollection of the man being honored by his household and community. It then climbs another register in a near-poetic contemplation of the nature of grief and ritual. Ripples of Job shimmer underneath questions about holiness, Creation, and veneration.

It should be noted that Orso is Eastern Orthodox, his parents Catholic, and he sometimes uses language about ritual that can be a bit discomfiting to those of us of a more staid, Protestant background. It's worth it to ride that out, however, and absorb the experience as Orso draws the reader in. 

Orso paints a picture rich with meaning and deep appeal, plucking at something that is almost a memory we all share. While he does acknowledge that not everyone has the capability to follow the path he marks out, I am not sure he has truly reckoned with all of the difficulties. 

It's obvious that only someone who owns a sufficient piece of land—and lives in a jurisdiction that allows such burials—can inter their loved ones themselves. This presumes the intention of lifetime ownership of that property as well. After all, how could you sell Grandma's grave? But beyond that is an aspect that Orso does not acknowledge fully.

However radically locally we may choose to live, that decision only lasts as long as *we* do. Or until we, like Orso's father, lose our ability to participate in these very same decisions. It does not follow that our descendants can, or will, retain that same place or a relationship to it. What then?

As the *de facto* family historian, I have had cause to wrestle with this issue. My third-great-grandmother, Aaltje Sprik, and five of her children were laid to rest on the farm where they died. A marker was placed a century and a half ago, and a new granite monument was added in the late 1990s. But since then, the old homestead has been sold for development. The house is gone, although the silo and some outbuildings remain on the edges of the subdivision that now occupies the site. The markers have seemingly vanished into the ether. No one seems to know what has become of them. Were Aaltje and her children moved to another local cemetery? There is no record of it. Was the marker simply tidied away by the developer so the new residents wouldn't be bothered by their proximity to the graves? 

When another century and a half has gone by, will Orso's great-great-grandchildren be able to find his father's grave?

I can walk down the lines of Atwood Cemetery and greet six generations of my ancestors as I move from north to south. That ground is, for me, thick with the known dead. 

Which way truly ties us more tightly to our places? Orso does not ask. He borrows Paul Kingsnorth's Machine language to elucidate the industrialization of modern funerary practices. He is certainly correct that it is more common historically for us to care for our own dead, even if it is a largely forgotten practice in the modern West. Graveyards, however, are as ancient as human culture itself. There may be space between abdicating our responsibilities to our loved ones in death, and taking all those things on ourselves, up to and including interring them on our own lands. A middle ground of caring for our loved ones at home, while still burying our dead in cemeteries, is more accessible to most people. This would also be *more* aligned with historical and cultural practice, not less. 

Minor quibbles about practicalities aside, this book about caring for our dead and reclaiming old rituals and practices that once made up the fabric of community is really asking a deeper question: What stitches us to our places?

In "Anne's House of Dreams," Marilla remarks to Mrs. Lynde, on the eve of Anne's wedding, "When I was a child I heard an old minister say that a house was not a real home until it had been consecrated by a birth, a wedding and a death." We have, bit by bit, turned all three into businesses rather than sacraments. And in so doing, allow the fabric of our places to become so frayed and moth-eaten that it seems it cannot hold us anymore. It falls to us to rewarp the loom, so that we can reweave the "underneath," until our places can hold the weight of our creatureliness again.

What Orso is really asking: is caring for our dead with our own hands and burying them in our own places one of the warp threads? Perhaps it is. His book makes a case for it, at least, without stridently insisting that everyone follow where he leads. It is entirely worthwhile to read *On the Threshold of Worlds* while keeping in mind not just what Orso says about caring for our dead but also what he doesn't.
### Something 'Wicked' This Way Comes
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/something-wicked-this-way-comes/
Last updated: 2026-08-31T11:00:03.000Z
**Carrie Gress.** [***Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused with Christianity***](https://sophiainstitute.com/product/something-wicked/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Sophia Institute Press, 2026\. $21.95\. 256 pp.**

Carrie Gress’ new book certainly begins on an ominous note. Her central argument, as the subtitle has it, is that “feminism can’t be fused with Christianity.” It’s either God or the devil. Choose at your own peril. 

The story goes something like this. Once, before Enlightenment rationalism and revolutionary ideals took over—replacing faith in God and in God-given hierarchies—Western people lived peacefully. Women accepted patriarchy as ordained by God in his wisdom, and the relationship between the sexes was harmonious. When Mary Wollstonecraft joined forces with the big bads of Enlightenment philosophy (Hume et al.), she threw the “woman issue” into the mix. Over two hundred years later, feminism has repeatedly aligned itself with dangerous ideologies, from Marxism and communism to occult practices, and more recently to the pro-choice movement. It’s time to eradicate this way of thought and free women from their feminist shackles. Only then will Christianity prevail once again.

*Something Wicked* proposes an attractive intellectual history of feminism. Yet overly tidy narratives are often untrue. I believe it’s important for Christians to consider arguments both in favour and against any given ideology, but we should focus on the best of those arguments, so that we may develop our capacity to reason well. Unfortunately, Gress doesn’t deliver on her promise of a rigorous, methodical takedown of feminism as an ideology. Her account is partial at best, and misleading at worst. 

This would not particularly matter, were it not for the fact that Gress has considerable public credibility: she holds a PhD from the Catholic University of America (where she is a fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology), she is a former fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and has several books already under her belt (including her popular *Theology of Home* series). *Something Wicked* has been endorsed by well-respected scholars such as the psychiatrist and philosopher Ian McGilchrist, and Gress regularly promotes her books on Catholic media outlets. She has enough influence over young Christian women that we must engage with her ideas, if only to decide that we won’t be recommending *Something Wicked* to our sisters, nieces, and daughters. 

## A False Premise

The book’s greatest flaw is that it is based on a false premise. Gress claims that Christian women have been fooled into trying to reconcile two incompatible ideologies, feminism and Christianity. As feminism has grown more powerful, Christianity correspondingly declined. 

There are several problems with this claim. 

First, it posits Christianity and feminism as competing ideologies. This is false. While feminism fits the description of an ideology (i.e., a set of beliefs which can be used to shape social, economic, or political action), Christianity can only be considered an ideology if viewed as a cultural set of practices and morals (what one might call “thin Christianity”). By contrast, “thick” Christianity is a practice of faith. It’s an all-encompassing worldview—in the words of C.S. Lewis, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” Of course, some ideologies are more dangerous or, conversely, more aligned with the Christian faith than others; but anything good to be found in any given ideology (whether that is conservatism, socialism, etc.) will inevitably be contained within Christianity. 

There is no competition there, Gress implies. There is, however, a choice for Christians. They may choose to retreat altogether from the political issues of secular society as they view engagement as futile or even corruptive. Or they may choose to engage with particular political ideologies that they judge to be conducive to the fostering and spreading of Christian faith, doctrine, or moral teaching. 

This will inevitably lead to disagreement. Some have objected to the Marxist influence on 20th century Catholic liberation theology. Others point out that Christianity has repeatedly been weaponized by far-right governments (most famously, of course, during Hitler’s regime). But as long as it remains clear that our true “citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20), Christians can engage in public life by subscribing to specific sets of political goals. It is, in theory at least, entirely possible for individuals to identify as “feminists” while retaining their overarching, inalienable allegiance to the Kingdom of God.

The question, then, is not actually whether Christianity can be fused with feminism, as Gress claims, but whether feminism is worth supporting. Gress very confidently answers in the negative. She sees such a vast divide in how philosophers pre- and post-Enlightenment envision ideas of virtue, duty, and faith, that any post-Enlightenment social and political movement, such as feminism, is in the grip of secularism. Thus it can’t contribute anything morally acceptable to faithful Christians. 

This is a compelling narrative, because it provides a simple solution to a very complex problem. But here we stumble upon the second issue with Gress’s central claim: Correlation does not necessarily imply causation. 

Gress has correctly identified the inverse correlation between the rise of Enlightenment philosophy and the decline of Christianity. It is the rest of her argument that gets muddled. Two of her main targets, Mary Wollstonecraft and Erika Bachiochi, exemplify her view of the role of feminism within this decline. She blames Wollstonecraft, an 18th-century writer who advocated for improved female education within the developing philosophical context of human rights, for promoting a genderless idea of woman. And she blames Bachochi, a contemporary legal scholar who has argued in her book *The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision* that Wollstonecraft in fact presented a view of rights based on mutual duties and responsibility, for trying to merge feminism with Christianity. 

## The Enlightenment Chasm 

Gress requires her readers to make several assumptions as part of this blame game. First, we would have to agree that feminism began with Mary Wollstonecraft. Next, we’d have to accept that Wollstonecraft was irredeemably immersed in rationalistic and empirical philosophy, to the point that her views on women’s rights and her political priorities more broadly can’t be separated from her Enlightenment-style abandonment of God and the embracing of Deism. We would also need to agree that she did, in fact, abandon a belief in the divine. Then, we would have to prove that all the figures associated with the women’s rights movement and with subsequent waves of feminism accepted Wollstonecraft’s views and continued directly on that path, and that the views of contemporary feminists are indeed a direct result of her ideas.

Gress simply doesn’t substantiate these claims. The first inconsistency is her treatment of the industrial revolution. She is not unaware of the legal and technological changes which contributed to the sweeping changes of the 18th century. In her introduction, she *does* name industrialization, marriage and property laws (which left women unable to support themselves if their husbands passed away or if they were abusive), secularization, and middle to upper class women being treated as ornamental as relevant factors. 

And yet, she promptly forgets all this. In the second part of *Something Wicked*, she goes into a little more detail, claiming that “Homelife was significantly disrupted by a surge in factories and the mechanization of work, as small cottage industries were swallowed up by enormous factories. The home ceased to be the locus of activity.” This is a well-known phenomenon in social history, with which I entirely agree, and to which Christopher Lasch devoted much of his seminal book *Women and the Common Life*. But the next step in Gress’s argument is a historical non sequitur. “The Industrial Revolution,” she continues, “coupled with the disvaluing of female gifts created a vacuum that the feminist ideology easily moved into. The simultaneous loss of home and mother eliminated the glue that holds Western civilization together.” 

Gress does not take into consideration the fact that many “feminists” (though the term is anachronistic for the late 18th century) in fact campaigned against the injustices and inequalities that arose as a result of said technological changes. As English society became more industrial and less agrarian, women were still expected to contribute to the household economy, but now they worked long shifts in factories, away from the home, and often were paid less than men (another change was that wage work became the norm). Small children were often brought along and had to start working while still very young until child labour laws kicked in in the latter half of the 19th century. None of this is the consequence of “feminist ideology.” Under such conditions, is it surprising that women started to campaign for fair wages? Or for the right to purchase property in their own right? 

The less interdependent society becomes, the more harm women and children incur. On that, Gress and I agree. But why, I kept thinking as I read this book, does she not put two and two together, and realize that figures of the women’s rights movement were in large part critiquing a situation not of their own making?

When it comes to middle- and upper-class women, Gress admits that in the 18th century their role was often ornamental. That is precisely Mary Wollstonecraft’s complaint, and yet Gress fails to notice any affinity between Wollstonecraft’s thought and her own. Her argument instead rests on the premises that 1) Wollstonecraft is the mother of feminism, and 2) she sowed the seeds of all the societal evils we see today. 

## Witch Hunting

Gress’s first wicked witch is Mary Wollstonecraft. She is not the first woman to write about female education (Christine de Pizan and Mary Astell are two prominent predecessors, though neither is mentioned), but Gress takes Wollstonecraft’s work as the beginning of all the evils of feminism.

One reason for this is that, along with the French proto-feminist Olympe de Gouges, Wollstonecraft was an early supporter of the French Revolution, which Gress takes to signify a wholesale rejection of any notions of hierarchy or authority. Sadly, she neglects to mention that writers such as de Gouges were ultimately guillotined for criticizing Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, and that Wollstonecraft herself became disillusioned with the excesses of the revolution. Gress also criticizes Wollstonecraft’s promotion of female education as opposed to Christianity, despite the fact that Wollstonecraft’s *Female Reader*, an anthology for young girls, includes many scriptural passages. 

Her greatest accusation, however, is that Wollstonecraft has an erroneous understanding of virtue. She believes that Wollstonecraft followed David Hume, who saw morality as merely based on feelings of approval or disapproval and as detached from divine authority. This allows Gress to discredit the entirety of Wollstonecraft’s thought as being severed from the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of Christian philosophy. 

However, Wollstonecraft’s account of the virtues does not, in fact, square with Hume’s. She simply doesn’t advocate for moral relativism in the way that Gress needs her to do, in order to prove that feminism was rotten from the very beginning. 

Many other witches follow Wollstonecraft in Gress’ account, from those who engaged in occult practices, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to those who were hostile to Christianity, like Matilda Gage; from the terrorist UK suffragettes like Emily Pankhurst, to the abortion rights advocates of second-wave feminism like Kate Millett and Shulamith Firestone.

Yet for each of these figures, there are women whom Gress neglects. Many first-wave women’s rights advocates, contrary to Gress’ claim that “Feminism is abortion’s engine,” openly opposed abortion. Susan B. Anthony and Mary Fenn Davis are just two of the examples Monica Klem and Madeleine McDowell discuss in *Pity for Evil: Suffrage, Abortion, and Women’s Empowerment in Reconstruction America* (2023). Not all feminists were irreligious, either. The 19th\-century abolitionist and women’s suffrage activists Sarah and Angelina Grimké, for example, were devout Quakers. In the UK, between the late 19th\- and early 20th\-centuries the suffragettes were opposed by the *suffragists*. While also seeking women’s suffrage, the suffragists campaigned peacefully under the leadership of Millicent Garrett Fawcett. Among their ranks was Josephine Butler (not to be confused with the contemporary gender theorist Judith Butler), a devout Anglican Christian who, among other efforts, also campaigned for the abolition of child prostitution and human trafficking. Closer to our time, Gress ignores Andrea Dworkin, who radically (and unpopularly) condemned both prostitution and pornography in the 1970s and 80s, just as sex-positive feminism was gaining momentum. These women don’t deserve to be forgotten.

## The Decay of the Christian West

The purpose of Gress’s witch-hunting is to prove that all kinds of contemporary social ills, including porn addiction, transgender ideology, single-sex parents adoption, child trafficking, prostitution, and drug addiction (her list, not mine) can be blamed on feminism. Men bear no blame in this calculus. According to Gress, men are rejecting marriage because women have made themselves too sexually available after the sexual revolution; the existence of the manosphere, while unfortunate, is a predictable reaction against feminism; domestic violence has become “commonplace,” but that is also, somehow, the fault of women. 

As we have seen, Gress is arguing that Christianity declined because of feminism, and that the only way for it to flourish again is for feminism to be eradicated. Just as the original fall is (reminds Gress) about Eve’s sin, so has our contemporary decline been at the hands of women. *Something Wicked*’s target readership is young girls and mothers, and I doubt that coming this close to outright misogyny is a helpful strategy for the supposed goal of converting women’s hearts.

It’s very difficult to read such an account and not walk away with the suspicion that *Something Wicked* is somewhat of an example of grifting. Given the number of commentators who have recently argued in favour of cultural Christianity as a means to reclaim traditional Western culture, Gress’s book catches the zeitgeist of a certain right-wing, religious-adjacent subculture. For example, she extensively engages with (and praises) the thought of Jordan Peterson—who, while very open about the West’s need for the Christian faith, has not openly converted. She likewise praises Erica Komisar, who, as of 2022, was openly opposed to restrictions on abortion in the wake of the overturn of Roe v. Wade (a view which should be anathema to Gress). 

Yet on the other hand, she accuses “a new group of Catholic women” of trying to “forge together” the teachings of Pope John Paul II with those of feminists and proto-feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft. Gress even comes dangerously close to slandering one of said women, Erika Bachiochi, by claiming that the blending of Catholicism and secularism—as evidenced the fact that Catholic women “contracept” and “abort” at similar rates to secular women—is best seen in Bachiochi’s work. This could easily be interpreted by unaware readers to mean that Bachiochi herself approves of contraception and abortion—but, in fact, she is a Catholic mother of seven who is publicly pro-life. If not outright slander, this is at best an *ad hominem* attack. 

My point is not that Gress isn’t allowed to take secular thinkers seriously—there is indeed a long Christian tradition of doing precisely this—but rather that her intellectual allegiances reveal a confused set of priorities. Why would Gress close off potentially fruitful debate with fellow Christians in such a vindictive manner? 

Ultimately, Gress will leave readers unsure of whether the goal is to develop a truly Christian vision of womanhood, or to restore political patriarchy and with it the “Christian West.” Gress would undoubtedly see these goals as interdependent, but they are not necessarily so. I wholeheartedly agree with Gress that women and children have historically been most cherished and safeguarded in those cultures where the influence of the Christian faith has been stronger. But this is because of the very tenets of the Christian faith. Contrary to Gress’s claim that we needed political patriarchy for the “dissemination and maintenance of Christianity,” Christianity had already been spreading before Constantine I made it the official religion of the Roman empire, in part because its insistence of equal dignity was so attractive to women. 

And to Gress’ claim that “civilization depends” on finding a road out of feminism, I would retort that it depends on finding a road out of secularism instead. St Augustine argued that Rome fell because of its own moral decadence, and that peace can only be found in the city of God. So, too, we should remember that adopting the Christian faith should not be a matter of civilizational flourishing, but rather of belief. It’s disappointing to see Gress, a sincere Christian, tap into the trend of cultural Christianity. 

Whether the intention is the genuine flourishing of a Christian society or merely the restoration of the Christian West, a movement as diverse in both political aims and philosophical underpinnings as feminism is the perfect scapegoat. I share Gress’ desire for motherhood and domestic work to be once again valued. But I can’t take *Something Wicked* seriously as a work of scholarship, because it is lacking in rigour and riddled with logical fallacies. In fact, its greatest flaw is not that it fails as an intellectual history of feminism (though it does that, too), but that it will inevitably teach its intended audience (i.e., young women) to reason badly. Itteaches them to look for single-factor, simplistic causes to explain complex social phenomena spanning centuries. And it teaches them to adopt a tribal outlook in their intellectual life, dismissing any thinkers who don’t neatly fall into the group who hold the “right opinion,” rather than examining thinkers individually, their good and bad ideas alike. 

I will not be giving this book to my daughter once she is old enough. I *will* expose her to arguments both for and against feminism so that she may grapple with them and come to her own conclusions, but *Something Wicked* won’t be my book of choice.
### “To Shew the Truth Of the Evangelical Historie”: The Apologetics of Nathaniel Lardner
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/to-shew-the-truth-of-the-evangelical-historie-the-apologetics-of-nathaniel-lardner/
Last updated: 2026-08-28T11:00:55.000Z
***This excerpt from* The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity *(2026) is published with permission from Oxford University Press.***

Any Londoner who visited Chew’s Coffeehouse on a Monday evening in the 1720s or 1730s and made his way through the haze of smoke coming from clay pipes and the excited chattering of small groups of men passionately debating the latest news would have encountered, among other gatherings at the scattered tables, a meeting of a local literary club. 

Coffeehouse intellectual clubs were common in the early eighteenth century, when Enlightenment would-be philosophers, gadflies, and local wags from the middle and upper classes gathered in a caffeine-fueled environment to discuss the latest ideas and test them with the standard of reason. The gathering at Chew’s Coffeehouse was, like others of its type, a venue for the intellectually curious. Each Monday evening, the chairman of the club proposed two questions for debate, and each member of the club presented an essay for discussion. 

These clubs were sometimes a magnet for deists and skeptics, but at this particular society, one of the members, Nathaniel Lardner, was a London minister—but one who was just as committed to reason as any deist. He was already in his forties at this point and so hard of hearing that he had trouble figuring out when the choir at his church had stopped singing, but he still loved to discuss ideas with people who held contrary opinions. He was also intellectually flexible enough to change his mind when presented with new evidence. 

As a lifelong Dissenter, he was used to being a nonconformist theologically and intellectually, and as a result, he enjoyed corresponding with deists, even though he thought they were entirely wrong. He was certainly no stranger to skepticism, because his pursuit of graduate training in theology had taken him to such leading centers of skeptical opinion as Utrecht, Leiden, and finally back to London. While participating in the literary club, he was in the process of rethinking his view of the Trinity. At first, he ardently defended the orthodox position, but after a few years of study, he became convinced by Unitarian arguments that the Son was not eternally preexistent, as orthodox Christians claimed ever since the Council of Nicaea.

In some respects, Lardner was a bit of an oddball. He never married, he lived with his father until he was in his mid-fifties, and, despite his graduate education at some of Europe’s best universities, he found it impossible to secure a permanent ministerial post until he was forty- five—and even then, he served in pulpit ministry for only a short time. 

The chief obstacle that he faced in finding ministerial employment was probably not his passion for argument or his propensity to change his mind on such key points of Christian doctrine as the Trinity—the latter of which might have alienated him from some of the more theologically conservative Presbyterian churches of his youth, but which was no obstacle for the increasing number of Unitarian-minded congregations among the English Dissenters. Rather, one of his biographers speculated, his greatest barrier to parish ministry was probably his near-deafness, which prevented his friends from communicating with him except by passing him written notes. 

Lardner’s coffeehouse friends were apparently willing to tolerate the inconvenience, but he seems to have felt self-conscious about imposing his disability on a congregation. When a leading Dissenting church invited him to serve as co-pastor, he turned down the offer. Though he did preach frequently, he would primarily make his mark on Christian apologetics through his writings. And it would be through the written word that he would remain devoted to the life of the mind, exploring new ideas and choosing to accept or reject them on the basis of reason.

Changes in intellectual conviction, when presented with sufficient evidence, were common for Lardner, because he believed in freedom of thought. In the late 1720s, when the London deist Thomas Woolston was arrested and imprisoned for repeatedly publishing material denying Jesus’s miracles, Lardner argued that the deist had the right to hold his own religious opinions without coercion, even if they might be erroneous. “Nothing is so voluntary as Religion,” he wrote, quoting the Dominican friar Raymond Martini. “Faith is to be wrought by persuasion, not by compulsion.” 

In the interest of producing this “persuasion” by rational means, Lardner published a book explaining why it was “rational, consistent, and credible” to interpret the accounts of three of Jesus’s most spectacular miracles—the raising of three people from the dead—as “literal histories.” He accomplished this task by carefully comparing each of the gospels with the others in order to show that the gospel writers were not prone to distortions and exaggerations when recounting the same events, but instead demonstrated the qualities of careful, trustworthy reporters. The deists therefore had no grounds to dismiss the accounts of Jesus’s miracles.

Lardner’s *A Vindication of Three of Our Blessed Savior’s Miracles*, as he titled this refutation of the deists’ arguments, was only the beginning of his career as a Christian apologist. After spending his Monday evenings each week at the coffeeshop conversing with the literati, he spent his Tuesday evenings among ministers whom he hoped to turn into apologists. 

The young Dissenting ministers who gathered with Lardner each Tuesday at a meetinghouse in the heart of London’s financial district were an eclectic bunch theologically, because “Dissenter” in early eighteenth-century England was a broad category that encompassed nearly every Protestant outside the Church of England—which meant everyone from Puritans to Unitarians. Besides Lardner, the group included two Baptists, three Presbyterians, and one Congregationalist whose views on scripture were suspected of being somewhat liberal. 

Perhaps they could have spent their time bickering over their divergent interpretations of Christian doctrine if they had wanted, but they decided instead to focus on a more constructive project: the defense of the Christian faith against deism. Each minister in the group, they decided, would deliver a short series of sermons on some aspect of the “the evidences of natural and revealed religion”—in other words, natural theology and a reasoned defense of the divine origin of scripture. 

For his own set of three lectures, Lardner chose to focus specifically on refuting historical criticisms that deists made of the four gospels. The topic quickly became a life focus for Lardner. His three lectures expanded into a two-volume book, published in 1730, but this was only the beginning: he continued working on the project throughout his life, until it eventually reached seventeen volumes.

Lardner’s work functioned as the first comprehensive encyclopedia of historical criticism of the gospels, organized around a list of problematic passages. For each passage whose historical accuracy skeptics had questioned, Lardner engaged in a detailed, exhaustive analysis of every classical reference or piece of historical evidence that might have bearing on the question. He left no stone unturned. His discussion of Luke’s one-verse reference to the census of Quirinius, for instance, continued for eighty-six pages. In each case, Lardner attempted to show that historical evidence vindicated the gospel accounts. The census of Quirinius, he argued, was historically plausible, despite what the deists had said. And so was every other gospel passage that the deists had questioned.

Lardner especially focused on the question of whether information that was mentioned in only one of the four gospels—or that was never mentioned in Josephus or any classical histories—could be trusted. For instance, was it reasonable to believe John’s account of the raising of Lazarus when that miracle—as spectacular as it was—did not appear in any of the Synoptic gospels? Was it reasonable to believe that the Roman emperor Augustus had ordered an empire-wide census, as Luke suggested, even though this was never mentioned in any classical source?

Lardner treated these skeptical questions seriously and respectfully, and unlike many previous Christian apologists, he never resorted to invective or denigration when debating his skeptical opponents. Instead, he treated their criticisms of the biblical text as an opportunity for serious intellectual investigation, and at each point, he thought that an exhaustive study of all relevant ancient sources and all possible objections would show that, in the end, the biblical account was credible. His work became a massive compendium of all possible confirmations of the historical narrative of the four gospels from the nonbiblical sources of classical antiquity.

Lardner believed in the historical accuracy of the Bible, but he was hardly an adamantine reactionary; he was open to novel interpretations, as long as they sustained the Bible’s historicity. In the case of the census of Quirinius, for instance, he argued for a very limited imperial order that applied only to Judea—which explained its absence from classical sources. This meant that the Authorized Version’s rendering of Luke 2:1 as “all the world should be taxed” was incorrect; a more accurate translation, Lardner argued from the Greek, was “all the land should be taxed”— thus making it possible that the census could apply only to Judea. 

Lardner’s methodology and presuppositions were in keeping with Enlightenment rationalism, but his end goal was conservative: he wanted to defend the historical integrity and authenticity of the original Greek biblical text, because he believed, as John Locke had, that if he could prove that the gospel narrative was historically trustworthy, its divine origins and authority would be confirmed as well. Jesus’s miracles and resurrection, he believed, could have occurred only through the power of God, so if he could prove that these miracles really happened—that is, that the reports about them were historically credible—he had essentially proved the truth of Christianity and subverted the deists. This was such an important goal that it was worth becoming the project of a lifetime. 

Three decades after embarking on his project, Lardner, now seventy years old, reflected on the purpose of his undertaking as he picked up his pen to begin the fourteenth volume of his ever- expanding work. “The design of this work, from the beginning, and all along,” he wrote, “has been to shew the truth of the evangelical historie, and thereby the truth of the Christian Religion. For if the facts related in the Gospels, and confirmed by the Epistles of the New Testament, may be relied upon, the Christian Religion is from heaven.”

In 1757, thirty-three years after he had begun the project—and after battling several severe fevers that nearly killed him—Lardner finally finished the seventeenth volume and put down his pen. But even though he wanted to write more, the multivolume analysis that he did produce was so comprehensive that it was not repeated for more than a century. 

Lardner taught orthodox Christians that they did not have to be afraid of skeptical objections; exhaustive historical study, he showed, would refute the critics’ charges and uphold the historicity of the biblical text.
### The Beguiling Search for Ourselves
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-beguiling-search-for-ourselves/
Last updated: 2026-08-28T11:00:22.000Z
Earlier this summer, the government of the United Kingdom made international news. Both Hasan Piker and Cenk Uyger, prominent left-wing influencers, were [barred](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy2rxyvvl1o?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) from entry into the country, “on the grounds that their presence … may not be conducive to the public good.” Piker and Uyger were set to make appearances at the Oxford Union, the hallowed speech and debate society at the University of Oxford. As it happens, I was also invited to be among Union chamber speeches during this very same week. My charge wasn’t to speak about political ideology, but instead about why young people today are miserable. 

Ironically, part of the answer is ideological politics and activism—a mission on both the left and right that promises to provide followers with an avenue to *find themselves and their meaning in life*. Instead, the opposite occurs: it ignites a vicious cycle of self-focus that makes young people anxious and depressed. 

This problem, though culture-wide, is acute among elite universities. I’ve seen this personally: six years ago, I was a graduate student at Oxford; thereafter, I spent several years as a researcher at Harvard; and these days, I am a researcher at Vanderbilt studying human flourishing. Given that I was raised in a lower-middle class Midwestern family, I am grateful and thrilled to have found myself in such places. For me, these universities have helped me to realize the American dream of upward mobility; of moving to strange, unknown places, and charting out on an adventure with a nontrivial chance of failure. But a huge majority of elite university students are neither grateful nor thrilled. They are bitter, resentful, and unhappy. 

So, in my own [chamber speech](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amswBnvWR0w&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) at the Oxford Union, I called attention to what happens when we become fully consumed with the ideas of “safetyism,” online influencers, and campus activism: in our bitterness and resentment, we become fully consumed with *ourselves*. This stands in stark contrast to the more transcendent habits that traditionally brought about meaning, ones that push us *beyond* ourselves. 

Let us, then, explore two big questions. Why, in the deepest sense, does self-focus make us miserable? And how can university students unshackle themselves from this tyranny? Two men—Oxford’s C. S. Lewis and Harvard’s William James—illuminated answers to these questions long ago, which we have forgotten. Their ideas, along with modern science, will chart the North Star for elite university students who are suffering today. 

## **The Mirror’s Tyranny**

“Look for yourself,” wrote C. S. Lewis in[ *Mere Christianity*](https://archive.org/details/MereChristianityCSL/mode/2up) (1952)*,* “and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay.”

These words were drafted during the Second World War while Lewis taught at Magdalen College, Oxford. As a graduate student at the University of Oxford, I was a stone’s throw away from Lewis’s old stomping grounds—but I was hardly in the perils of war. The coronavirus epidemic had just set in, and terrible as it was, I can’t say it was akin to war-torn Europe. My bomb shelter, so to speak, was a nice little flat with a view of tulips. 

In those days, I was studying the outgrowths of Enlightenment thought and how those ideas found their way to America. It was my view then that the Enlightenment’s ideals—a focus on progress, tolerance, reason, and the scientific method—led to a great boon of human dignity. It seemed to me that these ideals ignited a more generative (albeit imperfect) “pursuit of happiness” for ordinary people. Those intellectual origins are in no small part why I study human happiness today.

However, C. S. Lewis would have disagreed with my rosy view of the Enlightenment. And as the years have gone on, I have come to think that he may have had a point.

In [*The Abolition of Man*](https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.88346) (1943), Lewis argued that Enlightenment thinking created subjective morality, the too-tolerant idea that no one morality was better than another. He called the people who inherited this tradition “men without chests.” By this, he meant that society was full of individuals with smarts and an appetite to succeed; but since they lacked a moral framework to connect their intelligence with their ambition, this made them vulnerable to manipulation by nefarious actors. In terms we might understand today: talented young people were susceptible to getting conscripted into culture wars—ones that would lower *their* happiness andboost the power and influence of the folks leading, and profiting from, the charge.

Let’s start with the types of arguments that university students hear every day. Organized religion is but a corrupt fairy-tale, they are told, so it’s best to avoid it. Marriage and child-rearing are old relics that lower one’s individual freedom, so it’s best to never start a family. And as for your current family and friends who hold different political views than you? They threaten your way of life, so it’s best to go “no contact” with them, and to go “full contact” with the ideological influencers who are cashing in on your clicks. Lewis believed victims of manipulation would be easier to control, and in turn, their views would become less heterodox. Small wonder that university life has [become](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8493328/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) an epicenter of ideological orthodoxy.

But the point goes beyond that. The thing to understand is that young people—whether they are forgoing God, marriage, children, or friends and family—are doing so because of an intense focus on themselves. And indeed, as we “look for \[ourselves\],” we inadvertently throw away the very things that make life meaningful.

This is why some scholars argue that the Enlightenment—despite the extraordinary ways it has protected individual liberties—has done a poor job at creating shared, durable meaning across culture. This is the core hypothesis in Charles Taylor’s [*A Secular Age*](https://archive.org/stream/CharlesTaylorASecularAge2007BelknapPressOfHarvardUniversityPress/Charles-Taylor-A-Secular-Age-2007-Belknap-Press-of-Harvard-University-Press%5Fdjvu.txt) (2007), where he argues that meaning across the West is now fragmented, optional, and individually constructed. The result? Take it from Taylor: “There is a widespread sense of loss \[in the West\], if not always of God, then at least of meaning.”

But we should not stop with this mere cultural critique; deeper psychological phenomena are at play. This brings us to William James, the great 19th century psychologist at Harvard. James is often credited as the father of modern psychology. And in his magnum opus [*The Principles of Psychology*](http://infomotions.com/sandbox/great-books-redux/corpus/html/principles.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)(1890), he distinguishes between two conceptions of ourselves: the “I-self” and the “me-self.” The former refers to the mental state in which we look outward and observe the world; the latter refers to the mental state in which we observe ourselves. 

Of course, we need to spend appropriate time in both the I-self and me-self to survive and succeed in life. Without observing beyond ourselves (via the I-self), we would make no effort to bond with other people, and we might turn a blind eye to threats or predators. On the other hand, without ever observing ourselves (via the me-self), we would have no sense of identity or self-conception. More practically, the me-self is the mental state that encourages you to look sharp for, say, a job interview—and not to show up in pajamas. By healthily observing oneself, one can put their best foot forward in life.

But to flourish, the properly ordered person must find the correct balance between time spent in the I- and me-selves. James himself alluded to this, arguing that we must spend time “contemplating” our dual nature so that the I- and me-selves can “work out their drama together.” But this balancing act is a tall task. As James argued, “for each of us almost all of the interest attaches to one of the halves.” And to which half was he referring? That’s right: the *me-self*. 

Put differently, humanity’s natural tendency was, and has always been, to spend disproportionate time in the me-self, wrapped in self-focus. Today, in our era of digital mediation and identity obsession, we are more prone than ever to be lodged into this half of ourselves. 

Modern science demonstrates that we become more miserable because of it. For example, psychologists have long known that constant self-focus is [highly predictive](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11294281%5FSelf-Focused%5FAttention%5Fand%5FNegative%5FAffect%5FA%5FMeta-Analysis?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of strong negative emotions. In general, these negative feelings arise because thinking about oneself causes life’s worries and troubles to [dominate](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5429736/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) one’s attention, which crowds out feelings of, say, gratitude and generosity. Indeed, long before science demonstrated this empirically, St. Augustine made this point. His [concept](https://archive.org/details/gravityofsinaugu0000jens) of *homo incurvatus en se* refers to the natural human tendency to be “curved in on itself,” making our own desires and self-interest the center of our world. 

Unfortunately, this is the dominant reality for elite university students today.

## **The Era of Self-Focus**

Modern social media and technology have fashioned *incurvatus en se* into a way of life—every waking minute—for many college students. Welcome, then, to what we might call The Era of Self-Focus.

This era is uniquely spurred by digital mediation—through which we compare our real lives to everyone’s fake lives. For young people searching for a job, every LinkedIn post from one’s network might as well read: “I’m thrilled to announce that *I’m better than you*.” Worse is the self-focus paradigm generated by the influencer class—all of whom are richer and more beautiful than their followers. And worst of all is the online grievance culture that facilitates people to dwell endlessly on their problems. As bitterness and resentment rise, scholars [have shown](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-5922.12809?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that the gumption to use one’s agency to solve life’s problems seriously declines. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that chronically online college students are[ uniquely miserable](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1676899/full?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). 

This data help to explain how social media acts as a mirror to, and facilitates a curvature within, ourselves. For example, in 2010—the year that social media apps became ubiquitous on the smartphone—rates of[ anxiety](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11651023/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com),[ depression](https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/03/mental-health-adults?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), and affirmative responses to the statement “[my life feels meaningless](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38517022/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)” began to rise. This has led scholars such as Arthur Brooks, whose research team I lead, to argue that meaninglessness resides at the core of the so-called unhappiness epidemic. 

The outcomes of intense self-focus are evident, especially at elite places like the University of Oxford. According to[ recent data](https://www.oxfordsu.org/pageassets/studentvoice/policy-insights/SU-Welfare-Survey-Analysis.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) from the Oxford Student Union, nearly 40 percent of undergraduates admitted that since entering their degree program, their mental health had “worsened” or “slightly worsened.” And fully 55 percent of students said that their mental health was negatively affected by “family, romantic, or familial relationships.” Some of this might be innocuous—the surveyed students might have been homesick after all, and undergraduates are not known for *stable* dating lives—but something about university life clearly leads to self-focus. Baked within this dataset are surely students who created family schism based on their newfound political views.

During my own time at Oxford, I saw this among my program-mates. Some were terribly affected by the temporary lockdowns; others used their free time to wade into hot-button activism; hardly any sought romance; precisely zero were religious.

Not all of this can be blamed on Oxford—or, in fact, any other university whose students deal with these problems—but it is no secret that universities have intensified The Era of Self-Focus by centering campus life around self-care and grievance-based ideas. For example, while I was at Oxford during the coronavirus epidemic, we were inundated with self-care messages from the university administration asking about our well-being. Though well-intentioned, I found this mildly baffling. *I was fantastic! I was at Oxford having an intellectual adventure!* Yet even in my optimism, I noticed that the more messages I received to this effect, the more I began to question my own well-being. Put another way, I became more focused on myself, and less focused on ideas bigger than myself. A more realistic version of the administration’s messages might have been: *Are you thinking about yourself enough today?* 

Of course, the answer for many students is: *Yes, all the time.* For instance, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, “developing a meaningful life philosophy” was the[ top goal](https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~wwwecon/repecfiles/econdp/2502-ori.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of university students, and “being financially very well-off” was the least important objective. Today, those goals have inverted: finding meaning ranks last, whereas getting rich ranks highest. This is a good proxy measure for the fact that the search for meaning—and thus a focus beyond oneself—has cratered.

Again, during my time at Oxford, I made this inversion myself. My top reason for pursuing the degree was to explore ideas that would help me see the world more clearly. Color me naive, but upon entering my program, I had utterly no plans for what to “do next.” But after a mere six months, my friends in the program—who were frenetically securing their next step in the ladder—made me second guess my aims. In no time, I became a data figure in the study above. *Forget developing a meaningful life philosophy,* I thought. My main goal became something like: *Don’t be the loser without a prestigious job*.

Thankfully, at that time, university life in the UK wasn’t filled with vitriolic levels of grievance. But the same cannot be said for many American universities. In their book [*The Coddling of the American Mind*](https://books.google.com/books/about/The%5FCoddling%5Fof%5Fthe%5FAmerican%5FMind.html?id=9-o6DwAAQBAJ&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)(2018), Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff explore the 2010s rise of universities marrying a “safetyist” campus culture with one of grievance. Across scores of American data and case studies, they argue that American universities—in spotlighting so-called “trigger warnings” and “microaggressions” in the name of students’ well-being—inadvertently educated young people to equate emotional discomfort with physical harm. This was especially true at elite universities, in which students were highly attuned to the politics of the day. 

For the last five or so years, a degree of backlash has been underway within academia. But the point to underscore is that universities—like social media—have metastasized The Era of Self-Focus. They have curved students further inward, within the tyranny of the me-self. 

 But there is good news. The solution is not to dismantle university life, a place in which I have spent one-third of my life, and one that I believe in. Instead, universities should work on returning to their founding principles, which were once avenues to push students beyond themselves. For ideas on how this can be achieved, we must first unpack the paradox of self-focus—and finally return to our friends William James and C. S. Lewis.

## **Escaping Oneself, to Know Oneself**

Self-focus is a strange phenomenon. We are naturally drawn to it, and in modern life, we have become quite good at it. But here’s the paradox: if we do, indeed, spend all day focused on ourselves, shouldn’t we know ourselves better? 

 Researchers have answered this in many clever ways. Consider one[ novel experiment](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5305893%5FMirror%5FMirror%5Fon%5Fthe%5FWall%5FEnhancement%5Fin%5FSelf-Recognition?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), in which participants first had a photo taken of their face. In a separate room, the researchers made many several photoshopped copies of the original—a 10 percent more attractive copy, a 20 percent more attractive copy, and so on; and likewise for unattractive copies. When the participants were asked to select the photo of their *real* face from the dozen or so existing images, they were most likely to choose the 20 percent more beautified image—believing that was their *real* face.

In other words, despite our rampant self-focus, we don’t really know ourselves. There is a reason why we can’t pick our own face out of a lineup, why we[ can’t accurately assess](https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00280.x?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) our own personality, and why self-focus makes us a stranger to ourselves. What university students need today—across the US and the UK—is to be persuaded of a basic metaphysical truth, one that has unfortunately been waylaid by the spoils of Enlightenment thinking. The mysterious truth is that the only way to truly *know* yourself is by *escaping* yourself, in deep communion with big ideas, other people, and the divine.

But in The Era of Self-Focus, young adults do just the opposite. By naval gazing all day long, college students are crowding out these pursuits. They date less, have fewer friends, fear big ideas, are less spiritual or religious, and ignite more schism with their families because of partisan politics. 

Instead of contributing to this problem, universities can play a role in fixing it. They need only listen to great ideas of the past. 

Let’s begin with William James. In an 1899 [essay](https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21488-em-excerpted-from-em-br-what-makes-a-life-significant?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), James recounted his weeklong stint at Chautauqua Assembly, an adult-education meeting venue in upstate New York. There he experienced “security, intelligence, humanity, and order,” a utopian-like venue without conflict—much like what modern universities hope (but struggle) to emulate. Yet James found himself inexplicably dissatisfied. Here’s what he observed:

> What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death. But in this unspeakable Chautauqua there was no potentiality of death in sight anywhere, and no point of the compass visible from which danger might possibly appear.

What James longed for was a window into his own I-self, to become a “looker-on at life.” And what exactly did James wish to see? He desired to bask in awe of the greatest things that had ever been said and done, while also being challenged—even thrilled—by a sense of danger. That, in essence, is the classic role of great universities. Great universities once gave students an unfiltered prism into their I-selves, in which they could study and relive the greatest achievements of human beings, *while also* being challenged by ideas that didn’t match their worldview. Today’s universities must first return to that forgotten mission. 

Second, universities ought to learn from C. S. Lewis to help students transcend their self-focus. Lewis correctly noted that “look\[ing\] for yourself” will lead to “hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay.” But he followed up that sentiment with this: “Look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”

And indeed, looking for God was classically part and parcel with the intellectual venture at great universities—until recently, at least. For example, Oxford’s founding motto (“The Lord is my light”) and Harvard’s original mission (“Let every student be instructed…to know God”) each expressed a fundamental conviction: intellectual illumination and divine light were *the same thing*. Although neither university has been strictly tied to a religious sect for several hundred years—and while neither will (or should) return to a dogmatically religious approach—each would do well to require its students to reckon with theological arguments, perhaps through required coursework, taught by the best faculty each university has to offer. All students must confront the basic idea that underpins the West’s entire university project: the creator must not be separated in our scientific understanding and investigation of nature.

These two rules, from these two great men, are exactly the path toward a more vibrant university life today—as institutions, yes, but also as individuals. In short: these days university students neither stand in awe of great ideas nor worship the divine. But in returning to both pursuits, students will find what they seek, and they will be happy.

In the end, these strategies will unshackle today’s students from the tyranny of self-focus and open new avenues toward meaning. The alternative, which universities are haplessly pursuing today, will pull students further into a blackhole of *themselves,* despite all the empty promises to the contrary.
### Bringing Up Nietzsche
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/bringing-up-nietzsche/
Last updated: 2026-10-01T19:36:40.000Z
**Michael McEwen. *The Devil Reads Nietzsche: A Public Theology for a Post-Christian Age*. B&H Academic, 2025\. $27.99\. 224 pp.**

As a young parent, I was not prepared for how early my children exhibited skeptical tendencies and posed very difficult questions. My son was four years old when he told me, in all seriousness, that he was bigger than God. It happened during a very tense moment, when he repeatedly refused to obey me and finally demanded that I tell him why he should do what I asked. I was not prepared for a metaphysical discussion on the nature of obedience, but I knew that a simple “because I told you so” would not suffice. 

The situation demanded a good answer, as I faced an open revolt from a very serious four-year-old. I fumbled through something along the lines of how obeying our parents helps us learn to obey God, our heavenly Father. It is at this point that my son proclaimed that he is bigger than God, hence no obeying is required. How did I get a little Nietzsche on my hands?

It was, of course, a very comical situation, but the seriousness with which my son was speaking scared me. Really, I thought, questioning faith can start this early! In the years since that day, more questions followed. Some were not openly skeptical. When he was about six years old, he asked me where he was before he was in my belly. At this point, I already knew that my kid could handle abstract talk. Recognizing that he was deeply troubled by the question of his existence, I told him that before he appeared in my belly, he was in the mind of God. That answer actually satisfied him, for it was better to think that he was somewhere, rather than nowhere at all. 

Still, another time, when I felt it was my duty as a Christian parent to encourage my son to pray more for a specific situation, he asked me, “What if, when I pray, I just talk to myself and nothing more?” How did I end up with a young Nietzsche and Feuerbach in one? I really had a hard time answering that one, as I could sense the depth of that doubt and the void that was opening up in front of my son. One misstep on my part, and he might fall into it. The best I could do on that occasion was to explain that ultimately God permeates all of creation and our whole being, for he is a creator of everything. Therefore, even when it feels like we talk to ourselves, we, in fact, speak to God. 

As his younger sister grew older, she too joined in with questions that were far more difficult for me to handle. As a middle schooler, she asked me why God doesn’t just free everyone from hell and save everyone. If, as we were taught in weekly sermons, God is truly good and there is nothing we can do to save ourselves, He has to save us all. I realized then that I have a little skeptic, who listens to Sunday sermons, analyses them, and looks for logical inconsistencies.

Imagine for a moment that I told her that God, a supreme being, has the right to send those who disobey him to eternal torment. Would this be a satisfying answer to a skeptic? In her question, the issue was not only the fate of helpless human beings and apparent unfairness, but the very character of God. What kind of God is it, and would she want to believe in that God? Once again, I knew that I had to tread carefully and give an answer that would be satisfying to a young, skeptical mind. I told her that it is good to wish that everyone would be saved. It is something we should hope for and pray for whenever we can. But we cannot tell God what he should or shouldn’t do, for he is indeed God—and is greater than all our thoughts about Him.

What I found most striking about all these questions is that my children asked them when they were fairly young, before these questions could be appropriately attributed to profound cultural influence. In other words, their questions arose not from the outside culture, but internally, from their own interactions with church and experiences with Christianity. Now, suppose I did not answer these questions, perhaps shut them down, or gave a simplistic answer that they found unsatisfactory. How would my children have thought and felt once they got older and came into direct contact with the raging atheistic culture all around? 

Most parents or Sunday school teachers are not prepared intellectually or emotionally to answer the difficult questions children so naturally ask. Oftentimes, they can’t answer them for themselves, let alone for little schoolchildren or defiant teenagers. As a result, we desperately need popular-level engagement with skepticism, especially the Nietzschean kind, in our churches. Michael McEwen’s new book *The Devil Reads Nietzsche* is a timely resource for many Christians, who might feel beaten down by the skepticism and even nihilism of our times. 

To engage Nietzsche is no small feat; he is a fierce and powerful opponent whose writing aims to intimidate, demoralize, and even hurt anybody who wishes to stand up to him. Therefore, McEwen deserves due respect for approaching such a formidable adversary. He also, it must be noted, approaches Nietzsche charitably, in good faith, wishing to understand Nietzsche’s line of thought and arguments, rather than operating with flat generalizations or, worse, false pretenses. 

Treating Nietzsche charitably is the only way to approach such a thinker, not only because our faith demands such treatment of human beings or out of pity (Nietzsche’s capacious mind drove him to madness), but, more important, because Nietzsche rebelled against a lifeless cultural Christianity of his time. As Nikolai Berdyaev said, behind any atheistic rebellion against God is the rebellion *for* a greater vision of God against a low and unworthy view of the Divine. Nietzsche was, first and foremost, a cultural critic, not a metaphysical philosopher. It was Heidegger who first attributed metaphysics to Nietzsche. It is fitting, then, that McEwen reads Nietzsche carefully and points out Nietzsche’s project as the great skeptic himself understood it—that is, dismantling cultural and religious ideologies.

While McEwen offers a charitable reading of Nietzsche, he makes his stance clear: He does so with a full commitment to the truthfulness of the Christian metanarrative. McEwen, in other words, offers a critique of Nietzsche, a necessary pushback to his narrative from the point of view of Scripture, exposing the logical inconsistencies in Nietzschean proposals. 

Building on the work of such giants of contemporary theology as Charles Taylor and John Milbank, McEwen follows the prompting of Christopher Watkin, who calls on contemporary Christians to think critically about the narratives with which secular culture operates, rather than passively absorbing them. This critical posture requires understanding the ideas and ideologies we are exposed to and offering an alternative, thoroughly Biblical narrative in their place. McEwen provides just that: an attempt to understand Nietzsche on his own terms, while pointing out his fallacies, an account of how he has influenced our current culture, and finally a counter-narrative. 

How does he do that? McEwen follows a twofold pattern of argumentation. First, he demonstrates how Nietzsche borrows and parodies Christian ideas, twisting them to suit his purpose—to challenge Christianity. Second, he shows how Biblical narrative already has answers to Nietzsche’s challenges. For example, in his chapter on *Imago Dei* and human identity, McEwen looks at how Nietzsche addresses the question of what it means to be human.

The classical Christian understanding of human nature combined the Greco-Roman idea of rational (unchangeable) essence with *Imago Dei*, or Divine image bearers, to formulate a theological anthropology. Nietzsche offers an alternative vision of humans in his *Ecce Homo.* In this work, he calls for a radical breakaway from the Greco-Christian view of human beings. Human beings, according to Nietzsche, do not have a static essence or unchangeable nature. Rather, they evolve; they become something through their will to power. We do not know ourselves, and the constant becoming means that we change over time. The idea of change and becoming is tied to a particular view of history. Hence, an equally important concept to Nietzsche’s understanding of human beings is the idea of eternal return—a cyclical view of history and human development. While this may sound radically different from classical Christianity, McEwen contends that Nietzsche has retained the idea of eternity and appropriated or re-packaged the Christian concept of sanctification and transformation towards the resurrected body of Christ, but leaving out God. 

McEwen offers an alternative narrative in order to “out-narrate” Nietzsche and show how the Scripture already has a response to his claims. To summarize his response: The New Testament apostolic witness firmly proclaims our future resurrection in the manner of Jesus Christ. In Col. 1:15-18, Paul brings together Christology, our existence, and our identity so that we would know ourselves as Christ’s. In other words, we know who we are when we recognize ourselves as belonging to Christ. The answer to the question of who we are has already been given to us in Christ.

The mode of engagement McEwen suggests and models in his book is a helpful start. It gives Christian readers hope that even Nietzsche is not impervious to a critique; he can even be beaten at his own game. Although McEwen’s retelling of the Biblical narrative is rather short, it points to the depth and breadth of Christian tradition. And yet, his approach left me with a few questions.

First, what if our alternative narrative is not that alternative at all, but the same old narrative that Nietzsche reacts against? Nietzsche knew the Bible and came from a religiously devout home. He was well aware of the central role of Jesus Christ in forming our identity and the historical Christian view of human nature. Retelling the same narrative back to Nietzsche may not produce a different result, since this is precisely what Nietzsche is reacting against. 

How does a Biblical narrative help make sense of the history and human development we, as a civilization, have undergone over the last two hundred years? How does our understanding of our identity in Christ help a skeptical person understand dramatic historical and social changes that a given society, say Communist Russia, had experienced in the last hundred years? Nietzsche was not a theologian, not even a metaphysician, as he understood his own work. He was concerned with human culture, something we build or destroy. Therefore, to counter a Nietzschian skepticism, especially when it is raised against Christianity, we have to extract a vision of human history, human culture, and, crucially, development from a Biblical metanarrative. 

No less significant, what if “out-narrating” is not enough to address the widespread skepticism and nihilism in our world today? What if what’s required is not only an alternative critical theory, but something much more demanding—love for people, bearing their burdens, compassion, and giving of ourselves in love? When dealing with skeptics, even very young ones, a robust intellectual response is critical. But at some point, our actions will speak louder than our words.

McEwen’s book is a much-needed introduction to engaging the intellectual ideas of our time. We need more work like this. Christians can no longer ignore the world of secular ideas. We have entered a new era, where our culture no longer possesses strong Christian intuitions. We will have to learn to live in this culture and engage it anew, drawing from our Christian tradition answers befitting our times.
### Surprised by Silence
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/surprised-by-silence/
Last updated: 2026-08-27T11:00:15.000Z
Augustine’s *Confessions* has become one of my longest reading journeys. By that, I don’t mean it’s a book I’ve reread repeatedly, though I hope that to ultimately be true. What I mean is that I began the book over six months ago. Granted, I am naturally a slow reader, yet nearly every sentence is arresting, offering pause to interweave thought and interleave Scripture.

Yet one autobiographical and historical detail provided by Augustine has repeatedly caused me to set the book down for “a think,” struck by the detail’s significance not only to Augustine but also, perhaps, to the Christian life. The detail concerns a habit of Ambrose, the renowned bishop whom Augustine met—and by whom he was deeply influenced—after moving to Milan to teach rhetoric. The habit of Ambrose that Augustine preserves in Book VI, chapter 3, is this: silent reading.

It’s not that silent reading, of itself, was unknown. What specifically seems to have impressed itself upon Augustine was Ambrose’s habit of reading silently even while others entered, waited, and watched in Ambrose’s presence. The bishop’s door was always open, but the man himself had—in silent reading and reflection—entered a space they could not follow. To Augustine, himself thoroughly trained in rhetoric and the sonorous life of words, the scene was one he preserved of necessity in his autobiography.

From Anthony Esolen’s recent translation, Augustine’s surprise and wonderment:

> But when he read, his eyes went through the pages, while his heart spied into the sense, and his voice and tongue were still. Often when we were there—for no one was kept from entering his house, nor was it his custom to have visitors announced—we would see him reading in this way, silently, and never otherwise. We might then sit in daylong silence—for who would dare be a burden to someone so intent?—and finally take our leave.

There are arresting parallels between Augustine’s vision of Ambrose and the 1981 film *The Chosen*, based on Chaim Potok’s novel of the same name. Although I would rarely reference a film over the book from which it was adapted, Rod Steiger’s portrayal of Reb Saunders is remarkable. He believably reveals Saunders’ heart and—more importantly here—the nature of Reb Saunders’ relationship with his son, Danny. Gifted with a nearly perfect memory and an ability to see Scripture in every aspect of life and learning, Danny has been raised to follow in his father’s footsteps and eventually become the rabbi of their community. Yet, parceled with Danny’s talent was also an arrogance toward others, and an absence of real compassion.

Observing this early, Saunders resolved to withhold basic and direct conversation from his son, though he continued to care for and to teach him attentively as a mentor. It was a silence that hurt Danny deeply. But it was a silence, too, by which his father hoped to awaken in Danny an inward hearing: a capacity to perceive the suffering of others and receive the voice of his own heart and the voice of Torah.

Now, Ambrose’s silence was certainly of another kind, and he did converse with Augustine. Still, I suspect that his manner of silence planted a similar seed in Augustine, himself tremendously gifted and—by his own account—arrogant in his early life. Augustine was clearly surprised by this silence, and although it may not have been instructionally deliberate, surprise often awakens something in us, sometimes for a moment, sometimes for a lifetime. It is that “something” awakened in Augustine through his presence in the silence of that room—resonant even with the experience of a fictional character, Danny—that has made this brief episode in the *Confessions* a kind of hub from which my continued reading of *Confessions* proceeds.

For another moment, though, before I carry on with my own reading, I want to remain with Augustine, observing Ambrose in wonderment, while considering the ripples of another silence: one destined also to pour forth in proclamation.

Consider the Hebrew word: *rāqîaʿ*. It means “the firmament” or “the expanse.” It first appears in Genesis 1:6, where God establishes “the expanse” as a separation between the waters. At first, the expanse appears almost as silence itself: a mute space opened and held between waters above and waters below. God names it Heaven. Later, he sets the lights within the expanse to distinguish day from night and to mark days, seasons, and years.

Yet Scripture continues to reveal the *rāqîaʿ* as something more. By Psalm 19, the expanse is no longer shown merely as a boundary within creation, nor simply as a massive vault in which the lights move. It has become proclamatory, itself a herald.

> *The heavens declare the glory of God,and the sky above \[from the Hebrew rāqîaʿ\] proclaims his handiwork.Day to day pours out speech,and night to night reveals knowledge.There is no speech, nor are there words,whose voice is not heard.*(Ps. 19:1–3)

Then at Psalm 150, at the terminus of the Psalter, the heraldic movement becomes explicitly human. We are, in the psalm, summoned to join the praise already resounding in creation. We are called to praise God "in his sanctuary" and "in his mighty heavens," the living God in the *rāqîaʿ* of his power: “Praise the Lord! Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty heavens \[from the Hebrew *rāqîaʿ*\]!” (Ps. 150:1)

Yet, if we continue to let Scripture intertwine, before praise there comes another invitation. The prophet Isaiah bids us to slow down. "Listen to me in silence, O coastlands..." (Isa. 41:1). The coastlands, representing scattered peoples, are not summoned first to action, or even to praise. They are called to silence. Only then comes the invitation in the same verse: "...let them approach, then let them speak..."

That sequence is consequential. In a world ruled by noise and assertion, and by endless mechanisms of mind, silence is never emptiness. Silence is where revelation may be received. It is like the *rāqîaʿ*, like a sandbar set between lashing waters. It is perhaps what Augustine sensed while watching Ambrose read. It is what Danny, by his father’s hard love, came upon. And into silence God speaks: "I AM WHO I AM" (Ex. 3:14). 

Is that the silence we ourselves so often resist? Is this the silence that surprises? Before the heavens declare his glory and before humanity joins, God simply is. However, God does not remain hidden, culminating in what C. S. Lewis names the greatest miracle: the One who made, who named, the *rāqîaʿ* enters the world that he spoke into being. The eternal “I AM,” who eternally loves, takes flesh. The Word, through whom all things were made, is among us. And then comes the greatest surprise: the One before whom Isaiah’s coastlands fell silent now speaks forgiveness and stretches out his hands upon a cross to the still point of “It is finished” (John 19:30).

Silence ripples. On the pages of Scripture, somewhere between the “I AM” and the “It is finished,” we encounter another silence, this time with Elijah (1 Kgs. 19:11-13):

> *And \[the Lord\] said, “Go out and stand on the mount before the Lord.” And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire the sound of a low whisper \[qōl dĕmāmāh daqqāh\].*

In this verse, then comes the *qōl dĕmāmāh daqqāh*. Not the mountain-whipping of wind, nor the ruckus of rocks, nor even flame, but—in translation—the low whisper, the thin silence. Then:

> *When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. And behold, there came a voice to him and said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”*

What *are* we doing here? Silence will surprise. Silence may prepare, expose, humble, awaken. Yet silence was never the destination, just as Psalm 150 is not a psalm of silence. Elijah does not remain standing before a silent cave. Augustine does not remain forever sitting, watching Ambrose read. And *The Chosen* ends with Danny walking on, not trapped in his father's silence, but going out into the world to serve.

God speaks. The Word makes. And we? Sometimes we must linger in the silence between. Out of the stillness, the heavens still declare his glory. The Church now declares his Gospel. And faith comes. It comes not from our striving, our observations, or, ultimately, even our silence, but “from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Rom. 10:17). O coastlands, Christ is risen.
### Constructing a Common Good
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/constructing-a-common-good/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T11:00:51.000Z
**Allison Daminger. *What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life*. Princeton University Press (2025). $29.95\. 248 pp.**

A woman whose kids were in the same activities as mine when young used to send a warning text to the moms’ group when she left town. She gave heads-up that the B team would be on, which meant that her husband would be showing up instead. She told us, so we would pick up the slack.

Allison Daminger’s book pokes a sore spot in domestic relations. At issue is not the easily reckoned load of practical chores, now subject to decades’ worth of gendered time-use studies. Here is a category harder to measure. Cognitive labor can be invisible, but it generates loud grievances. Women might combust with exasperation that they do so much of *this* and still have to explain what *it* is. Men might express frustration that after years of taking on more housework, they still get faulted for not doing enough. 

Consider how much dads’ doings have changed in a few generations. A man now might remember that his grandfather never packed kids’ lunches, for instance, while his father might have done them occasionally when mom was out of commission (like maybe in the hospital). This contemporary man might insist: I fill the lunchboxes three times *every week*. Can’t you see I’m doing a lot, he might demand, while a spouse who plans meals, buys groceries, monitors school allergy protocols, remembers her kids’ tastes, and keeps track of brown-bag field-trip days, might ask why he wants praise and gratitude for sticking a sandwich in a bag. 

If readers confronting Daminger’s title wonder, what *do* American moms think about when they let their minds wander, the answer is not a beach cabin on Bora Bora. The book fills in the blanks. Its clever cover is composed of color-coded thought bubbles asking things like: Should we switch her pediatrician? What have the kids eaten this week? See something on social media about swimming registration? It is true that some of these items seem urgent but are trifles. But raising kids in a society that pins identity to employment status and makes family a kind of side hustle raises stakes of this stuff. America does not bless the household as a little church or a little commonwealth. Amid atomized individualism, parents’ cognitive labor may come as close as anything to constructing a common good. 

Daminger, a sociologist, addresses her book to academics who study American families and to political figures who can help them. But in the process, she speaks just as much to men and women like the ones she interviews. Like time-use studies, her investigations into cognitive-labor patterns confirm that many couples do not have a balance. In heterosexual pairs, women still do a greater share. Same-sex couples also demonstrate imbalance although she finds them more flexible.

The author lays out the problem neatly. A "cognitive labor episode” entails four components: anticipate, identify options, decide, and monitor. Action comes in ten “domains,” including food, childcare, children’s engagement, logistics, cleaning, finances, social relationships, shopping, home maintenance, and leisure. Changing sheets is an example of cleaning. Tracking report cards is an example of children’s engagement. These lists not only clarify her terms but function inadvertently for readers as a diagnostic tool. For readers who recognize this stuff because they do it all the time, the lists provide satisfying recognition of the invisible parts of American childcare. Those who register surprise at these items are hoisted by their own petard. 

Just as some physical chores are harder or nicer than other kinds, Daminger names the burdens and benefits of cognitive ones. Overseeing home renovation is high-burden/high-benefit; taking out trash is low-burden/low-benefit; managing family calendars is high-burden but “usually only moderately beneficial” and “extremely abstract.” Moms often manage family calendars. Couples might conform to stereotypes to explain themselves, so women sometimes appear as “Superhuman” control freaks, men sometimes “Bumblers.”

Daminger is generous with the couples she interviews, giving benefit of the doubt even to dysfunctional ones. Her charitable assessment of her interviewees accentuates the book’s central puzzle. Why do otherwise considerate men and women with pretty up-to-date notions about gender stick with patterns that are so clearly unfair? She argues that cognitive labor is tilted sharply because society still stresses traditional characteristics for men and women. While interviewees mostly shun gender essentialism, many uphold a personal essentialism that yields basically the same result. So, a mom might say she handles birthday parties or meal planning just from preference. The author is not persuaded. What interviewees might claim as merely a “me thing” is reinforced by social and institutional norms. Humans invest in skills and deploy them. That means that mom does not have to be the one to maintain the family calendar. The author uses the example of a middle-school principal to call the bluff in this case. Can it really be true that the reason he lets his wife handle family schedules is that he, who plans the schedules of a school full of adolescents, is not good at organization? 

The book’s assessment of patterns around cognitive labor is perceptive. But the analysis shies away from first-principle arguments about why this matters. The real problem around mental load is not just the size of it but the shape. 

Why is there so much? Some of what American parents do for their kids arises from physical need. Kids have bodies that change rapidly, get dirty, need food and shelter. But consumer-culture childhood bundles inanities together with necessities. Much gets added to mental load by individualism and the imperatives of intensive parenting—the reigning style of American childrearing. In this system, adults define themselves by their paid work and support kids who define themselves by attributes with economic futures. In its late-twentieth-century heyday, scholars like Viviana Zelizer, Annette Lareau, and Sharon Hays traced intensive parenting to economic insecurity: Because parents do not know what job kids will need to keep a middle-class standard of living, they have to prepare for everything. 

Nineteenth-century industrialization inscribed men and women in separate spheres, the former at work and the latter presiding angelically in the home, at least in middle-class families. Women going to work in high percentages since the 1970s shattered those spheres. Weirdly, the residuum of separate-spheres ideology that persists does not mostly divide men and women, whose spheres now overlap, but parents and children. Parents work. Parents work for pay in an office, for pay from home, and in home for maintenance and hygiene. Children do not work. Middle-class parents are supposed to use all meritocratic levers to elevate offspring, who are to compose a self out of hobbies, preferences, diagnoses, and quirks. The sports, activities, lessons, and enrichments that middle-class children have come to take as normal are pleasant in the present and aimed at the future, at least at the pie-in-the-sky of college admission. Childhood leisure often is protected as contrast to the future work it enables. As a friend of mine advised her teen, she’d do better spending summer on standardized-test prep than a part-time job because potential scholarships that may result would cash out for more than a paycheck. 

Cultural standards of childhood dictate the terms of parenthood.These standards made parenthood a bigger job, handed down when mothers were presumed to be the ones doing it. Its parameters not only reflect standards of a bygone decade (1950s? 1980s?), but also the ever-shifting requirements of American middle-class childhood.

Why do women do this stuff? Cultivating children’s aspiring individuality is the work middle-class women were assigned and told to get good at. Part of mothers’ job is keeping up with what the job is, which means that part of their job is keeping up with all of its attendant tasks in order to delegate some. All this means that, as parental roles currently stand, it *is* the mother’s job to supervise the mental load of family life, even in order to offload some.

Why don’t men do this stuff? For sure, some do. Still, the disparity in cognitive labor that Daminger finds is potent provocation. It’s a bitter joke among women that dads get praise for doing basic kid stuff that moms do all the time unsung: Isn’t it great that he took the kiddos to the playground *and* brought a snack?! Some men, involved in children’s lives in ways their own fathers never would have dreamed, resent being impugned for underperformance. But conflicts around this load also might arise because one party feels pressured to assume a greater share of a job whose terms he never would have agreed to. The same system that multiplied mothers’ tasks erased the value of some older fatherhood duties. 

Older models may have called for fathers’ active investment in equipping children, especially sons, with skills for future work or public roles. In some religious traditions fathers held more responsibility for children’s moral formation and for enforcing social expectations. An economy inviting middle-class youngsters to invent themselves by buying things and watching screens has less use for a dad’s plodding instruction on, say, how to sell a house or change a tire, let alone how to develop courage or equanimity. Once those offerings are spurned, some fathers, when offered a share of what remains in childrearing, like reminding kids to floss or monitoring parental-control software, might not want to lean in. They may lean the other way instead, armed with classic strategies of workplace resistance like feigning ignorance or breaking tools. So doing, they would resemble what Daminger calls a Bumbler.

The couples Daminger studies are admirable. They want to do well for their households, their children, their spouses. Wisely, solutions she presents in their service do not start with to-do lists for them. She bids first for broad legal and political fixes. Work should be made less totalizing and more flexible so parents don’t need to worry about families while on the clock. Parental leave and paperwork reduction acts would help. An economy marked by less dramatic inequality would mean less cultural competition. Daminger has the blessed temerity to bid child-serving institutions like schools and camps to support this revolution by limiting extra junk they assign parents to do. When Daminger turns reform back homeward, she de-escalates conflict, advising men and women who “identify a mismatch between your ideal and actual allocation,” to “develop a plan for bringing them into alignment.” 

 I have seen versions of alignment among couples who enforce on each other a kind of rigid equality, each task split down the middle.There are some good reasons why housekeeping and childrearing get configured as a slate of tasks to divvy up. Treating domestic duties like this reflects effort to rationalize and respect them, to neutralize gendered categories of drudgery and “real” work, to name tasks according to services they provide children rather than by particular relationships so that either parent is eligible to provide these services now generically labeled “parenting” or even just “caregiving.” 

But what is wrong with parents’ cognitive labor imbalance is not just the way it is divided but the compulsion to divide. The foundational problem with disproportionate mental load is failure to envision a common life. This problem afflicts American habits around courtship and coupling as well as parenthood, enshrining an ideal of two working spouses who affirm each other’s careers and compartmentalize the other parts of life, leaving the home as a staging area for stuff and kids. Sorting out the shares evenly is only the best goal when work is a mere series of components, discrete items on a checklist, interchangeably performed. 

Except, a family does not work that way. Life together is not an array of separate tasks that can be flipped into one basket or another but the coordination of them *in toto*. Cognitive labor has been left to carry so much weight because it is through little details of the everyday that common life is constituted, often outside recognition that such a thing exists. Thinking about due dates and expiration dates, clothing sizes and homeroom assignments, get-well cards and appliance repair, becomes the thread holding together discrete tasks. In some couples Daminger examines, women manage cognitive labor because with it they call into being the closest thing to a common life a household may have. The welter of little details isproof that somebody is thinking about the big picture.

There is no sense in romanticizing old-fashioned farm families or the time when fathers ruled. For sure, a common life could emerge from willingness of wife, children, and other dependents to fall in line with dictates from the head of the household, or with what economic pressures dictate to all through him. The remedy now is not best sought by teasing apart breadwinning and caregiving to fit an old model, whether one lapsed or actually mythical.

The key change necessary for righting cognitive labor is for people in households to understand that they are in this together, that they know what the “this” is, and they know whom “they” includes. Cognitive labor of the kind Daminger measures is the big human work of care, of seeing and knowing each other as particular people. It is what families need to do to make home the place where *we* are, from which bridges extend out to the world and back in. 

The other necessary step is to reimagine kids not as only objects of parental labor but as participants in the common life. This is the boast of big families—that parents worry less and kids do more because they have to*.* The remedy to parents’ maldistribution of work is to reduce and not just redistribute it, to have less work and also to allocate it in more than two baskets, mom’s and dad’s. Reduction can come with children’s management of more of their own stuff plus collaboration in the work that is left over. Obviously, I am not ordering babies to chop firewood. But children at fairly tender ages can be trusted, and honored, with shared responsibilities. 

Believe in it? I’ve seen it done. I know some twenty- and thirty-somethings raising young children, managing households collaboratively in ways tempting to envy but so beautiful that even that sin is cast out. There’s the couple who shift an infant from one’s sling to the other’s front-carrier at an academic conference. There’s the couple whose children flourish after a big move of house, job, and school, stabilized by the strong good that both parents built at home. There’s the pair with a child needing hands-on medical assistance, where both parents are adept with equipment and confident of the other’s competence to meet the child’s needs. I love Daminger’s suggestions, especially the institutional ones. My confidence about families in the future is fueled not so much by political reform or the normalizing of gender-neutral chore spreadsheets, but because I have seen so many astonishing young people who understand themselves as making together the life they value together. The men in these couples seem to think that children are good, that they like their particular family, and that they are willing to do what is needed to keep it all going.

I am not putting burdens on these lovely people to solve the problem Daminger names. I know their family dynamics only from a little peephole I breathed on the window, and do not know how effortful or hashed-out these arrangements are. I conclude on a note inspired by Daminger’s clever title. To ask what’s on *her* mind is to hint that something else should be on *his*. Men may be key to bringing change, although I think not strictly in the scheme of chore-distributing fairness. Men might push back against the dumb things competitiveness and consumer culture impose on the workload of being responsible for young humans in a home. American childrearing systems, built decades ago for stay-at-home mothers without asking their say, burden both parents. Fathers might advocate for their families by cheerfully refusing.
### Learning from Rehoboam: Lessons on Leadership and Transitions
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/learning-from-rehoboam-lessons-on-leadership-and-transitions/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T11:00:16.000Z
We are on the cusp of [significant leadership transitions](https://mereorthodoxy.com/ministry-after-the-boomer-apocalypse/) within the American church. As one generation retires and new leaders arise, we will face many difficult questions about what those transitions should look like as well as the dangers we risk if we get them wrong. For now, the range of possibilities open to us is quite broad, but it will narrow rapidly in the coming years. If we want to get it right, now is the time for thought, planning, and conversation about what makes for faithful and healthy leadership.

## A Tragic Case Study

King Rehoboam in 1 Kings 12 offers a terrific (or tragic) case study in poor leadership transfer. Successor to his father, the famously wise King Solomon, Rehoboam is immediately approached by Solomon’s labor force. They don’t mind serving, but Solomon’s yoke has become heavy, and they want a reprieve. 

Rehoboam requests three days to consider the matter, during which he seeks counsel from two groups: first, the older men who had advised his father, Solomon, and then his younger friends who had “grown up with him.” The older men recommended lightening the load and thus securing the people’s devoted service. The younger men advised doubling down on Solomon’s yoke, lest the people think the new management is weak. 

Tragically, Rehoboam abandons the older men’s counsel and rules harshly. Ultimately, the kingdom was torn in two as a result of Rehoboam’s poor leadership.

## Misguided Image

“Leadership” can conjure up many different images. The word itself can feel like a stuffy, florescent-lit boardroom. Or the hot soil of a colonial battlefield. Or even the sting of icicles clinging to Shackleton’s beard on the *Endurance*. These images are aggressive, grueling, and overwhelmingly male. 

However, leadership is not gender specific, nor is it relegated to a title, a corporate office, or a military grade watercraft. Leadership takes place wherever there is a system (a business, team, small group, or family) that needs to be managed, directed, or changed. 

Dan Allender appropriately broadens the imagery of leadership when he rightly says, “if there is one little girl who looks at you and says, ‘Mommy’, then you are a leader.” Indeed, anyone who uses their gifts, talents, and resources for the good and guidance of others is a leader. 

In his book, *A Non-Anxious Presence*, Mark Sayers skillfully adapts Edwin Friedman’s work on systems theory. Friedman identified that healthy organisms produce healthy systems. Individuals who can differentiate themselves from––not be affected by––the inevitable stress and anxiety in a system can impact the system positively. 

Sayers applies these principles when he argues that good leadership is not reducible to charisma, drive, intelligence, or achievements, but being a *non-anxious presence*. 

But how does one lead as a self-differentiated non-anxious presence?

## Getting on the Balcony

In their excellent book on leadership, Linsky and Heifetz say a crucial first step for any leader is *getting on the balcony*. This is the thirty-thousand foot view of a system, in leader-speak. But at its simplest, this is a learned awareness of oneself, those around you, how the system fits together, and how it is doing. 

This balcony-view takes devoted time. Some have the luxury of multi-day retreats and custom analytics to gain such a view. Others manage it with a notepad after the kids go to bed. Many make mental notes as they sit bleary-eyed over breakfast. 

King Rehoboam took three days to reflect on the change of power from his father to himself. The people complained of heavy burdens. He needed to assess the situation and get counsel. Such reflection can be as broad as assessing cultural trends or as narrow as getting clear on where the few people around the dinner table are emotionally, spiritually, and physically.

From the balcony, it can be helpful to identify the broad system(s) or networks you inhabit, the dominant hubs, the individual nodes, and the connections between them:

Sayers helpfully parses these components of a system:

- **Nodes** – the individuals: family members, teammates, congregants
- **Connections** – how the nodes are related: friends, family, coworkers
- **Hubs** – highly connected nodes within the system: any leader, group, or platform that touches many nodes
- **Protocols** – the agreed upon rules of the system: bylaws, mission statements, values

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-20-at-3.55.48---PM.png)

We can see how just two systems can have many overlapping and dynamic connections, with many different areas for potential stress and anxiety.

Such anxiety can be the result of not knowing where we fit. It is on the balcony where we assess the big picture. 

## The Necessary Work

Once you have clear eyes on the system in question, Linsky and Heifetz suggest four necessary tasks. One reason Rehoboam is a helpful case study is because, according to Linsky and Heifetz, he does just about everything wrong.

### Distinguish between *technical* and *adaptive* problems.

Technical problems are problems that can be quickly resolved using techniques already at hand, usually by an authority figure. Technical solutions for technical problems are often easily implemented––top-down––and require little change in a system. 

In contrast, adaptive problems often are rooted in people’s values, behaviors, and motives. Because they are more embedded in the *people* of the system, they often require action from the people themselves.

A helpful example of this distinction is surgery and medicine versus lifestyle changes or physical therapy. Surgery and medicine are (relatively) easily implemented and require little on the part of the recipient. Surgery is performed; the problem is addressed. Lifestyle change and physical therapy are much more difficult and require a high level of buy-in from the beneficiary. Often such change pushes against deeply ingrained, unhealthy routines that are hard to quit. 

Both approaches are legitimate and one does not preclude the other, but knowing the difference is essential. Adaptive solutions to technical problems waste everyone’s time; technical solutions to adaptive problems will only mask the real issues. 

In the case of Rehoboam, he mistook an adaptive problem as a technical one. The people wanted a leader who cared about them, one who heard their cries of weariness, one who was committed to their flourishing. This would’ve likely taken a lot of emotional intelligence and character Rehoboam didn’t have *and* would’ve taken a lot of adjustment from everyone to figure out new routines and rhythms of working to ensure the people weren’t overwhelmed but the work didn’t suffer. 

Adaptive solutions often fizzle once the reality of required change sets in. It was much easier for Rehoboam to double down on the currently available technique of exploitation. 

While every system is constantly dealing with a mix of technical and adaptive problems, Sayers points out that Western society as a whole has historically adopted a technical-first approach to system management. Due to the success of industrialization, technical “programming” became the assumed leadership solution to all problems––good leadership was keeping the machine well-oiled and the people in line. 

However, with globalization and the explosion of the internet allowing system hubs to be decentralized, adaptive solutions are needed much more often. Sayers says a more helpful framework than a mechanical “program” approach is *virology*. Viruses constantly test themselves against their environment, adapting until they can gain a stronghold in a system. Leadership in the modern age must likewise be ruthlessly adaptive. 

### Find out where people are.

Many systems have clear processes for people, such as organizational charts or discipleship sequences and pipelines. Good leaders know where each person is, both personally and organizationally:

#### **Personally** 

Where are they as human beings? A simple framework such as PRE/PS can be useful, noting where people are *Physically, Relationally, Emotionally/Psychologically,* and *Spiritually*. 

Staying aware of this will help in knowing where to focus one’s time and resources, and help to guide interactions.

#### **Organizationally**

Where are they as system nodes––what connections and alignments do they have and share with others? An important note here is to [connect relationally](https://mereorthodoxy.com/connecting-in-an-age-of-competition/) in order to discern system location, rather than assuming you know based on actions or reactions. 

I recently attended the Presbyterian Church in America’s General Assembly and was enlightened after meeting and conversing with people across a large system. I was able to interact with numerous “nodes” outside my typical spheres. This relational connection brought new clarity on how people were aligned and connected in the system (not just how I assumed they would be!), and opened possibilities for future adaptive work. 

To find out where people are requires actually meeting people where they are. Call it “boots on the ground”; call it “grassroots”; there must be a relational connection with each member in the system, on some level. This personal knowledge often happens outside of formal meetings. There isn’t a “paper-trail” for these encounters; they’re not reflected in official minutes but they pave the way for collaborative adaptive solutions. 

Here, Rehoboam had a lay-up opportunity to hear from the people and learn where they were. They came forward offering their perspective. They’re willing to serve, but they want a change. They had been freed from slavery in Egypt, but their freedom had once again turned to exploitation. 

Now, it’s not totally fair to accuse Rehoboam of not being a man of the people; kings have a lot on their plates. However, I think it’s fair to assume a lack of relational connection for two reasons: his arrogance and his inexperience. 

Rehoboam responds, “my pinky is thicker than my father’s thighs”––in other words, “You think it was bad before?… Hold my beer!” Such arrogance is a young man’s game. Few who have endured the true task of leadership over decades come out on the other side as arrogant. Leadership is a crucible. Again, a prime example of this is mothers: often working outside the home and still managing the lion’s share of household operations by default. I know many mothers refined by the fires of leadership; I know very few arrogant mothers. 

But Rehoboam’s arrogance is only compounded and supported by the unstable foundation of inexperience. Technique is always alluring to the inexperienced. Techniques can be adopted quickly and give the veneer of competence. Relational investment and compromise, on the other hand, is uncomfortable, takes time, and many mistakes and misjudgments must be made along the path toward wisdom. 

### Listen to the music/subtext.

When connecting relationally, a good leader must be in tune to the underlying dynamics and unspoken melody that sit quietly between the lines. 

Rehoboam's arrogance and inexperience were a recipe for being an anxious presence. His anxiety led him to perceive threats where there were none. It also made him deaf to the music. He can’t accurately hear the subtext of their request: a longing for the freedom they once knew after Egypt. 

He perceives their request as a threat against his inexperience rather than a genuine plea for reprieve. His insecurity muffles his ears to their hearts; he reads their *longing* for freedom as a desire for *leverage* over a new king.

Anxiety limited his leadership toolbelt to reactive harshness. 

### Pay attention to the leaders.

In a network system, stress typically manifests at the hub level. Organizationally, this is usually the location of the “leaders.” Having the most contact with each individual node, they absorb each node’s anxiety and often become overwhelmed long before any one individual. Unfortunately, this also means an anxious presence at the hub level can negatively affect multiple nodes simultaneously, causing anxiety to go “viral.”

In the case of Rehoboam, the leaders were the older men. They knew the people’s weariness, and encouraged Rehoboam to relieve them. Had the people come on their own, one could wonder about their motives. But Rehoboam should have realized that the complaint came also from the leading, older men––their experience and character should have vouched for the sincerity of the people’s request. Such is the value of not leading alone.

At this stage, we must also understand that hub “leadership” is not always held by a person. Digital, political, or ideological hubs can gain dominance quietly and quickly outside of system control. For example, social media itself can be a hub and is likely dominant across any system, touching nearly every node and posing the threat of extreme, unpredictable, and constant anxiety.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-20-at-3.56.20---PM.png)

Paying attention to pervasive and decentralized influences require varying levels of expertise and involvement to discern and combat. Insights and hub-specific resources from leaders like Jonathan Haidt and [his work in *The Anxious Generation*](https://www.afterbabel.com/p/its-time-to-free-the-anxious-generation?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) are needed to address such issues that extend beyond our own expertise.

## Finding Partners for the Journey

Linsky and Heifetz highlight this need for outside help. This is true whether on a team, leading a group, or managing a family––no one can lead effectively on their own. We need the valuable input, insight, and oversight of others gifted in ways different than ourselves. 

Herein lies Rehoboam’s crucial mistake. The old men had “stood before Solomon” who was unsurpassed in wisdom. Not only this, but they had experience under their belts. They were standing before Solomon, gleaning his wisdom, before Rehoboam or his friends were even born. They’ve seen a thing or two. 

Not so with Rehoboam’s other friends. They’ve only stood before their peers. Simply put, they were unqualified to be offering advice to the new king. In his foolishness, Rehoboam promoted his friends to hub-leadership––inexperienced youths who have not honed the craft of non-anxious leadership.

The result was a divided kingdom.

## Leadership Fail-Safe

While a tragic tale of leadership, it also offers an encouraging truth for those tasked with leading others: we can never out– or under-lead God. In verse 15, God’s providence is given as a divine leadership fail-safe: King Rehoboam didn’t listen to the people “*for* it was a turn of affairs brought about by the LORD that he might fulfill his word.” 

Of course there is wisdom in making plans and seeking to lead well, but ultimately even our best leadership efforts are beholden to the direction of God (Pr. 16:9). In a letter to a nobleman, John Newton wrote:

All changes, successes, disappointments, all that is memorable in the annals of history, all the risings and falls of empires, all the turns in human life, take place according to His plan.

Not even Rehoboam’s folly can undo God’s plan.

The Lord is in the business of using foolish counsel to fulfill his word. God used the foolishness of Rehoboam to fulfill his promise to Solomon that he would divide his kingdom. Likewise, God used the foolishness of the cross to fulfill his promise that a new King would crush the Serpent’s head, uniting a new kingdom in himself.

The God of the Balcony came low in the person of Jesus, rubbing shoulders with the people. He exercised perfect leadership, even giving his own life so that he could lead us to his Father. All our leadership––good and bad––is eclipsed by the Good Shepherd’s grace and promise to bring his people safely home, into a kingdom that can never be divided.

A new generation of leaders can lead in freedom, non-anxiously and adaptively, willing to risk failing under the grace of such a gospel fail-safe.
### Why You Should Read Josef Pieper
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-you-should-read-josef-pieper/
Last updated: 2026-10-01T19:36:46.000Z
This past summer, I tried to get a trend going. A friend and I thought it’d be funny to select an obscure figure - someone who’s on almost no one’s radar - and construct a whole fake narrative about how the general public was now dying to get on board with their work. And so naturally we chose Josef Pieper.

Yet in the midst of the wheelhouse of jokes we made about how everyone from the upper echelon of Tik Tok stars to Taylor Swift were hopping on the Pieper bandwagon, I was surprised to find that *people actually started reading him.* Not hundreds, but probably around 60\. Which might not seem like a lot, but drumming up enough interest to get 60 people to read a dead German Thomistic philosopher is no small feat. 

And in the midst of championing a fake trend that became real, I started realizing why Pieper was so great. 

Pieper offers a generation inundated by irony, anxiety, productivity-obsession, and cynicism a unique account of joy that owes less to mindless optimism than the rational consequences of recognizing the goodness of reality.

—

I first ran across the name Josef Pieper while reading [Alan Noble’s](https://substack.com/@oalannoble?r=2mvy4l&utm%5Fmedium=ios&utm%5Fsource=stories&shareImageVariant=light) recent book *To Live Well*. Noble is older than I am, but he’s perceptive about our cultural aches and has a pulse on Gen Z’s core longings. Some of the Pieper quotes I read resonated with myself and friends around my age. So I picked up *Leisure,* his most famous book. Soon after, I bought 12 more copies to give away. Distilling the appeal of Josef Pieper is a tough task, but if I had to pick a phrase, I’d say *joyous realism.* 

It’s not that Pieper is all about fun and games and contentment in a simplistic way, though he is technically about all of those things. It’s more so that Pieper thinks of happiness as a byproduct of a virtuous life with God. Happiness is a result of leisure—the ability to rest and enjoy and contemplate the deeper facets of reality that go beyond mere work. And it is not illusory joy—it is joy rooted in philosophical and theological realism about the state of reality. 

He [says](https://ignatius.com/faith-hope-love-fhlp/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that since loving another person is the desire to “share in beatitude with them,” then joy is the outcome, the fruit, the outpouring of all authentic love. As such, all acts of loving are necessarily knit together with and in pure joy. In fact, if we didn’t feel happy after acting in accordance with a genuine desire to love someone else, we wouldn’t really be acting out of love, but out of stoic duty. And stoic duty is, for Pieper, anathema to both cultivating real virtue and inhabiting life well. 

It’s partly his indebtedness to Aquinas that makes him willing to repeatedly return to this idea (which, at my current count, appears in six of his books), since Aquinas said “Man desires happiness naturally and by necessity” (ST I-I, q. 94, a. 1), “To desire to be happy is not a matter of free choice,” (I-I, q. 19, a. 10), and ultimately pointed to communion and union with God as the *summon bonum* (II-II, q. 1-5)*.* 

But there’s something more complex about his orientation to happiness and joy that you’ll scarcely find elsewhere—especially not within the timid-to-get-associated-with-prosperity-gospel groups. It’s not just wishful thinking; it’s more like highlighting happiness as a logical, rational, necessary consequence of faithfully abiding in Jesus. It’s not something to be surprised about.

Part of what enables this emphasis is Pieper’s [conviction](https://ignatius.com/only-the-lover-sings-olsp/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that humans only “are” as they “become.” There is no “is” within a human being if that “is” doesn’t account for their being in a state of progression, movement, or continual momentum. He thought that we must understand that in the act of being created, we are all “shot toward our destination like an arrow.” We’re insanely and beautifully teleological. 

In other words, we’re pilgrims—perpetually on-the-way. And this reality that we have “not yet arrived,” that we’re in a perpetual state of pilgrimage, we come to accept an intrinsic lack of wholeness in our present state. But once accepted, it angles our desires so that we’re always aware that they’re restless for now. It disciplines the nagging craving for nirvana and metabolizes instead our slow and arduous pilgrimage toward eventual beatitude. It reminds us to wait longingly for this “state of bliss (*Gückselikeit*).” In his words, “The object of this dynamism, the destination of this journey, the aim, therefore, of this becoming and the moving force underlying it all, is the good.” And our pilgrimage is a constant journey of participatively receiving the good in all its forms.

In my personal favorite entry in Pieper’s bibliography, [*In Tune with the World*](https://books.google.com/books/about/In%5FTune%5Fwith%5Fthe%5FWorld.html?id=pHINAQAAMAAJ&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*,* he lays the foundation for *why* someone with an astute background in philosophy, a field which has historically fertilized an immense number of brooding cynics, can actually rejoice and rejoice always. He asks the question of “why do we rejoice and have festivals?” It’s because of the realization and affirmation that everything around us is *good.* 

Even though many biblical texts indicate that the world is corrupted and ruled by “the evil one,” this doesn’t mean that it isn’t truly and thoroughly *good*. To borrow metaphysical terms, seeing the world as entirely evil is only feasible within a framework that accepts creation’s substance as taking on the necessary property of “evil”—having its substance altered. Instead, since God declared His creation “good/very good,” He bestowed upon us an essential nature that isn’t stripped away by the comingling of the properties of corruption and sin. Sin corrupts creation; but it doesn’t transform God’s good creation into an ontological [mistake](https://bookshop.org/p/books/creation-regained-biblical-basics-for-a-reformational-worldview-albert-m-wolters/5ccb5faf8ee812ad?ean=9780802829696&bkshp-astro=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

Central to this affirmation of the good is the rejection of what is evil, and the renunciation of all that’s not edifying even on a momentary basis. In affirming what’s good and true and right, we come to create a real and tangible *reason* for joy. Affirming isn’t a blind reduction or ignorance of what’s evil, but a thorough identification of the aspects of our reality that are praiseworthy. And this is where true joy comes from; it can’t come without a reason, as that would make for the artificial joy of hedonic pleasure. But affirming the goodness of the world and life and our being on-the-way toward God is where joy and festivity necessarily sprout from. 

So even though joy and festivity are intrinsically secondary (our purpose and sense of meaning cannot be scaffolded upon happiness alone) they are still healthy byproducts of a life that happily acknowledges that God exist—and how great it is that He exists! 

Conversely, “festivity is impossible to the naysayer.” Put another way: festivity is impossible for the cynic, the nihilist, the chronic pessimist. It’s only possible when one has meaningful affirmations to celebrate. Early Christians even called exclusion from the eucharist a banishment into “unfestivity.” This is where all religious festivals stem from—themselves reminders to live in accord with an affirmation of the goodness of creation and our embodied, fallible existence. 

Much of this is uncomfortable for those more used to hearing that the world is marred and a threat to righteousness. And Pieper acknowledges that the world [*can*](https://ignatius.com/guide-to-thomas-aquinas-gtap/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) indeed threaten the faith. But it is not primarily and most significantly an environment that wreaks havoc on righteousness. 

Pieper is not just creating a useful fiction for generating good vibes or hollow optimism; he’s identifying reality: that there is a goodness to what is created, and part of loving the good (which occurs primarily through loving God, others, and what He’s made) involves the secondary consequence of realizing that happiness and joy must flow from this. 

Beyond his pure philosophy, there’s much about Pieper’s general posture that’s commendable. He knows how to communicate ideas to non-specialists. His work is dense, but not impenetrable. He is unafraid of crossing the boundaries of academic specializations. Though he is a philosopher, he oscillates between the theologian voice and historian voice at will. And this works to his benefit: he writes as a philosopher, but his conclusions are theological – opening up new ways to think and live and move and have our being as theologians. 

Pieper is also refreshingly ecumenical. He quotes C. S. Lewis in many of his books and even pays a painstakingly thorough compliment toward Chesterton’s scholarship on Aquinas. For a generation burnt out from “my denomination” triumphalism, reading a serious philosopher pay serious respect to those on the other side of denominational lines feels like an Advil knocking out a lingering headache. 

His work now exists as a time capsule. There aren’t really monographs written about him in the way that people write about Moltmann or Barth. So it’s purely the interest of readers that keeps his work alive. 

And yet, despite how seemingly unpalatable his work might seem to younger generations, there is a kind of post-postmodernism (or metamodern) angle to his work. It’s appealing. He’s hopeful. He knows all the worst things that could happen in the world, the sheer weight of our negativity bias that draws us into a perpetual rumination of all that’s wrong and all that could go wrong. 

And yet, he still believes, he still hopes, he’s still confident in love’s power to overcome hate and fear. He identifies our formation into the virtues as a worthwhile battle. He realizes the worst possible scenarios but invites us to move forward anyway. For him, despair is the outcome of a life bent toward rejecting an affirmation of the good. His total allergy to cynicism speaks to a generation fatigued by mistrust and suspicion. For younger people who are arguably more inclined toward despair than any generation before, that’s the kind of affirmation we’re craving. We know that all is not well with our souls; but Pieper shows us why and then lights a way to follow.
### What is Union with Christ?
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/what-is-union-with-christ/
Last updated: 2026-10-01T19:36:12.000Z
Union with Christ is at the very heart of the Christian faith, yet its meaning and implications are lost upon the vast majority of Christians today. What is union with Christ, and why does it matter in the Christian life? 

Through faith, the Holy Spirit unites us with the incarnate Son of God in his death, resurrection, and ascension, such that we who are in Christ know God as our Father. Union with Christ is thus first and foremost about knowing Christ, and with him, all his saving benefits.

Union with Christ is simultaneously profound and inexhaustible, yet extremely basic and easily understandable. On one hand, union with Christ is a profound mystery because the whole constellation of all divinely revealed Christian doctrines converge upon and inter-relate in our union with Christ: the Trinity, the person and work of Christ, the church, the sacraments, and far more! Union with Christ is described in Holy Scripture with a wide range of expressions and images, and various aspects of union with Christ have been differently emphasized throughout the history of Christian worship and witness. The Byzantine writer Nicholas Cabasilas writes in his work “On the Life in Christ” (pgs. 5–6) that our union with Christ “is closer than any other union which man can possibly imagine and does not lend itself to any exact comparisons,” and hence Scripture uses a wide range of images and metaphors to speak about union with Christ. Similarly, New Testament scholar G. K. Beale characterizes union with the risen and ascended Christ to a multi-faceted gem, composed of seemingly quite different sides that nonetheless are integrated with one another. Far, far more can be said about this endless topic than is possible in a short essay. 

Yet, on the other hand, union with Christ is so simple that even little children can understand it quite well: it is Christ, dwelling in our hearts by faith (Eph 3:17). All of the saving benefits which God objectively accomplished in Jesus Christ are subjectively applied to us as the Holy Spirit unites us with Christ through faith. Through this bond, communion, sharing, oneness, participation, and mutual indwelling of Christ being in us and us being in Christ, we know Christ and all his benefits. 

This essay will look at four aspects of our union with Christ: first, its scriptural and theological basis; second, how union with Christ is the central doctrine of salvation; third, we will explore the means of grace whereby Christ unites us with himself by his Word and Spirit in the church; and fourth, we will note only a few of the practical and pastoral implications of union with Christ for Christian living, especially in our lived experiences of suffering, virtue formation, mission, and worship.

## The Scriptural and Theological Basis of Union with Christ

The Holy Spirit’s work of uniting believers with Jesus Christ presupposes two prior unions: the union of three persons in one God, the Holy Trinity; and second, the basis of our union with Christ is the union of two natures, truly human and truly divine, in the one person of Jesus Christ in his incarnation. 

The Christian faith gives astonished and delighted testimony to the God of the gospel. God is the one who lives and loves in freedom, and Christian faith contemplates God, and all else in relation to God. Before ever worlds were made, the Father and the Son relate to one another as “Father” and “Son,” and the Holy Spirit is from the Father as the bond of love in an eternal communion of unapproachable majesty, blessedness, and the glorious splendor of undivided light. 

Not out of any deficiency or want in God, but out of the overflowing fullness and joy of God’s life as Trinity, God relates outwardly to creatures in his works from creation to salvation to the consummation of all things. With respect to God’s work of creation, our union with Christ rests on humanity having been created as creatures who are compatible with God. There is a difference between God the Creator and all else which is his creation; God alone is infinite and unchanging and eternal, and all else is finite, ever-changing, and temporal. So, while God’s intention is for humanity to become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4), that never means we transgress the Creator-creature distinction. Yet, there is a compatibility whereby humans can have union and communion with God because we are created in the image and likeness of God, and the archetypal image of the invisible God, after which we were fashioned, is Jesus Christ (Gen 1:26–27; Col 1:15).

The one God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, quintessentially and definitively revealed himself in the fullness of time when the eternal Son of God took to himself a truly human nature. This is the desire of nations, the mystery which angels long to look into, which we marvel over and celebrate with wonder at Christmas, that Jesus Christ is truly divine and truly human. Because God became man in Jesus Christ, now we in him can become participants in God’s life and perfections. The renewal of the whole cosmos and redemption of individual sinners was accomplished in the humiliation and exaltation of Jesus Christ. After rising from the dead, Jesus lifted up his hands and bestowed a blessing upon his people, and while he was blessing them he was taken up into heaven (Lk 24:50–51). Having obtained salvation, he now bestows it upon his people in benediction, as the Holy Spirit in the new covenant was poured out at Pentecost to create a communion of saints (Acts 1–2). Christ is now at the right hand of God in heaven, “he is not here; he is risen” (Matt 28:6). But Christ becomes our contemporary and we become contemporaries with him, as the Spirit joins us with Christ as co-participants in dying and rising with Christ (Gal 2:20, 6:14; Rom 6:1–4; Col 2:13–15, 3:1–4). The Father’s sending of the Son and the Holy Spirit is thus how God’s good creation, ruined by sin, is redeemed and transformed to become the kingdom of God that shares in God’s life. All the fullness of deity dwells in Christ bodily, and He as risen and ascended Lord is reconciling all things to himself through the blood of Christ as his Holy Spirit heralds his saving word throughout the world (Col 1:18–23, 3:1, 1:8).

Hence, the Trinity and incarnation are integral to how creatures can enter into a saving relationship with the God of the gospel: the Holy Spirit unites us with Christ, the God-man, sent by the Father. Further, there is no competition for prominence between being Trinity-centered or Christ-centered, for these inter-related foci are concentric circles. When we rightly so “fix our eyes on Jesus” (Heb 12:2) and devote rapt attention to the person and work of Christ, we will continually rediscover afresh just how profoundly Jesus’ own center is the glory of the Father in the Holy Spirit. Once our focus is there, we will be driven back to Christ as we discover how the Father and Spirit glorify the Son.

## Union with Christ as the Key to How Redemption is Accomplished and Applied

Union with Christ describes the focus of the gospel on what God has objectively accomplished in Jesus Christ and subjectively applies to us as the Spirit unites us with Christ through faith. The gospel is Son-centered; “the gospel of God,” promised beforehand in the Scriptures of the Old Testament,” is first and foremost “concerning his Son” (Rom 1:1–3). The gospel is not mainly about us, or the benefits that Christ has given us. The gospel is not good advice about what we should do; it is good news about Jesus and what he has done. The gospel is not something we do; it is a heralding of what God has singularly accomplished in Jesus Christ. It is about Jesus Christ, first and foremost, and when we apprehend Christ, we share in him and all his saving benefits. 

When you say the Apostles’ creed and the Nicene creed, you will notice that particular outward works of God towards creation are appropriated by various members of the Trinity. Though, as one God, the three persons always work together, in the first article of the creed the work of creation is especially appropriated by the Father, though the Son and the Spirit are involved. The second article of the creed is devoted the person and work of the Son of God. The third article of the creed might seem to end with confessing simply that “we believe in the Holy Spirit,” before a list of random-seeming things such as the church, baptism, forgiveness, and the resurrection of the dead follow. However, we should understand that implicit within the creed is a vision of how union with Christ explains redemption, accomplished and applied. The incarnate career of the Son of God accomplished an objective salvation to renew all things, and the Holy Spirit unites us with the Son such that we are vindicated with him, joined with the communion of saints in the one holy, catholic, and apostolic church, we are raised with him, and share in Christ’s everlasting life. It is not spelled out in either creed that the Spirit unites us with Christ through faith such that we share in his distinct but inseparable saving benefits, but that is nonetheless the key to the logic of confessing our faith in the words of the creed. 

A real redemption was accomplished when the eternal Son of God, who had taken to himself a truly human nature, was “delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Rom 4:25). The Son was not an unwilling victim; the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit always work together inseparably in all their works from creation to providence, from salvation to consummation. The Son willingly laid down his life, the Father and the Spirit were integral to his resurrection (Jn 10:18; Rom 8:11). 

Thus, when God forgives sinners and declares they are righteous, it is not a legal fiction; a real sentence was carried out upon our sin, since “God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh” (Rom 8:3). Thereby, the saving righteousness of God is revealed in at least two ways. First, in the same way that a just judge cannot minimize or overlook real evil, God is shown to be “just” in Christ’s shed blood and death; second, God is shown to be “the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” as God gives the gift of his saving righteousness to those who are united with Christ (Rom 3:26). Yet, God’s objective accomplishment of salvation entailed far more than the death of Christ. Jesus, by his resurrection from the dead, was “vindicated” by the Holy Spirit (1 Tim 3:16; Rom 1:4). 

Further, after his humiliation and exaltation by rising from the dead, the Son ascended into heaven. There, he is both the offering and the great high priest; rather than continuing to stand at the altar and offer repeated sacrifices, Christ sat down after making a perfect, once-for-all-time offering of his crucified and risen flesh-and-blood in the heavenly Holy of Holies. Now we, with him, can draw by faith to the throne of grace (Heb 10:11–16; 4:12). Christ does not merely save us by dying in our place for our sins, taking upon himself the just punishment we deserved — though he does. Further, Christ in his own person embodied the ends for which humanity was created. He is the first of a newly restored humanity, the second and Last Adam. Humanity’s prophetic, priestly, and royal vocation to tend and cultivate the garden-temple of God’s cosmos is fulfilled in Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension.

Now all that is Christ’s becomes ours. An especially clear passage of Scripture on this principle is 1 Corinthians 1:30–31, namely, “because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.’” 

Hence, in adoption, by sending the Spirit into our hearts, we become children who share in the Son’s address to God as ‘Abba, father’! As adopted sons, we have both the relational benefits of being in God’s family, and the legal benefits of being heirs of all that is Christ’s. In justification, we who had exchanged the truth about God for a lie in our idolatry and lawless transgression are declared righteous by being in the crucified and risen Messiah, because we share in his vindication; we are not only “justified by his blood” but also “saved by his life,” whereby Christ’s own vindication and triumph has put an end to our enmity and hostility, reconciling us to the God who justifies the ungodly in Christ (Rom 4:5, 5:9–11; Col 1:19–23). 

Hence, all other means of appraising our worth are called into question, because the righteousness of God is appropriated as the Spirit unites us with Christ by faith, such that we have fellowship with Christ in his sufferings and participate in his resurrection (Phil 3:1–11). We are justified by faith because through faith we are joined with Christ, such that our sin was co-crucified with him and now Christ lives in us, as we live by faith in the Son of God who loved us and gave himself for us (Gal 2:15, 19–20). Notably, whatever all justification entails, it precludes boasting in anything other means of regarding ourselves as worthy than the cross of Christ by which we were co-crucified with Christ, since now his new creation has come (Gal 6:14–15; 1 Cor 1:31). In sanctification, God’s grace does not create licentiousness to continue in sin, but rather we were buried with Christ through baptism and raised with him to walk in newness of life; whereas we were once incapable of responding to God, now through our union with Christ we are no longer agents and servants of the powers of sin and death, but we are agents and servants of righteousness (Rom 6:1–19). 

In glorification, humanity is restored and created towards those ends for which we were created in the image and likeness of God, namely to glorify God and enjoy him forever. Our glorification is already secured in Christ as the firstfruits of what is to come, although we are not yet glorified like Christ with bodies no longer subject to decay, but at the resurrection of the dead we will become like Christ’s risen and glorified body (Phil 3:19–21, Rom 8:30). Hence, we are even now “heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Rom 8:17). In election, we who deserved to be rejected are the chosen and Beloved of God, because we are in the elected and rejected Lord Jesus Christ (Eph 1:3–11). In regeneration, we who were dead are made alive together with Christ by his grace (Eph 2:1–10). There are further saving benefits of Christ we might enumerate; for example, we who were foolish and darkened now are united with Christ, who is wisdom itself, and whose Spirit enlightens our hearts to behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor 3:17–4:6; 1 Cor 1:30; Eph 1:18). 

Thus, in the gospel, Christ became for us several saving realities, and being ‘in him’ we come to appropriate his distinct but inseparable benefits. That is the key to avoiding innumerable problems. Foregrounding union with Christ as the central doctrine of salvation helps us coherently explain how Christ can simultaneously say to us “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” but also “deny yourself, take up your cross daily, and follow me” (Matt 11:28; Lk 9:23). For example, this helps us avoid thinking we can become lax about sin since justification is a gift of mercy to the undeserving. Why? The only way we appropriate forgiveness is through union with Christ, and Christ is one whole person, whom we cannot tear him apart. We cannot be united with only one part of Christ, such as the part of Christ that forgives us, without also being united with the whole of Christ, who also calls us to be conformed to his image in obedience and raised us to walk in newness of life (Rom 6:1–4). 

Simultaneously, having a clear grasp of union with Christ can help us avoid the grave problems that emerge when we fail to distinguish between his saving benefits, such as collapsing justification into a summons to transformed living that makes our right standing before God depend upon our moral performance, which would be far from ‘good news’ to all who know themselves to be sinners. Justification as our legal status before God, is not a matter of our striving to become more righteous, but a gift received by faith alone, even though the faith that receives Christ and all his benefits will never be alone, but we also by the Spirit must grow in our sanctification, becoming conformed to the image of Christ in holiness.

## The Means of Grace Whereby Christ Unites us with Himself in the Church 

The triune God uses the ordinary means of grace in the church to unite us with Christ, principally, the word of God and the holy sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist.

The word of God is *alive*. Far from an inert artifact from ancient history, the word of God is “living and active”; it is sharper than a two edged sword, piercing us to expose the thoughts and intensions of our hearts, it slays and makes alives (Heb 4:12). Like a surgeon’s scalpel, the word of God cuts but only in order to heal. Upon saying farwell to the Ephesian elders, Paul commended them to “God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified” (Acts 20:32). God does everything by his explosive, lively, unsettling, life-giving Word. At creation, by his word all things were made, speaking creation into existence out of nothing; in salvation, by his word God gives life to the dead. In the fulness of time, his word became flesh and dwelt among us in Jesus Christ, who is Immanuel, “God with us,” and his Spirit now works his word in to our hearts such that we pray back to God his words of praise, both in the very breath in our longs and in the words of the Psalms (Rom 4:17; Jn 1:14; Matt 1:23; Rom 15:6). 

But it is particularly through the word of God that we become united with Jesus Christ. We receive the Holy Spirit “by hearing with faith” (Gal 3:2, 5). The word of God, which is our very life as his covenant people, is not a hidden or esoteric mystery which we must go on a quest to ascertain, or which only an enlightened visionary can reach (Deut 32:47; 30:11–14). God in his kind condescension has brought his word near to us in Christ’s death and resurrection; it is now in our hearts, because “faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Rom 10:17). The word of God is a key means whereby the Holy Spirit unites us with Christ, since “in him \[Christ\] you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory” (Eph 1:13–14). Hence, in his 1517 lectures on Hebrews, Martin Luther hyperbolically captured how “if you were to ask a Christian what his task is and by what he is worthy of the name of Christian, there could be no other response than hearing the Word of God, that is, faith. Ears are the only organs of the Christian” (LW 29:224). 

Jesus especially promised to work through his word. Through the public proclamation of the word of God in the church’s assembled worship, and through the private ministry of the word in the best and worst moments of life, Christ is reconciling the world to himself (2 Cor 5:16–21). The assault of grace upon the old age liberates us to enter with Christ into the new creation through his powerful, lively, precious, life-giving word (Psa 119:25; 2 Cor 5:17).

The word of God creates the church by uniting her with Christ. Crucially, God not merely uses his word to personally unite individuals with Christ, and it is not merely the case that individuals who are in Christ happen to also become joined with one another at church. The church is created by the word which God uses to unite us with Christ, and the church is the context wherein individuals become personally united with Christ as Christ in the church works through his word and sacraments. 

A wide array of beautiful metaphors are used in Holy Scripture for the union between Christ and the church: marriage between a husband and wife is a great mystery which signifies the union between Christ and the church (Eph 5:22–31). Not only are our minds or spirits united with Christ, but life in the body is inexorably transformed when we are no longer our own but become “one” with the Lord; the intimacy of the one-flesh union between a husband and wife, wherein the two become “one,” is analogous to how the church is united with Christ, such that it is like we are dragging Christ himself into sin when we misuse our bodies (1 Cor 6:12–20). The union between Christ and the church is like a body composed of significantly varying members (1 Cor 12:12–31; Rom 12:4–8). 

The Holy Spirit indwells the bodies of those who are in Christ similarly to how the one God of Israel dwelt in the temple (1 Cor 3:16; 6:19). The church’s union with Christ is also analogous to the wandering people of God in the wilderness; our forerunner has already burst ahead to enter into God’s heavenly rest by his ascension as prophet, priest, and king, and soon he will take us to himself so that we can enter into his promised rest (Heb 3–4; 12:1–2). The church’s union with Christ is also analogous to how a royal figure embodies a whole people; Jesus, specifically as “Christ,” that is, “the Messiah” or “the anointed one,” is the church’s Savior King who shares in his triumph and reign through the way of the cross now, and glory later (2 Tim 2:12; Rom 6:5–14; 2 Cor 1:20–22). 

Jesus himself likened the church’s union with Himself to the relationship between a vine and its branches (Jn 15:1–11). Branches that are fruitless are taken a way, and those that do bear fruit are pruned, disrupting our expectations for instant gratification. But we have no life apart from him, and in the inexpressible glory of his kindness, he invites us: “abide in me, and I in you” (Jn 15:4). What that entails is eminently simple: letting the word of Christ abide in us (Jn 15:7), keeping his commandments, and thus abiding in his love (Jn 15:9–10).

As the church’s one foundation, Christ works not only through his Word but also through what St. Augustine called the ‘visible words’ of the holy sacraments. The sacraments which our Lord Jesus Christ himself instituted are not only a sign of profession or of the love that Christians ought to have among themselves, but they are “certain sure witnesses, and effectual signs of grace, and God’s good will towards us, by the which he doth work invisibly in us, and doth not only quicken, but also strengthen and confirm our Faith in him” (Article XXVIII, 2019 BCP 781). Throughout the whole of covenant history in both the Old and New Testaments, God uses physical, material, tangible signs in order to signify and seal the promises of the gospel (Rom 4:11). Through baptism, we are buried with Christ (Rom 6:4); through the washing of regeneration, Christ is at work (Tit 3:5); and as a means of grace God uses baptism to save us (1 Pet 3:21), even though “the efficacy of baptism is not tied to that moment of time wherein it is administered” (WCF 28.6).

In the Eucharist, we have *koinonia*, that is “participation” or “sharing” or “fellowship with” the body and blood Christ (1 Cor 10:16). Our Lord Jesus Christ himself said “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him,” and hence Christ uses the sacrament of Holy Communion, which Jesus called his body and blood of the new covenant, to unite us with himself (John 6:56), through the life-giving Holy Spirit (Jn 6:63). The Heidelberg Catechism explains what it means to eat Christ’s flesh and to drink his blood in terms of both believing the word of the gospel where Christ’s death and resurrection save us from our sins, but it is also “to be united more and more to his sacred body through the Holy Spirit, who lives both in Christ and in us,” since we remain on earth while Christ is ascended into heaven as our prophet, priest, and king (Heidelberg Catechism Q&A #76). As Fred Sanders put it, “Baptism shows our being in Christ; the Lord’s Supper shows Christ being in us” (*Union with Christ and the Life of Faith*, 124).

Finally, Christ promised to unite us with himself through prayer. We do need a mediator between humanity and God, and we have the singular, only sufficient one in the God-man, Jesus Christ himself (1 Tim 2:5). There is a *poverty* to our prayer; we do not know how to pray as we ought. Yet, the triune God works within us to make our prayers effective as God speaks to God through God. The Holy Spirit intercedes within us and our risen and ascended Lord Jesus also intercedes for us (Rom 8:26, 34). Hence, we can find mercy and grace to help in time of need, because we have a great high priest in heaven (Heb 4:14–16). Further, especially when we pray God’s word back to God, we are participating in Jesus’ own prayers since he is both the singer and the subject of the Psalms (Heb 2:12; Rom 15:3). Both personal, private devotion, and especially corporate or common prayer with others are means Christ uses to commune with and build up his people. 

Hence, the outward and ordinary means whereby Christ unites us with himself are the word of God, the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, and prayer. As Robert Letham captures:

> Salvation is our being united with Christ; the Father unites us to the incarnate Sno, who effects our salvation, by the Holy Spirit. This is one movement of God’s grace, for all three persons work in harmony and indivisible unity. The means the Spirit uses, from our side, is faith. This is because our salvation is the result of grace, something achieved for us, not anything we ourselves could do. It therefore comes to us from outside ourselves. However, saving fatih does not occur in a vacuum. We are brought to salvation in the context of the church. There is an outward side to what happens within. Union with Christ comes to external expression in baptism, as we are united with Christ’s church… and union with Christ is to be cultivated, developed, nourished. To that end, the Father has appointed that our union with the Son be matured by the Holy Spirit through the means he has appointed for that purpose… the preaching of the Word, the sacraments, and prayer… transformation in union with Christ occurs through the means of grace, until the church is entirely conformed to Christ, when it sees him as he is and is like him in glory."

## The Pastoral and Practical Significance of Union with Christ: Suffering, Ethics, Mission, Liturgy

Finally, union with Christ practically and pastorally transforms practical Christian living, especially our lived experiences of suffering, virtue formation, mission, and worship.

Suffering, in a modern and secular imagination, is either a necessary means whereby higher forms evolve from lower means (per Hegel and Darwin), or it is an utterly meaningless and randomized fate of the unfortunate, to which we can either respond by ordering our interior lives towards virtue (Neo-Stoicism) or by acquiring as much pleasure and material comfort as possible. 

Suffering indeed can feel meaningless (Ecc 1:2). We live and die amidst heartache within, and horrors without. There is hidden, psychological agony that we struggle to understand ourselves let alone articulate to others. Then, our bodies betray us, loved ones suffer, and there is the wreckage of history and unspeakable atrocities past and present that leave us speechless. 

Amidst it all, a Christian’s imagination of suffering will be gripped by our union with Christ. Her hope will be anchored to the one who endured not only unspeakable pain and shame, but real, cursed, godforsakenness; he entered the depths of an abyss and a shadowy darkness which none can fathom — yet did so in order to overcome the present evil age, as the first herald of the new creation, who lays his right hand upon us and says “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades” (Rev 1:17–18). Despite it all, we therefore become enable to say, with St. Paul:

> I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

Christians worship a God who is praised in Holy Scripture as the God of all consolation, even as he calls us to participate not only in the comfort which Christ alone can provide but also to suffer:

> Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort. (2 Corinthians 1:3–7)

Christian ministry specifically takes on new meaning when it is understood in light of our union with Christ, since it is fleshing out Christ’s otherwise hidden afflictions (Col 1:24). We not merely teach and warn in order to present people mature in Christ; it is actually Christ himself who is at work within us (Col 1:24–25). Christ is the one who makes an appeal through us, as we herald his sacred and imperishable gospel of reconciliation to the whole cosmos (2 Cor 5:19). God is the one who “in Christ” leads us in triumphal procession, and God is the one who “through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere,” as the fragrance of Christ is the aroma of life to those who are being saved and of death to those who are perishing (2 Cor 2:14–17). 

Union with Christ is not the kind of thing one grasps and then moves on from; it is an infinite, inexhaustible well that is the key to the whole of the Christian life. It is an unshakeable anchor of hope in our suffering and an unquenchable fire that fuels worship, mission, striving after holiness, and growth in practices that forge virtue for all who can say “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2:20).
### Being a Public School Kid
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/being-a-public-school-kid/
Last updated: 2026-08-24T11:00:23.000Z
Since the 1960s, conservative Christians have railed against public schools as little more than “leftist indoctrination factories.” Christian critics of “government schools” (as the cool Rushdoony kids say) regularly accuse administrators and teachers of hijacking captive public school audiences, pushing left-wing, anti-American history, weaponizing libraries, and turning their students against “traditional,” conservative, or Christian values. 

I’m not going to litigate the truth or prevalence of these claims. Instead, I’m going to offer a personal story about public school. 

Cards up front: I am a public school kid. Our two kids are public school kids, and my wife, who was a public school kid, has worked for decades in public schools. 

And while some of my conservative Christian friends might be tempted to label my story as an example of indirect, on-the-sly “leftist indoctrination” or an early, slippery slope version of “woke,” I’m going to argue differently. 

It was something very lovely, and something we desperately need more of today.

But first, I have to talk about 1974.

\*\*\*

It was an auspicious year in America. 

President Nixon’s resignation stunned the nation in August, and just weeks later, President Ford pardoned his predecessor and offered a conditional amnesty for Vietnam War draft evaders. In December, the Senate accused the Pentagon of spying on the White House, and Seymour Hersh broke his blockbuster story about the CIA’s domestic operations against antiwar activists. 

When historians talk about the feeling or mood evoked by this period — the zeitgeist —they simply call it “post-Watergate.” 

And if one locale incarnated “post-Watergate” more than any other, that place was Los Angeles.

Earlier, in May, the Los Angeles Police Department’s SWAT surrounded a house used by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). Television viewers across the country watched live as the siege concluded with gunfire and the house engulfed in flames. Mere days before Nixon’s resignation, Muharem Kurbegovic, a Yugoslav-American aerospace engineer arrested for lewd conduct and fired from his job, killed three and injured 36 in a bombing at Los Angeles International Airport. 

And it wasn’t just the violence. Los Angeles was at the forefront of America’s “post-Watergate” cultural transformation, whether in the debut of folk rock’s melancholic “Los Angeles sound,” or in the introduction of *All in the Family*, *M\*A\*S\*H*, and *The Mary Tyler Moore Show* — the controversial, socially conscious “greatest lineup in television history.” 

In 1974, Los Angeles was the vanguard. It premonished the almost-dawning American culture war.

It was also the year I entered Mrs. Mary Higuchi’s kindergarten class at John Adams Elementary School in Los Angeles’ South Bay suburb of Torrance. 

——————

Historically, Los Angeles’s South Bay—including Torrance and Gardena—has had one of the largest concentrations of Japanese residents in Southern California. Outside of Honolulu, Torrance has the largest Japanese population of any city in the United States. When Japanese immigrants came to California, many leased or bought South Bay farmland and also built nurseries and garden centers. Though much of the farmland was eventually replaced by tract homes and designer neighborhoods, the Japanese-American community remained. In fact, in the late 50s and early 60s, Honda, Datsun/Nissan, and Toyota all flocked to the South Bay to set up US headquarters. 

In 1974, John Adams Elementary was filled with Tanakas, Kikunos, Yoshiokas, Kamiyas, Uyematsus, Sumitomos, Nishihiras, Muranakas, and Oshimas. One of my good childhood friends was a Kashiwai. It was a mix of older Japanese-American families and newcomers, some direct from Japan and others via Okinawa or Hawaii. 

Growing up in Torrance didn’t just mean Farrell's Ice Cream Parlour and pizza, but also Children’s Day parties with koinobori (carp streamers). We all watched KWHY-TV and reenacted scenes from Japanese *tokusatsus* (live action) and robot cartoons like Kikaida, Kamen Rider, and Brave Raideen. My dear grandmother went out of her way one birthday to drive me to a Japanese toy store in Gardena so that I could get the chest missile-firing UFO Senshi Diapolon figure I’d seen on a commercial. I learned how to write my first name in Japanese script after my friend dropped it in a birthday card.

And in Mrs. Higuchi’s class, we bowed upon entering. We greeted her every day with “Konnichiwa, sensei!” We learned our numbers to ten in Japanese. If you ask me today to name the four primary islands of Japan, I will give them to you in order from northeast to southwest — precisely in the way Mrs. Higuchi taught me. My mom recalls Mrs. Higuchi keeping a very decorative class, complete with live fish swimming in containers that hung from the ceiling. I definitely remember tie-dyeing homemade kimonos as a class — which, let’s be honest, is 1970s California cultural fusion at its finest. It was a special and fond year for me, and my mom knitted Ms. Higuchi a shawl in appreciation. 

I’d always understood that one of the reasons — if not *the* reason — Mrs. Higuchi shared her culture and taught us rudimentary Japanese was because we had a non-English speaking Japanese girl in our class. If it’s accurate, it’s easy to see how inviting and wonderful of a classroom Mrs. Higuchi’s approach would make for a new, tentative, and perhaps scared foreign language speaker. 

That said, looking up Mrs. Higuchi decades later gave me a deeper appreciation of what she did for me and my classmates. It unveiled why what she did wasn’t perhaps merely about making a more comfortable classroom for a Japanese girl, if my memory is even correct. 

I had always pictured Mrs. Higuchi as being in her early or mid 20s when she was my kindergarten teacher. Kids don’t know better, and I was definitely off on my assessment. 

You see, in 1974, Hatsuko Mary Yoshioka Higuchi was actually 35 years old. 

And when she was just three years old, on 6 August 1942, Hatsuko Yoshioka, her parents, Goro and Kiyoko Yoshioka, and her younger sister, Etsuko, were removed from their South Bay home and arrived at the Poston War Relocation Center, just to the east of the Colorado River in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, where they were interned for three years as Family Number 42128.

\*\*\*

A standard high school American history textbook will certainly address Japanese-American internment, but it often won’t give a good sense of the rapidity with which it all happened. It will outline the locations of the different internment camps in the American West and Arkansas, but it almost assuredly lacks details on the organizational and bureaucratic players behind the camps, or about the internal politics of the camps themselves. 

The US War Relocation Authority (WRA) started construction on Poston in March, just a month following President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066\. The camp was still being built in May and June, as the first Japanese American families arrived. Unlike most camps, the incoming families weren’t first filtered through “assembly centers” (like the one at Santa Anita Racetrack). Instead, they came directly from their homes, farms, and nurseries in Southern and Central California. By September, the Poston War Relocation Center was, in effect, Arizona’s third-largest city. Its population was nearly half the size of Tucson, and 40% of Phoenix.

Poston was different from all of the other Japanese internment camps in one, specific way. It was initially managed jointly by the WRA and the US Office of Indian Affairs (OIA). It was located wholly within the bounds of the Colorado River Indian Reservation, built on Mohave and Chemehuevi land. The two tribes had not wanted to house the camp, but, overruling tribal elders, the WRA and OIA considered Poston a bureaucratic win-win. The WRA got its camp, and the OIA believed it would ultimately reap longer-term infrastructure benefits (like new roads and irrigation systems) without having to break its own budget.

Ariel Wiebe, a doctoral student at University of New Mexico, recently explained how the OIA saw the internment camp through the lens of social science. The OIA believed that lessons learned from the “colony’s” governance could assist in postwar reconstruction efforts. Wiebe highlights many of the tensions that rarely make it into high school textbooks — camp conflicts between first-generation Japanese immigrants (issei) and second-generation Japanese-Americans (nisei), labor unrest, fights over wages, and fears of law enforcement informants.

Poston was actually three separate camp “units” (Poston I, Poston II, and Poston III), eventually barbed wire-fenced as a single entity. Each of the three units were sub-divided into what might be thought of as “neighborhood” blocks, containing about 14 individual housing barracks, a mess hall, communal restrooms and showers, and laundry facilities. In each of the housing barracks, four families were typically allotted 500 square feet of living space each. 

The Yoshioka family was assigned to Poston III, Block 318\. This meant one single room — about the size of Mrs. Higuchi’s elementary classroom — for her issei father, kibei nisei mother, and, at first, Hatsuko and her sister. Another sister and brother would be born at Poston, eventually making the family a household of two parents and four Japanese-American children straddling the nisei-sansei divide. (Third-generation Japanese-Americans are often referred to as “sansei.”)

Like others at Poston, Hatsuko’s parents divided the family’s space into private “bedrooms” with sheets. And for a good part of the year, that space was the only spot to escape the heat. Poston’s average summer daytime temperature runs about 105 degrees, and it’s almost always above 100 between May and September, which makes it unsurprising that Poston I, II, and III were colloquially called “Roasten," "Toasten" and “Dustin.”

In a 2019 oral history, Mrs. Higuchi’s memories of Poston were understandably fleeting— just like my own memories of her class. Her remembrances centered around the family’s living quarters, the weather, and, unsurprisingly for her age at the time, play:

"Well, we played a lot, I know...I don't really remember that much more except for we used to just play around, run around all over. During the daytime, mainly because it was so hot outside, we would play indoors. We would just run through the house and jump on the bed, and we would use it as a, what do you call it, like a trampoline, and we would just jump all around."

"Well, we didn't have a playground with equipment, swings and so forth, however, we did play outdoors a lot. I guess more indoors because of the heat. I don't know, we enjoyed coloring, paper dolls. But I really don't remember that much more because we were so young at that time, three, four, five."

Interned at Poston, Mrs. Higuchi’s father, Goro Yoshioka, a first-generation immigrant vegetable hauler, became a mess hall cook. Kiyoko, her mother — who had been born an American citizen in Santa Monica, California, sent back to Japan by an overwhelmed, widowed father at the age of six, and returned in her early twenties to work at a Southern California cannery — settled into the camp’s sewing classes and learned how to knit. Mrs. Higuchi’s most vivid memories were of her mother’s struggles with childrearing and day-to-day domestic life:

"\[My mother\] kept herself pretty busy with the four kids, and everything had to be hand washed, of course. Washing all the diapers, the cloth diapers and always hanging them, and I could remember the rope being strung across the room with clothes dripping onto, the water dripping onto the floor, because she didn't have a wringer or anything, you just did the best you can to get the water out. And mainly because there was severe dust storms in Arizona, so she had to dry most of her clothes indoors."

"We did go to the mess hall and eat, but my mother found it really difficult because when we went there, we just wanted to play, run around, and not eat. And so she had a hard time getting us to sit down and eat, and caring for the little ones. So oftentimes we would just stay in the barracks and my father would bring home the food for us and we would eat there in the barracks."

And then, after three years, just as rapidly as it had been constructed and populated, Poston closed. 

A little over 100 days after Japan’s surrender, all of the interned Japanese-Americans at Poston had left. Most took buses or trains back to their old California hometowns. The camp and all its infrastructure then reverted to the Colorado River Indian Reservation, which, in 1945, added Hopi and Navajo tribes to its jurisdiction. 

\*\*\*

Mrs. Higuchi dates her family’s return to the South Bay to her start of her first grade year. She was six years old, and had just completed kindergarten at Poston. 

Her family came back with very little, and they returned to very little. 

They hadn’t been allowed many possessions and heirlooms at Poston, so her parents had left boxes and suitcases with a neighbor. Mrs. Higuchi relates what happened when they went to collect their belongings:

"...And when we came back, a friend, our neighbor, had said that they would take care of our suitcases and all our boxes of goods that we were not able to take to camp. But when we came back, we went into that barn, and I remember my mother crying because everything was broken into. There were just a few broken dishes, empty boxes all torn apart, there was nothing there. And so all her wedding gifts, I know she was just heartbroken to come back to that."

Goro Yoshioka didn’t have a truck, so he wasn’t able to get back into vegetable hauling. They, however, had access to land for rent in the South Bay, so Hatusko Yoshioka and her family learned to farm. The years between 1945 and 1951, as Mary Yoshioka wrote to her training teacher, were “the happiest days of \[her\] life.” This comes across in her oral history, too. Mrs. Higuchi talked of her father’s baked goods, his pier-fishing trips with her brother, Tetsuo, playing tag and hide-and-seek in the cauliflower fields, doing homework and art at the dining room table in the evenings, her mother reading them Japanese stories, and walking alongside her father as he irrigated the crops. The kids went to public school, and as their Japanese names were considered difficult to pronounce, the teachers soon bestowed them more “American” names: Mary (Hatsuko), Betty (Etsuko), Mitzi (Mitsuko), and Jimmy (Tetsuo). 

Her parents saved enough money to purchase their own property, but, in November 1951, right before they could move, Goro Yoshioka, who had been ill on-and-off at Poston, died of heart failure. Mary Yoshioka was in the middle of seventh grade, and during the Christmas holiday, she, her mother, and her three younger siblings moved to Torrance. Kiyoko Yoshioka, now widowed, had a house physically moved from Gardena to Torrance, and — having no other option — transitioned into a life of farming romaine lettuce and cauliflower, and into single parenthood.

In the face of this, Mary’s mother was adamant — adamant — that her children get a solid education, including piano and Saturday Japanese language classes. “Every day,” Mrs. Higuchi recalled her mother saying, “it was benkyo shinasai, ‘study, study, study,’ benkyo shinasai.” 

And Mary Yoshioka was the oldest child par excellence. 

Farming at home, she became president of the Girls’ League, and in her high school senior year (1956-1957), she was Torrance High’s homecoming queen, rode in the parade celebrating Torrance’s designation as an “All America City,” and, scholarships in hand, she graduated and went to UCLA. That same fall, she’d even had the time to represent Gardena Valley as a Nisei Week Festival Queen contestant and win the local Miss Walteria pageant. 

Mary majored in education, and she didn’t shy away at all from extracurriculars. “I was very active at UCLA,” she said, “I was in social clubs, I was in all the big social clubs that were really popular.” These included the California Club, the Prytanean Women’s Honor Society, and UCLA’s Bruin Belles Service Association. “I was Bruin Belles president,” she added, “where we would go meet the football teams, and any visitors coming\[.\] \[W\]e would be the official greeters.” After graduation, she began her student teaching. By the end of 1964, she’d started full-time at John Adams and married Mokoto Higuchi, a recent Loyola law graduate, a fellow UCLA alumnus, and the past president of UCLA’s Nisei Bruins. 

And, by 1974, she’d even made her own splash as an elementary educator. From 1967 to 1970, Mrs. Higuchi and another John Adams teacher, Ms. Karen McDonough, experimented with whether sex-segregated first-grade classrooms helped young boys read sooner and better. Their approach, based on earlier studies from a school in Virginia, made the local papers, which played up the school’s program as a type of “good” and “novel” form of “segregation” in the Torrance Unified School District.

\*\*\*

It’s fuzzy, but I can remember one particular moment of correction in Mrs. Higuchi’s class. Being an oldest child myself, I was very upset that I’d not been able to draw a perfectly round circle for an art project, so I’d cajoled our teacher’s aide to draw one for me. Mrs. Higuchi would have none of it, and told me that no matter the result, I was to be doing my own artwork. 

I wouldn’t learn until long, long after I’d left the South Bay how important art was to her.

Her mother Kiyoko didn’t enjoy drawing as much as her late father, but Mrs. Higuchi believed she’d inherited her mother’s close attention to “the shapes and beauty of things.” She described her mother as entranced by nature, and — perhaps not surprising given Poston’s history — her mother had a lifelong fascination with Native American culture. Mrs. Higuchi attributed most of her own interest in art, though, to her father. “He used to spend so much time drawing every night with us,” she recalled, “I think probably my interest \[in art\] comes from his spending time with us in that way.” Goro Yoshioka not only drew, but he worked with his hands. In Poston, he hand-carved birds and butterflies, made vases, and fashioned Sonoran desert ironwood into sculpture. 

And later, Mrs. Higuchi met an artist who invested in her just as her own father had. 

For many years, she taught art classes at Torrance’s Joslyn Recreation Center. It was there, in 1989, that she began a friendship with Henry Fukuhara, the prominent Japanese-American watercolorist and mixed-media artist. 

Born in 1913, Fukuhara demonstrated an early aptitude in art at Santa Monica High School. Financial constraints meant Fukuhara wasn’t able to complete art school, yet, when he was only in his mid-20s, the Automobile Club of Southern California published some of his linoleum-cut block landscape prints, and they were displayed at the Los Angeles Museum. Money was tight, and Fukuhara’s artistry took a more applied turn as he ran a landscaping business and nursery with his brother.

Then came the war. 

As was Mrs. Higuchi’s family, Fukuhara, his wife, and children were interned, held with over 10,000 other Japanese-Americans at the Manzanar War Relocation Center. There, on the desolate, eastern slope of California’s Sierra Mountains, Fukuhara’s prowess landed him employment in the camp’s drafting department, where he surveyed locations for gravesites. In his spare time, he did his own sketch work. He painted his first watercolor. He also received permission to travel to other internment camps, which he also sketched. 

One way to obtain passage out of the internment camp system was through furlough work, typically on farms facing wartime labor shortages. This is something Fukuhara did on and off. Eventually, by promising to move away from the West Coast, he and his family left Manzanar permanently and moved to Long Island, New York. He published a book of his internment sketches in 1944, which were exhibited for Manzanar’s own residents for two weeks that same year. Thankfully, the California Historical Society has made Fukuhara’s prints available for online viewing.

Fukuhara, his father, and his brother ran a successful greenhouse business in New York for over 40 years. He didn’t jump back into art until the 1970s, but over that decade and into the next, his watercolors were displayed in galleries and public buildings across Long Island. He retired to Southern California in the late 1980s, moving back into his old, childhood home. Teaching through Santa Monica College’s Emeritus program, he continued to run exhibitions, and offered Thursday and Saturday workshops (or “paint outs”), giving students the opportunity to explore their craft, plein air, around greater Los Angeles.

“\[Fukuhara\] really encouraged me,” said Mrs. Higuchi. “I mean, there was a special bonding that occurred and he was just fatherly, like missing my long-gone father.” Mrs. Higuchi describes the kind of mentor everyone hopes for. She began to attend his “paint outs.” He wrote her weekly letters, pointed her to important books and exhibitions, and connected her to other international watercolorists. 

In 1998, Fukuhara — with a core group that included Mrs. Higuchi — began taking students to Manzanar, which became multi-day “paint outs” in and around the former camp. Fukuhara held his Manzanar workshops until 2005, at which time a friend, Al Setton, took over for him. Fukuhara died in 2010, at the age of 96\. Mrs. Higuchi described Fukuhara’s approach to the Manzanar “paint-outs”:

“\[W\]e went there for the weekend, and he would do a \[demonstration piece\] of Mt. Whitney or go to the Manzanar site, and he would paint there. And then he'd let us go off on our own and paint. \[A\]nd at maybe two o'clock, we would gather together and we \[would\] critique\[.\] \[W\]e would put all our paintings against the buildings at the \[Manzanar\] visitor center. And we would sit out there and he would \[critique\] our work, and that was quite an experience.”

Fukuhara inspired Mrs. Higuchi’s exploration of her own family’s internment experience through mixed media, especially after she retired from Torrance Unified School District in 2003\. Her “Executive Order \[EO\] 9066” collection is the most well-known, with individual paintings from the series shown over the last two decades across museums, exhibition halls, and university galleries in California and the Western United States. 

In her EO 9066 series, Mrs. Higuchi often blurs or sometimes removes the faces from the Japanese American subjects. They’re anonymized, reduced to a sole racial category, reflecting the US government’s disregard of the individual in internment. She weaves barbed wire in and around the figures, framing them on one side or the other with an ever-present guard tower. Some paintings later in her series focus on the child’s world of play in the camps, but no gallerygoer ever escapes the War Department’s order, “Instructions to All Persons of Japanese Ancestry,” What the War Department plastered on posters up and down the West Coast explodes across many of Mrs. Higuchi’s EO 9066 canvasses. It is an essential element of her first five. 

Sometimes, however, Mrs. Higuchi’s use of wartime phrases is part of a more complex, layered conversation. Take, for example, EO 9066 Series 11, which depicts Spider Rock in Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly National Monument. The War Department’s order is there, but it’s barely discernible. You can see some of it buried on the side of a three-table-topped mountain on the right. Glancing to the sharp peak on the left, one finds starkly carved words from a January 1942 newspaper column by Hearst sportswriter Henry McLemore. These words, calling for “herd\[ing\]” and “pack\[ing off\] Japanese-Americians to the “Badlands,” are actually emblazoned at Manzanar’s Visitor Center. One easily observes in the painting McLemore’s poisoned conclusion, “Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.” Ghostly guard towers surveil the camps on each peak. The piece, Mrs. Higuchi explains, was all but complete but for an announcement from the US Department of Justice. In May 2011, President Obama’s Acting Solicitor General publicly admitted that his predecessor, Charles Fahy, hid a 1942 Office of Naval Intelligence report from the Supreme Court in the Hirabayashi, Yasui, and Korematsu cases. The report assessed, at the time, that Japanese Americans on the West Coast didn’t constitute a military threat. Mrs. Higuchi splashed the center of the canvas, in blood red, with language from the ONI report, scrawling parts of her own journal entry about the announcement below it. “Today,” one clearly distinguishes in her cursive, “I feel anger.” 

Mrs. Higuchi’s artwork became a doorway, just slightly ajar, into her mother’s struggles and fears during internment. Kiyoko Yoshioka traveled to Manzanar with her daughter, who laughs as she recalls her mother’s High Desert napping. As for many other elderly Japanese Americans, it was hard for her mother to talk about Poston. Even when Mrs. Higuchi gently asked while painting, she encountered anguished hesitancy. “Hatusko,” her mother would answer, “hanashitakunai” \[“I don’t want to talk about it.”\]. Mrs. Higuchi would in turn plead, “kodomo no tame ni” \[“For the sake of the children.”\]. Eventually, Mrs. Higuchi was able to convince her mother to give a few of her thoughts on paper. “Kyampu no koto omoidasu,” \[“I remember the camp.”\], her mother wrote. Mrs. Higuchi described further:

“\[her memory of Poston\] makes her very sad, mainly because she thought about the children. ‘What's going to happen to my children, kodomotachi?’ \[‘The children..’\] ‘Kodomotachi,’ she said, We would come home, and come home fighting and crying, and she said, ‘Watashi mo…' \[‘I also (was crying)’\] When we came home, she, herself, ‘Namida ga, boroboro,’ \[‘The tears were pouring out.’\] the tears came down her face as well. She just could not help crying, because all she kept thinking is, ‘What is going to happen to my children?’”

——————

Today, evangelical Christian subculture is fixated on the so-called wrong uses of empathy. Over and over again, one hears about toxic or “untethered” empathy, and how people “manipulate” empathy, or use it for “emotional blackmail.” Sympathy, as two scholars have related, is giving a hand to someone trapped in a pit, while empathy — well, that’s like jumping down into the pit so that you can better relate to “pit living,” or adopting the grievances of everyone unlucky enough to have fallen into a pit. Sympathy, with its proper distance and boundaries, is taken as a good. Empathy, on the other hand, they say, leads to “emotional fusion.” It assumes any and all victims are in the right, regardless of what those victims stand for.

I can’t tell you how much I despise this debate. 

This war on empathy has done little but produce a greater coarsening among fellow Christians in the public square, particularly when one talks about the more distasteful, horrible moments of American history. It’s become much, much too easy for conservative Christians to yell “toxic empathy!” or “woke!” or “emotional fusion!” in any debates that could involve race, class, civil rights, or political liberalism. I’m even willing to wager that some of my fellow conservative Christians take this very article as tacking in the direction of “toxic empathetic” — intentionally manipulative — for no other reason than it addresses internment.

Setting empathy against sympathy is, in the end, a losing tactic. 

Mrs. Higuchi never invited our kindergarten class to "actively share” in her family’s lasting emotional pain. She never addressed her family’s internment to engender pity or allow us to acknowledge pain from a safe distance. Again, I’d not known at all about her early childhood experience until looking her up decades later. To the best I can recall, she didn't read to us any books about Japanese-American internment. (In fact, it doesn’t appear there \*were\* any kindergarten-level picture books on internment until the early 1990s). 

I think we can all agree there are very few, if truly any, hand-holds for kindergarteners when it comes to Japanese-American internment. You can't teach them *Korematsu vs. United States*. You can't teach them Judge Robert Jackson’s warning about how criminalizing inheritable characteristics is a “loaded weapon” in the wrong government hands. You’re not going to get them to understand whether the judicial validity of a curfew order should have been extended to forcible relocation. There's something to be said about age-appropriateness, ensuring young students know America’s good and true ideals deep deep down, which makes the cracking and breaking of those ideals ever more striking to kids as they mature. 

There was nothing remotely directly or indirectly “woke” or “leftist” about Mrs. Higuchi’s public school classroom. There was no “indoctrination.” It wasn’t about empathy or sympathy. Instead, it was something much more classically humanist — perhaps even personalist. She taught love. She taught us to love Japanese language, to love Japanese culture, and to love Japanese Americans, and to love them all *together with one another.* She taught us to love *difference*, to *honor* difference, to *enjoy* difference, and enjoy it *together with one another*. She taught us *connection* *together with one another*.

Her classroom acknowledged the South Bay’s Japanese-American community. Her approach said, “Our community is worth bringing into the classroom. Our language and traditions are worth bringing into the classroom.” To a first-generation, non-English speaking Japanese girl, her message was “I want you to be at ease, so I'm going to teach all of these other students some of *your* language, and I want you to know that it is ok for you to speak your language here.” To those in the class, like me, who weren’t of Japanese heritage, it was, “Behold your neighbors. They are who you live around. Love them and appreciate them for who they are.” 

That is how you teach kindergartners about internment. 

You teach them to love and honor their neighbors, the neighbors’ heritage, and their neighbors’ culture, and in doing so, you make the concept of internment incomprehensible to them — impossible to even countenance. Moreover, again as they mature, you also make them horror-struck that it was ever considered a viable option to begin with.

“What is going to happen to my children?” One doesn’t have to declare oneself for Tribe Empathy or Tribe Sympathy to know — really know — a mother’s lament. Hers is a quintessential human fear, and it’s not difficult at all to grasp how much pain it caused her at Poston. 

Mrs. Higuchi has continued to give talks over the last decade or so. She has visited other internment camp sites, attended pilgrimages, sat on internment-related panel discussions, and painted. She still tells her audiences about her mother’s overall hesitancy (“I don’t want to talk about it.”), but she emphasizes to them, as she did to her mother, it *is* something that we all must talk about, *kodomo no tame ni* \[“For the sake of the children.”\].

In today's atmosphere, one could offer an even greater sense of urgency -- *Kore wa shinken ni hanasanakereba narimasen* \[“We must talk seriously about this.”\]

For me and for my fellow public school kindergarteners, Mrs. Higuchi fit a larger world into a Torrance elementary classroom. It made 1974 a little less auspicious for all of us. 

And it was lovely.

*Mukashi osewa ni natta koto o, ima mo taihen kansha shite orimasu.*
### Character for Communion: Ecumenical Habits of the Heart from Berkouwer and Echeverria
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/character-for-communion-ecumenical-habits-of-the-heart-from-berkouwer-and-echeverria/
Last updated: 2026-09-03T19:52:45.000Z
Several years ago, I had a chance encounter that felt like the start of a joke: two Presbyterians, one Anglo-Catholic, one Lutheran, and one Baptist, all ministers, walked into a coffee shop. 

We were there for different meetings, but as clergyman after clergyman walked in the door, we couldn’t help but laugh. Handshakes and hugs were exchanged, and one crowned the occasion with a pronouncement: “this is ecumenism in action.” Well, leave it to the Presbyterian to make a categorical correction; my friend responded, with a bit of a wry smile: “yes, but not BS ecumenism.” 

His words hit home. 

In Northern Virginia, ministerial associations abound. In my “secular-but-pluralistic, white-collar” culture, it’s considered good form to meet with other church leaders. The county even hosts annual clergy conversations, aimed at gathering church leaders with department officials to discuss community concerns. Non-profits court local congregations regularly, looking for partnerships. And if your church tries to host a booth at the local county fair, you’re likely to get lumped in with the rest of the faith-based organizations in “church row,” presumably because we’re offering similar things. 

In this region, such “ecumenism” is socially acceptable, even seemingly virtuous: we join hands for the common good, and we stay silent about the doctrines that offend. While there are certain social and organizational benefits to knowing leaders from other denominations, these sorts of culturally-approved gatherings ultimately fall short of real ecumenical work. By papering over our real differences and deepest convictions, we embrace the shallowest form of unity, which in turn erases true diversity. Our proximity to one another may increase, but our communion with one another withers. 

Of course, a reactionary response doesn’t solve the problem. In the face of cultural pressure to diminish distinctives, many churches simply double-down on partisanship, associating only with the rare few that approach near conformity to their own doctrinal, or cultural, ideals. But given Jesus’s High Priestly Prayer in John 17, and our credal commitment to “one holy catholic church, the communion of saints,” circling the wagons isn’t a viable solution either. As Christians, we need each other. And considering the spiritual needs and hungers of modern society, the world needs us, too, together. We need real, not BS, “ecumenism in action.”

What would that look like, in practice? In good Presbyterian fashion, let me recommend a book.

Eduardo Echeverria’s remarkable 2013 ecumenical study, [*Berkouwer and Catholicism: Disputed Questions*](https://brill.com/display/title/23106?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*,* is one exceptional model for meaningful ecumenism. Though brimming with academic rigor, the book is, at heart, a conversation: scholar to scholar, Christian to Christian. 

Echeverria first presents the world of Vatican II Catholicism, an era of Roman Catholic renewal amidst a culture of vast social and technological change. In this environment, theologians such as Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Karl Rahner worked to recover ancient sources to re-articulate Catholic distinctives for this new age. And as the Roman Catholic Church wrestled with its identity, we find the Dutch Reformed theologian G. C. Berkouwer listening in, laboring to understand, engage, and respond faithfully. His sustained engagement with Catholic dogma offers the main substance of the book. Throughout the work, Echeverria, himself a Roman Catholic scholar with a Neo-Calvinist background, presents Berkouwer’s theological treatment of several primary doctrinal disputes, and then he continues the conversation, probing for areas of agreement and disagreement, and offering constructive criticism to advance the conversation. What emerges is a study in ecumenical character, where two Christians strive to “get rid of misunderstanding as well as to arrive at real and abiding differences,” a process that promises to “deepen \[both\] self-understanding and…communion.”

In this spirit, I will highlight the ecumenical habits of the heart that are modeled in this scholarly discussion. Once we see such ecumenical character on display between a Protestant and a Catholic, we can begin to imagine the possibility and promise of real ecumenism for Christians of all traditions in pluralistic, progressive, and secular societies.

What becomes immediately apparent is that ecumenism is not easy. It may be an “adventure,” as Berkouwer terms it, but healthy ecumenism requires effort. For both Berkouwer and Echeverria, this adventure cost a lifetime of study and hundreds of pages of text. What drove such a “blood, sweat, and tears” labor of love? 

## **Commitment to Unity**

First and foremost: both share a deeply theological **commitment to unity**. Both Berkouwer and Echeverria allow themselves to feel the burden of ecclesial division. Both are moved by Jesus’s Upper Room teaching. Both begin the story of the Church with God’s intention to gather one people together in worship. In light of God’s plan, Berkouwer laments this division, saying “the severance of unity is a catastrophe for the world.” 

At the same time, unity cannot be purchased by erasing theological distinction. In Berkouwer’s words, “we cannot make believe the differences do not exist \[between the churches\].” This leaves Christians in an uncomfortable theological and missiological middle-ground, with only one clear way forward: pressing on toward unity by engaging our differences in real relationships. 

In this, Echeverria invokes John Paul II’s vision of healthy ecumenism: a movement from “antagonism and conflict to a situation where each party recognizes the other as a partner. When undertaking dialogue, each side must presuppose in the other a desire for reconciliation, for unity in truth.” In this way, ecumenical dialogue is marked, first of all, by Christian hope, a holy longing to see Jesus’s prayer for unity bear fruit in real time. Driven by such hope, the ecumenical project takes on a spirit of optimism and openness of one Christian for another. 

## **Epistemic Humility**

This move toward one another requires a second commitment: **epistemic humility**. Theological honesty requires us to acknowledge that our doctrinal commitments emerge from within the confines of the human experience. Thus, Christians of all convictions are faced with a perpetual challenge: communicating timeless truths within the constraints of time and space. As Berkouwer says himself, “the historical-factual process...does not transcend the times, but is entangled with them in all sorts of ways. It cannot be denied that one encounters the undeniable fact of the situated setting of the various pronouncements made by the Church in any given era.” 

This does not diminish the truth of the Church’s confessions, but it does increase our appreciation of the divine mystery. As Echeverria helpfully puts it, at all times, “we know much more than we can tell.” Propositional statements may accurately encapsulate aspects of divine reality, but they do not capture the total abundance of God. Therefore, humility is always required.

As an example of epistemic humility, Berkouwer does not immediately denigrate Roman Catholics for believing that dogmas can develop over time. He accepts the fact that the “historical-factual process” impacts all Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant. As Herman Bavinck demonstrates in his *Reformed Dogmatics,* the Reformed tradition takes our embodied limitations seriously, but opts for a different solution. Rather than opening the door to dogmatic development, our human limitations require us to lean more fully on the sufficiency of Scripture. But the different direction does not erase the shared starting point—as created and fallen humans, we do know more than we can tell—so both parties enter dialogue with a sense of epistemic humility.

## **Responsible Listening**

Such humility raises the need for the third commitment of ecumenical character: **responsible listening**. In his dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church, Berkouwer was convinced that his task carried “the responsibility first of all to understand Catholic doctrine in its most prominent and fundamental thoughts.” Such understanding required sustained study. As Echeverria shows throughout the book, Berkouwer read the works of the major *nouvelle théologie* academics, actively engaged with the documents of Vatican I and II, and even traveled to Rome as an invited observer of the Vatican II proceedings. 

As well, he wrote and re-wrote various assessments of the renewal movements and theological developments throughout his career. At every step in his journey, Berkouwer took Roman Catholicism seriously, and sought to understand it as a complex system, worthy of respectful cross-examination. In Echeverria’s assessment, Berkouwer “always listened seriously to the other before he responded, and once he responded it was not as if everything that could be said about theological differences between Rome and the Reformation had now been said, and thus the discussion with Catholicism was over.”

Echeverria’s response shows a similar commitment to responsible listening. Indeed, this is one of the book’s commendable strengths: it is both a master-class in Catholic dogmatics and in Neo-Calvinism itself. For example, in his discussion of faith and reason, Echeverria demonstrates a detailed knowledge of the inner workings of Dutch Reformed epistemology, probing the significance of Herman Dooyeweerd on the Neo-Calvinist suspicion of natural law, and of the separation of classical theism from the biblical storyline, which rendered the “structure/direction” explanation of creation and fall, popularized by Al Wolters. This detailed study not only offers valuable insights for both Reformed and Catholic Christians; it also showcases the biblical virtue of a willingness to listen, being “quick to hear, slow to speak” (James 1:19) when assessing the theological commitments of another tradition.

## **Charitable Evaluation**

Having listened thoroughly, the fourth component of ecumenical character is **charitable evaluation**. As compared to his more-critical pre-Vatican II writings, Berkouwer’s later work seeks to affirm as much common ground as possible, before highlighting areas of continued disagreement. Then, when highlighting disagreement, he worked to get to the real root of the difference, offering a critique as true as possible to the source material, for the sake of growth. As he puts it, ecumenical dialogue, at its best, 

> \[gets\] at the real meaning of past controversy so that popular caricatures that each side holds of the other can be corrected. But the desire to get rid of misunderstanding is motivated by an equally strong will to get at the real and abiding differences. And it is at these points of differences that the ecumenical dialogue comes alive with both urgency and desire.

A good example of charitable evaluation is Berkouwer’s treatment of the traditional Protestant dogmatic punching-bag: the Catholic exaltation of Mary. Rather than settling for a caricature claiming that Rome deified Mary, Berkouwer was able to pin-point the real concern: “her disputed function as co-redemptrix.” Pursuing this specific trajectory required an earnest engagement with the dominant Catholic approaches to Mary—dogmatic maximalism and minimalism—evaluating their core motivations and concerns. Only then did he move to critique. 

In short, Berkouwer sought both common ground and dogmatic specificity. He agreed with the Catholics—they were not mingling Mary with deity any more than the early church did when calling Mary the “God-bearer.” Further, he agreed with the minimalist Catholics—whatever Mary’s role, Christ must be the sole agent of salvation, and Scripture must be the guide for doctrine. Having found the bedrock of the debate, Berkouwer then moved to offer the Reformed critique: Scripture simply does not exalt Mary the way Catholicism does, whether maximalist or minimalist.

## **Biblical Conviction**

Thus, charitable evaluation leads to the final commitment of ecumenical character: **biblical conviction**. Since the Scriptures are the final authority in any doctrinal dispute, once the lines of dialogue have been drawn and the real issue established, the Scriptures must be allowed to speak. This is the final move in Berkouwer’s doctrinal debates. 

For instance, when discussing the relationship of reason and faith in Christianity, Berkouwer establishes his Reformed anthropology on the foundation of the Bible: “we never encounter such a man—man-as-reason…—in Scripture.” This, of course, is not meant as a simplistic “slam dunk” against Catholic dogma; Berkouwer understands that his fellow interlocutors are also dealing with Scripture. Nonetheless, the final appeal in any dispute must be made according to Scripture; on this foundation we stand.

This commitment to speak with biblical conviction set Berkouwer’s course with the aforementioned debate about Mary. At multiple points in his writing, he engages Marian theology with a final appeal to Scripture. As Berkouwer reads them, the Scriptures do not present Mary as co-redemptrix, nor indicate that she saw herself as anything of the sort. Nor do they assign a mediatorial role in any aspect of redemption to anyone other than Christ. Thus, while the Scriptures lead us to appreciate the example of Mary’s faithfulness, they do not permit us to view her as anything more than an exemplar of humble faith, a “blessed sister,” yes, but not an “exalted mother.” 

To this, the Catholic may reply, as Echeverria does, that there are biblical resources for an exalted view of Mary, via typological readings of Genesis 3:15, John 19:26, Revelation 12:1, and other texts. But, far from being the end of the debate, this biblical back-and-forth is really just the beginning of a rich and multifaceted conversation, as we engage God’s “living and active” Word (Hebrews 4:12), the unfolding drama of redemption with Christ at the center. In this way, the debate moves from propositional, doctrinal statements to Scripture itself, with both Catholic and Protestant holding our blessed book, and saying “this is how we read God’s Word.” 

Total agreement is unlikely, but this doesn’t render the endeavor fruitless. Our ultimate goal is not simply intellectual agreement, but genuine spiritual communion with fellow Christians, as far as our differences allow, this side of heaven. And the best path to spiritual communion is to wrestle earnestly, in good faith, with Scripture itself, together. 

This is where ecumenical character leads us, no matter which denomination we engage with. We begin with a fundamental commitment to unity, which opens the desire to pursue spiritual and theological fellowship. From this commitment, we embrace our own epistemic humility, acknowledging that we all “see through a glass, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12), no matter how rigorous our confession. This humility allows us to lean into the relationship with responsible listening and charitable understanding, seeking to thoroughly understand the tradition (and the person) with whom we are dealing, and to celebrate our commonalities before confronting our differences. Then, finally, we speak with biblical conviction, bringing the truth of the Scriptures to bear. 

Of course, this kind of ecumenical pursuit has its risks. In our openness to others, we may cede too much ground, or fail to acknowledge the true extent of our differences. Echeverria even wonders if Berkouwer goes too far at times. Concerning the historically-contingent nature of human language, Berkouwer asks, “May we simply remain where Chalcedon stood, or shouldn’t we much rather regard Chalcedon as a beginning, as pointing the way, as protection against a specific heresy in order to subsequently direct us once again to the full gospel?” It is a provocative question, indeed, and unfortunately, Berkouwer never gives an answer. And without great care, this line of questioning easily becomes a wholesale abandonment of the church’s creeds and canons, under the auspices of faithful progress. Thus, it is not without cause that some conservative evangelicals correlate ecumenical dialogue with doctrinal drift. Caution is needed.

But when ecumenical character is exercised to the fullest, “the adventure in ecumenicity” reaps great rewards. By listening carefully to a different ecclesial tradition, you come to a greater appreciation of your own. The “gifts and graces” (to quote the Westminster Confession of Faith) of the other tradition sharpen your own grasp of God’s truth and push toward greater faithfulness. The disagreements renew gratitude for the gifts of God present in your own denominational home. On the missional front, our network for outreach is strengthened. And on the personal side, the work of bridge-building generates friendship, partnership, and spiritual communion among believers. In this way, “ecumenism in action,” conducted with healthy ecumenical character, brings blessing, as “iron sharpens iron” (Proverbs 27:17), and as fellow disciples are drawn toward one another in love.
### When Therapy Culture Comes to Church
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/when-therapy-culture-comes-to-church/
Last updated: 2026-08-21T11:00:56.000Z
(Join Matthew Loftus and *Mere Orthodoxy* editor-in-chief Jake Meador next week [for an online forum](https://mereorthodoxy.com/forum/) discussing his book.)

**Matthew Loftus.** [***Resisting Therapy Culture: The Dangers of Pop Psychology and How the Church Can Respond***](https://www.ivpress.com/resisting-therapy-culture?srsltid=AfmBOooJmVtuPFCFpBx%5FqFJDUm6CtutiP-CelajmDEaIwbIJRuhSAFkK&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. InterVarsity Press, 2026\. $21.99\. 224 pp.**

If you spend any time in conservative circles—whether those who are conservative Christian or merely conservative politically—chances are that you have been exposed to something like the following narrative. Half a millennium ago, Western thought was dominated by the assumptions of orthodox Christianity. There was a clear sense of communal identity and the common good. The world was seen as enchanted—full of spiritual realities. Then with the metaphysics of William of Ockham, the theology of Martin Luther, or the philosophy of René Descartes, everything took a turn toward the individual and his or her pursuit of truth, whether in the form of scientific rationalism or expressive emotivism.

The narrative goes a bit differently depending on the focus of the commentator. Some chiefly blame the thinkers of the Enlightenment—Kant, Hume, Rousseau—while others save their fire for the Romantic poets or the psychosexuality of Sigmund Freud. The resulting societal malaise goes by different names: emotivism and managerialism (per Alasdair MacIntyre), technocracy (per Jacques Ellul), secularism (per Charles Taylor), or the therapeutic (per Philip Rieff). 

This last designation speaks most clearly to our psychological depths. We live in what the sociologist Frank Furedi dubbed “therapy culture” in his 2003 book *Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age*. The term is now widely used to describe what many consider a societal emergency: the co-opting of psychological terminology and concepts by the wellness industry, social media influencers, political activists, and even your next door neighbor to create an entire therapeutic way of life, a mindset far removed from the original intent of professionally certified therapists.

In his new book *Resisting Therapy Culture: The Dangers of Pop Psychology and How the Church Can Respond*, Matthew Loftus approaches the issue from the perspective of a physician, missionary, and theological writer. His first sentence gets right to the point: “Therapy culture is out of control, and it’s making people sicker.” He locates its toxicity in “the *medicalization* of normal emotional and spiritual experience, the *judgment* of all activities by their perceived impact on mental health, and the *loss of agency* that is induced by the first two components and then aggravates them in turn.” This creates an iatrogenic effect in which the prescribed treatment harms the patient rather than helping them.

Even if you have not been listening to the proclamations of the broadly conservative intelligentsia over the past decade or two, you understand what Loftus is describing. We have all witnessed the proliferation of “trigger warnings,” the expanding definition of “trauma” to include nearly anything unpleasant, the labeling of all kinds of people as “toxic,” the constant admonitions to “speak your truth” and look within for answers. All of us likely know someone who, in the pursuit of better “mental health,” has engaged in all sorts of injurious actions, often torching their relationships. My frequent use of quotation marks in this paragraph indicates how certain words have shifted from their original meaning.

Loftus argues that therapy culture “destroys the practice of therapy itself because it ultimately saps people of their character, integrity, and self-determination and replaces them with the wooden language of wellness.” It must be distinguished from good psychological therapy, which “requires that we view ourselves as moral agents capable of changing our lives for the better,” instead teaching us to regard our actions, “no matter how harmful they are to ourselves or others, as instinctual responses to individual traumas or social injustices that cannot be helped.” This leads to the constant redefinition so prevalent in everyday speech: 

> A hierarchy of suffering has become established in which exotic disorders are appropriated and treated as consumer products, while mundane suffering gets overinflated into ‘severe depression.’… When diagnoses are used carelessly, the people who are genuinely suffering from mental illness are marginalized through ‘linguistic inflation’ and ‘false equivalence.’

Loftus’s argument in response is not that Christians should avoid therapy altogether or that there are no legitimate mental illnesses. Rather, we must not lose a proper sense of human agency. Indeed, the defense of agency is at the heart of *Resisting Therapy Culture*. “We need to keep what’s good about psychology and therapy while emphatically rejecting what’s evil,” Loftus argues. Therapy culture offers its brand of self-help as “a secular form of salvation,” one in which grace is crucially absent. Christianity upholds both the reality of our moral responsibility and the free grace that sets sinners free: 

> One of the best things that Christians can do is help retain that sense of moral responsibility and remind people that no matter their circumstances, they *can* choose to do good and not evil. That sense of responsibility, however, is only part of a larger picture of grace, for we believe that our good choices are the result of the Holy Spirit working in our life (Romans 8:1-17).

A deeply Christian understanding of suffering plays an important role in this process. The chief villain in Loftus’s grand narrative of the past half millennium may well be Francis Bacon, whose *Novum Organum* had a profound influence on the Scientific Revolution. “The Baconian Project starts off with the righteous impulse to use the gifts that God has given us to relieve suffering but slowly expands that impulse into a quest to eliminate suffering entirely,” Loftus notes. But the quest to avoid any and all suffering is ultimately injurious to human relationships and the human psyche: 

> The idea of an authentic self that will unfold inside of you if you give it freedom from external strictures and indulge your internal desires is itself a lie, and the pressure to discover and perform such a self is undoubtedly a contributor to mental illness.

This broad argument echoes components of the grand narrative we have received over the past decade from authors like Rod Dreher (*The Benedict Option*), Jonathan Haidt (*The Anxious Generation*), Carl Trueman (*The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self*), and even Paul Kingsnorth (*Against the Machine*). And so, as I was reading, I could not help wondering if this narrative has become a bit too easy. Are we so accustomed to it, so thoroughly convinced of its validity that we might be missing certain nuances here and there?

Loftus asserts in *Resisting Therapy Culture* that social media “has been well-recognized as a mind virus that can spread mental health problems like eating disorders and self-harm,” and states that the prime culprits behind the explosion of therapy speak and psychiatric diagnoses are likely “smartphones and social media.” This is the argument made successfully by Jonathan Haidt and accepted practically as gospel in some circles now, but it is less clear whether our digital activities are a leading or trailing indicator of our mental malaise. Haidt’s former collaborator, the psychologist Peter Gray, who is known for his championing of free play for children, is now arguing children must also be given creative leeway online for the sake of their psychological health. The two men have apparently [fallen out](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/07/phones-haidt-play-gray/687846/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) over the issue, a sign that even within the broad consensus of this societal narrative, there is room for doubt and nuance.

Speaking personally, I have seen too much of the contradictions of human behavior, the twists and turns of history, and the complexities of our society to believe we can have a neat and tidy explanation for our present situation. Call me a cynic if you will, but everything seems a bit too easy. When I read these grand narratives, I find myself nodding along with practically everything. It all seems to echo my observations, which is precisely why I’ve become skeptical. I don’t trust myself enough when I am simply nodding along.

There is something about this narrative that can turn us into reactionaries, making us see everything as too black and white. And this is precisely what Loftus acknowledges in *Resisting Therapy Culture*. He realizes that in rightly opposing the abuses of therapy culture, we can become simple reactionaries, rejecting all of psychiatric treatment, refusing to recognize any proper diagnosis. We can give ourselves over entirely to something “nouthetic,” which is in fact just anti-science. Loftus acknowledges the complex relationship between mind and body, and the reality of sin’s curse upon our mental condition. There are some things the church can do and others it cannot—nor was it ever meant to do. He has full compassion for the sufferer while not pretending we can avoid all suffering. In fact, the drive to avoid all suffering can make us tyrannical, inhumane, and unfeeling. 

Here it helps that Loftus is a practicing physician and has himself sought help for mental and emotional difficulties. He has witnessed the realities of human suffering among people the rest of the world has largely forgotten. His is not academic analysis as much as personal: a longing for genuine healing borne of close experience with sickness. He believes the medical profession (including psychiatry) is a gift of common grace that can genuinely help those in need, but he also believes our ultimate salvation is found only in Jesus Christ. As he puts it, “Only Christianity teaches us about a God who enters into our suffering and promises to transform it by his power, which allows us to affirm that suffering is not only real, but also capable of making us more like Christ.”

I therefore commend Loftus for his attempts to strike this proper balance between the head and the heart, the therapeutic and the theological. We must always be asking questions, always subjecting everything to the standard of biblical truth. To God we give our complete trust, but never to ourselves nor to any narrative crafted by human beings, however expansively it seems to explain everything. The question Christ puts to sufferers is always the same: “Do you want to be made well?” (John 5:6) Not “Do you want to be validated?” or “Do you want to be comfortable?” but “Do you want to be made well?” By his grace he heals us, body and soul, now and in eternity.
### What to do When Authors We Love Sin
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/what-to-do-when-authors-we-love-sin/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T14:52:26.000Z
It’s one of those emails you dread receiving as a writer: a request for a correction.

I had written several articles for a business magazine recently, and on one page I misstated a fact about a new product. It required correcting.

So, working with the publisher, we apologized, updated the document online, and moved on. What else could we do? 10,000 physical copies had already gone out, and we certainly would not be chasing all of those down.

Of course, it was easy for me to brush the error off. I wrote a lot of words and it was one little error…that we knew about. Could have happened to anyone. I was tired when I wrote it. Did I mention it was a small error?

But it was certainly annoying for the company. Perhaps it makes their product look inferior to the competition. Maybe the error will get indexed by AI and repeated elsewhere. Could they even lose sales over it?

All the while, I walk away free. Someone else ‘paid’ for my mistake, you could say.

The whole episode reminded me of my time working as a radio news anchor, where some of my past verbal misfires undoubtedly caused issues. One time, I promoted a charity walk on the wrong day. On another occasion, during an overnight shift, I gave out the wrong time of day to listeners. Don’t get me started on my butchery of those European tennis player names. And those are just some of the sillier and more public errors in my professional life!

And so it was, with great awareness of my own foibles and shortcomings, that I sat down recently with a few friends to sit in judgement of some well-known and, if not presently then at least once, respected Christian theologians.

Some backstory: I started volunteering in my Baptist church’s small library in 2023\. I regularly read Christian non-fiction, and this was a section that needed some attention despite the fact it was (and remains, much to my chagrin) one of the least used sections of the library.

By this time, the Ravi Zacharias books were long gone following feedback from the church’s elders board to the lead librarian, another volunteer. However, as I spent more time with our still-considerable list of remaining books, I started to notice other questionable names: Bill Hybels and James Macdonald, to name two in our (former) holdings. Shortly after I raised their names for consideration, their books were quickly jettisoned. 

Over the years, other books that had been donated or were an existing part of our holdings made their way out the door, whether for theological reasons, or author issues, or more. A book that the author himself discredited, gone. A prolific author whose views on the virgin birth and universal salvation didn’t align with our church’s teachings, gone. Questionable reads on young earth creationism and end times prophecies, gone. 

Then, as our newfound power started to really flex its muscles, it turned to pre-emptively banning authors for their affiliation with certain controversial churches or rumblings about their leadership styles. 

So it went until we finally hit a wall in 2026 with Philip Yancey.

See, it wasn’t just the chief librarian and myself involved in this process. We were also consulting an elder within the church and, as of fall of 2025, our new lead pastor. 

And when it came time to decide whether the works of Yancey, following the disclosure of his multi-year affair, should remain in the library, we were split. Or at least not all in perfect agreement.

While I, being of a younger generation, did not necessarily ‘grow up’ with Yancey’s books and had no emotional attachment to them, they were among the favourites of our church elder representative. While it was basically just a business decision to me, the issue was personal for him.

Should we simply stop acquiring new Yancey books, or did we need to remove some or all of his works? Does it matter that he confessed? What might our congregants think to see his works still on our shelves? Do we need to consult our denomination? What if we added an informative bookmark? Don’t we have enough other books on the same topics…why not just feature those instead?

Suddenly, this caused our little review committee to ask deeper questions about what we were doing, and why.

The church has wrestled with these questions long before our little committee ever did. 

There are stories like [the Wicked Bible](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked%5FBible?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), where a printing mistake (whether deliberate, accidental, or a work of sabotage – all possibilities) carried serious consequences, and other moments in history when error was met with far heavier hands. Scripture itself warns plainly about false teaching and the responsibility to guard against it, while also including wisdom from flawed leaders such as David and Solomon. Actually, it does more than include those leaders: it documents and condemns David’s sin with Bathsheba and Solomon’s idolatry and polygamy, and yet goes on to praise both men and include their stories and writings in the Bible we carry today.

The Scriptures also remind us that judgment belongs to God, and that vengeance is His alone. Living in that tension, between protecting our fellow congregants and overstepping our place, is not a new challenge, though it felt very real as we debate which books deserve a place on our shelves. Judgement is not necessarily negative, but it is also not neutral, and decisions still had to be made.

The debate about church library policy tipped into an important discussion, left unresolved, about how a church library fit into our overall mission and purpose as a church. Our primary users were children and parents within the church community seeking age-appropriate books. While no one was arguing for the outright removal of adult non-fiction or any of the other sections, we had yet to articulate a goal for those other, lesser used sections, or the library as a whole. 

The contrast between what we offered and what was available at the public library helped make the case for our continued existence. If I asked most local librarians about Yancey, I suspect most would have tilted their heads and said, “Who?” So, we had the outline of a purpose at least - being different from the public library by carrying Christian materials - but had not articulated a greater reason for being. 

We were all working as volunteers with the best intentions: to ensure we were providing quality materials to our congregants and not bringing the church or our faith into disrepute. Besides, we had limited shelf space; we couldn’t stock everything, so why settle for reads that were sub-optimal if alternatives existed?

On the other hand, you can't make consistent decisions about what belongs on the shelf until you've decided what the shelf is for. A small, laminated paper label which says “Non-fiction” only provides so much guidance.

Despite all the reasonable and compelling arguments being made by the various committee members, as the Yancey debate reached its zenith I obviously hadn’t fully convinced myself we were in the right. I started to critically evaluate my own recommendations for the church library. For instance, I had suggested we add books by Brennan Manning, whose books had been helpful to me. And yet, Manning was a long-time alcoholic. Even as I tried to justify to myself the differences in conduct of the two men, I was left with the question: who was I to judge someone else who found the adulterer Philip Yancey’s books helpful? 

I also noticed the way I developed a hypersensitivity to *who* I was reading, sometimes at the expense of *what* I was reading. During a church mentorship program, a couple of months after Yancey’s news was announced, I was assigned a Christian lifestyle book which was written by yet another author who had confessed to an affair a few years after its publication. Vague references were made to the issue in this updated version of the book, and further research identified an affair as the issue. It left a sour taste in my mouth for the book’s ‘wisdom.’ 

Yet, this book had sold over one million copies and had undoubtedly helped some people along the way. Is the quippy quote that “a truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone” sound advice even for church librarians, or a recipe for heresy and hurt?

In that vein, our pastor observed that we didn’t want to retain authors whose presence could cause harm to congregants. “If there was someone within the church whose spouse cheated on them, and they saw we were promoting a book by an unfaithful author…” The consequences of our choices weren’t simply whether a Yancey fan who wanted to borrow a book went away empty handed, but whether we were potentially contributing to harm within our congregation.

Our little library had also stocked quite a few John MacArthur books, and the debate about whether his church’s push back against COVID restrictions was faithful and God honouring or a failure to honour God’s chosen leaders remained unsettled. Ultimately, we kept the MacArthur books, and I kept my personal MacArthur study Bible, which was a gift from my wife at the outset of my faith journey. I guess emotional attachments are fine, as long as they’re mine?

Working in public relations and marketing as I do, I recognized my instinct to contribute to a good public image for my church. Yet, this wasn’t an optics exercise. I failed to take seriously the ways I was sitting in judgement of my fellow Christians.

Had I stopped to take a ‘log and speck’ perspective, I wonder what some of these authors might have said about my book (which, conveniently for me, is no longer in print, so don’t bother looking for it) and my life. I suspect they would have said, echoing John 8, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.”

Our little cull started as a judgement on the work and ministries of these authors, but it was more than that. We may have been depriving potential readers of books that might have benefited their walk or reached the next step in their faith journey. While it’s true that we can’t stock everything, our shelves can’t be empty either.

Evaluating the lives of our authors was, indirectly, also a judgement on our existing authors, deeming them and their ideas worthy of inclusion despite not knowing each one, their story, their intent, or the quality of their teaching. It was applying pressure to them that was unfair, with a fickle approval that could be suddenly and silently withdrawn by a committee applying an inconsistent standard.

The discussions within our little committee continue back and forth with an effort to find a more consistent pattern, and particularly one that is slower to ban and instead seeks to practice discernment informed by grace. It’s messy, in a good way, as we unpack people’s personal biases, their emotional attachments, and their learning styles and try to balance that with good theology, a focus on serving our congregation, and an effort to honour our God and Saviour through our work. Or at least to try and sit in His judgement seat a little less frequently, as we remind ourselves “this author has disqualified himself from a particular ministry" is not necessarily the same as "God cannot use anything this author has written.”

It does not mean abandoning all standards, or accepting all Christian literature. No one advocated for undoing the bans on Ravi Zacharias’s books, for example. 

If anything, by arriving at the inevitable conclusion of our book review debate where we realize our own limitations, we’ve been helpfully and deliberately confronted with a mirror, a challenge to articulate a purpose for our work, and a reminder that discernment and judgement are not the same thing.

The whole episode made me wonder what would be in Jesus’ library, if He had one. Would He admire the efforts of His children to write books, like a parent admires their child’s school crafts? Would He restrict Himself to the Scriptures, as some more conservative denominations might? Would He see past the author’s sins and judge the content on its own merit? 

Perhaps the better question is this: when we build our libraries, whether personal or church, are we better off trying to protect ourselves from flawed voices, or giving ourselves space to recognize that God can even work through sinful and broken people, including some of the Biblical heroes we read about in Scriptures?

Because if the answer is the former, we may find that in trying to guard the shelves, we have made them far smaller and emptier than they were ever meant to be.

When I learned about the error in my work, I was quick to explain away my own mistake as small, understandable, and human. I’m not sure I offered the same generosity to others when I reduced their lives and ministries to their failures.

Perhaps that is the tension we are left to live with, not just in our little church library, but everywhere.
### In Praise of My Youth Pastor
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/in-praise-of-my-youth-pastor/
Last updated: 2026-10-01T19:36:52.000Z
Three months ago, my youth pastor died after fighting brain cancer for 9 years. 

Jason (Jay) Hewitt was more than my personal youth pastor, of course. Outside of our relationship, he was a husband, a father, a youth pastor to hundreds (if not thousands) of students, the founding pastor of Friends Church Orange, an Ironman competitor, an author, and more. I can’t begin to give a good account of his life, because he did more in 44 years than most can hope for in twice that time. But for those of you interested in that breadth, and especially his heroic battle to run an Ironman while fighting cancer as a visual legacy for his little girl, you can read about it in his memoir, [*I Am Weak, I Am Strong*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0310367476?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*,* or watch the documentary about it, [*Dear Hero*](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Dear+Hero+Jay+Hewitt&utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com)*.* Jay’s legacy of love to his wife, Natalie, and daughter, Hero, are a thousand times more beautiful than what I’m going to talk about here and I’d love you to know more of it.

In this piece, though, I simply want to pay tribute to him for the ways he personally blessed and gave shape to my life in ways that I am still reckoning. Over the years he was a mentor, a friend, and a brother. I've joked before that I am a Presbyterian because of Tim Keller. But I am a *pastor* because of Jay. 

I haven't been able to write anything about his passing or pay tribute to him publicly, partially just because my commitments in other fields, but mostly because I just couldn’t. I think I can now.

What follows is a loose narrative of my friendship with Jay and what I learned from him along the way. They are only a few of the ways that God used him to shape me and for which I am grateful. This is going to be necessarily autobiographical, unfortunately, but I suppose the point is that I can’t really tell the story of my own spiritual life and calling without talking about Jay.

## **The Coolest Guy I Knew**

I can't remember the exact year that I met Jay. I do know that it was by my junior year in high school that I started to get to *know* him. Jay was an undergrad in Bible and theology at a local Christian college (Hope International) and one of several interns with our massive high school ministry (400+) at Friends church in Yorba Linda. We connected on a mission trip we took with our partner church in Utah. We were there to talk to Mormons, going door to door inviting them to an Easter Service. (Weirdly they were less receptive to our attempted door-front conversations than you’d expect.)

In any case, what I remember was sitting in our host’s basement talking theology and music. Jay loved all kinds of rock, punk, etc. but I remember having the distinct privilege of introducing him to Coheed and Cambria’s first album. It made me feel cool.

Because, here is the thing, Jay was undoubtedly the most naturally cool person I had ever known. He was tall. He was athletic. He played the guitar. He skateboarded and rode dirtbikes. He had backpacked across Europe. He was one of the funniest people you would ever meet in your life, with one of the quickest smiles and loudest laughs. All the guys wanted to be like Jay when we hit his age. And he was dating the coolest girl, who all the girls looked up to and wanted to grow up and be just like. Pretty much everything he tried, he got good at. Everybody liked him. What’s more, there was no way to be jealous of him because he was kind and thoughtful to you personally in the process. I mean, at the funeral they played video of him after the time he lost a front tooth in some accident (I can’t remember why), and even as he joked around at how goofy he looked, he was still cooler than you at being self-consciously goofy. (If it feels like I am making the guy up, there are several thousand witnesses who observed him up close over decades who can attest to Jay’s insane levels of natural coolness.)

More importantly for my story, though, he loved Jesus and the Bible and everything that went with it. And everybody could tell that. Which is probably why they made him the youth pastor when everyone left.

## **Man in Charge**

All this happened 20 years ago so my memory is a little fuzzy as to the details. But what I do recall is towards the end of my junior year or beginning of my senior year, the senior high school pastor, the associate high school pastor, and a couple of other interns all left for various legitimate reasons. Unfortunately, this left a 400-to-500-person youth group without a pastor. And in their sovereign wisdom, the elders at Friends church looked at this 22-year-old, freshly (or about to be) married, recent graduate from Bible college, and decided to give him the job. 

It made obvious sense to me at the time because I was 17 and didn't know anything, but at the age of 40 this is a crazy decision on paper.

Looking back, I suspect that it was more than just lazy pragmatism because time ended up proving those elders right. They must have seen what everybody eventually saw when it came to Jay. He was an extraordinarily mature young man, who carried himself at 22 better than most guys do at 30\. He had wrestled through some real pain and challenges in his youth, which God, in his Providence, had used to shape him into a pastor so early. 

What I remember at that time, though, was seeing Jay step up. I didn't realize how formative it was for me, but I witnessed the weight of that entire ministry put on his shoulders—with all of the logistics, the preaching, the planning, the nagging/doubting parents, and the weight of several hundred souls—and I watched him bear up under it and succeed. Through prayer, humility, and probably a lot of behind the scenes doubts and stress that I was not privy to, he bore up and didn’t crack. And he became our pastor. 

As a note, I know prayer was a core part of this just because my senior year I ended up on our ministry's prayer team. (I could not sing, play an instrument, or do sound, so “prayer team” was it.) I remember we’d meet every other week for prayer and he would corral a group of goofy, hormonal 17 year olds into the serious work of praying for the souls of our peers. We were there to hang out and goof off, but Jay actually got us to pray. Why? Because he knew we needed it. He knew he needed it. It’s one of the ways I learned that I needed it. 

## **My First Sermon** 

One of the key episodes in my story together, though, came a year later, during my freshmen year in college, when Jay let me preach my first sermon. 

Things were happening fast in my life. To condense a long story, the first half of freshman year was hard spiritually. I didn't start coming out of the woods until that winter as I attended a new church, started reading my Bible again, and at a special event was challenged to read my Bible and pray for an hour a day. I said, “yes.”

What followed was one of the greatest seasons of spiritual renewal in my life. I had never felt such intimacy, power, and joy in my relationship with God. Nor had I experienced such a desire to share with my friends and family about Jesus. I was already a pretty outwardly expressive Christian. I was always happy to argue about the faith or invite my friends to church or even give them Bibles. But this was something new.

In my enthusiasm, I decided to go back and tell Jay about the excitement that had come into my life through prayer. I also thought it would be a great idea to ask him if I could share for 5 minutes with his students on a Sunday morning about the power of prayer. 

To which he remarkably said, “Yeah, let’s do that in a couple of weeks.” 

I don't remember the exact timeline but as I recall it over the next week as I started to think about what I wanted to say, I texted Jay, “Hey, I actually have a little bit more to say could I make it 10 minutes.” 

To which he said, “Sure, go ahead.”

A couple of days later he got another text at which point he just said, “why don't we plan on having you preach the whole thing.”

This is another one of those instances where I think back and say, “if it were me I would have never let this happen.” But thank God it wasn't me. Thank God, it was Jay.

And so, that next Sunday, I got up in front of a few hundred students at Yorba Linda Friends and talked about the power of prayer in my life over the past few months as well as more importantly what the Scripture says about the power of prayer. I don't have the notes to that sermon because to my knowledge I was still crafting what I wanted to say and putting it in the correct order about 5 minutes before I got up there that Sunday. I have to reiterate: This was an insane amount of trust that Jay had shown me.

But for whatever reason, the Spirit of God was working that day in at least two ways. First, there was a visible response from several of the students who came up to thank me for that word who then went on to begin their own at least short stints with prayer. More importantly, another staff at Friends, walked up to me after and said, “Hey that was great. You’re studying to be a youth pastor, right?” To which I replied, “No. I am going to be a…lawyer?”

Up until that moment, for several years, the plan had been firmly set in my mind to go study poli sci, become a lawyer, head into politics and see what God did from there. But in that moment after that sermon, I became aware of something that God had been doing in my heart for some time. That question, after that sermon, is the first in a chain of events that led to me consciously discerning a path into ministry.

There’s more to the story, as I intend to share, but without Jay taking a risk on a young college student that week, I don’t know what would have happened. 

## **Mentor**

Funnily enough in all those months of conversations that followed with several mentors and friends, Jay wasn't initially the first person who was excited and convinced I should head into ministry. He loved me and trusted me, but I remember in that initial conversation I had where I started talking with him about becoming a pastor, he pushed hard and reminded me how much I liked arguing with people and how much patience you need with people in the ministry. That last quality wasn’t something I had at eighteen. 

And yet, over time, as this desire persisted and grew, Jay continued to give me chances and really took me under his wing. 

It happened in several stages. After a couple of years down the same path, volunteering in various ministries, serving with 6th graders, and so on, Jay gave me the chance to be a house teacher. The high school ministry was so big that Wednesday night Bible studies were divvied up according to grade and school. And usually there was a local teacher who would present part of the lesson at each home before they broke up into small groups. At twenty-one, Jay gave me a shot at my first regular teaching gig. 

After that, when I finally enrolled in seminary, Jay brought me on as a teaching intern to help in the high school ministry. This was a remarkable opportunity of the sort I only realized was as special as it was afterward. 

Basically, my job was to help with the teaching of the high school ministry while I was in seminary. That consisted of two things. First, because my interest in academic theology was already starting to show, Jay let me create and teach a monthly Sunday school class through varieties of doctrines and texts such as: the Trinity, Hell, Parables, Revelation. Again, the risks were wild, the classes were small, but I learned a lot and had a blast. 

The other remarkable aspect of this internship was essentially learning how to preach with Jay. I've often joked that because I never got an M.Div. (only an M.A.), I never took a formal preaching class. Instead, I just listened to Tim Keller and Edmund Clowney’s classic lectures “Preaching Christ in a Postmodern World” probably three times through (this was back when you could download them off iTunesU). And that's true as far as it goes.

More importantly, Jay had me start meeting with him once a week to go over his sermons. 

Jay was one of the best communicators I've ever known. He had a way with words, images, stories, and the text that drove the truth into our hearts. But at the same time, he always wanted to improve. So he invited me in to start wrestling through texts together and work through a logical and theological order. What we would do is usually get together every Monday and try to hammer things out for an hour together. Jay would have already reflected on the text himself but then we'd get in his tiny little office in the corner, get out a whiteboard, and start to map the relationship between the various points he wanted to make from the text into a coherent whole. It was unlike anything I’d ever done before.

Things got really fun, though, when I actually convinced Jay to listen to the Keller lectures as well. He loved it. As I said, he was already a good preacher, but Tim's model of Christ-centered exposition really fired up his imagination. And so, we actually started to play around with the content and came up with our own shorthand structure to any sermon. It went something like this:

- Insight
- Problem
- Turn (Christ)
- New Identity

The idea is that any text is going to point you to some significant insight into the world, a problem connected to it, the way Christ’s life, death, and resurrection is an answer to it, and an ethic or a new identity that flows from your understanding the way the gospel answers the problem. So a sermon on friendship would talk to you about the nature of friendship, the way your sin stops you from being a friend, the way Christ was a friend to us in the cross, and the way that grace frees us up to be friends to others, or something like that. And it would be connecting the OT to the NT. 

Anyway, Tim's stuff was more complicated than that, but when we synthesized it into this little heuristic, it opened worlds for us. We realized you could switch the component pieces around based on whatever was more suitable to the text and you weren't just stuck with the one basic sermon structure, or one basic point, or one basic application. The text still governed that and we had to wrestle it out every week, but it gave you a way of logically and theologically organizing a through line that our students could follow and would always take them to Christ and into a new life.

Every week, then, for maybe two years in seminary, that’s what we did. We’d think through structure and try to word-smith it into a good one-liner for our high-schoolers to take home. I always sucked at that part. Jay was the master with the take home. And it was not just because he liked to play around with words. One thing that I got from Jay was his deep appreciation that he needed to not just draw out a logical connection before his students but he needed to present the truth to them in a way that could be remembered—in a way that reverberated in their souls like the songs they sung the rest of the week. Maybe it was the musician in him.

The really remarkable thing, though, was that I'd leave on Monday and I'd show up on Sunday at church and somehow, what Jay was preaching was what we had talked about, but it was *Jay's* sermon structured, fleshed out, illustrated, and preached in a way that felt like it was hitting me between the eyes with the gospel every time.

There is one other component in all this that I can’t skip: I got to see Jay think and pray about students as part of his process of preaching. And in the middle of that I just got to be his friend. We wrestled with texts together, we wrestled with our students’ lives together, we wrestled with our own lives in light of these texts. I have had the privilege of studying with some of the finest theologians, biblical scholars, and pastors operating today. But I have never had something quite like those couple of years of Mondays with Jay.

So, while it's true that there is no report card for the grade from my class on homiletics, I can't actually say that I never took a class on preaching. Between Tim's theories and Jay’s weekly apprenticeship during these formative years, I think I had one of the best educations in preaching I could have. 

## **Sending Me Off**

That was a beautiful thing because those were years of transition and anxiety. My early 20s were full of doubts, ambition, and the struggle to know if or how God would ever use me. I wasn't sure if I should go to more graduate or pastoral ministry, and if pastoral ministry, then where. I thought about these things constantly. I was also dating my future wife, McKenna, trying to think about what our life together would be like. And in the middle of this internship Jay just pastored me through all of that. True he was only a few years ahead of me, but again he felt so wise. And he was wise. And patient. 

I remember going out for a walk with him talking about my future and what it was going to look like and I can't even remember what provoked it but I remember him looking at me and saying to the effect of, “Dude, I'm not sure what you're going to do. I know God has something for you. But what I will say is I know God has blessed you with a good woman. McKenna is a great girl, she loves Jesus. And if you're married to her even if your job sucks for a while you're going to be OK.”

My job doesn’t suck, but he was right about McKenna. 

In any case, there was nobody else McKenna and I wanted to perform our wedding. And I'm so glad today that we still have those photos of Jay’s big fat grin standing behind me as I got to see McKenna walk down the aisle. 

But he didn't just send me off into marriage, he sent me off into my first job. A few months after I finished my masters and about four months into my engagement, I finally landed a gig working with college students and young adults at a Presbyterian church nearby. I was sad to be leaving but excited to go strike out on my own. As my going away present Jay actually went out and bought me my first Logos Bible Software. To a nerd like me just starting out, it felt like Jay had handed me the keys to the Library of Alexandria.

More importantly it was just one more way that Jay continued to invest in me and put his money where his mouth was when it came to telling me he believed in God's calling on my life.

## **Later Years** 

We obviously stayed friends, but as our ministry paths started to shift, we got less time together over the years. He got to watch me start to figure out how to run my own ministry and I got to watch him answer the call to go plant a church in Orange. One of my only regrets about becoming presbyterian was that at it meant Jay and I were probably never going to be on staff again together. 

In any case, contact got sparser over the years as I moved away to grad school, he fought his long battle with cancer, and our families passed through different life stages and ministry contexts. But like so many who watched and cheered from afar I was amazed at Jay’s resilience and faith in God through the trial of those later years.

Even at the end, Jay never ceased to give testimony and to bless and shape me. By the grace of God and the kindness his wife, Natalie, I was able to visit him a couple of weeks before the end. The cancer had come up again and we knew this time it wasn't going away. After a couple of weeks of trying to coordinate schedules, I was able to make it in. By that time, Jay was feeling pretty weak and needed help to get up and move.

But even as we sat there talking, I could see, even in the middle of the pain, joy and light in his eyes. One of the funniest things was just him asking me what I thought of kids driving around on e-bikes. One had just driven by the window. Characteristically, I was kind of cranky about it because I'm always scared someone is gonna dart right out in front of me. Jay just looked at me with this twinkle in his eyes and said, “I love ‘em. I love seeing them drive by. I want to get one.” After all these years, all the pain, all the wisdom, growth, and saintly maturity, Jay was also still a kid on a bike doing wheelies. 

We said our goodbyes. I’ll leave all that more private, but in God’s mercy I got to say what I hoped he already knew about who he was to me. And that was the last time I saw him. I thought I had one more visit, perhaps, but I think Jay knew better. He knew Jesus was coming for him soon. 

I don't have a really good way to end this other than to say, youth pastors get a bad rap today. Some for good reason. But I've never been able to personally identify with it. Maybe that’s because God gave me the best one a kid could ever ask for. Jay loved his family. Jay loved us. Jay loved Jesus. 

And he finished well. Which is perhaps the last thing he showed me how to do.
### Why Your Church Should Use a Lectionary
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-case-for-u/
Last updated: 2026-08-18T11:00:36.000Z
*This essay is adapted from Michael Niebauer's new book* [From Word to Worship: How the Lectionary Welcomes You into Sacred Time Through Story, Symbol, and Sacrament](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781540906090%5Ffrom-word-to-worship?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

For the past 2,000 years, most churches gathered together on Sundays to hear Scripture read aloud according to a set schedule of readings (called a lectionary) tied to the seasons of the Church. While the use of a Sunday lectionary remains the norm in Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, it has almost entirely been lost in Protestant and Evangelical circles. Many of the Protestant churches in the West that continue to use a lectionary are in rapid decline, and the non-denominational churches that have taken their place typically prefer topical sermons or sermon series. Many contemporary Reformed and Baptist churches likewise prefer either topical sermons or expository sermon series that go through single books of the Bible. 

While there are advantages to these approaches to preaching, the use of a lectionary as the principal guide for preaching enables a unique and rich encounter with God’s Word that these other approaches often lack. My new book [*From Word to Worship*](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781540906090%5Ffrom-word-to-worship?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) helps Christians discover the rich connections between each of the four weekly lectionary readings, as well as the relationship between these readings and the liturgy and seasons of the Church. It is meant to help any church that uses some form of three-year lectionary, and invite those that don’t use a lectionary to consider adopting one. What are some of the advantages of using a Sunday lectionary?

## Disciplined Preaching

**First, the lectionary disciplines the preaching of the congregation.** One of the best parts of the Sunday lectionary (either its one-year or three-year vintage) is its givenness—the scripture readings for each Sunday are scheduled in perpetuity, and as a result everyone knows what passages will be read and preached upon well in advance. This disciplines the congregation to hear, and pastors to preach, from portions of the Bible they would otherwise avoid. Scripture, not the pastor, sets the preaching agenda. While this might seem restrictive for pastors, it can actually be quite freeing: it relieves them of the burden of trying to be mind-readers, or worse yet, amateur sociologists, trying to intuit the needs of the congregation and pick passages to meet those needs. 

Additionally, the use of a Sunday lectionary disciplines the preaching expectations of the congregation. Church members know in advance what Scripture is going to be read, and they should come expecting the sermon to emanate out of those texts. This is particularly important in an age in which Christians have become accustomed to expecting sermons that touch on hot-button political and cultural issues. When people show up expecting to hear sermons based on the headlines, they will inevitably be disappointed, since the pastor cannot possibly satiate such varied and idiosyncratic preaching demands of every single parishioner. 

I often hear this complaint from my evangelical pastor friends: “I have parishioners leaving because my preaching is too political, and I have parishioners leaving because I am not political enough.” Using the set schedule of readings in a Sunday lectionary can help to remedy this issue. Pastors can reinforce in their congregations that they should show up each Sunday expecting to hear about the scheduled Bible readings—no more and no less.

## Emphasizing the Divine Authorship of Scripture

**Second, the lectionary prioritizes the divine authorship of the Bible.** Scripture is the Word of God written through human hands inspired by the Holy Spirit. This is often referred to as the dual authorship—human and divine—of the Bible. Much of contemporary Biblical interpretation, and the preaching which flows from it, starts first with the human authorship of Scripture. Most commentaries, for instance, begin with an analysis of the estimated date of composition and the identity of the human author of a specific Biblical book. The application of the Biblical text to the Christian life then flows out of historical, lexical, and archeological research. Expository preaching likewise typically starts with historical backgrounds and grammatical analysis before moving on to application for the church. 

While there are benefits to such an approach, its weakness is the potential to diminish the interpretive range of Scripture. The meaning of any given passage is here whittled down to whatever one posits to be in the mind of the human author at the time of writing. But Scripture is the Word and words of an infinite God, and because God is the ultimate author of the Bible, there will always be a surplus of meaning behind any particular passage of Scripture—meaning that stretches well beyond the original date of composition, and well beyond what was even known to the human authors who composed it. 

For instance, God intends for the crossing of the Red Sea to be an event that discloses to us part of the meaning of Christian baptism. Christians believe this to be true even if Moses had no knowledge of Christian baptism, and it is a meaning that cannot be found through an assessment of the original composition of Exodus. We can assert this truth because we believe that God, not Moses, is the ultimate author of Exodus. Prioritizing human authorship can often diminish our ability to see the many faithful interpretations embedded in Scripture.

The lectionary, in contrast, invites us to prioritize the divine authorship of the Bible. Rather than going book by book through the Bible, starting with the historical context of each book, the lectionary presents to us biblical passages (lections) that are explicitly taken *out* of historical context. When one attends a service of a church that uses the lectionary, one can hear a slice of the Old Testament, a Psalm, another slice of an epistle, and finally a Gospel reading. 

If we think of the Bible only as a collection of individual books with discreet human authors, such a selective process would be odd at best, or even dangerous. But if the Bible truly is written by God, then reading various selections from various books written over thousands of years is quite natural. It is akin to going to a book club to discuss *Pride and Prejudice*, where discussion can jump seamlessly from chapter to chapter as one discusses various themes and characters. One can do so because one assumes that the book is a cohesive whole written by a single author. Likewise, if we assume Scripture is a unitive whole written by God, we should be able to move seamlessly from book to book, drawing faithful connections from text to text, and in turn growing deeper in our love and knowledge of God.

## Hearing Scripture in Community

**Third, the lectionary prioritizes the hearing and performing of Scripture in community.** Most of us are accustomed to encountering the Bible primarily through reading it: on our own, in a Bible study, or in a classroom. We see words on a page and think about the significance of those words for our lives. While reading is a vitally important way of encountering Scripture, the Bible is also meant to be heard out loud within the gathered congregation. 

It is supposed to be read out loud as part of one event—corporate worship—that also includes prayer, praise, fellowship, and the reception of the Eucharist. Within this context, the congregation is encouraged to see the connections between the Bible and the church’s worship, where it is called to enact and perform the content of the Bible. We are called not just to be *readers* of Scripture, but *hearers* and *doers*, and Sunday worship is the primary place we do the hearing and the doing. 

The lectionary arranges Scripture so that we can easily make this connection: we hear passages about fire and judgment, we see the fire of candles, and we respond in an act of repentance. We hear passages about manna and the bread of life paired together, and we are invited to live out these passages by tasting the body of Christ at the Eucharis. I wrote *From Word to Worship* to draw out these connections, so that both pastor and congregation might better see the relationship between Scripture, liturgy, and the seasons of the church.

My hope is that more churches would adopt some form of either the traditional one-year or three-year Sunday lectionary to guide their weekly encounter with Scripture. Preaching out of the lectionary does not preclude the occasional topical sermon or expository series, although it should be noted that such approaches to Scripture can also be utilized outside of Sunday mornings, such as in Christian education classes or mid-week Bible studies. Those churches that choose to utilize a lectionary will discover an ancient, faithful encounter with God’s word that highlights the rich harmonic interconnectedness of Old Testament, New Testament, liturgy, and the life of the people of God.
### The Problem of Christian Socialism
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-problem-of-christian-socialism/
Last updated: 2026-08-17T11:00:33.000Z
Socialism is on the rise in the United States. Its recent ascendency started with Bernie Sanders’ surprising challenge to Hilary Clinton in 2016, then the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib in 2019, and most recently with Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City since January 2026\. It has been a good decade for the Democratic Socialists of America, at least.

Socialism, however, is a slippery term not limited to left-wing politicians, politics, or parties. Many see the parallel rise of the populist right, which rejects economic liberty in favor of nationalism and industrial policy, as a form of socialism as well. Historically, at least, most have been as anti-capitalist as the typical socialist, even if they might balk at being called socialist today.

Another historical way of viewing socialism would be trade-unionism, which has been on the decline for decades now in the United States. Nevertheless, it recently took a surprising turn toward political diversity when Sean O’Brien, the general president of the Brotherhood of Teamsters, spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2024\. The Teamsters did not endorse a presidential candidate that year, breaking with a two-decade streak of backing Democrats since 2000\. 

Others see “socialism” in the welfare state capitalism of Scandinavia. Economists would dispute this (hence the term “welfare state *capitalism*”), but for many this is what socialism means, as distinct from, say, communism or fascism. Socialists today often, to their credit, object to equating socialism with communism or fascism, but most communists and fascists would not object to this equation, rather claiming their ideologies to be the truest forms of socialism. 

For still others, “socialism” simply means caring for one’s neighbor, the idea that morality, ethics, love, justice, and fairness are not individual values but necessarily mean working for the common good, including the material wellbeing of others and state social policies.

What are socially conscious Christians to make of this? Can a Christian be a socialist? Or is the term “Christian socialist” a contradiction? 

A Christian perspective must contend, as Anglican theologian F. D. Maurice put it, “with the unsocial Christians and unchristian Socialists,” whether or not one would call oneself a “Christian socialist.” Simply claiming or rejecting “socialism,” however one defines it, is not enough. Any answer to the problem of American socialism requires a positive vision of Christian social service and action.

## **S. L. Frank on the Problem of Christian Socialism**

First, as a matter of fact, it should be noted that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is Roman Catholic. So if the question, “Can a Christian be a socialist?” is merely a factual matter, the answer is yes. Nor is she the first such Christian socialist in history, as we’ll see in a moment. I start here, however, because I want to be clear that the foregoing discussion is not meant to call into question the sincerity of anyone’s faith.

 Before some brief history of Christian socialism, however, it is important to more clearly parse S. L. Frank’s understanding of the pivotal term: “it might seem that ‘Christian socialism’ is, in principle, not a problem at all,” [writes Frank](http://www.odinblago.ru/frank%5Fproblema?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). “And indeed, so far as by socialism we mean nothing other than an attitude of active love for one’s neighbors, a serious sense of responsibility for their material fate, every Christian, insofar as he wishes to be a true Christian, must in this sense be a ‘socialist.’” Here we see that the usage of “socialism” as merely “caring for one’s neighbor” is not recent. 

In this sense, Frank even writes [in a later work](https://archive.org/details/bwb%5FKU-643-470), “‘Christian socialism’ as a doctrine of social reform was preached by St. John Chrysostom in the fourth century and has been present in a general form in Christian thought from the moment when the so-called ‘social question’ began to trouble human conscience.” He then claims, “The sound and rational principles of it have been proclaimed obligatory for Christians in the well-known modern Encyclicals of the Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI,” i.e., [*Rerum Novarum*](https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf%5Fl-xiii%5Fenc%5F15051891%5Frerum-novarum.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (1891) and [*Quadragesimo Anno*](https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf%5Fp-xi%5Fenc%5F19310515%5Fquadragesimo-anno.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (1931). Frank also, on a purely voluntary level, supports Christian organized labor, among other social enterprises: “There must be Christian unions of various trades and professions, Christian societies for supplying human needs, Christian organizations for reconciling all kinds of human conflicts.”

Indeed, even at the time Frank wrote his essay on Christian socialism (1939), “socialism” had a broad semantic range. The German historical school of economics, for example, claimed to promote socialism, but it was not Marxist. Indeed, at its worst it can be seen as a precursor to National Socialist—i.e., Nazi—economics, though many of its major figures, such as W. G. F. Roscher, were far more mainstream and could not fairly be associated with Nazism. Similarly, many American Social Gospel theologians, such as Washington Gladden, were influenced by this economic school as well. Some, such as Walter Rauschenbusch, even explicitly supported socialism and identified as a Christian socialist, though in his case that position seems more informed by the now-obscure work of Henry George, author of [*Progress and Poverty*](https://archive.org/details/progresspoverty0000henr%5Fm1z4/page/n5/mode/2up) and advocate of the land tax.

Importantly, Frank survived the Russian revolution, being exiled in 1922 with many other religious intellectuals and settling in Berlin. This would have been a bad enough environment in the coming years for a Slav, but Frank was also ethnically Jewish. In 1937, he and his family fled to Paris, after being questioned more than once by the SS. He lost many friends and family in the Holocaust. Thus, Frank had seen real communism and fascism, and he rejected both those forms of socialism. But he did not merely equate socialism with these extremes. He had friends, such as the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev and the theologian Fr. Sergei Bulgakov, who, in different ways, identified as Christian socialists. So Frank’s position carries with it relevant, contemporary nuance.

Bulgakov, notably, had been a Marxist economist before his religious conversion, after which he published several critiques of Marxism, including an explicit rejection of the labor theory of value. According to [Gennadii Aliaiev](https://rprt.northwestern.edu/documents/research-scholar-articles/aliaiev-article-3.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), “Bulgakov’s main point” of an essay he wrote on Christianity and socialism “is that the social and economic nature of socialism is beyond the doctrine of the Orthodox Church. The only thing that is to be really condemned is the militant atheism with which it is confused.” Aliaiev continues, “However, Frank insists” in a response to Bulgakov “that not only must openly professed atheism be rejected, but also the condemnation must be spread to latent atheism: the grounds on which the dominant type of the socialistic mood rises.” 

As for Berdyaev, his socialism was personalistic and anarchistic—suspicious of state power but also rejecting capitalism. As editor of the journal *Put’* that published Bulgakov’s essay, he claimed to welcome all perspectives—except any that tried to justify capitalism. To his credit, however, he published Frank’s essay in *Put’*s final issue. Why would this be “to his credit”? Because Frank does not stop at the “caring for one’s neighbor” definition of socialism, explicitly rejecting socialism as a model for social structures and affirming economic liberty. 

Frank asks, 

> “\[H\]ow should a Christian relate—precisely as a Christian, that is, from the depths of his specifically Christian life orientation—to the idea of social reforms? This question ultimately boils down to the question: how should a Christian evaluate external measures, organizational order, aimed at satisfying the material needs of people?” 

As an empirical matter, Frank thinks the answer should be obvious: “In essence, we think that the experience of socialist economy (both in Russia and in Germany) refutes this assertion”—that in relation to the fair distribution of income and the material well-being of the masses, the socialist system has an advantage over capitalism—“and testifies to the exact opposite.” 

But, again, Frank takes part in a conversation with friends whom he knows to be neither fascists nor communists. Thus, he adds further nuance to sharpen his critique, rather than resting it on the worst historical expressions of socialism. 

Frank makes a distinction between two aspects of social life, corresponding to various dualities, such as the heavenly and earthly kingdoms, the Church and the world, grace and the law: “This duality does not, as is often thought, entail complete indifference to the ‘world,’ a complete isolation within the ‘heavenly’ alone; such a position would, on the contrary, signify the absence of the duality fundamental to Christian consciousness.” Thus, Frank *affirms* the aspiration to apply Christian principles to social structures and material life. The question—and, to him, the problem—is whether the social structures of socialism can promote Christian principles.

The law and government are needed to check the full social harm of human sin, but they cannot save. Thus, Frank argues in his social philosophy, [*The Spiritual Foundations of Society*](https://www.google.com/books/edition/The%5FSpiritual%5FFoundations%5Fof%5FSociety/cFi2AAAAIAAJ?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), that civil law must reconcile spontaneous order with external planning, always preserving and protecting human freedom, only curtailing its abuse and leaving room for it to provide what the state never can: the grace and mercy of the Gospel that alone can save the soul. The state cannot love. Thus, he writes in his essay on Christian socialism, “From the standpoint of Christian faith and a Christian understanding of life, preference is given to that social system or order that is most conducive to the development and strengthening of free, fraternal, loving communion between people.” Making himself clear, he adds, “As paradoxical as it may seem, such a system is not ‘socialism,’ but rather a system based on the economic freedom of the individual, on the freedom of individual disposal of property.”

Thus, Frank’s answer to the question, “Can a Christian be a socialist?” is ultimately “no,” so long as one understands socialism as more than merely “caring for one’s neighbor.” Indeed, he implies that such concern should lead us to the opposite conclusion. As he wrote in *The Spiritual Foundations of Society*, “In practice, liberalism or Manchesterism contains a considerable amount of truth. But this truth usually receives an incorrect philosophical explanation.” The correct “philosophical explanation,” to Frank, is one based on his Orthodox Christian perspective. The duality of life has ontological roots—it is a divinely grounded order. The Kingdom of God consists in the proper union of the law and grace in the reality of “Godmanhood,” our communion with the divine, revealed by Jesus Christ, the unique “God-Man,” who preached [the good news of the Fatherhood of God](https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/dispatch-faith/christianity-fatherhood-orthodoxy/?gift%5Fkey=c28f1b0b4d4d7f38&gift%5Fref=3898086&utm%5Fsource=giftlink&utm%5Fcampaign=membergift&utm%5Fmedium=copy%5Flinke7NxGAtt2YA62opxOc3okDTOUQUIE-SjnR72mVtQhlIdj-MfQuNIQg%3D%3D&@OriginalLink=thedispatch.com). 

## **F. D. Maurice’s Christian Socialism**

While I am personally sympathetic to Frank’s position, we can further nuance this discussion by considering the socialism of the first Christian socialist, F. D. Maurice. I say that Maurice is the first Christian socialist, because he actually coined the term for a series of tracts he and other leaders of his movement published in 1850\. “‘Tracts on Christian Socialism,’” [wrote Maurice to J. M. Ludlow](https://archive.org/details/a592475702mauruoft/page/n5/mode/2up), “is, it seems to me, the only title which will define our object and will commit us at once to the conflict we must engage in sooner or later with the unsocial Christians and the unchristian Socialists.” 

In 1850, socialism in England was not yet political. There were some—the Chartists—who wanted political change for the sake of the working classes. They would later merge with the socialists, but in Maurice’s day English socialists focused more on advocacy for organized labor, for workers freely forming unions of mutual support. Under Maurice’s leadership, the Christian socialists supported entrepreneurial worker cooperatives in the neighborhood of Lincoln’s Inn, where he served as chaplain while teaching theology at King’s College, London.

Two years before publishing *Tracts on Christian Socialism*, at the same time as the publication of the *Communist Manifesto* by Karl Marx and Friederich Engels and, more impactful at the time, concurrently with the 1848 February Revolution in Paris, Maurice preached a series of sermons on the Lord’s Prayer. His first sermon contains a surprising affirmation for a socialist, at least by narrow and radical understandings of that term: “Property,” [preached Maurice](https://archive.org/details/lordsprayernine00maur), “is holy.” 

Why was property holy for Maurice? For the same reason that S. L. Frank rejected Christian socialism in his time: “Beneath all distinction of property and of rank lie the obligations of a common Creation, Redemption, Humanity,” says Maurice. Property, to Maurice, is grounded in social responsibility. After all, Christians pray “our Father” not just “my Father.” “\[T\]he name Father loses its significance for us individually, when we will not use it as the members of a family,” he preached. 

Key to understanding Maurice’s social activism—and his consistent rejection of his young contemporaries’ more radical socialism—is his belief in a “divine order” of society, grounded in the Fatherhood of God. As he wrote in his [*Social Morality*](https://archive.org/details/socialmorality00mauruoft), “a Fatherly Will is at the root of Humanity and upholds the Universe.” While Maurice stops short of Frank’s Orthodox affirmation of “Godmanhood,” they nevertheless share a common Christian Platonism that grounds their social vision. God has established an ideal social order to which our earthly communities must conform as outposts of God’s kingdom. Thus, by contrast to “unchristian Socialists,” [Maurice asserted](https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003192114/democratic-socialism-britain-vol-2-david-reisman?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), “I assume that to *be* the only possible condition of society which they wish to make the condition of it.” Socialism, as he conceived it, already existed in the Christian brotherhood of the Church established by Jesus Christ. We do not need to establish the kingdom of heaven on earth; it is already here.

At the same time, however, Maurice did support local workers, offering biweekly conferences with labor leaders and a weekly Bible study for other Christian socialists, as well as serving as chaplain of Lincoln’s Inn. Like Frank, his rejection of the explicit and latent atheism of the dominant socialism of his day did not mean social inaction. Rather, he took their challenge seriously, while still taking inspiration from the then-new science of political economy. Maurice never quite understood competition in non-adversarial terms, but he was a measured admirer of Adam Smith (especially his condemnation of the slave trade and aristocratic monopolies), as well as being a friendly associate of John Stuart Mill. 

While many socialists today might be unsatisfied with Maurice’s “Christian socialism,” he at the same time demonstrates that the best socialist impulses need not lead one to Marxism or populism, nor to other radical and revolutionary perspectives on the right or left. And to his credit, Maurice did leave a lasting legacy.

While the worker cooperatives ultimately failed due to mismanagement and legal obstacles, in 1854 workers in Maurice’s community approached him to become first president of The Working Men’s College, London, which still exists to this day. This school was the first in Europe to provide humane higher education to the working classes, offering courses at night and on weekends. In a series of lectures to promote the new college, Maurice outlined its liberating goal: “We must aim in all our teaching of the working classes, at making them free,” by “seek\[ing\] all above all things to make our working people understand that they are Persons, and not Things.” They, too, are bearers of God’s image, with immeasurable worth and potential. Christians cannot rest in “unsocial” contentment with the status quo, but must work for the good of their neighbors, their brethren in Christ.

## **Can a Christian be a socialist? Yes and No**

Other Christian socialists, like Ludlow, lamented that Maurice diverted the energy of the movement into the college. But for Maurice, this dignifying and liberating education had been the point of Christian socialism all along. And it should give us pause today as we watch the rise of socialism across our political landscape. 

On the one hand, Frank offers good reasons why Christians should be hesitant to accept and support many socialist proposals. But on the other hand, Maurice models an alternative Christian socialism that does not fall into the sort of utopian errors Frank feared. 

At the least, both thinkers agree that it is not enough to criticize or reject what one fears in socialism. One must also affirm what is positive and give people a better alternative, a clearer—and more practical—social vision. For that, in line with Frank and contrary to the socialism of many today, we need more economic freedom for charitable and entrepreneurial initiative, not less. And we need churches to take the lead, as Maurice envisioned and modeled in his life, so that with God as our Father we may all in our various vocations fulfill Christ’s words: “inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me” (25:40).
### Protecting Our Humanity with... Robots?
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/protecting-our-humanity-with-robots/
Last updated: 2026-08-14T11:00:11.000Z
The Substack world was abuzz recently with news that[ Substack has partnered with Pangram](https://post.substack.com/p/against-claudefishing?selection=1ebc5689-0932-4524-9a3f-0b2b686a2e87), a system that analyzes text to determine what percentage of that text is “human,” what percentage is “AI,” and what percentage is “AI-assisted.” How is it able to decipher the difference between human writing and AI writing? Here’s how[ their website](https://www.pangram.com/research/how-it-works?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) explains it:

> We train an initial model on a small but diverse dataset of approximately 1 million documents comprised of public and licensed human-written text. The dataset also includes AI-generated text produced by GPT-4 and other frontier language models. The result of training is a neural network capable of reliably predicting whether text was authored by human or AI.

In other words, Pangram is an AI model trained to identify AI written text. What is perhaps most impressive about their system is that it boasts a “near zero false positive rate” - no doubt a great encouragement to those who are concerned about the nice folks on the internet utilizing Pangram to go on a massive witch hunt. In all seriousness, if the claims this company makes for its AI model are true, it really is a remarkably effective tool at verifying the human authenticity of any written text. If Pangram says something you read on Substack was 100% written by a human being, it is almost certainly so. 

When I published my first article following the integration on Pangram into Substack earlier this week, I couldn’t resist clicking the “Scan for AI text” option to find out if I was, indeed, human. If you had any concerns up to this point, I have good news for you: it turns out, I am human. Or at least my writing is 100% human. I know it because a robot told me so. 

And therein lies the profound, unsettling irony in all of this. 

As I watched the Pangram verification pop up on my screen to assure me that my writing was 100% human, what came to my mind were the countless times over the years that I’ve clicked on pictures of cars, buses, and stoplights to prove that I am not a robot. CAPTCHA was a gatekeeping system designed by humans for the specific purpose of keeping bots out of places they shouldn’t be and to protect human identities. A system, by the way, that is now[ a thing of the past](https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/09/ai-defeats-traffic-image-captcha-in-another-triumph-of-machine-over-man/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) due to the sophistication of AI agents. 

You could argue that Pangram is simply doing something similar, but the angle is different because this is about our *words*. Words that Jesus said arise out of the abundance of the heart (Luke 6:45). Words that have the power of life and death (Prov. 18:21). We want those words to be human. Yes and amen. But should we seek a machine to make that determination for us? Whether we want to or not, we’re conceding something by allowing an AI model to test us and tell us whose writing is human and whose isn’t. In the right, good, and understandable yearning for the writing we read to come from the heart, mind, and soul of a human being, we’re effectively handing our two-factor image bearing authentication over to a robot. Is this the right way to gate-keep our humanity? 

I’m not convinced it is. But I’ll tell you what I *am* convinced of. 

I’m convinced that the *best* writing - the writing that is most compelling, most genuine, most true, most good, most wonderful, and most meaningful - is always, inevitably going to come from women and men who are made in the image and likeness of God. Full stop. The machines are getting “better” each day at firing their mathematical synapses to produce clean, tight, and rhythmic prose. Their slop might be getting less sloppy, but they’re not becoming more human. They’re not growing in the wisdom and knowledge and grace of God. They’re not even capable of wanting to. And I think that will show up in the words “written” by AI or assisted by AI. The kind of writing that reflects our Creator can only be done by ensouled creatures. Call me foolishly optimistic, but I’m simply going to trust that *that* kind of writing is what will end up rising to the top of my own affections and the affections of other humans.

So I’ll be ignoring the existence of Pangram as I read my Substack articles, thank you very much. I think Substack’s heart is in the right place in bringing this tool in, and I can admire that. I want human writing, too. I’m just not willing to subject my fellow image bearers and their words to a robot’s “human” radar in my pursuit of it.
### Science and the Limits of the Possible
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/science-and-the-limits-of-the-possible/
Last updated: 2026-08-13T11:00:42.000Z
The world is a better and more interesting place thanks to scientific discovery and innovation. Few things have inspired me more in my career than witnessing novelty and creativity in science. Yet in the past few years, I have found myself increasingly uneasy about the attitude of society, including scientists, toward scientific advances. I am not afraid of AI overlords (though maybe I should be). Instead, my worries focus on the very way that science is understood by those who innovate, discover, and create. 

Presently, we can select embryos, edit genes, synthesize novel molecules, manipulate weather, implant computers into brains, explore space, and model intelligence. Just last month the FCC [approved](https://time.com/article/2026/07/14/reflect-orbital-space-mirror-what-to-know/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) a proposal for a space mirror to provide sunlight during nighttime. We possess tremendous ability, but what—or who—is it for? It seems we are consumed with a desire to remake the world in our own image. The state of scientific innovation brings to my mind a haunting line from the book of Judges: 

> In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. (Judges 21:25, *ESV*)

This current cultural moment has been a long time in the making. As science has progressed, we have slowly removed our creator king and elevated ourselves to that position. Over the past five hundred years, science has moved through various paradigms of the world. I propose that there have been two primary ones and that we are in the transition to the third, present conception. 

## **Tracing the Lines**

The first dominant scientific paradigm emphasized the order and regularity of the world. Originating in the idea of a *machina mundi*, or world machine, early modern science was marked by its “clockwork” conception of the world. Imagining the world as a clock whose gears tick with remarkable precision, many great scientists, like Newton, Descartes, and Copernicus, used this kind of language to give praise to the Creator who designed the world. 

Scientific insights from the nineteenth century shifted the view away from the clockwork notion and toward the second primary conception: the “emergence” conception. New geological and biological theories suggested that the present world came together slowly—layer by layer and step by step. Rather than elucidating the laws of nature, the main scientific pursuits transitioned to understanding how the world emerged from the disordered matter of its ancient past. Quantum indeterminacy, which revealed that reality at its finest level was governed by probability rather than determinate laws, further unsettled the scientific image of the world. This emphasis on order emerging from chaos defines the emergence conception of the late modern period. This conception gradually came to shape the scientific imagination. Arising alongside the dechristianization of society, the idea of emergence is best captured by Nobel Laureate Jacques Monod who [declared](https://www.amazon.com/Chance-Necessity-Natural-Philosophy-Biology/dp/0140256466?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), “Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe…out of which he emerged only by chance.” No longer is there any inherent order or plan for the world. Meaning is being made as the universe matures. 

## **The Programmable World**

More recently, human ability has never been greater. There are now cures for previously incurable diseases, technology allows us to communicate with anyone around the world at any time, and it feels like any task is achievable if we devote enough effort to it. The general sense is that we can change the world into anything that we want it to be. We increasingly imagine ourselves to be the authors of meaning. This is the birth of the “programmable” world, the third and present conception.

What defines this programmable world is the desire for mastery and control. Humans no longer view themselves as stewards of the earth under divine rule. We now view nature as raw resources awaiting redesign, as Martin Heidegger described in his famous [essay](https://www.amazon.com/Question-Concerning-Technology-Perennial-Thought/dp/0062290703?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). We no longer ask what creation is, but what it can be made to become. Phillip Sherrard [elucidates](https://archive.org/details/rapeofmannaturee0000sher/mode/2up) this further by saying contemporary science “presumes that the earth belongs to man, not man to the earth.” We have promoted ourselves from creature to creator.

This vision of mastery is rarely stated in these terms. Consider the recent remarks of AI researcher François Chollet on [X](https://x.com/fchollet/status/2073927440779694477?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) who said, “All of reality is programmable.” Few scientists will openly advocate a vision of dominance, but this language of programmability reveals how many understand the world: a world stripped of givenness to modify, optimize, and redesign to our whims. Human embryos are winnowed like wheat from chaff, genetic code is rewritten to our liking, and even our bodies are carved and chemically altered to meet our designs. We are the potters, and the world is our clay.

Technology critics like [Jacques Ellul](https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Society-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394703901?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), [Lewis Mumford](https://www.amazon.com/Technics-Civilization-Lewis-Mumford/dp/0226550273?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), and, more recently, [Paul Kingsnorth](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/756181/against-the-machine-by-paul-kingsnorth/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) have described the dominating role of technology in our lives. But the spirit of this programmable age is best summarized by Egbert Schuurman. In the spirit of Ellul, Schuurman labels this instinct toward mastery as “technicism.” Schuurman [writes](https://www.amazon.com/Discovering-Dooyeweerd-D-F-Strauss/dp/0888153228?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), 

> Technicism is the pretension of humans, as self-declared lords and masters using the scientific-technical method of control, to bend all of reality to their will in order to solve all problems, old and new, and to guarantee increasing material prosperity and progress.

To adopt the vision of the programmable world, we must first declare ourselves as sovereign. No longer is there a sense of transcendent responsibility. The goal now, it seems, is simply to exhaust the limits of the possible.

## **Science and Technology as Participation**

Returning to that final line from Judges, the narrative does not suggest that everyone pursued depravity wholesale. Instead, everyone did what was “right in his own eyes.” This does not pronounce the lack of a moral code as much as it suggests innumerable self-legislated moral codes. A king should bind conscience and delineate right from wrong. With no king, science is pursued according to each person’s own ethical leanings. 

Presently, scientific innovation and technological development operate chiefly on the harm principle. If an activity is not causing direct harm or generates substantial risk of physical harm down the road, there is little reason to stop its advance. The effect then becomes clear: virtually all innovation is good (especially if it returns a profit). Any sense of an inherent normative element of science has been lost.

While it might be more natural to develop opinions on technologies relating to human germline editing or autonomous lethal weapons, consider the following example with relatively low moral stakes: [GloFish](https://www.glofish.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Certain species of fish have been genetically engineered to fluoresce different colors for aesthetic purposes in aquariums. What standard is there to evaluate this venture? With no sense of transcendent normative structure, it seems odd to even question whether this is an acceptable use of technology since it harms neither the fish nor the environment.

To develop an evaluative framework, the place of science needs to be reinterpreted. Science is nothing less than the discovery and development of creation as a response to God’s call for humanity to subdue the earth (Genesis 1:28). This mandate to develop the earth is a continuation of God’s creative work. As Bruce Ashford and Craig Bartholomew [describe](https://www.amazon.com/Doctrine-Creation-Constructive-Kuyperian-Approach/dp/0830854908?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), God intended for his image bearers to continue to develop creation. This mandate carries an intrinsic normative element. Specifically, God calls us to take what he has given and “make something of it for his glory.” By grounding ourselves in this creation mandate, we resist the impulse to self-legislate right and wrong. Ultimately, to do science is to participate in God’s creative work—to investigate, innovate, and create with the same direction toward justice and holiness as our creator king.

Rather than reflecting the lost spiritual state of the period of the judges, science should reflect its task of stewardship. This may be best reflected in Psalm 8:6-8:

> You made them rulers over the works of your hands;  
> you put everything under their feet: all flocks and herds,  
> and the animals of the wild, the birds in the sky,  
> and the fish in the sea,  
> all that swim the paths of the seas.

We are rulers of the earth in that sense—not owners. Returning to the fluorescent fish, genetic engineering of organisms surely displays the prowess of the human mind, and it *could* be argued that it is an example of creation being further developed. Yet this modification treats animals as programmable commodities. Engineering fish solely to satisfy our aesthetic preferences risks reducing them to objects for our own alteration rather than creatures with their own telos in creation. It must not be forgotten that animals were declared good before mankind was created. In fact, humans were only granted permission to use them for food after the flood (Genesis 9:3). Humans are tasked with stewarding fish toward flourishing here on this earth. As it presently stands, innovations like GloFish represent technology for its own sake.

The technicist spirit of the age echoes the words of Pindar from over two millennia ago. In forsaking a belief in transcendence, we resign ourselves to the material, only able to engage with the possibilities of our finite existence. If we acknowledge our place under a king’s rule, not only will this guide how to pursue our science, but it allows us to take part in a much greater project that began with time itself: creation praising its creator (Psalm 19:1).
### American Evangelicals Long for the Embrace of the Machine God
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/american-evangelicals-long-for-the-embrace-of-the-machine-god/
Last updated: 2026-10-01T19:36:57.000Z
Pastors using AI [to write](https://www.christianpost.com/news/majority-of-pastors-using-ai-to-prepare-sermons-study.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) [their sermons](https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/pastors-using-ai-to-help-write-sermons-grapple-with-where-to-draw-the-line-97dcd1f9?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Evangelical thought influencers defending and promoting [AI](https://x.com/JoshDaws/status/2030140781910966677?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) [as a teaching](https://shenviapologetics.com/ai-and-homeschooling/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) [or writing](https://blog.ayjay.org/against-ai/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) [tool](https://www.challies.com/articles/wise-and-helpful-ways-for-christians-to-experiment-with-ai/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Conferences dedicated to encouraging church leadership [to adopt AI to manage their congregations](https://www.aiforchurchleaders.com/roadmap?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). At evangelical colleges and universities, so many students use AI to do their schoolwork that at times it feels like it’s all that us faculty ever talk about. That’s not even counting the Christian universities who are choosing to [give every student](https://andersonuniversity.edu/news/boodlebox/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) [a professional](https://www.wlc.edu/news/academics/boodlebox.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) [subscription](https://lipscomb.edu/news/lipscomb-university-among-first-private-institutions-nation-offer-campus-wide-ai-access-and?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to ChatGPT and Claude.

Overall, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that evangelicals are one of the most AI-pilled demographics in America. Surveys show that persons who attend church more than once a week [are more likely](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/my-manifesto-on-ai-and-religion/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) than any other group to report having “a great deal of confidence in artificial intelligence” and that Christians are more likely than others to say that [they trust AI](https://www.barna.com/research/christians-trust-ai-flourishing-spiritual-authority/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) with major decisions.

There are some notable exceptions. John Piper has frequently spoken out [against pastors](https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/should-i-use-ai-to-help-me-write-sermons?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) [using AI](https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/where-ai-fails?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Yet the fact that the man feels the need to spend his retirement [publicly railing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIMZH7DEPPQ&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) against ChatGPT suggests that he’s deeply concerned about an emerging trend. When The Gospel Coalition [announced](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/ai-tgc-missional-opportunity/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that it would not accept AI-written or assisted submissions, they received broad [pushback online](https://x.com/danitreweek/status/2085141066337136913?s=20&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) from evangelical [pastors](https://x.com/ZacharyGarris/status/2085409814801481778?s=20&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and [thought leaders](https://x.com/JoshDaws/status/2085139164022903069?s=20&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) who accused them of [Luddism](https://x.com/aaron%5Frenn/status/2085040003189473712?s=20&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), [gatekeeping](https://x.com/WilliamWolfe/status/2085461044517011597?s=20&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), and [refusing to change](https://x.com/NateAFischer/status/2085472164724015554?s=20&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) with the times.

One might imagine that evangelicals, being theologically committed to the concept of the *imago Dei* and to the duty of individual believers to study the Bible without relying on intermediaries, would be at the forefront of criticism of a technology which seeks to blur the lines between human and machine. Yet the most prominent Christian critics of AI are either Catholic ([Jennifer Frey](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/21/opinion/ai-liberal-arts-education.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), [Jeremy Wayne Tate](https://americanmind.org/salvo/ai-is-not-your-friend/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)), mainline Protestants ([Megan Fritts](https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/a-matter-of-words/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)), Orthodox ([Rod Dreher](https://roddreher.substack.com/p/ai-as-ouija-board-and-familiar), [Paul Kingsnorth](https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/writers-against-ai)) or of Catholic-adjacent liturgical denominations such as Anglicanism ([Susannah Black Roberts](https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/188-christians-against-ai-art-susannah-black-roberts/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)). Why are so many evangelicals rushing to embrace it instead?

I believe evangelicals have embraced AI for three reasons, one political, one theological, and one psychological: They tend to strongly believe in free markets, they commonly hold certain theological positions that have left them without antibodies against AI, and AI promises a new source of certainty in an uncertain world.

## Capitalism and AI

First, evangelicals [tend to also be](https://prri.org/spotlight/republicans-white-evangelical-protestants-most-likely-to-believing-capitalism-is-important-for-being-truly-american/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) free-market capitalists. Therefore, they tend to see technological advancement as both beneficial and inevitable. If a company refuses to adopt a beneficial technology, they will get out-competed by those who do. New technology may leave more people out of work in the short term, but [in the long term](https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6717/economics/the-luddite-fallacy/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) it will create new jobs while raising society’s overall standard of living.

AI also purports to solve two troublesome constraints on economic growth. According to [Baumol’s Cost Disease](https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/glossary/baumols-cost-disease-explained/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), health care, education, and housing construction have increased steadily relative to inflation because these fields cannot be automated: one doctor can only see so many patients, one teacher can only manage so many students. If an AI-enhanced doctor can treat twice as many patients per hour, even at the loss of some quality, this could bring down the soaring cost of health care.

AI also purports to solve the social problem of what to do with those left behind by globalization, deindustrialization, and automation, who lack the skills necessary to shift to white-collar ‘knowledge economy’ jobs. Theoretically, AI will allow those with less aptitude for education to do work that once required advanced degrees.

But capitalism isn’t a sufficient explanation. American evangelicals reject the logic of the market in many domains: abortion, gestational surrogacy, fetal stem cell research, pornography, prostitution, and euthanasia are all instances where evangelicals believe the *imago Dei* should overrule the free market.

## Theological Reasons Evangelicals are Uncritical of AI

There are certain theological positions commonly (but not universally) held within evangelicalism (but not within Catholicism, Orthodoxy, or other liturgical traditions) which have left evangelicals without antibodies that might otherwise have given them some immunity to the AI mind virus.

### **Mind-Body Dualism**

As a made up-quote [falsely attributed to CS Lewis](https://mereorthodoxy.com/you-dont-have-a-soul-cs-lewis-never-said-it/) puts it: “you do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” With the body reduced to a physical sleeve rather than a fundamental part of us, there is little theological basis to object to the merging of man and machine. If the soul is the only thing that really matters, then nothing AI does really matters, as it can’t touch our souls. (Mind-body dualism also lies at the heart of some evangelicals’ acceptance of cremation and opposition to psychiatry). 

### **Individualistic Pietism**

A pietist sees morality primarily as a question of individual choice, without systemic considerations. An individual’s will is taken as paramount: it is their responsibility to choose good and their failure if they don’t. Applied to technology, this leads to the position that a tool is morally neutral: the moral issue is in how you use it. Anyone familiar with the debate over gun control has heard this view expressed in the slogan “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” But this can be applied to any piece of technology, such as in the [ERLC’s 2019 statement on AI](https://erlc.com/policy-content/artificial-intelligence-an-evangelical-statement-of-principles/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), which states “When AI is employed in accordance with God’s moral will, it is an example of man’s obedience to the divine command to steward creation and to honor Him.” 

### **Rejection of Natural Law**

A commitment to the doctrines of *sola scriptura* and biblical inerrancy have left many evangelicals skeptical of arguments rooted in natural law. They are unlikely to be swayed by arguments that AI violates the natural order of things, or that technology has a *telos* beyond whatever the end user chooses to do with it. If the Bible doesn’t say that I can’t use ChatGPT to write my sermons, then it must not be wrong.

All of this leads to an antinomian view of art and technology, where objects have no inherent properties beyond their physical materials and all meaning lies in what we attach to them. The only thing that matters is how we respond, hence the concern in many colleges with teaching ‘ethical use’ of AI. What’s missing is any deep consideration of how the tools we use shape us, the virtues and vices that are promoted by offloading our thinking to a computer, or whether widespread adoption is good for society at large.

## The Quest for Certainty

The third issue is psychological. Evangelicals crave certainty, even as evangelicalism continues to wrestle with fundamental questions of authority. Here I turn to an unlikely source: the godfather of postmodernism, Jean-François Lyotard. In his 1978 book *The Postmodern Condition,* Lyotard observed that computers were transforming knowledge into information, and thereby enabling it to be bought and sold. He foresaw that this would lead to knowledge being valued only for its *utility* rather than for any fundamental truth value, which in turn would lead to a loss of social consensus around what was true.

With enough foresight to recognize that everyone thinking they are right about everything all the time is not a recipe for a functional society, Lyotard spent the last pages of *The Postmodern Condition* considering possible ways to re-establish societal consensus around truth. He settled on the hope that a future hyperintelligent computer system could control access to knowledge, and aid individuals by “supplying them with the information they usually lack for making knowledgeable decisions.” If everyone relies on the same AI program to tell them what is true, then consensus around truth could be restored.

The person who posts screenshots of AI summaries to try and win arguments online, the pastor who turns to AI to ‘explain’ a difficult theological concept, or the student who turns to an AI-generated summary because they can’t figure out what Plato is trying to say all crave what modernity cannot give them. Unprepared for the hard, careful work of separating truth from falsehood, they long for Lyotard’s hypothetical computer to simply *tell them what is true.* 

Of course, this is a mirage. AI cannot rise beyond its training data. It can only present statistically likely combinations of words. Biases in the training data become outputs of the model, and the same technology that allows AI programs to give detailed answers also [makes them](https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05746?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) frequently hallucinate falsehoods. 

No computer program can determine truth. But the authoritative-sounding voice and the ability to get an answer to any question that statistically feels right, even if it’s wrong, are beguiling. And so they move, haltingly at first, and then all at once, into the cold silicon arms of the Machine God.

## Embodiment Contra the Machine God

Evangelicals are unlikely to reach a consensus any time soon on the theological issues outlined above. But both pro-AI evangelicals and AI-critical evangelicals (like the editors of TGC as well as this website) should be able to recognize that the source of truth was Himself *embodied*. 

Embodiment is a profound antidote to the AI mind virus: the meaning of the Incarnation is that God is not an inaccessible, contextless Truth but the Logos made flesh who made his dwelling among us. *Knowledge* of Jesus Christ different from *information* about Jesus. Information is disembodied knowledge, rendered into the binary language of computer code, it can be transmitted from one form to another. Knowledge is embodied, experienced, and deeply entangled with what it means to be human. Knowing Christ means a relationship with Him.

The father teaching his son to ride a bicycle rather than telling him to watch YouTube tutorials, or the pastor who takes the time to help a parishioner think through a difficult moral dilemma, are practicing the transmission of embodied knowledge within the context of a human relationship. No AI program – [even one trained on a pastor’s own sermons](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/30/us/ai-twin-pastor-justin-lester-california-church.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) – can replicate this because it can only transmit information; not being human, it can never give knowledge. 

The pursuit of embodiment is another area where Christians need to recognize the pre-eminence of the *imago Dei* over the logic of the market. Embodiment can be expensive and inefficient, because it doesn’t scale. Yet, in an AI-optimized world it is going to be crucial to retaining human connection and recognition of the *imago Dei* in ourselves and each other.
### Resisting Therapy Culture with Matthew Loftus
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/resisting-therapy-culture-with-matthew-loftus/
Last updated: 2026-08-11T16:55:31.000Z
**Date**: Tuesday, August 25  
**Time**: 11:30 AM CST  
**Location**: Online  
**Total Seats**: 100

**The Event**  
\- Keynote from Matthew Loftus on [*Resisting Therapy Culture*](https://ivpress.com/resisting-therapy-culture?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)  
\- Interview between Matthew Loftus and Jake Meador  
\- Live Audience Q&A

*Sponsored by*

[![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/08/image.png)](https://ivpress.com/resisting-therapy-culture?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

**About** [***Resisting Therapy Culture***](https://ivpress.com/resisting-therapy-culture?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

**Let Churches Be Churches and Therapists Be Therapists**

We live in an age where "therapy culture" dominates our cultural milieu. Everywhere we look, therapeutic language and psychological concepts are popularized, misapplied, and lose their medical significance. Therapy and psychiatry are good practices, but when people begin to filter everything in life through a therapeutic lens, it becomes harmful rather than helpful.

The church is not immune to this phenomenon. Increasingly, people's expectations of the church and its leaders are viewed through the lens of psychological health and wellness.

In this book, Matthew Loftus unpacks how this kind of "therapy culture" can distort the Christian life. He argues that the church cannot do for people what therapy and psychiatry are designed to do. While church should be a place of healing and love for people who are suffering from mental illness, churches and their leaders should focus on what they are called to do: bringing people together to worship God.

**What you'll get with** ***Resisting Therapy Culture*:**

- An understanding of the role of the church in supporting people through mental health struggles
- A deeper appreciation for the expertise and value of mental health professionals
- Insight into how both therapy and the church can be good for Christians' spiritual and mental health in their own intended ways
- Encouragement for church leaders to renew their focus on leading people in worship

This book is an invitation for church leaders to focus on what the church does best. As Loftus explains, "People will live healthier lives when churches and therapists are working well, but the two do not have the same mission, methods, mandates, or measures of success. . . . Both should do the very best that they can in the sphere of work that God has assigned."
### The Magpie #6: Wilderness
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-magpie-6-wilderness/
Last updated: 2026-08-11T11:00:55.000Z
**Cal Flyn.** [***The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness***](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/761751/the-savage-landscape-by-cal-flyn/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Viking, 2026\. $35.00\. 448 pp.**

The concept of wilderness is almost impossibly rich. “The Wilderness” is something both tactile (it exists, you can go there!) and hidden (for once you can get there, is it really wild anymore?). Wilderness also constantly invites our interest in its provenance. Was the wilderness wild before we said it was so? Once towns encroach on the wilderness, is it wilderness any longer? If a tree falls in the wild forest and no one hears it, is there anyone there to call it *wild*?

Wilderness, in other words, is in the eye of the beholder. It requires someone to observe and name it. For this reason, the question of wilderness is caught up in a back-and-forth interrogation between the wild landscape and the “wild” in our imagination.

There is a long history of interest in the American wilderness. For this reason there is also a vast literature on the topic. Both Max Oelschlaeger’s [*The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology*](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300053708/the-idea-of-wilderness/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (1991) and Roderick Nash’s [*Wilderness and the American Mind*](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300190380/wilderness-and-the-american-mind/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (1965) frame the historical question. Karl Jacoby’s [*Crimes Against Nature*](https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520282292/crimes-against-nature?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)(2014) and Caroline Fraser’s [*Rewilding the World*](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312655419/rewildingtheworld/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (2010) take colorful examples of poachers and endangered animals and put them in the context of the larger story of conservation. Hundreds of essays stake out more academic views on wilderness and conservation, and the pros and cons of designating something as “wild” and the implications of such designations for policy.

But America’s history with wilderness extends also into the imagination. In fact, you could make an argument that *the idea* of the open frontier and the possibilities it contains is America’s most significant cultural ideal. 

Personally, I have long loved books set in the American frontier. Beginning with an early affection for the novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the eponymous Kirsten books from the American Girl franchise, I moved on to novels from Jane Smiley, Wallace Stegner, Marilynne Robinson, and Kent Haruf. All of these novels, interestingly, set their protagonists against a vast and sometimes unforgiving landscape. The protagonists endure the very human challenges of aging, love, and loss—experiences that are their own unforgiving landscape. Setting stories of human aging and loss against vast prairie and rugged plains has always been a suggestive choice.

Much of our time, after all, is spent plodding, doing the same things over and over again, as if we too were in an endless prairie whose boundaries have no clear sight line. All of a sudden there rises ahead the sight of your great defeat. 

The older I get, the more I think that death always comes as a surprise, even when we know it is on the horizon. I love stories set in the prairie, and in the plains. My own life is at the moment blissfully filled with a glut of ordinary days, but I know a stark disruption will someday be on the horizon.

All of this is to say that there is much to like Cal Flyn’s *The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness*. In her book, Flyn tells interesting stories about the wilderness, broadly conceived. She takes her readers to the hunting preserves in Africa, where the high ticket kills of endangered animals funds the project of conservation, and to erupting volcanoes, to examine the idea of the “sublime.” She writes about Ansel Adams and his role in documenting (and thus creating) the idea of the wilderness, and she tells of her experience hiking in Yosemite’s designated wilderness areas. 

She researches “environmental conservation through exclusion” when she visits Uganda’s famed gorillas, and also encounters the human guerillas who make conservation in that area so dangerous and difficult. 

In her chapter on the supernatural character of some landscapes, Flyn writes engagingly of Pungmo, a small village in Nepal where villagers live among the wildlife, including the snow leopard. Her deep respect for this wilderness and its creatures there verges on religious awe. 

Flyn is a keen observer, and aims to argue that the veneration of the land and of wild animals that exists in some cultures is a clear boon to wildlife conservationists. Conservation must accept the values of the people who live in the sites to be conserved; the land and the animals who live there shape the spiritual values of the people. These are straightforward observations but also interesting and rich ones. 

Flyn travels all over the world to encounter the sites she writes about. She clearly has a personal stake in the question, and she gladly enters the stories she tells. This might be a benefit of her wilderness writing, but for me, it also is a real weakness of an otherwise fascinating book. 

The attempt to remove the “third wall” between writer and subject—made famous by the Gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson—has been the distinctive development of nonfiction since the 1970s. Especially in the last twenty years, popular nonfiction appears to contain almost an imperative toward the first person. Self-disclosure *can* sell an idea. Books like Rebecca Skloot’s *The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks* benefit from the back-and-forth conversation of the author with the family of Lacks. John McPhee does this well. Janet Malcom’s 1989 *The Journalist and the Murderer* may be the best example of a book that succeeds when the author enters it as investigator and narrator. As Kristen Martin writes in a 2022 essay for *The Atlantic,* “When a writer does decide to adhere to fact, they have at their disposal two main subjects—the self and everything outside the self. But even when nonfiction writers plan to turn their gaze outward, what they discover can have a tricky way of bringing them back to themselves.” This can work. Sometimes.

But I’ve read more than a few nonfiction titles lately that have great questions, fantastic titles and cover art, and yet contain an underwhelming treatment of their subject matter. Entering a little bit into the story can grant a piece of nonfiction some color. But increasingly the line seems to be fading between nonfiction and memoir. I have turned down reviews on half a dozen nonfiction titles lately because their treatment of their subject matter is so thin, so insubstantial, compared to the author’s preoccupation with his or her own opinion.

In its weakest points, Cal Flyn’s ambitious book suffers from this confusion. Though she’s isolated the right question about the wilderness and the difficulty of identifying where it starts and ends, she can’t help but put herself in the story to excess.

This leaves the reader wondering what they are supposed to gain from the text. “Landscape: emotions for cowards, perhaps. Or—not cowards, but those of us who like to feel and to be felt, but who don’t like to say it out loud.” Or “The lack of control over one’s emotional weather has often been a source of great frustration to me. Without this cyclone of rapidly fluctuating pressures, would I not be a rational and productive person?” She is also susceptible to overwriting. When describing a volcano, she writes that “rivulets of thickened magma seeped from vents and cracks, as slow and as gelatinous as icing from a cake, a grey skin forming, then cracking to reveal soft, burnt orange in underlayer.” When this overwriting meets easy caricatures, it yields prose like this: “This stylizing of wilderness was a kind of amnesia, an airbrushing of the past. A massaging of fact into myth into visual shorthand. It was simpler that way, and more beautiful.” 

It is hard to miss the irony of a book on the wilderness that is so self-absorbed. Wilderness, after all, should get us outside ourselves so that we contemplate something beyond our own experience. But *The Savage Landscape* gets bogged down at times in the author’s own head.

It is not completely her fault. This is only one of many recent nonfiction books that seem to suffer from what I think is a very online self-perception. Such books take a large, subtle question and identify in it two “sides.” There is an easy binary setup, perhaps something like “privacy is good” or “information is better”; then the author chips away at the two sides and leaves us with the view that, in the end, both sides are really one and the same. Somehow, whether it is affordable housing or the wilderness or colonialism or dog behavior, the answer, in the end, is really us. We are the ones who are encroaching on the wilderness, or stealing each other’s privacy, or hijacking the economy. The last lines of Flyn’s book really are: “We are all of us moving through the void.”

Many of the books I have picked up and put down of late seem to have been crafted for an audience that is very self-absorbed. Readers seem less interested in the subject matter than in having their own prior opinions endorsed. But what good nonfiction needs is the integrity of an author who knows what she thinks and takes ownership of it. When she does these things, she might very well appear in the book as a collaborator to her argument. But there is nothing good that comes from muddying the distinction between nonfiction and memoir.
### Living and Dying with the Saints in Wheaton
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/living-and-dying-with-the-saints-in-wheaton/
Last updated: 2026-08-11T03:54:12.000Z
I once had a conversation with a prominent evangelical figure during which I unexpectedly found myself being chided for where I was born. Being from Iowa, this person suggested, meant that he was somehow less susceptible to the realities of sin that clearly, to his mind, must have affected me being from California. Looking back, I think that I can safely say that his comment was intended to be tongue-in-cheek, but it still rubbed me the wrong way. It suggested, at the very least, a lack of humility. It might have even pointed to an underdeveloped doctrine of sin, as if sin doesn’t affect the lives of people in the Midwest, and an equally underdeveloped doctrine of grace, as if grace somehow stopped at the border of my home state. 

Death has no time for such sarcasm. 

The prospect and the reality of death quickly remove the notion that any person or community is free from the wages of sin (Rom. 3:23). This is, of course, a truth that all people learn at some point, some at a very early age, even if it tends to be placed on the back burner of our thoughts. In the past year, I have spent a significant amount of time reflecting on the reality of death – some of which I have willingly undertaken, and some of which has been thrust upon me. 

## **With a Little Help from My Students, a Book, and a Film**

Under the Core Book program at Wheaton College, where I have taught for nearly two decades, the entire college community is invited each year to read the same book (in addition to the Bible), to engage in communal reflection and learning, and to participate in on-campus events related to the book. For this most recent academic year, the Core Book was [*When Breath Becomes Air*](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/258507/when-breath-becomes-air-by-paul-kalanithi/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), a memoir by Paul Kalanithi that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It tells his story about being a rising neurosurgeon who receives a terrible diagnosis of incurable stage IV lung cancer at the age of 36\. I had my first-year students read the book in class. I think it’s safe to say that it’s not exactly what they were expecting for their first semester in college. 

Given the prominence of Wheaton College locally, the number of churches in the immediate community, and the presence of prominent Christian institutions in the area (for example, *Christianity Today*, multiple Christian publishers, and a variety of parachurch organizations), Wheaton is regularly regarded as among the most “Christian” of communities in the country (with all apologies to Nashville, Colorado Springs, Grand Rapids, Birmingham, and others). Having spent nearly twenty years here, I can confidently say that Wheaton undoubtedly benefits from the presence of such institutions. But I can also say with equal confidence that Wheaton is fallen and in need of redemption. Wheaton, too, is susceptible to the reality of death. 

As a college community, we were reminded of that unwelcome truth recently with the sudden passing of our colleague, professor, and friend Daniel Treier. Like the author of our Core Book, Dan received a diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer. Others who knew Dan better than I have written eloquently about his particular contributions to evangelical theology through his teaching, writing, and mentoring of students (for example, see [Kevin Vanhoozer’s tribute](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/vanhoozer-treier-tribute/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)). I knew Dan both personally – our families attend the same church, our teenage daughters are friends, and we would occasionally chat about baseball or play golf together (he was much more consistent in his drives off the tee than I am) – and professionally – in my role as an academic editor, I worked with him on several projects, and I had recently contracted him for a book on Scripture. I wouldn’t be the first person to note that he conveyed both a seriousness about his work and a cheerfulness that would shine through at times. I still catch myself sometimes looking over at church, expecting to see him where he sat each week. 

Of course, this wasn’t the first time that death had knocked on the door of Wheaton College. Like any other community, we grieve, we celebrate the lives of those we have lost, and we wrestle with questions. But it has occurred to me that we might be better equipped than some communities to respond to the questions that inevitably arise when death shows up uninvited. For my part, at least, I found comfort not only in the words of Scripture, but also – perhaps surprisingly – in the college’s Core Book and another unexpected source: a film by Terrence Malick, which we screened for students at the college last year. 

## **An Invitation to Die**

On the cusp of launching a successful career, Kalanithi writes in his memoir, “I had reached the mountaintop, I could see the Promised Land, from Gilead to Jericho to the Mediterranean Sea.” But as he examines his own CT scans, he knows that everything has changed. Even as he grew steadily weaker, Kalanithi was determined to record his life and his final days. Through his words, he invites us to consider how we would respond when confronted with this reality. 

*A Hidden Life*, a 2019 film by Terrence Malick, offers a similar invitation. Malick presents the story of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer and devout Catholic who, when called to serve in the Nazi war effort, refuses to take the oath to Hitler. For this refusal, Franz and his family, including his wife, Fani, are increasingly ostracized in their small village of St. Radegund. Later, Franz is arrested, imprisoned, and ultimately executed. 

As is so often the case in Malick’s films, especially those that he has made in the past twenty years, running beneath the stunning imagery and the rich texture of music is a pressing question. In this case, the question is not only “What *would* you do?” if you were confronted by this situation, which might seem rather distant to most of us. No, Malick won’t let us off that easily. His film also asks, in a way that is applicable to each one of us, “What *will* you do? What will you do when confronted with the reality of death? And what kind of life do you want to live until then?” 

Taking a cue from Brett McCracken, who, in [his review of the film](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/hidden-life-faith-based-masterpiece/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), calls *A Hidden Life* “a psalm crying out to the God of refuge and deliverance,” I turn to three psalms.

## **Pleasant Places: Psalm 16:5-6**

> The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup;  
> you hold my lot.  
> The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;  
> I have a goodly heritage.

If you are acquainted with Malick’s films, then the beginning of *A Hidden Life* will likely seem both familiar and yet distinct. Several of the features that have characterized his more recent films are immediately evident: the use of voiceover, extended images of nature (often featuring water, wind, light, and, here, mountains), long takes juxtaposed with a series of quick images, a mise-en-scène that is rarely still (either because the camera is moving, or the actors on the screen are moving, or both), and the use of music, especially non-diegetic music (that is, music that is not part of the world on the screen – in this case, the score from James Newton Howard and several pieces of classical music, including works by Bach, Handel, and others). These and other elements make watching a film by Malick a different kind of experience for viewers: for some, it can be disruptively different; for others, pleasantly so. His films, I have found, often give viewers time and space to reflect on their themes. Malick, you might say, likes to make space for the Holy Spirit to work. 

In this respect, *A Hidden Life* (2019) will seem familiar to the acquainted viewer. Early on, we encounter idyllic images: the Austrian mountains; blooming fields; Franz and Fani at work side by side on their farm; memories of their first meeting. These images are accompanied by equally beautiful, and now diegetic sounds (that is, sounds that are part of the world on the screen): the noises of a farm; flowing rivers; the tolling of church bells; friendly neighbors; three children at play. Fani reflects, “It seemed no trouble could reach our valley. We lived above the clouds.” 

In *When Breath Becomes Air*, Kalanithi describes his own version of a quiet valley. He tells us that he had not only developed a passion for medicine and, more particularly, neurosurgery. We also learn that he had an interest in literature, developing what he called “a deep love of, and care for, language.” There’s an MA in Literature sprinkled in among his medical degrees. So, it is perhaps not as surprising as it might have been for a surgeon who also loved works by Joyce, Solzhenitsyn, Tolstoy, and Hemingway among others to quote Walt Whitman’s 1892 poem, “Song of Myself,” when assessing his early life: “I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin.”

An idyllic farm in the mountains. A bustling family. Perfect health. Are these not, to use the words of the Psalmist, “boundary lines \[that\] have fallen… in pleasant places”? 

But already, as both readers and viewers, we have been warned. No matter how many times Paul looks at his own CT scans, he cannot avoid the diagnosis: “The future I had imagined, the one just about to be realized, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated.” Similarly, in the film, the opening voiceover from Franz points to a hope, but one that is unrealized: “I thought that we could build our nest high up in the trees. Fly away, like birds, to the mountains.” What follows are images from Leni Riefenstahl’s notorious Nazi propaganda film, *Triumph of the Will* (1935), depicting Hitler descending through the clouds to arrive at a rally in Nuremburg. If we are paying attention, we also hear Bach’s *St. Matthew’s Passion*. Radegund may seem like an Edenic locale, but Malick has already suggested that it will not last. Fani hears plane engines roar in the distance. As viewers, we know that Austrian soldiers who are called to military service need to swear an oath to Hitler. To refuse would result in death, leaving Franz’s family abandoned. His parish priest tells him that his sacrifice would benefit no one. Even the bishop tells him, “You have a duty to the Fatherland. The church tells you so.” 

The theological truth in both the book and the film is that sin and its effects are radical – that is, it affects and infects everything; it is everywhere. Nowhere and no one is hidden from it. Not California. Not Iowa. Not Radegund. Even in the Garden of Eden, sin enters in. 

## **Passing Shadows: Psalm 144:3-4** 

> O Lord, what are humans that you regard them,  
> or mortals that you think of them?  
> They are like a breath;  
> their days are like a passing shadow.

In one scene, Malick seems to intentionally echo Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film, *The Seventh Seal*. In that classic work, a knight (played by Max von Sydow) and his squire return from the Crusades only to be confronted by the ravages of the Black Plague and the personification of Death. Later, they enter a small church, where they find an artist at work, painting a fresco of the Dance of Death. The squire asks the artist, “Why all this daubing?” “To remind people of death,” responds the artist. “That won't make them any happier,” says the squire. “I paint life as it is,” replies the artist. “Then folk can do as they like.” 

Malick’s version of the scene presents Franz and an artist discussing his depictions of Jesus. “I paint their comfortable Christ with a halo over his head,” says the artist to Franz. “Someday I might have the courage to venture. Not yet. Someday I’ll paint the true Christ.” This artist-in-residence serves as a kind of stand-in for Malick, who might well be speaking to himself. His next film, tentatively entitled *The Way of the Wind*, is about the life of Jesus. 

In the meantime, Malick has given us another passion. At one point, Franz is walking past a crucifix statue. He pauses to look at it, as if he knows where this is all going. According to Luke 9, shortly after the Transfiguration and after repeatedly foretelling his own death, Jesus begins to make his way toward the cross that awaits him. Verse 51 reads: “When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” 

It is difficult *not* to notice some of the Christological comparisons in the film. The people from Franz’s hometown can’t believe what he is doing – for example, he refuses to donate to the German war effort – and the village begins to turn against the Jägerstätter family. “It’s an act of madness,” says one woman to Fani. “A sin. A sin against his family, against his village.” The mayor tries to convince him to change his mind: “You’re worse than them. Because they are enemies, but you are a traitor.” The peaceful, friendly village of Radegund has now become a stand-in for a disbelieving Nazareth. But Franz is resolute in his conviction. He explicitly quotes Psalm 144: “We are like a breath. Like a shadow that passes away.” You might say that he has set his face to go to Berlin. 

As expected, Franz is eventually called up to serve in the military. In early March 1943, when he refuses to take the oath to Hitler, he is arrested and imprisoned. By May 4, he is taken to Tegel Prison outside Berlin. There, his Christ-like suffering continues: the soldiers mock him, beat him, abuse him. Like Christ in the garden, he prays to God. The authorities question him. Even some of his fellow prisoners mock him, like the thief on the cross. He is brought before the court. The Pilate-like judge (played by Bruno Ganz) asks him, “Do you judge me?” After a sham trial, he is condemned to death. Even a final visit from Fani and his parish priest will not change Franz’s mind or stay the execution. 

Tegel Prison also happens to be the place where another anti-Nazi, Christian dissenter was held. Shortly after Jägerstätter was arrested, German theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was also arrested, but Bonhoeffer arrived at Tegel before Jägerstätter. Just more than a week before Franz’s arrival, Bonhoeffer wrote a letter to his parents, Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer on April 25, Easter Sunday: 

What is so liberating about Good Friday and Easter is the fact that our thoughts are pulled far beyond our personal circumstances to the ultimate meaning of all life, suffering, and indeed everything that happens, and this gives us great hope.

Bonhoeffer outlived Jägerstätter by nearly two years, but he, too, was eventually executed by the Nazi state. In one of his earlier works, *The Cost of Discipleship*, he had revealed that he already knew the truth of the invitation to follow Jesus: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

Let us not forget that Franz’s passion also entailed the suffering of others, including his mother, his children, his sister-in-law, and especially his wife, Fani. She struggles to keep up with the work on the farm. She is ostracized by the villagers. From prison, Franz imagines his children taking part in the Corpus Christi celebrations, but Fani knows the truth: they have been excluded from these communal events. In [his analysis of *A Hidden Life*](https://www.robertkohen.com/filmcriticism/2020/7/11/a-hidden-life-2019-terrence-malick?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), film critic Robert Kohen helpfully reminds us that when “Fani writes to an imprisoned Franz about his ‘three little women,’” she places the film alongside Louisa May Alcott’s novel, *Little Women*, “another work about the trials wives and children must endure when men are absent during wartime.” Like Mrs. O’Brien in a different Malick film, *The Tree of Life*, who prays to God after the death of her son, Fani prays: “Lord, you do nothing. Where are you? Why did you create us?” 

In *When Breath Becomes Air*, Paul’s wife, Lucy, suffers alongside him. As he grapples with his diagnosis, Paul reminds his readers of the next line in that same Whitman poem: 

> I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,   
> Hoping to cease not till death. 

Prior to Paul’s own death, a friend and fellow medical student, Jeff, died. Reflecting on this loss, Paul writes, “Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms… Jeff and I had trained for years to actively engage with death, to grapple with it, like Jacob with the angel, and, in so doing, to confront the meaning of a life… Our patients’ lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins.” It is true that death is part of creaturely life. But it is still an enemy, an unwelcomed guest, an unintended consequence (Gen. 3:19), part of what theologian Karl Barth called the “shadowside” of creation – those limitations of our creaturely finitude and mortality. 

Franz Jägerstätter was executed on August 9, 1943 at 36 years old. Malick depicts the church bell tolling in Radegund. 

## **Hidden in Christ: Psalm 121:1-8**

> I lift up my eyes to the hills— where will my help come from?My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.  
> He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber… The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade at your right hand… the Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore.

As with Malick’s other films, it is worth pausing to consider the meaning of the title: *A Hidden Life*. How, exactly, is this life hidden? 

There might be some irony at work here in that the small village of St. Radegund, though high up in the hills, was not hidden and could not be hidden from Hitler’s designs. Even this valley was not hidden from the reality of sin. In another sense, Franz’s life remained largely unknown and thus hidden from the public eye for a long time. In 1964, more than twenty years after Franz’s death, Gordon Zahn published the first biography about him, *In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jägerstätter*, bringing his story to light. 

But we are given another interpretive clue at the end of the film. The closing title card offers a quote from *Middlemarch* by George Eliot: 

> … for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Eliot helpfully reminds us that it is not a life that seeks attention that brings lasting change. Rather, it is a faithful, quiet – yes, even hidden – life that leads to sustained flourishing. A life that sows seeds, like Franz and Fani on their farm, that will only grow in time. 

I would echo Eliot’s advice. But I have to confess that this reading of the film leaves me somewhat unsatisfied. For it hardly recognizes the faith that guided Franz’s life, the faith that informed his difficult – almost impossible – decisions in the midst of great trials, the faith that remained with him until death. Might there be something else at work here? 

In Colossians 3:1-4, we read: 

> So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on the things that are above, not on the things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.

“Death always wins.” That is what Kalanithi suggested in his memoir. In a sense, of course, he was right. Confronted with his own mortality, he states, “Death, so familiar to me in my work, was now paying a personal visit.” No one will remain hidden from death’s personal visit. Not Paul. Not Franz. Not Malick. Not Dan. Not you. Not me. 

But the promise that we have as followers of Christ is that he has conquered death, and if we have been buried with him into death, if we have hidden our lives in Christ, then we will be raised again to new life (Rom. 6:4). A hidden life, then, is not only a meaningful life lived in obscurity. Much more than that, a hidden life is one that finds its true meaning and fulfillment in Christ. 

In my pastoral role, I have found myself reading the words of Psalm 121 nearly countless times in parishioners’ homes, at the bedside in the hospital, or with grieving families. Perhaps one of the reasons that page of my Bible is so worn is that the pressing question that the Psalmist asks gets an immediate reply: “Where will my help come from? / My help comes from the Lord.” The Lord, the one who made heaven and earth, is the one who sends help by sending the Son into the world to redeem humanity and remake the world. 

In *Lord Jesus Christ*, the last book that he published before his own death, Dan wrote the following about the promises found in Christ: 

> As the Son of Man, Jesus sinlessly identified with humanity’s current condition and thereby fulfilled our triumphant destiny. For, in union with him and his suffering, we enjoy the glory God made for us to share as royal priests of creation.

In [his commentary on Malick’s film](https://thepointmag.com/criticism/patience-a-hidden-life/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), Alan Jacobs reminds us that the word “martyr” means “witness”: “\[T\]he martyr is one who bears witness to the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ, most typically by undergoing his or her own Passion.” On June 1, 2007, the Roman Catholic Church officially declared that Jägerstätter was a martyr for the faith. Later that same year, on October 26, he was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI. Many members of the Jägerstätter family were present at the event, including his wife, their children, and grandchildren.

## **An Invitation to Live** 

Last fall, as part of the Core Book program, I found myself on a panel with other Wheaton College faculty members, discussing Kalanithi’s book and the reality of suffering. Little did any of us who were gathered that evening know that in less than two months, Dan would be gone. At Dan’s memorial service, where we celebrated his life and his faith, Phil Ryken, president of Wheaton College, challenged the congregation with two questions: “What are you living for?” and “Are you ready to die?” 

It turns out that the college’s Core Book and Malick’s film are not so much invitations to reflect upon death, though they are that. But even more so, they are invitations to reflect upon life. What kind of life do you want to live? In whose hands will you place your life? Not just at the moment of death, but now? 

On July 8, 1943, two days after the tribunal condemned Franz to death, he wrote a letter to Fani: 

> It is a joy to be able to suffer for Jesus and our faith. We have the joyful hope that the few days in this life when we have been separated will be replaced by thousands of days in eternity, where we shall rejoice with God.

Near the close of the film, Fani, who had earlier prayed to God with a questioning faith, prays again, this time with greater assurance as she prays to God on behalf of Franz: “You love him more than I do. Give him courage, wisdom, strength.” In the end, Malick offers us, through her words, a vision of new creation: 

> A time will come when we will know what all this is for. And there will be no mysteries. We will know why we live. We’ll come together. We’ll plan orchards. Fields. We’ll build the land back up. Franz, I’ll meet you there. In the mountains.

Franz, Paul, Dan – their lives were not hidden from the realities of sin and suffering. But neither were their lives hidden from God. Indeed, being hidden in Christ allows us to see death for what it really is: an enemy defeated. And it allows us to see who we really are: conquerors through Christ.
### Saying 'Here I Am' in the Digital Age
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/saying-here-i-am-in-the-digital-age/
Last updated: 2026-08-07T18:36:27.000Z
In his preface to *This Day:* *Sabbath Poems*, Kentucky poet-farmer, Wendell Berry, laments the sorrowful swallowing of our physical world by the mechanical:

> By disfigurements that our time imposes upon our consciousness, by scars of bad history that mark the land, by sounds of machinery dominating the air, the mind may be returned to themes of loss, estrangement, and sorrow. That one is sometimes able, among the disturbances of the present world, to wander into some good and beautiful whereabouts of woods, grow quiet and come to rest is a gift, a wonder, and a kind of grace.

While it is the disturbed and dominated present world that Berry mourns, it is this same world where he also finds a beautiful gift: a place to grow quiet in the rubble and be human again.

This is the mission of the Christian life: to help others wander into the good and beautiful grace of the Son of God amid the disfigurement and estrangement of the world.

However, this implies relationship and presence. In our decentralized, digitally disturbed age, presence has become more complicated. At the risk of being reductionistic, we can separate our lives into two broad spheres of presence: media presence and mission presence. Elsewhere in his preface, Berry likewise notes this fundamental divide between “mechanical” and “natural” life. We can further understand this divide as being between the places we inhabit *online*, and the places we inhabit *physically* and are thus called to be on mission with God. To use Berry’s imagery, the technological is devouring the physical; one is increasingly dominated by the accelerated “sounds of machinery” (e.g. clicks and notifications); the other holds the gift of rest and wonder. 

While these spheres are not necessarily mutually exclusive per se, they operate on two vastly different understandings of the self, imposing upon our consciousness in drastically different ways.

## **Media Presence**

In the digital age we quite literally bring ourselves into existence. There is no shortage of ways for us to create ourselves with usernames, avatars, pictures, and posts. These are the digital elements that constitute existence in an online environment, in “the machine.” Self-creation and self-sustaining are the modes of being. However, this self of our own making still requires external validation––if no one follows me, if no one shares my post, if no one likes my picture… do I *really* exist?

In his recent book, *Superbloom: How Technologies Of Connection Tear Us Apart*, Nicholas Carr considers the contrasting environments of physical vs. virtual worlds: 

> In the physical world, we remain present even when we're quiet. In the virtual world, we don't. To shut up, even briefly, is to disappear. To confirm our existence, we have to keep posting. We have to keep repeating *Here I am!*

This phrase––*Here I am!*––is the quintessential, unwritten caption whenever we click “post.” It is both our desperate announcement of *self-creation* and our anxious attempt at *self-justification*. 

Consider what these words mean in a media sphere:

### **“Here”** 

The *here* of this announcement is a disembodied and asynchronous anti-location. The very word loses its temporal and tangible meaning in a digital world. Carr notes how online life “removed the constraints of space and time and \[placed\] them into a frictionless setting of instantaneity and simultaneity.” *Here* is merely a digital impression; a time-stamped act fed into algorithmic computation. One can be “here” anywhere and everywhere; *place* has been disfigured by digitization.

### **“I”** 

The *I* that is announced has been carefully curated and polished pre-post. This is a dangerously fragile *I*, up for debate and in constant need of external validation. This is an *I* who is consumed by the very media for which it created itself. Carr points out the various roles we must play––“producer and impresario, hawker and emcee, for a show that never stops.” *I* must keep up, lest *I* fade into algorithmic oblivion. However, the whole endeavor is a farce; Byung-Chul Han has termed as “smart power” the seductive force social media uses to make us who *it* wants through the appearance of self-creation. 

### **“am”** 

Our *being* is reduced to presenting, proving, and then preserving our existence. All action is aimed at justifying ourselves to the watching world. Lesslie Newbigin argues that the combination of the Enlightenment and industrialization stripped us of any clear cultural telos. There isn’t a uniting *end* or purpose of being for collective society. Thus, we must each manufacture our own purpose. As a result, fragile, telos-seeking selves flock to social platforms hoping to find one.

We can visualize this self-created self as one that simultaneously presents itself *to* the world via social media, while also requiring external feedback, validation, and acceptance *from* social media to confirm and justify its existence:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-07-at-1.31.13---PM.png)

Not only is such a resulting conception of self incredibly unfulfilling and inherently anxious (always one mistake away from having our existence *canceled*), but it also becomes increasingly anti-relational. [Freya India observes](https://www.afterbabel.com/p/degrading-effects-of-life-online?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) how these platforms form us negatively, “We become resentful. Bitter. Competitive. Quietly wishing for others to fail.”

Such resentment is rooted in the zero-sum game of digital glory––more attention for you likely means less for me. We are quite literally competing for our lives, hoping to outperform one another to secure our social validation. This is a unique disfigurement of our time, as Berry would say.

## **Mission Presence**

In contrast to our digital environments, presence in mission is not an act of *creation*, but rather a *responsive* act. Throughout Scripture we see several characters respond to the call and commission of God with the very same phrase, “*Here I am!”* 

- Abraham – responds “*Here I am*” and is called to sacrifice his only son, Isaac.
- Jacob – responds “*Here I am*” and is called to return to Canaan.
- Moses – responds “*Here I am*” and is called to redeem God’s people from slavery.
- Samuel – responds “*Here I am*” and is called to be a prophet to God’s people.
- Isaiah – responds “*Here I am*” and is called to an unfruitful ministry.

However, in this context these words have an entirely different meaning. Each of these were responses to the God who creates, calls, and commissions his people. Rather than an act of self-creation and self-justification, these are acts of self-subservience and self-submission. 

### **“Here”**

Each response was uttered from an actual location in space and time. These men stood before God and were in relationship with others. Many of their calls even included dramatically tangible acts like bearing a knife down toward one’s firstborn son, or shielding one’s eyes from a blazing shrub. *Here* required their full bodies—Samuel’s running back and forth, Isaiah’s scorched lips—and was often marked with tangible signs like stone altars marking an actual *place*.

### **“I”**

These were *I*’s with solid identities in relation to others––fathers of families, shepherds to flocks, apprentices to mentors, prophets to nations. They had concrete, tested, and honed gifts and abilities that were commissioned for the good of others. Further, these encounters were *unique*––for instance, Moses was the *I* at the bush, and no other *I*. Kevin Vanhoozer names such an encounter with God’s word an “I/Thou” affair; who we are is uniquely defined and expanded by our contact with God. 

### **“am”**

*Being* is for the purpose of service. *Being* is dictated and given shape by the mission God assigns. Rather than justifying ourselves, proving our own righteousness and worth to others, Bruce Waltke argues that true righteousness is lived out by disadvantaging oneself in order to advantage others. Thus, *being* is applied in the act of serving. We *are* through God and for others. This is most striking in Moses’ case, who realizes his purpose through being sent by “I AM”.

Now we can see how a biblical conception of self is not self-created, but created by God and lived out via the call of God. And, rather than the self being something pieced together by *receiving,* it is something discovered during the act of *giving* in the context of mission:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-07-at-1.31.20---PM.png)

How does such a God-created, called, and commissioned self move forward in mission?

## **The Self on Mission**

We must earnestly answer God’s call in Scripture to mission with the same words, *“Here I am!*” Tim Keller has outlined a helpful framework for discerning one’s call (i.e. mission). Keller says there are basically three necessary elements: Affinity, Ability, and Opportunity, each of which corresponds helpfully to our phrase:

### **“Here”** (Opportunity)

\- Where am I geographically? 

\- What *places* do I inhabit? 

\- What are the actual needs of the people here and what are the real opportunities open for me?

To answer this question, we must have a level of commitment to a physical community—some “good and beautiful whereabouts” where we can be present. This is increasingly unpopular for rising Gen Zers––transience and open options are more exciting. Like one character in Berry’s *Jayber Crow*, the temptation is to live like “there is always a better place for a person to live, better work to do, a better spouse to wed, better friends to have.” But *Jayber* is very much a story about *membership—*what it means to belong mutually to a place and its people. Carr says virtual presence requires physical absence. Thus, the online self belongs to no one. In this way, social media is the graveyard of mission. Mission will starve without *membership* to a place and its people. Over-involvement on social platforms removes us from the *place* of mission.

### **“I”** (Ability)

\- Who am I in Jesus Christ? 

\- How has God made and wired me? 

\- Where have others recognized and affirmed gifting? 

\- What unique abilities do I have and how can those be used for the good of those around me? 

Again, this requires being deeply known and open to feedback via trial and error in community. You will likely have to serve in many uncomfortable ways before you or someone else realizes where you fit. Paul wanted Timothy’s progress in ministry to be a public spectacle. Much less painful than such growth in the spotlight is to carefully craft ourselves in private before making our impressive public (digital) appearance, but, as we have seen, this is a fragile and fruitless self obligated only to its own self-creative purpose.

### **“am”** (Affinity)

\- At the core of who I am, what excites me? 

\- What types of people, contexts, and ministries do I vibrate towards?

This, I think, is a silent casualty of online life. We are inundated with endless amounts of diverse content––the result being the nearly impossible task of focusing on any one interest. We are simply too overwhelmed to notice and act on our own affinities. Bo Burnham’s comedic line, welcoming us into the internet is: “*Can I interest you in everything? All of the time?*” Catechized and thus formed by everything, we are left amorphous enigmas, even to ourselves! Our being must be shaped by the ancient and tangible practices of the Christian faith—silence, word and prayer, sacraments. In these, novelty is replaced with embodied repetition, providing a stable foundation on which unique interests can be discerned and flourish. 

Keller says when these three “plates” align, there is warrant to believe God has uniquely created and called you to be on mission in this area. However, discerning these will likely only happen in non-virtual contexts, away from air dominated by technological buzz.

\*\*\*

Ultimately, Carr points out that “social media is successful because it gives us what we want.” Thus, the only way to tip the scales of virtual presence toward physical presence in mission is to change what it is we want. That is a work of the missional God alone.

We must pray for hearts that desire not a fragile, fleeting sense of self that must be recreated each day while we await validation via notifications, but one that longs to join the mission of the Triune God to bring flourishing—grace, rest, and wonder—to every good and beautiful place including *where you are*.

Regardless of *our* desires, mission is successful because it is what *God* wants, and he gets what he wants—to *undo* the themes of loss, estrangement, and sorrow. It is within this glorious and guaranteed divine mission we’ve been invited to respond, “*Here I am!*”
### Screwtape is Hiding in Your Pocket
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/screwtape-is-hiding-in-your-pocket/
Last updated: 2026-09-03T19:53:02.000Z
While reading Vice President Vance's second memoir, [*Communion*](https://www.amazon.com/Communion-Finding-Way-Back-Faith-ebook/dp/B0GTQ68YZN?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), two dots connected as I reflected on my own transition from the analog to the digital world in the late '90s. The first was Vance's mention of rereading C. S. Lewis's [*The Screwtape Letters*](https://www.harperlibrarybookclub.com/9780060652937/the-screwtape-letters/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) during his military deployment, noting the cleverness of the demon's ability to get man to lose his faith. The second dot came [later in the book](https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/16/politics/takeaways-jd-vance-book-communion?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), when Vance warns us of the dangers of the "[attention economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention%5Feconomy?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)," or the monetization of the mind.

Being the same age as the Vice President, not only did I begin to romanticize the simplicity of my childhood, but a sense of guilt also washed over me, knowing I couldn't divorce my phone and social media. While my work in public policy requires frequent phone use, I have to be honest with myself—it frequently crosses the line into mindless distraction. Even though my social media activity has been outsourced to a contractor, many of the posts still have a "look at me" vibe as I try to build the platform of followers needed to sell a future book. Between the subtle distraction and micro self-worship, I couldn't help but ponder, "Is Screwtape hiding in my pocket?"

[C. S. Lewis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.%5FS.%5FLewis?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) published *The Screwtape Letters* in 1942, during World War II, when men faced extreme adversity and hard times. The fictional book is about a senior demon, Screwtape, who writes instructional letters to his inexperienced nephew, Wormwood, detailing psychological tactics to tempt a human man away from God and into damnation. The layman believes the path to hell is through the sin of hardened behavior such as stealing and killing, but the devil knows ease is his preferred method of success. "Indeed," the senior devil Screwtape advises his nephew Wormwood in the twelfth letter, "the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."

In the time of Lewis, Screwtape's "gentle slope" strategy had to be improvised with the mediums of the day, including newspapers, radio, and idle conversation. Today, it has been optimally engineered, shrunken down, and placed in the pocket of nearly every man, woman, and child in the Western world. Reread the *Letters* with a smartphone on the desk beside you and the book looks more like a product roadmap.

## **Two Tracks, Same Destination**

Hell's strategy, as Screwtape lays it out, runs along two tracks. The first bends the soul's attention inward slowly until the self becomes the object of worship. The second dissipates attention outward into what Screwtape calls "Nothing." It's not pleasure, not even sin in any sense, but a drift toward aimlessness that consumes a life without anyone ever choosing it. The tracks seem like opposites, as one concentrates attention and the other scatters it. They share the same destination, however, because both accomplish the only thing Hell needs: keeping the soul from looking at God. The smartphone is the first device in history that runs both tracks at once.

## **Self-Worship**

Screwtape's earliest advice about prayer is not to prevent it but to redirect it by keeping the patient's mind on his own performance. Teach him to "estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling," Screwtape advises in the fourth letter, so that his attention curves back on himself rather than out toward the God he is addressing. Later, in the fourteenth letter, comes the trap of humility: "Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, 'By jove! I'm being humble,' and almost immediately pride—pride at his own humility—will appear." The pattern is consistent. Hell does not need you to declare yourself a god. It needs only to make you the permanent subject of your own thoughts.

Now pick up your phone. Its camera faces both ways, but in the age of "selfies," the lens pointed at your own face gets the attention. It counts your steps, your followers, your likes, operating like lights on a car's dashboard, tracking one's metrics and updating them in real time. Wormwood was assigned one patient and studied him individually, learning his moods and vanities to exploit them. The recommendation algorithm is Wormwood at scale: a tempter assigned personally to you, attentive to you alone, laboring around the clock in the background to learn your interests and addictions and then feeding them back to you. Today, our virtues arrive pre-photographed: the workout posted, the volunteer event hashtagged, the job promotion announced.

## **Distraction**

The second track is boring but just as efficient, and Screwtape is most honest and direct when describing it. In the twelfth letter he celebrates the patient's slide into vague, unsatisfying habit: "Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why." The damned man's epitaph, Screwtape says, will be his own bewildered admission: "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked."

Lewis needed a metaphor for "a dreary flickering of the mind," but today we have it: a screenshot of last week's screen-time report, ironically sent on the morning of the [Sabbath](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbath?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Few people choose to spend four hours a day on a phone, and that is precisely the design. The infinite scroll has no milestones and no signposts. It never asks for a decision, because a decision is a moment at which a soul might wake up. Screwtape even supplies the economics of the attention industry in a single sentence from the ninth letter: "An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula." Any big tech product manager optimizing for engagement has rediscovered it, and only recently have some [come forward to admit the strategy](https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/sean-parker-facebook-was-designed-to-exploit-human-vulnerability-1513306782?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

In the very first letter, Screwtape recalls an atheist patient he believed was safely in hand—that is, until his thoughts began drifting in a dangerous direction during an afternoon in the British Museum. Screwtape did not argue with him but instead merely suggested lunch. By the time the man was in the street, watching the buses go by and picking up a newspaper, the demon's crisis had passed. "He is now safe in Our Father's house," Screwtape reports. No argument was ever needed, just an interruption. The smartphone notification is the perfected form of Screwtape's lunch suggestion, delivered dozens of times a day, timed to arrive whenever one's attention threatens to settle on anything meaningful in one's life.

## **Lived Experience**

I write this as a member of perhaps the last generation able to testify from inside a single life, also known as [Elder Millennials](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujfPvvpgPXc&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Born in 1985, I grew up with technology on a leash and anchored in place. The landline phone was attached to the kitchen wall, the cable television sat in the living room, and eventually the dial-up modem for the internet was stowed under the computer desk. 

Being forced to play outside, I found long stretches of hours that nothing arrived to fill. The bicycle was my getaway vehicle to stay busy and elude parental oversight. Boredom, it turns out, was load-bearing for my own betterment. The integration of what I call the "tech-triad"—smartphones, social media, and high-speed internet—morphed our existence through young adulthood. For those of us who went to college and pursued white-collar careers, we were conditioned to focus on showing the world our "[resume virtues](https://www.awakin.org/v2/read/view.php?tid=1083&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)" as key to secular pursuits like getting a better job or making more money which often uprooted us away from family and community. The Book of Matthew gives us [multiple examples](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+6%3A1-4&version=NKJV&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of why we are supposed to do good without advertising it or drawing attention to ourselves. But the internet constantly nudges us to join the infinite loop of content creation where we feel the need for publicity in order to scale the operation of good that we perform.

## **A Disguise**

"There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils," Lewis wrote in the preface of the book. "One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them." He writes that Hell is "equally pleased by both errors," hailing "a materialist or a magician with the same delight." 

The devil's real advantage is not that he is powerful but that he is hard to locate. He’s easily waved off by the skeptic as superstition to the atheist but also shrunk by the believer to a cartoon. The guy in red tights with a pitchfork, as described by Screwtape in the seventh letter, is the image he hopes we will visualize—the joke he wants us all to believe. The truly deceptive power of the devil is that he can shapeshift into anything he wants to achieve the mission, much like the [T-1000](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-1000?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in the movie [*Terminator 2*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator%5F2:%5FJudgment%5FDay?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (a childhood favorite). The screen glowing in your palm never announces itself as a temptation. It arrived first as a tool then it became a convenience and over time we all saw it as the easy way to stay connected. This is precisely the disguise a competent tempter would choose.

## **Analog Resistance**

For those of us trapped in [the Matrix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FMatrix?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), counsel is needed, and it's found in the thirteenth letter, where Screwtape furiously rebukes Wormwood for a catastrophic blunder: the patient was allowed two real positive pleasures. The first is reading a book he actually enjoyed, and the second is walking alone to an old mill for tea, through country he really likes. 

Real pleasures are dangerous to Hell, Screwtape explains, because they are real: they give a man "a touchstone of reality," and they are, "in a sense, on the Enemy's ground." The man who "truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact forearmed against some of our subtlest modes of attack."

For me, deer hunting and fishing with my dad on the weekends provided hours of silence in the woods and on the water. Although not religious, he found peace and was one with the land, whereas I, like any hyper young boy, felt the pain of extreme boredom. It would take me several years after his death from [ALS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALS?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in 2003 to appreciate the solitude that only nature can provide.

In 31 letters, Screwtape provides us with the whole counterattack in one sentence, similar to the lectures I received from Dad after staying up all night from a new addiction to the internet. It's not about abstinence from tech for its own sake, but the deliberate recovery of unmediated reality, including things like the walk without the fitness report, the meal without the photograph, the goal achieved without announcement, the real friend across an actual table. 

Attention is the raw material of worship, so in many ways, we become what we behold. The smartphone proposes two objects of beholding, the self and the void, and it will alternate between them indefinitely. The older and more rooted discipline proposes a third direction: outward, toward creation, neighbor, and God, on ground the Enemy of our enemy has held all along.

Screwtape closed his letters "Your affectionate uncle." The device in your pocket sends its regards.
### Ross Douthat and the Future of Digital Media
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/ross-douthat-and-the-future-of-digital-media/
Last updated: 2026-08-05T11:00:12.000Z
It has been over ten years since ESPN shuttered [Grantland](https://grantland.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), a beloved online magazine that still has never been surpassed in online media, at least in my opinion. At its peak, Bill Simmons's outlet had [an assembly of talent](https://grantland.com/contributors/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) unlike anything seen before or since in online media and featured writing and [storytelling](https://grantland.com/features/an-oral-history-malice-palace/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that was consistently [joyous](https://grantland.com/features/luis-suarez-start-premier-league-season/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), [delightful](https://grantland.com/features/brian-phillips-soccer-boredom/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), and [amongst](https://grantland.com/features/sumo-wrestling-tokyo-japan-hakuho-yukio-mishima-novelist-seppuku/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) the [finest](https://grantland.com/features/2014-mlb-playoffs-kansas-city-royals-remarkable-run/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) [work](https://grantland.com/features/the-wet-stuff-verruckt-waterslide-schlitterbahn/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) I've [read](https://grantland.com/features/irina-pavlova-brooklyn-nets-mikhail-prokhorov/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in [20 years](https://grantland.com/features/brian-phillips-boxing-career-freed-american-slave-tom-molineaux/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of [working](https://grantland.com/features/on-trail-piggyback-bandit/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in [online media](https://grantland.com/the-triangle/its-time-to-stop-being-stupid-about-sports-gambling/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). (Charles Pierce's piece on online gambling is [particularly prescient](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/online-sports-betting-app-addiction/686061/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) given [where we are today](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5777632/2024/10/14/sports-betting-addiction-problem-fans/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).)

But in 2015 ESPN, which had funded the site essentially as a vanity project to keep Simmons around without really understanding what they had, shut it down. And while Simmons and many of his staff would re-form as The Ringer, much of what made Grantland so unique and enjoyable died when ESPN pulled the plug. 

Most significantly, Simmons's writing career basically ended when Grantland ended. In the 11 years since Grantland was shuttered, Simmons has barely written at all, becoming a full-time podcaster instead. Meanwhile, the magazine he built on ESPN's dime has never been replicated, even when most of their people eventually ended up at The Ringer.

Sadly, it isn't surprising that Grantland ended. The problem that doomed it was simple: We have a media environment in which producing great content day-to-day is relatively simple (simple, not easy) but producing it in a way that is sustainable over years is not. In the case of Grantland, it cost ESPN a lot of money to maintain, and no one had figured out a good way to monetize online writing. Keep in mind that this was 2015 and the only major outlet to successfully implement a paywall at that point was the New York *Times*. The Washington *Post* only launched their paywall in 2013, not long before the shuttering of Grantland. *The Atlantic* didn't fully implement theirs until 2019\. *The New Yorker* went to a paywall in 2014\. The rest of the big magazines: *New York, Wired, Vanity Fair*, etc. all launched their gates in the late 2010s as well.

This meant that Grantland, while an obvious success as a vehicle for publishing great writing, was out in the cold a bit when it came to the business side. [The viral traffic models](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/678592/traffic-by-ben-smith/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) used by Buzzfeed or the Huffington Post didn't apply to Grantland because their traffic wasn't high enough. Combine that with ESPN's unwillingness to add a paywall and, well, Grantland was doomed from the beginning in some sense. Those four beautiful years we got of it were a joy because the media we got was exceptional, but it was never gonna last because the model supporting it couldn't last given the existing models for financing online media.

I have thought about Grantland and Simmons in particular many times as I reflect on the news that [the best newspaper columnist in America is moving to a TV show](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/business/media/60-minutes-ross-douthat.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and, presumably, will no longer be writing columns. That columnist, of course, is Ross Douthat, formerly of the New York *Times* and now bound for Bari Weiss's rebooted 60 Minutes.

In one sense, there is actually not anything *that* surprising about the move, even if it caught me (and most others) off guard when it was first announced last week. When you set aside the initial shock, consider these points: For the past year, Douthat has been a columnist, a newsletter author, and a podcaster (with a podcast that surely requires a great deal of research to do well). He has also traveled extensively, and he and his wife have five kids. (I'll note now: I have no personal knowledge of any of Douthat's thinking here; we have met maybe a half dozen times and have only spoken at any length once and that was in a *Plough* editorial meeting with many others present. So all I am saying here is based on what can be observed based on publicly available information.)

When you lay it out like that, it's not especially surprising that the man with that combination of a quite intense professional workload and a busy family life would be open to other opportunities. Additionally, given the amount of money that Paramount is investing in 60 Minutes under Weiss's leadership it is quite likely that Douthat was offered a fairly lucrative wage and, well, Douthat and his wife have five kids who will want to go to college someday... you can understand the rationale here. The move is likely to make for a significant improvement in the Douthat family's quality of life and as an admirer of Douthat's, even if a sometimes critical one, I'm delighted for him personally and for his family.

Yet while CBS and the Douthats figure to be big winners with the move, I can't help wondering if everyone else loses, for at least three significant reasons. 

In the first place, for the 60 Minutes experiment to work we will need Weiss, a lifelong print media figure, to get very good very fast at running a complex broadcast news operation. This seems unlikely to me, not because Weiss lacks talent, but because a broadcast endeavor like 60 Minutes is a very different thing from a print endeavor like *The Free Press*. This is to say nothing of the fairly significant fact that Weiss's time at the show has been [remarkably contentious](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/60-minutes-in-turmoil-after-longtime-correspondent-scott-pelley-is-fired?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) already and, fair or not, any media endeavor funded by the Ellisons is [going to be perceived](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/27/opinion/media-ellison-paramount.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) as state-sponsored media by many, at least as long as President Trump is in the White House.

Second, it is not at all clear to me that the 60 Minutes format will port to new media environments, though that is obviously what Paramount is paying Weiss to figure out. The obvious video successes in our current media space are properties like the Joe Rogan Experience, Call Her Daddy, the Ezra Klein Show, Douthat's former podcast Interesting Times, and so on. None of these shows are reported journalistic projects; all of them are interview-based shows in which curious, engaging hosts who are good at asking questions have extended conversations with guests that their audience will find interesting. 60 Minutes has always had interviews as a component of their work, but the purpose of the interviews was not simply to feature an interesting guest, as with all those podcasts, but to use the interview to deepen the audience's knowledge of the story 60 Minutes was covering that week. In other words, it is an extremely different interviewing style than what is most popular today and I am not sure how well their style translates to today's media audiences. Indeed, I struggle to think of any video project built around longform reporting that is already thriving and serves as proof of concept for what Weiss's 60 Minutes might become. Others have tried such things–Vice Media did something like it for awhile, but, well, [that didn't really pan out for them](https://www.npr.org/2023/05/15/1173260377/vice-media-bankruptcy?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). 

Doubtless 60 Minutes hired Douthat because they plan to use him as an interviewer and have him carry on his work with Interesting Times. Yet even there Weiss's own record at 60 Minutes so far suggests that Douthat will not have nearly as much freedom with them as he had at the Times, where he [routinely](https://x.com/upholdreality/status/1938788736034378027?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) asked [very pointed questions](https://x.com/atrupar/status/2067626377994506700?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of his guests and where his guests not infrequently [struggled to answer](https://youtu.be/YAJMnZ8QkmY?si=3YECfnqHj6WuUtnC&t=3662&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Will Douthat be allowed to push as hard as an interviewer with a legacy broadcast news outlet as he did while at the *Times*? I have my doubts, though obviously I would love to be wrong about this.

Third, and this is my largest concern: As the above examples make clear, we have shifted into a media environment in which individuals are far more powerful than institutions. Columnists and essayists who are good at those roles have a tendency to build platforms that surpass their employer's, in some ways. Over time they cease to be "columnists" or even "writers" and instead become "media personalities." And as media personalities, they often have a kind of power that can rival or even surpass that of their employers. I expect that the *Times* will lose many subscribers over Douthat's departure. 

But we have seen this pattern play out many times before: Tucker Carlson left Fox News and while his audience is not as broad as it once was and he is somewhat quarantined on Twitter in a way he was not while at Fox, he still has a meaningful audience and clearly has a sustainable media operation behind him. Candace Owens's departure from *The Daily Wire* played out in a similar way: Her audience is almost certainly larger at this point than that of her former boss Ben Shapiro, who has remained rooted in the institution he built. Obviously both Carlson and Owens are extremely different figures from Douthat. It may be that their commercial success as independent producers is not replicable because it depends on a particular sort of audience that is toxic enough to alienate anyone not already part of it and large enough to sustain some larger media operations. Douthat obviously will not profit from that same arrangement, nor would most other media figures. 

Even so, the functional reality of our current media ecosystem is that for complex reasons likely related to media format (lots of audio and video content especially), the loneliness epidemic, and the ubiquity of smartphones, we now exist in a media space in which personalities are supreme. In a past age, we read columnists in search of delight, provocation, and wisdom. Today I worry that we treat our media personalities less like professionals with a skill we value and more like a kind of conversation partner and friend we turn to in order to fill up the time with something that interests us. That shift has significant ramifications for what it means to work in media.

Smart institutions, such as the *Times*, understand this. That's why they brought Douthat into the podcast space: His column style always suggested he would be a great interviewer. Before Douthat they had already made a similar move with Ezra Klein, who they hired away from Vox to be both a columnist and podcaster, as he had done for some time at Vox already. It isn't a surprise that they would look at Klein's success, look at Douthat's style as a writer, and reasonably conclude that he'd be an excellent podcaster. The note sent to *Times* staff about [his departure](https://x.com/BenMullin/status/2082194850049380433/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) said it well: 

> He arrived already fluent in a kind of thinking and writing many pundits never learn; the essay that changes its own mind partway through, in public, on purpose.... He was right about things early, wrong about things honestly and never, not once, boring.

> A year ago, Ross took on something new and harder: He agreed to help us build a show, putting himself in front of a camera and an audience in ways a print columnist rarely has to. "Interesting Times" became appointment viewing for a simple reason: Ross would let a conversation go somewhere he hadn't planned. With respect and humor, he pressed JD Vance and Peter Thiel hard enough to surface something true about each of them. He wrestled with guests like Chase Strangio and Helen Andrews but never let their provocative conversations curdle into a partisan debate. And when Ben Sasse sat across from him to talk about dying, Ross let himself feel it on air instead of remaining at a distance. All of this asked Ross to be exposed in a different way than the page demands, and he did it with the same rigor and the same refusal to perform certainty he brought to all his work.

That is precisely correct. But it implies what I take to be a serious problem for our media environment: Because media endeavors are today largely built around personalities there is always a strong incentive to find more ways to put that personality in front of your desired audience. And when the person is as talented as Douthat, it goes very well. But, like Grantland, it can't last. 

The work of simply writing 1-2 columns a week at the level Douthat did for so many years is already enormous. To be lucid, clever, and creative in such a tight space is almost impossible because doing so requires enormous levels of verbal dexterity and precision on the part of the writer. He has to be able to be penetrating and engaging without showing any of his work because there simply isn't room for it. There are very few writers who can do that well and none do it as well as Douthat. 

In the evangelical space, Tish Warren, David French, and Bonnie Kristian can do it. Amongst Catholic writers, Leah Sargeant, Matt Schmitz, and Matt Walther are all good. But those who can are rare. Even columnists who have had success in the shorter format, like David Brooks or Elizabeth Bruenig, often turn out to be far stronger writers when given more space. Other good writers are largely defeated by the space constraint and need much more room to be at their best—Kevin Williamson at *The Dispatch* would fit here. So too, I think, would writers like Andrew Sullivan, George Packer, Wesley Morris, Jelani Cobb, Ta-Nehisi Coates, or Caitlin Flanagan. These are all excellent writers, but like most good writers they struggle to be forced into an 800 word suit. The writer who wears such clothing well is rare.

Likewise, the work of prepping sufficiently to have longform conversations of the caliber Douthat routinely managed on Interesting Times is immensely demanding and difficult. You will never be able to read all the things you'd like to read before talking to someone. You'll always feel a little unprepared. But the time for the interview arrives and you have to do it. And Douthat consistently did it at quite a high level, after taking a bit of time to find his footing.

Now layer on top of that a fairly demanding travel schedule as well as book projects which must somehow be fitted in. The workload we are describing here is immense and, honestly, not terribly human. My point here is not that you should feel sorry for media people. I recently spent time talking to an immigrant man who drives Uber 72 hours a week to pay the bills. Anyone who makes a living from their pen is absurdly blessed. But, even so, to make a living from one's pen in a way that can be maintained over years or decades is difficult.

And this is what I worry will happen if nothing changes in our media environment: Because all the momentum and incentives in our environment push toward maximizing the value of individuals, we will keep seeing individual producers put into positions that cannot ultimately be sustained long term. What will win out is what promises a relative degree of stability for the producer in terms of money and work routine. That's why Bill Simmons, once one of our best sports writers, stopped writing. And it's why the best newspaper columnist in America no longer works at a newspaper and almost certainly is done being a columnist. 

For those of us who love the written word and who believe writing is a superior form of media for its unique power to shape thought and force clarity, the loss of a generational columnist is a loss that touches us all, and one we should all grieve.
### PowerWash Simulator and the Yearning to Work
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/powerwash-simulator-and-the-yearning-to-work/
Last updated: 2026-08-04T11:00:46.000Z
Ever since I can remember, video games have been escapist to the core. Growing up, I spent plenty of hours stomping turtles in *Super Mario World* with my cousins, and flying snowspeeders over the pixelated wastes of Hoth in *Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire* at 1 a.m. with my best friend. More recently, while my infant sons snoozed, I logged some time in the postapocalyptic Pacific Northwest of *The Last of Us* and the war-torn fantasy landscapes of *Dark Souls*.

A common denominator, of course, is that these games offer experiences unavailable elsewhere—windows into other lives and strange new worlds. And plenty has been written about how the unfolding “crisis of manhood”—many young men’s struggles to enter productive adulthood and form families—is bound up, at least in part, with the ubiquity of video games. After all, modern games offer a *very* effective feedback-reward loop: as the player progresses further into the game, they overcome challenges and experience a sense of accomplishment. Digital worlds are more realistic, and more compelling, than ever before. But of course, this “progress” is a sham. When the blue glow of the PlayStation fades to black, there’s not much to show for all that time invested—except the player is a little older, and a little sadder, and probably a little lonelier. When the world feels hostile, why not flee into fantasy?

Perhaps, though, this assumption no longer holds. Largely under the public radar, a curious shift has taken place: today, some of the most popular games on the market are the farthest thing from escapist. Rather, they are simulations of *real-world blue-collar labor.* Last year, *PowerWash Simulator,* the undisputed king of the genre, [reached an astounding 17 millionplayers](https://www.futurlab.co.uk/news/thank-you-for-17-million-powerwash-simulator-players?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). (Just to put that figure in perspective, that’s about three times as many as the latest blockbuster *Assassin’s Creed* release).

To be clear, *PowerWash Simulator* is exactly what it sounds like. Instead of wielding a gun or a plasma rifle, the player…wields a power washer. The point of the game isn’t to storm a castle or save a princess, but simply to hose down dirty playgrounds, buildings, construction equipment, or other objects. And *PowerWash Simulator* is far from the only game of its ilk: other recent bestsellers include *Lawn Mowing Simulator*, *Bus Simulator*, *Farming Simulator* and *Construction Simulator* (a favorite of my excavator-obsessed three-year-old). Earlier this year, *Retro Rewind: Video Store Simulator*—in which the player takes on the role of a 1990s-era video store manager by purchasing and shelving movies, enforcing late fees, and stocking refreshments—[topped the sales charts](https://www.polygon.com/retro-rewind-99-steam-video-store-sims/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

Simulation games, of course, are nothing new. *Age of Empires* famously thrust players into the role of military tactician and economic planner, just as *SimCity* invited gamers to try their hand at city management (all the way down to plumbing and zoning). But what sets these new titles apart is their relative lack of apparent ambitiousness. There’s something classically aspirational about being a warlord or a mayor; for better or worse, few would say the same about running a power washer or lawn mower. These jobs still exist in the real world, but they don’t pay well or offer much chance of advancement. They are not promoted or rewarded, and are often perceived as drudgery.

What, exactly, is going on here? Why spend one’s days simulating apparently mundane work?

\* \* \*

Increasingly, a modern path to workplace success seems to run through an increasingly narrow channel: get near-perfect grades in high school; attend a top university; survive a gauntlet of credentialing exams, interviews, and status games; work relentlessly, in ever-more-demanding roles, until retirement. Even this, of course, is not enough: one must also be relentlessly entrepreneurial, constantly looking for unseen opportunities to maintain an edge over one’s competition. And even *that* already-demanding regimen has been intensified still further by the advent of generative AI. Subject-matter expertise and an entrepreneurial spirit are no longer enough; one must now master a technology that ostensibly changes by the day, becoming a symphony conductor for swarms of AI agents to which one’s core cognitive proficiencies have been outsourced.

It has not always been this way. Within living memory, it was possible to obtain a more-or-less well-paying job—with a defined set of competencies—and work at that job for one’s whole career, enjoying a healthy employer-provided pension upon retirement. And, more to the point: today’s hyper-optimized intellectual work, especially when mediated by AI tools, is not always all that satisfying. Much of it approximates what anthropologist [David Graeber famously termed](https://bookshop.org/p/books/bullshit-jobs-a-theory-david-graeber/0d039e8f2a049e5a?ean=9781501143335&bkshp-astro=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) “bulls\*\*t jobs”—a sort of “paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence, even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”

Against that backdrop, one starts to understand the peculiar charm of digital labor simulators. As Graeber writes, “\[o\]ne must assume that the percentage of nurses, bus drivers, dentists, street cleaners, farmers, music teachers, repairmen, gardeners, firefighters, set designers, plumbers, journalists, safety inspectors, musicians, tailors, and school crossing guards who checked ‘no’ to the question ‘Does your job make any meaningful difference in the world?’ was approximately zero.” Indeed: these are precisely the sorts of jobs that today’s labor-simulation games largely depict—roles in which physical matter is moved about, and chaos turned into order. They are jobs that *really matter*, in a tangible way, to the health of the lived environment.

And for the most part, these are the kinds of jobs that do not preclude deep reflection in the very midst of labor. A financier or corporate attorney cannot really let his mind drift at work; he is compensated for precisely that cognitive capital. But [as Zena Hitz writes](https://bookshop.org/p/books/lost-in-thought-the-hidden-pleasures-of-an-intellectual-life-zena-hitz/4052da58f165f011?ean=9780691229195&bkshp-astro=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), “\[d\]espite ancient prejudice against it, manual labor leaves the mind free to ruminate and consider in a way that other forms of labor do not. This is why carpentry, or gardening, or housecleaning can be satisfying in a way that ticking boxes, pushing paper, or thinking through complex but trivial problems is not.”

The images of pre-Fall labor we are given in the opening pages of the Book of Genesis evoke this very truth. Adam is placed in Eden “to work it and take care of it.” (Gen. 2:15)—and, so too, to commune with God “in the cool of the day” (Gen. 3:8). His labor does not estrange him from creation, or from consciousness of his relationship to his Creator, but weaves him into it. It is hard to say the same of many of today’s demanding professional roles.

None of this is what one expects from video games. It is certainly not escapist. Indeed, the fact that thousands of young men are spending their free hours pretending to use power washers, or lawnmowers, testifies to a deep yearning to *contribute* to the business of common life, rather than a desire to escape. But will they get the chance? Of course power washing and lawnmowing jobs still exist, but—unless one owns the business—they are not really the sorts of roles upon which one can fund a stable life or family. Can it really be the case that the *only* types of jobs that can monetarily provide for the basic prerequisites of a stable life—home and family—will be jobs incapable of bringing meaning or purpose to vast numbers of workers, workers who simply want to bring physical order out of disorder?

In the years ahead, it will not be possible to ignore this question. The number of individuals who *can* meet all today’s supposed benchmarks—who claim all the academic and professional brass rings, who dynamically innovate in the face of new challenges, and who operate at the cutting edge of technology—is vanishingly small. There will always be many, many persons in a given economic system who will not—or *cannot*—become the endlessly deconstructible commercial subjects demanded by an ever-faster-paced market system. (By definition, all entrepreneurs obviously cannot succeed.) A public policy that cuts with the grain of created order cannot simply declare that all these people’s labor—all their productive capacity they can offer the world—is simply obsolete and unwanted, or unprofitable.

In the popularity of *PowerWash Simulator* and the like, we now have empirical evidence that points in a rather unexpected direction. A world without work will not look like a Marxian paradise of art and music and philosophy, of joyous liberation from daily drudgery. Rather, it will look like the sad silence of individuals withdrawing into digital labor simulators, grasping toward some semblance of the meaningful work that reality denies them. After all: it’s simply *inefficient* for them to do anything else. Nobody might starve—a universal basic income could see to that—but few would truly flourish.

\* \* \*

As anyone who’s been in the workforce longer than a few years knows, there is plenty of unpleasantness about the working world, from petty commuting frustrations to coworker squabbles to ethical morasses. And yet, at its best, we know that work itself is no curse. It is the field in which we satisfy the impulse to bring new from old, to make the tarnished beautiful, to create within the horizon of creation. In countless different ways, we till and tend the garden of our world. And a healthy politics makes space for that yearning rather than trying to optimize it away—or reserve it for a lucky few. 

The young men playing *PowerWash Simulator* in the wee hours of the morning, whether or not they have the words for it, know this instinctively. But do the rest of us?
### The Great Books for You and for Me
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-great-books-for-you-and-for-me/
Last updated: 2026-08-03T11:00:21.000Z
At the end of August this summer, I’m going to be back in the college classroom for the first time in three years—or, technically, almost six years, since the last on-campus class I taught was in Spring 2020 and the subsequent three years were all online. I’m especially excited, because I will be teaching Greek history—which means that we will begin the semester by reading Homer’s *Odyssey* in its entirety. We’ll go from there to read Herodotus, Thucydides, a smattering of Athenian comedies and tragedies, before concluding the semester by reading Plato’s *Apology* and putting Socrates back on trial in our own classroom. We’ll see if this group of students awards him his request of free dinners for life. 

As it happens, my new home department’s mission of Great Books emphasis in teaching history and political theory fits well with an exciting new trend. This past May in *The Atlantic*, David Brooks took a break from [mourning the destructive effects](https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/how-ivy-league-admissions-broke-america-david-brooks-explains/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of the Ivy League on America and proclaimed instead: "[Something Big Is Happening on Campus.](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/david-brooks-something-is-going-right-at-universities/687200/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)" The subject of his newfound optimism? Great Books curricula. He opened his essay with a brief profile of Roosevelt Montás, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who fell in love with Plato as a high-schooler, became a college professor of Great Books, and wrote a book about it along the way, aptly titled [*Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation*](https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691200392/rescuing-socrates?srsltid=AfmBOoooP9DBq5pVFq-cFYdmYAiKHfC-9gVdaZE5f7ISln5F3gW7IgKY&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Not bad for an immigrant kid who literally found a book of Plato's dialogues in the trash.

Reading can be life-changing, many agree, including those who might not be died-in-the-wool Great Books advocates. Indeed, the importance of reading has been the reason behind the push for literacy campaigns in American public schools for generations now, and now for some college programs too. While the humanities continue with gritted teeth to field the questions about the utility of those degrees and program cuts about, many universities simply move to offer the Great Books—and find that if you build such programs, the students will come. Brooks’s experience on the ground confirms the growth of this trend: 

> I get to visit about two dozen campuses every year, and I meet at least a few teachers like Montás at each of them. I can generally spot the ones with the pure disease, the ones with that raw teacher-fire. Usually, they had some experience early in life when they fell in love with learning. This love then became a ruling passion, and now they fervently seek to share it with their students in the classroom. You can find them at Ivies and at community colleges, at big state schools and small liberal-arts colleges. They are a part of what’s going right in American higher education, the part that critics (like me) don’t write about enough.

I grew up in a bookish immigrant family. Our home shelves were filled with the works of Dumas, Balzac, Beecher Stowe, James Fenimore Cooper, Jack London, Stevenson, Homer, Plutarch, Gogol, Pushkin, and many, many more, whom I read first in Russian, because that was the language of my family’s home library. I double-majored in the Classics and French Literature in college and went on to get a PhD in Classics. In other words, an appreciation of the importance of what is generally referred to as Great Books was, in my family and throughout all my life, axiomatic.

But for many others the question remains: Sure, reading is good (and the [decline of reading is apocalyptic](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), the July *Atlantic* cover story reminds), but why does it matter *what* we read? Why is reading the Great Books, specifically, life-changing, as opposed to merely a literary diet of adult equivalents of *Dog Man* or *Captain Underpants*, literal (but not literary) bestsellers that they are? And, on a related note, what books should be counted among the Great Books, anyway? These questions are more difficult to answer, because they require making a judgment—that some books are better or more valuable than others. Casting such judgments, though, has become a political affair. The spirit of pluralism, in particular, is categorically antithetical to making a judgment that certain books are, in fact, much better than others. My own academic home field of Classics has experienced an implosion as a result, with some on the inside accusing the field of being for too long nothing but the study of dead white men—by other dead white men. 

This is an argument that proponents of the Great Books have to contend with as well. And so, on the surface at least, it seems that the case for the Great Books (just as for the Classics, which generally are included within Great Books curricula) is going to be different for those who approach the field from the right rather than from the left. Except, as I started digging deeper, it turned out that most defenses of the Great Books, whether on the left or the right, have effectively been repeating the same arguments time and again. 

Perhaps Brooks is right, and the love of the Great Books is a uniting force in the American higher education landscape. Indeed, it seems that all who teach the Great Books face a common enemy—the “utilitarian” approach that dominates higher education at the moment, valuing all subject matter entirely based on utility. From this perspective, AI in particular seems to have destroyed any need for reading and writing. But the unified response from both the right and the left remains the same: to read is human. And reading the Great Books now has a new purpose of buttressing our humanity in the face of the machine onslaught.

## **The Right Case for Great Books**

Over the past decade if not longer, the Great Books, along with their close relative, [Classical education](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/18/have-the-liberal-arts-gone-conservative?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), have acquired a strong association with the political right and especially with Christian readers. Consider Catholic convert and philosopher Zena Hitz’s bestseller [*Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life*](https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691178714/lost-in-thought?srsltid=AfmBOorXwhEWHIAOjf6zLxw1IFlIefEzm2VrfeTDRvO6XrsQYAd4CZ8H&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Hitz received her PhD in ancient philosophy from Princeton University, and after a few years in a traditional academic position, she walked away in search of something she couldn’t name but that she felt was missing. She found God and a deeper love of the intellectual life in the process. In her book, she presents the intellectual life rooted in reading Great Books as a transcendent delight. She now teaches at her own undergraduate alma mater, St. John’s College, an institution whose curriculum is structured entirely around the reading of Great Books. 

For other conservative Great Books advocates, like evangelical scholar Karen Swallow Prior, reading these books teaches the virtues essential for living a good and well-ordered life in community with God and fellow humans. That is the main argument in her book [*On Reading Well: Finding a Good Life Through Great Books*](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781587435836%5Fon-reading-well?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Walking the reader through virtues and vices of classic literary characters, Prior shows that the very act of reading is formational for us as persons. Great Books change us—they make us better. 

Pepperdine University Great Books professor Jessica Hooten Wilson agrees. In her book [*The Scandal of Holiness*](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781587435249%5Fthe-scandal-of-holiness?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), she shows how reading enriches our imagination and introduces “literary saints” who will guide us throughout our lives, allowing us to find goodness, truth, and beauty. Catholic literary scholar Christopher Scalia makes a version of this argument in his own book [*13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (But Probably Haven’t Read)*](https://www.amazon.com/Novels-Conservatives-Will-Probably-Havent/dp/1510782397?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), as he argues that conservatives are facing a crisis of the imagination, and reading the Great Books is one way to address it. 

Ultimately, conservative arguments in favor of the Great Books revolve around the formational aspects of reading. Great Books are the kinds of books that make their readers better—they form readers in the virtues, they productively shape their imagination and faith, and they make them better citizens of liberal democracy. 

In defining the Great Books, furthermore, conservatives emphasize the value of humility and tradition: if millennia of readers have considered Vergil essential reading, who are we to arrogantly declare that we suddenly know better? What do such proclamations say about our character? “The good life begins and ends with humility,” Swallow Prior says in concluding her book. On a related note, conservative defenses of the Great Books continue to emphasize the timeless nature of these books. To read a Greek tragedy in the twenty-first century will elicit some of the same emotions that the original audiences felt in the fifth century BC. Our shared humanity is on display through reading these books and discussing them together. That is what the pursuit of goodness, truth, and beauty has been about for over two and a half millennia now.

When it comes to facing questions of utility, then, conservatives can point to matters of the soul—reading is transcendent, which means that in addition to improving the brain and the heart, it also elevates the soul. This is useful for the education and elevation of persons, albeit not in terms that ever make it into any course learning outcomes. Yet this role of the Great Books is particularly important right now—because our cultural crisis right now [is metaphysical](https://firstthings.com/our-crisis-is-metaphysical-2026-d-c-lecture/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), as conservative journalist Mary Harrington argues. By neglecting matters of the spirit, we lose our very humanity. In other words, in this age of AI, we need the Great Books more than ever. 

## **The Left Case for Great Books**

So can a case for the Great Books be made from the political left? Must one be a conservative and a Christian of some sort to appreciate these books? The answer, it seems, is no. But the arguments that come from the left are remarkably familiar. It seems, really, that the left case for the Great Books is identical to that made from the right. It’s just that it is made by people who self-identify as left-leaning.

For instance, while Montás himself is not affiliated with the right and is a lapsed Catholic, his own *Rescuing Socrates*, is still imbued with the same language and values that conservatives have generally presented in their arguments in favor of a Great Books education—especially, the belief that Great Books make us better persons and citizens. To say that reading Plato saves lives may sound dramatic but is true for all Great Books advocates, left or right. 

Likewise, this was my impression in reading Daniel Walden’s essay earlier this year, "[The Left Case for the Great Books](https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/the-left-case-for-great-books/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)." Walden is a liberal Catholic, and he is a self-described leftist. He is a Homerist by academic training, and he has spent his academic career teaching in Great Books programs, most recently at the Honors College of the University of Tulsa. In other words, few have his credentials for making a left-of-center defense of the Great Books in earnest.

But what is striking in reading Walden’s argument for the value of the Great Books is just how much it holds in common with the right-leaning arguments. He argues that the Great Books are the sort of books that teach us to be better people individually, and this matters for us personally. They are timeless—as he notes with examples from Homer and Aeschylus. The Great Books equip us to be good citizens in a liberal democracy, and this makes liberal education a public good, no less than a personal good. Finally, deep conversations about the Great Books teach students intellectual honesty and how to function well in community: 

> The secret ingredient behind the most successful Great Books programs is not only the syllabus but the intellectual community that is formed. A community is necessary because it lets people who have begun to recognize their common humanity develop new ways of relating to one another that have nothing to do with the scripts handed to them by their social context, and this new community must be insulated in some way from society at large so that the compulsion to follow these omnipresent, ready-made social scripts loses some of its force.

Really, the only thing that is absent from Walden’s defense of the Great Books, in comparison with conservative scholars, is the interest in the formational aspect of these books spiritually. Still, much of the language that Walden presents about treasuring our “common humanity” can be found also in conservative defenses of the Great Books—because to speak of our shared humanity often involves speaking of the spiritual realm, going back to the doctrine of the *Imago Dei*, creation of humanity in God’s image. Many on the left stop short of this last point, even if they are religious. 

But so far, all of the books and essays I have discussed have been by academically trained scholars of the Great Books. Maybe it is academic training that has led to the similarities of their arguments, a skeptic might note. What about a normal reader—perhaps someone who didn't get a Great Books education in any school setting but came to love reading as an adult? How might such a person defend the Great Books?

Such is the story of Naomi Kanakia, the author of the newest contribution to the genre of defenses of the Great Books, [*What's So Great About the Great Books? Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You)*](https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691251929/whats-so-great-about-the-great-books?srsltid=AfmBOor-EyaVln84hFXQfPc9EYLzZEQfyrKYO19W-CbBGU8P3-4FEf4U&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). The uniqueness of her book, she argues, lies in her own late arrival to reading the Great Books. She holds an MFA and is a YA novelist. She does not hold a PhD in any field and is not employed in academia. And so, her questions do not have to do with teaching the Great Books in a college setting but rather with the education of “normal” people. How might someone who had missed the chance to read much earlier approach getting a Great Books education later on in life? And why might such reading be good for that person?

Key to Kanakia’s argument is her own story. Educated in a private Catholic high school that was immersed in the Great Books and included the study of Latin, she rebelled in college, spending the four years drinking heavily and often high as well. Getting rejected from all MFA programs to which she applied at first, though, taught her humility and made her realize that good writers are, first and foremost, good readers. And so, she found a list of Great Books and started reading through this list for personal improvement. This was nearly two decades ago, and in her own way, she found that (surprise!) reading the Great Books saved her life. 

Really, the main signs of Kanakia’s left-of-center views lie in the following three aspects of her argument. First, she is dismissive of the idea of universal truth, goodness, and beauty—indeed, there is a footnote early in the book that ridicules Jessica Hooten Wilson’s idea of the transcendent aspect of reading. Second, Kanakia argues that far from being timeless, the entire concept of the Great Books is a recent construct—just as many scholars on the left now argue that gender is a construct, as is class, religion, and so on. Finally, the conclusion delves heavily into her own identity struggles as a queer man who transitioned to being a woman in adulthood. 

And yet, even while trying to be dismissive of arguments about the unique value of the Great Books, Kanakia cannot help but return repeatedly to how key reading them has been for her life after college, and how transformative reading them can be for others. Without using such words as “transcendent” or “timeless” or “formational,” she effectively says the same thing as conservative scholars have been saying all along, and as Walden did in his own essay. She reflects in her conclusion: “To open the Great Books is to begin a conversation. And the nature of that conversation is different for every person. Everyone who’s had a sustained encounter with these books has felt something, has felt themselves changed by them. That’s the whole reason people like me tend to recommend these books—because they *do* destroy you, in some way, but the destruction is good.” As a conservative classicist, I agree. 

## **Reading Together**

While the arguments in favor of the Great Books from both the left and the right are remarkably similar, Kanakia’s question is important: What should someone do, who did not receive a good education in these books in high school or college? After all, while Brooks has observed many such programs in American colleges and universities, they are still far from universal and are remarkably endangered. Walden himself, after teaching Great Books at the University of Tulsa for a few years, now finds himself out of a job at the conclusion of this academic year: the Great Books-based honors college that hired him has been phased out, following the [very public firing](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/opinion/liberal-arts-college-students-administration.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of the college’s dean, Jennifer Frey. 

As it happens, Zena Hitz, the author of *Lost in Thought*, had started an educational initiative for adults just a few years ago to address this very concern. Called “[Catherine Project](https://catherineproject.org/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com),” the initiative offers synchronous online reading groups and language courses for adults on a variety of Great Books and ancient languages. Some in-person groups have lately been added too. Taught by volunteers, classes are entirely free. The home page outlines the mission as follows: “If you seek real learning and real conversation, we invite you to join us in reading and discussing great books. We welcome people from all educational backgrounds and walks of life. We charge no tuition or fees.”

The popularity of Catherine Project and similar smaller, local initiatives shows that there is a desire for book clubs and good conversations still. Furthermore, perhaps the most important aspect of Great Books that comes through in the process is the desire for community. Indeed, no one is stopping anyone from starting a local book club—as a friend of mine did this winter. Over the course of three months, a group of moms met monthly in the evening to discuss a novel over cheese and other snacks, taking turns hosting while each respective host’s feral children roamed the house, resisting bedtime to check out the excitement. 

These small and local trends help address a concern that some have raised about the Great Books and their advocates: What about the practical considerations of education? What is the point of reading Great Books? While Great Books advocates are willing to respond to questions on this when asked and pushed (as they repeatedly are), they generally prefer simply to encourage reading instead of worrying about making all things practical and continuing to prove their worth.

As a classicist, I will say that this concern with practical considerations is a very modern question. Rather than accusing Great Books advocates of being impractical, perhaps we should see together with them just how recent these concerns are. The whole point of Great Books is that we need timeless things to shape our modern brains. Too much modernity isn't great for forming our imagination—and this, by the way, has practical implications too. Would we want doctors and lawyers and businessmen in our society to be knowledgeable solely in their specific craft and have no knowledge of anything else? The emphasis on Great Books for educating both students and adults in past generations reminds us that there is value in forming whole persons—indeed, we forget this sometimes, but lawyers are people too. And our society will be better if all professionals who inhabit these practical careers are genuinely virtuous people and citizens. Perhaps, in other words, the Great Books are practical in ways that are not as immediately apparent, but whose absence we can see in our vice-filled society. 

There is a wonder in reading the Great Books. This wonder is meant to be shared and is not limited to academic settings alone. Indeed, while most of those who have written about the merits of these books teach in colleges and universities, it seems that there is a rising recognition that the Great Books are not merely a college subject. If we say that to read is human and is the solution to our metaphysical crisis, the conversation naturally moves beyond the walls of higher education and pushes us to consider habits of an educated citizen body. 

In the Classical Athenian democracy, one of the most significant things the citizens did together was gather for tragedy and comedy performances. Citizens of all ages and life stages and all political persuasions were able to watch the same works performed on stage, discuss them, and achieve together what Aristotle terms in his *Poetics* a “catharsis of pity and fear.” We can think of this as group therapy—by discussing stories that spoke to their present crises, citizens were better equipped to go on in their daily lives. Indeed, there is nothing like this right now in our own society—and we are certainly the worse for it. 

Reading the Great Books is not easy for a variety of reasons, as those who have written about them universally agree—they are dense, the language may be difficult, and some are quite long (Kanakia describes, for instance, the challenges of reading Proust—whom she ultimately loved). But in our brave new world of fast everything, reading timeless literature—and, especially, reading it together with others—can still delight, encourage, and uplift us, if we let it.
### Snakes, Gods, and Heroes: Greek Myth in Acts 27-28
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/snakes-gods-and-heroes-greek-myth-in-acts-27-28/
Last updated: 2026-07-31T10:59:59.000Z
Out of the dry brush of a Mediterranean island, thousands of years ago, a viper strikes. Bystanders recoil as a respected man, recently arrived on the island, shakes off the snake. Immediately, the bystanders ask those most human of questions: *why?* And *why him*? 

For Christian readers, this introduction is clearly a retelling of Acts 28\. The Apostle Paul, a prisoner being transported to Rome, is shipwrecked on a sandbar. He and the others manage to swim to safety on the isle of Malta; as Paul predicted, not a single life is lost. They huddle by a bonfire to warm up, only for a venomous snake to emerge and bite Paul on the hand. 

But to someone familiar with classical Greek culture–as Luke, the author of Acts, undoubtedly was–those first sentences also tell the story of the Greek hero Philoctetes. Unlike the more famous figures of the Trojan War, like Odysseus or Achilles, Philoctetes has mostly faded from our cultural memory. This is a pity, especially for Bible readers. We read better when we acknowledge the New Testament as an artifact of the Greco-Roman world from which it emerged. Crucially, modern readers might not recognize the countercultural nature of Acts 27 and 28 unless we know the myths to which those chapters act as a theological corrective. A side-by-side reading of these two snakebite tales reveals that Acts borrows certain classical conventions in order to better confront the pagan world with the Christian vision of an all-loving, all-powerful God.

## **Sea Journeys and Shipwrecks**

Before the snakebite, Luke uses an even more familiar cultural symbol–the sea. People of the ancient Mediterranean world associated the sea with possibility, with danger, and even with corruption. Its geographical centrality in the region contributed to its centrality in the cultural imaginary of the time. Thus, early readers of Acts 27 would be immediately familiar with its genre: that of the seafaring adventure. Tales of the sea naturally take on an epic quality–one they perhaps borrow from that original seafaring yarn, the *Odyssey*, in which Odysseus and his men must face terrifying monsters, wrathful gods, vicious storms, and a host of other challenges. Despite his vaunted wit, Odysseus is the journey’s only survivor. 

The story of Paul’s own odyssey goes on at length–44 verses of adventure at sea. That Luke spends so much time narrating the journey from Caesarea to Rome indicates just how perilous–yet also fascinating–sea travel was in the ancient world. While Luke’s telling avoids any hint of supernatural sea monsters, it includes several other conventions of the genre, like extended journeys, deadly storms, and catastrophic shipwrecks. 

Despite these similarities, the countercultural Gospel narrative shines forth. Particularly surprising to a Greco-Roman would be how Paul morphs from prisoner to leader during the journey. Paul’s world is not one to valorize the underdog. Their heroes are kings, princes, demigods, or warriors–men more like Julius, the centurion responsible for Paul and his fellow prisoners. However, Luke quickly challenges his culture’s beliefs in noble birth and physical strength as key requirements for heroism. The real hero of this journey is not Julius the centurion but Paul the prisoner. Thus, Luke transfers agency away from the military leader of the voyage, showing Paul astutely assessing the traveling conditions and sharing his assessments without fear. On four occasions in Acts 27, Luke records Paul boldly addressing the centurion, the soldiers, and the prisoners. At one point he “stands up among them” to speak, and Luke even records him “advising” and “urging” them. This is hardly the expected behavior of a prisoner. 

But of course, Paul is more than a prisoner. He is also an evangelist, an apostle, a minister of the gospel. Highlighting Paul’s surprising degree of authority on the ship emphasizes his role as a mouthpiece of God, more powerful than any centurion. The ultimate power and authority of the true God will become even more evident in the next chapter. 

Acts 27 concludes with the chaos of a shipwreck off the coast of Malta, as everyone swims, scrambles, or floats to dry land. As Paul predicted, all survive. But then Paul suffers that snakebite, which seems a cruel twist of fate for someone who has just miraculously survived a shipwreck. Luke, however, has a point to make about fate, and this poses just the right opportunity. Paul shakes off the snake as well as any ill effects of the bite and walks away to make more converts for Christ. Fate has no power over one who is made new in Christ.

## **Triumph in Tragedy**

Philoctetes, in similar circumstances, was not so lucky. As we will see, the vagaries of fate and the vengefulness of gods make his story one of misery. Who was Philoctetes? A second-string player in the great game of the Trojan War, Philoctetes inhabits the same mythical world as Odysseus and Heracles. He earns a few lines in numerous classical sources, including Homer and Ovid; one ancient source also mentions now-lost plays about his life by Aeschylus and Euripides. As is common with figures from Greek myth, the extant sources present some contradictory details. These characters, after all, originate in oral tradition, so competing versions of their stories have always existed. Each time an ancient poet or playwright takes up the raw material of told and re-told myth, they bend it further, making it fit their own genre and purpose. 

All this is true with the tale of Philoctetes. Nonetheless, a basic biography follows. A skilled archer and king of the Greek city-state Meliboea, Philoctetes is son of the famed Argonaut, King Poeas. Philoctetes first garners attention for an act of assisted suicide. Heracles, suffering from a poisoned robe, begs to be put out of his misery. Philoctetes–or in some tellings, his father Poeas–constructs a funeral pyre, lights it with a flaming arrow, and helps the tormented Heracles out of this life and into the next. 

For this act Philoctetes earns Heracles’ famed bow and arrows, which, according to prophecy, will be needed to defeat Troy. However, in helping Heracles to escape his fate, Philoctetes also earns the enmity of the gods. This, for the ancients, is always precarious, but especially so when one is setting out on a journey. The *Iliad* records that Philoctetes leads seven ships of archers from his home across the Aegean towards Troy. As the Roman fabulist Hyginus describes the situation, the ships pause at an island, where Juno (Hera, for the Greeks), furious that Philoctetes aided her enemy Heracles, sends a snake to bite Philoctetes on the foot. Another account, by Apollodorus of Athens, describes the snake emerging from a fire, much like the viper in Acts 28\. In this telling, the Greeks en route to Troy pause to make sacrifices to Apollo when the snake crawls from the altar to bite Philoctetes. 

The various retellings all agree that Philoctetes’s wound festers and stinks, so that ultimately Odysseus, one of the leaders of the Trojan expedition, decides to abandon him on the island of Lemnos, in the Aegean Sea. Philoctetes lives alone there for ten years, a castaway who spends his days hunting small game with the bow of Heracles and mourning his ill fortune. 

It is here that the most comprehensive surviving portrayal of Philoctetes picks up: the eponymous play by Sophocles, which won first prize at the Athenian Dionysia in 409 BC. The play’s action begins ten years after the snakebite, as Philoctetes is once more visited by the Greeks who abandoned him a decade before. While early Greek plays featured only a chorus and a single actor in a speaking role, Sophocles expanded this roster in his dramas, using three speaking actors, who could move as needed among roles. This structural innovation works especially well in *Philoctetes*, with its three central characters: the abandoned Philoctetes; the unscrupulous Odysseus, who schemes to take Philoctetes and his bow to Troy; and the young Neoptolemus, son of the slain Achilles, torn between his pity for Philoctetes and his desire to help Odysseus end the Trojan War. These three figures create the play’s moral tension, which feels surprisingly compelling to modern readers. Odysseus, with his resolve to use any means necessary to bring about a Greek victory, reads like a textbook example of *realpolitik*. Meanwhile, Philoctetes’ bitterness is understandable, but he has nursed his trauma so that it has outgrown his own personhood.

Philoctetes’ defining trait, in Sophocles’ play, is his suffering. Even from a distance the Greeks observe the former hero’s sad new life: “A wretch hunting wretchedly for game… miserable and alone always, sick from his savage infection…\[C\]rawling in discomfort…His cry carries far and wide.” Philoctetes’ own assessment of his plight is just as grim: “This is the tenth year that I have been dying here, wretched and hungry, feeding this insatiable wound on my misery.” 

Philoctetes goes from being a leader of men and friend to the greatest of heroes to a pathetic wretch who cries like a sick infant and crawls on the ground like the snake that wounded him. Like his friend Heracles before him, Philoctetes begs for death as a release from suffering. This is the reversal in fortunes that characterizes Greek tragedy; no human, however mighty, is safe from a hammer-blow of fate. Yet in Acts, Luke emphasizes the exact opposite: no human, however lowly, is too wretched to be visited by divine wisdom and power. Thus, Paul the prisoner outranks Julius the centurion, while Philoctetes the hero falls into utter abjection. 

Another convention of Greek tragedy is the role of the chorus in commenting on events of the plot. Alan Sommerstein, Emeritus Professor of Greek at Nottingham University, writes that the chorus in classical tragedy was typically composed of “a group of persons who had little power over events (such as women, old men, sailors) but who stood to be deeply affected, for good or ill, by the actions of the principal characters.” Thus, they “comment on and illuminate the action rather than influencing its development.” In this way, they are audience stand-ins, modeling the culturally appropriate response. 

In *Philoctetes*, the chorus are the sailors who have traveled to the island with Odysseus and Neoptolemus. While Odysseus sees in Philoctetes not a suffering human but a tool he cast aside too soon, the chorus observes with mixed pity and horror that Philoctetes is a “poor wretch,” “miserable and alone.” While Odysseus bluntly declares that he abandoned Philoctetes because his agonized cries disturbed and distracted the other Greek warriors, the chorus gives voice to its culture’s theory of suffering: “This is the work of the gods!” 

What does this mean for Paul? Here we must again jump from Lemnos to Malta. One of the more unique features of Acts 28 is that Luke too creates a sort of chorus out of the islanders of Malta, who observe both the shipwreck and the snakebite. As in Sophocles, this “chorus” provides a commentary on events based in the preconceptions of their pagan Mediterranean culture. Unsurprisingly then, they too interpret the snakebite as a form of divine punishment: “This man must be a murderer; for though he escaped from the sea, the goddess Justice has not allowed him to live” (Acts 28:4). They stand by, watching for the venom’s grim effects, waiting for the outspoken Paul to be diminished into a whimpering wretch like Philoctetes. In other words, Luke’s Maltese chorus starts with the same expectations held by the chorus of Sophocles, but Luke subverts those expectations when Paul not only survives the bite but goes on to heal first the father of the island’s chief administrator, then the rest of the island’s sick. Thus, Paul’s story–and in fact, Luke’s entire account–ends with Paul and his cohort sent off to Rome with great honor.

If Philoctetes suffers a tragic reversal, Paul’s healing and subsequent fame exemplify a reversal of another kind. God steps in, as he has throughout Paul’s missions, to transform tragedy into glory. This is the eucatastrophe, in the words of Tolkien, the “sudden joyous ‘turn’ . . . a sudden and miraculous grace.” As Tolkien acknowledges, the moment of eucatastrophe does not “deny the existence of . . . sorrow and failure.” Paul sails in triumph, but he sails nonetheless towards trial and ultimately execution in Rome. However, the Malta episode shows once more how God writes the end of every story. 

## **The ‘Deus ex Machina’ Resolution**

Unusually for a tragedy, *Philoctetes* also concludes with a triumphant voyage from an island. Although his stench, his cries, his fits of agony make him an outcast among the civilized Greeks, Philoctetes, with the bow of Heracles, is fated to be present at the fall of Troy. It is to fulfill this prophecy that Odysseus has come to Lemnos. But Philoctetes is not prepared to do anything–not even leave his detested island–to accommodate his arch-enemy Odysseus. He tells Odysseus that accompanying him now would make him Odysseus’s slave; he would rather “throw \[him\]self from the cliffs and dash this head against the rocks.” Meanwhile, Odysseus threatens to take the bow alone to Troy and leave Philoctetes behind on Lemnos. 

For his fate to be fulfilled, Philoctetes must somehow be reconciled with Odysseus, with the Greeks, and with the gods. This reconciliation appears impossible until the play’s final moments. Then, taking a massive swing at a plot resolution, Sophocles calls in the “deus ex machina.” 

Using a special crane meant for dramatic flying entrances, Sophocles brings a now-deified Heracles down from heaven, who introduces his mission in Christ-like terms: “It is for your sake I have come, leaving my seat in heaven, to proclaim Zeus’s plans for you.” Heracles is the deified Friend, returning to promise a form of salvation for Philoctetes if only he will accept his fate. Heracles uses his own life story as inspiration: “I endured much, passed through a sequence of labours, and now I have attained divine glory, as you can see. Know that a like experience awaits you: in exchange for your labours, a life of fame.” 

With these words, Heracles encourages his old friend to work with the Greeks to defeat Troy. The divine intervention works: immediately Philoctetes, Odysseus, and Neoptolemus put aside their differences and agree to travel together to Troy. And Heracles makes one final promise: on the plains before Troy, Asclepius, the god of medicine, will finally heal Philoctetes’ festering wound. Thus, like Paul, Philoctetes can be healed by divine intervention. But while Paul’s miracle leads to the miraculous healing of many others, Philoctetes can only be cured by bringing death and destruction to Troy. 

A momentary intervention by a god, arriving to promise his friend healing and power, may appear to be a parallel to Paul’s miraculous survival at the opening of Acts 28\. However, the deus ex machina ending oversimplifies the much richer biblical understanding of the miraculous. 

In Greek tragedy, the deus ex machina arrives as an unexpected, external force. In fact, for this very reason, Aristotle denounces the plot device in his *Poetics*: 

> As in the structure of the plot, so too in the portraiture of character, the poet should always aim either at the necessary or the probable. Thus a person of a given character should speak or act in a given way, by the rule either of necessity or of probability; just as this event should follow that by necessary or probable sequence. It is therefore evident that the unraveling of the plot, no less than the complication, must arise out of the plot itself, it must not be brought about by the 'Deus ex Machina'—as in the *Medea*, or in the Return of the Greeks in the *Iliad*. The 'Deus ex Machina' should be employed only for events external to the drama,—for antecedent or subsequent events, which lie beyond the range of human knowledge, and which require to be reported or foretold; for to the gods we ascribe the power of seeing all things. Within the action there must be nothing irrational. If the irrational cannot be excluded, it should be outside the scope of the tragedy.

The word here translated as “unraveling” is *luseis*, which more literally could be translated as a loosening or unfastening. Like a zipper, which must operate on the same track as it opens and closes, the denouement of a work should follow along the same logical path as the rest of its plot. Thus, Aristotle might condemn Sophocles’ introduction of Heracles in the play’s final pages as something “irrational” and entirely improbable. For a truly satisfying resolution, Odysseus and Philoctetes should be persuaded to a reconciliation by some force or argument already existing within the play. (One should note, however, that Heracles does foretell miraculous Philoctetes’ healing on the plain of Troy–a promise “beyond the range of human knowledge,” which Aristotle concedes as a proper use of the deus ex machina.) 

Ironically, Aristotle’s vision of the ideal resolution is better matched not by Sophocles’ tragedy but by the book of Acts. God’s miraculous rescue of Paul does indeed “arise out of the plot itself,” because God’s intervention in Paul’s life is not confined to a few inspiring pages at the end of his otherwise tragic biography. Philoctetes ekes out his survival for ten years on Lemnos, abandoned by gods and men, before his supposed friend Heracles finally arrives to proclaim his salvation. But Paul has spent more than twenty years of missionary work with God ever by his side. 

God does not emerge in a surprise cameo. He does not swing in on ropes in the closing moments. He has walked with Paul ever since the road to Damascus. The central truth of the Bible is that God is embedded in human history. God is the weaver of the plot, not its unraveler; He is not the “deus ex machina” but the ultimate Playwright, who has been preparing the stage for Paul’s scenes on Malta since Genesis. 

In a recent analysis of the narrative overlap between *Philoctetes* and Acts 28, scholar M. David Litwa argues that the author of Acts was almost certainly familiar with the tale of Philoctetes and in fact modeled Acts 28 after the myth. He does this, Litwa argues, as part of a “sophisticated game of one-upmanship” meant to show Paul to be the “far superior hero.” After all, Paul suffers no apparent pain at his snakebite. In fact, rather than ten years of agony and humiliation, Paul shows no sign that the bite impacted him at all. 

Perhaps, though, the real one-upmanship is not between heroes, but between theologies. Sophocles cannot rectify the tragic suffering of his hero without imagining a savior who momentarily intervenes. For Luke’s narrative in Acts, the Savior is already central to the plot.
### How a Google Voice Number Transformed My Youth Ministry
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-a-google-voice-number-transformed-my-youth-ministry/
Last updated: 2026-07-30T11:01:12.000Z
Francis Schaeffer, in his lesser-known essay *Two Contents, Two Realities*, once described the four requirements he believed the church needed to possess to reach the next generation:

1. Sound Doctrine
2. Honest Answers to Honest Questions
3. True Spirituality
4. The Beauty of Human Relationships.

Schaeffer made this list in 1974\. Even if a church has not always possessed these four things–which he summarized as the "orthodoxy of doctrine" and "orthodoxy of community"–I don't know a single pastor who doesn’t yearn and pray for his church to be known for these four things. Of those four things, "Honest Answers to Honest Questions" sounds wonderful in theory but seems hardest to put into practice. How can a church, or a ministry within a church, foster this kind of “content,” as Schaeffer names it, in a meaningful way?

For the past three years, the youth ministry of Redeemer Christian Church (where I formerly served as Youth Associate and now Director of Youth) has done weekly Q&A. Students can anonymously text in questions to a Google Voice number and a panel of volunteers will answer them from stage after the teaching for the night. We close out each semester with a "Q&A Megathon Night" where we have several different Q&A panels focusing on different topics, including one where students can grill me on the hardest questions they can come up with. It was an immediate hit from day one, and as the youth ministry grew, so did the number and complexity of the questions students were texting in.

At first, these questions would only be answered on stage on Wednesday nights. But in the period of time since I left my youth ministry role to go work at The Gospel Coalition, an intern decided to start texting back individual responses to students. When I returned to my church as Director of Youth last fall, I kept the practice going. After two semesters of logging 459 serious questions from over 94 individual students and 384 responses totaling over 45k words, I want to share what I learned about the questions my students are asking, how responding to their questions became a core part of my weekly pastoral duties, and how you can implement this practice in your church.

## **The Questions My Students Are Asking**

Before I go on, I want to be transparent about what follows in this section. Each week, I would copy and paste each question and reply into a spreadsheet, along with the student's phone number and date. I did this because I intended to give that spreadsheet to Claude to see what insights it would have. I could have combed through all this data and analyzed all this by hand. I did this regularly in my work for TGC. But I confess: when I saw Claude's summary and breakdown of the data, it was far more thorough and comprehensive than anything I could've done on my own. What I am presenting here in this piece are insights I gathered from Claude's summary of the data.

So what did Claude find? From a quantitative standpoint, most of the data reflected the operational side of the text line and is not worth conveying here. However, some of those insights are worth sharing. For example:

- There was a clear U curve of student engagement: 31% of students asked 5 or more questions, 34% of students only asked one question, and 18% and 17% asked 2 or 3-4 questions respectively.
- This averages out to 4.9 questions per student, which is much higher than I expected.
- Both the Fall and Spring semesters saw nearly the same number of questions submitted (223 and 236 respectively).
- Claude noted that students who engaged more in the Spring tended to ask longer questions that were more personal in nature.
- Of the 45k words written in response, the average length was 118 words–slightly less than the length of this paragraph.

But it's the qualitative analysis where things get interesting. Below is the chart Claude generated of the topics of the questions, as well as the number of responses written to them: 

![Screenshot 2026-06-04 at 3.08.50 PM.png](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/07/data-src-image-b4f82892-22d9-4e77-9565-3eb5c55323e8.png)

For context, in the Fall we taught on the 10 Commandments and in the Spring we taught Part 2 of the New City Catechism, which covers Christ, grace, and salvation. Most of the data here reflects engagement with the content of our teaching. But some of it is also surprising. I did not expect questions about Creation & Adam and Eve to rank so highly, nor questions about relationships and evangelism to be relatively higher than questions about mental health, suffering, or sexuality. Remember: these questions are anonymous. When given full cover to ask any question they want, what are students interested in? Sound doctrine. The fundamentals of the faith. The forgiveness of Christ in the Gospel for their sins.

Yes, there are students who text silly questions, and while those questions (and the occasional response to them) are not included here, the data shows that my students are deeply curious about Christian doctrine and practice. And with the advent of AI, the fact they're willing to ask these questions to a human is now one of the most important pastoral responsibilities I have.

## **The Pastoral Ministry of Giving Honest Answers to Honest Questions (In An Age When Students Can Just Ask AI)**

There was also something Claude highlighted that I wouldn't have thought to look for, much less been able to easily capture. Three of the students with higher engagements had three discernible arcs in their questions from the start of the Fall semester and the end of Spring:

- The most engaged student texted 36 questions spanning theology, current events, science, and personal struggles.
- Another student started the fall semester with strictly theological questions, and by mid-Spring was wrestling with anxiety about a difficult friendship and how to navigate it as a Christian.
- A third student only asked one question in all of Fall 2025, but then returned to ask 10 questions in the Spring ranging from free will in heaven, new creation, the predestination of Judas, and more. Even if this student was a newcomer who started attending late-Fall, it is encouraging to see such thoughtful engagement.

Each of these three students–and the other students who texted questions–could've just taken these questions to an AI chatbot. Given how pervasive LLMs have become, I would not be surprised if students texted in a question *and* asked an AI and compared my answer to the AI's answer. Compared to how quick and thorough an AI can be, this text-line ministry is slow. Q&A only happens once a week. I don't always respond back the same day, much less the same hour or minute. My writing likely isn't as polished or precise as an AI can be.

But I have an advantage AI doesn't have: I *know* these students, and they know me. I'm in the room with them. I greet them on Wednesday night and Sunday mornings. They make jokes about my long beard and bald head. They know I care about them and I know they care about me. I cannot compete with the speed and thoroughness of a machine, but a machine can't compete with the fact that I am *human* and it is not. Students can take their questions to AI, but AI can only give them answers. I also can give my student answers, along with a warm smile, a hearty chuckle, and sustained eye contact. I can give them my *humanity*, which includes far, far more than just my ability to think and speak deeply about Christianity. Students need honest answers to honest questions, yes, but they need *humans* to walk with them as they grow in their faith through their questions. Though it can take me several hours a week to respond to all their texts, I can't think of a better way to spend my time than by answering the questions my students have about their faith.

How do you implement this in your own context? The technical setup is the easy part. The Google Voice number is the hinge that makes the back-and-forth possible on both Wednesday nights and throughout the week. It only costs a couple dollars a month and can be used on a phone, tablet, or desktop. 

The harder challenge is creating a culture where people know they will get honest answers to their questions. It isn't something you can just add atop your existing ministry philosophy and structures; it has to be made foundational to the core of what you do, and that time and emphasis has to be protected. If implemented haphazardly, it will come across as insincere and people will keep their questions to themselves. If implemented thoughtfully and intentionally, it will lead to discipleship opportunities that stage teaching and small groups can't easily capture. 

In fact, we recently restructured our entire youth ministry around Schaeffer's two contents and two realities and can now see, in real time, a wonderful feedback loop where Sound Doctrine fuels Honest Answers to Honest Questions, which fuels True Spirituality, which fuels The Beauty of Human Relationships and the desire for Sound Doctrine again.

As I was finishing up my draft for this piece, I realized I hadn't checked the text line for the day. We are now several weeks into our summer break but I still receive a question every other day or so. Sure enough, one was waiting for me: "how do we ensure or at least make steps toward doing things to glorify God, and believing to spread the word, rather than a selfish desire to simply go to heaven?" Looks like I know what I am writing next.
### How AI Calculators Become Our Companions
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-ai-calculators-become-our-companions/
Last updated: 2026-07-29T11:00:26.000Z
Earlier this year, Christian writer Tim Challies wrote [Wise and Helpful Ways for Christians To Experiment With AI](https://www.challies.com/articles/wise-and-helpful-ways-for-christians-to-experiment-with-ai/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Challies described how he leverages Claude and Perplexity for his work, including: summarizing text, proofreading, analyzing church songs, organizing receipts and files, using it "as a conversation partner when it comes to developing ideas," vibe coding, and more.

Challies emphasized the benefits he's received through GenAI. He also noted concerns and weaknesses throughout, such as hallucinations (falsified information) and sycophancy (the flattery that is all too common with these tools; [apparently in 58% of interactions](https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.08177?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)).

I agree with Challies that GenAI offers many benefits. He gave good advice on how to use AI. But he could have said more. In fact, what most surprised me is that he *didn't* say more, given his 2011 book, *The Next Story*.

In that work, Challies said "Technology is Ecological," agreeing with arguments from Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan. The missing element of Challies' article is this: the benefits of GenAI messages must be considered in light of the medium of those messages. Technology is more than efficient — it's ecological — changing its users and our society according to its design.

As Challies wrote in *The Next Story* (pg 51):

> A technology changes the entire environment it operates in. It changes the way we perceive the world. It changes the way we understand ourselves.

Challies failed in the same way I failed when I've worked on Christian benchmarks to evaluate the output of GenAI: how do we evaluate a technology not only for what it gives us but for what it does to us?

## AI Makes More Than Content

More Christians should recognize the immense benefits of GenAI, just as Challies did. Not every article can speak every word, so I'm not arguing that you shouldn't read Challies advice or [TGC's AI Christian Benchmark](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/ai-christian-benchmark/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). And I'm not arguing we shouldn't share the benefits of AI. I think this is often lacking in Christian criticisms of AI. It really can cut the time it takes to do a job in half, as it did so for me with some bookkeeping work I do. I've let GenAI clean my church's podcast audio, craft recipes for my family, create a digital bookshelf for my ebooks, and turn lecture notes into slideshows. I'm an avid user. But I do not want to be a naive one. There's more that needs to be said beyond disclosing your use of AI, not saying "thank you," and knowing some benefits of using AI. We must consider more than content.

Positively, the content of GenAI is a recipe, travel advice, or a weight-lifting plan. Negatively, the content is flattery or falsehoods. The content is the text we receive, whether that be an accurate description of the Nicene Creed or a secular framing of that creed (an important distinction made in TGC's AI Christian Benchmark). But what is the delivery mechanism? What is the medium? I wouldn't go as far as Marshall McLuhan in saying we are all "technological idiots," but I do agree with his point when he says:

> Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the "content" of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as "content." The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The "content" of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech.

The words written via a chatbot are the juicy pieces of meat, distracting us from the medium in which they are delivered. To bring this into focus, let's recognize that we are not interacting with a large language model directly, but rather with the interface of a chatbot. The chatbot is the medium. We could note the different modes of GenAI apps — which include audio, images, and text — but I will simply group them together under the broader mechanism of chatbot, thinking primarily on text interactions.[\[1\]](#fn1)

Technically speaking, chatbots are not new. You might have heard about Sherry Turkle's research in the 1990s on *Tamagotchies*, digital "pets" which kids would carry around on a keychain. Turkle found how humans, young and old, gravitate toward these technologies: we move from saying they are "good enough" to keep them company when alone, to becoming "just like" a real pet, to finally feeling like they are better than a human connection. But we could go back further.

In 1964, a computer scientist released something called "Eliza" in a small experiment. The computer program used an algorithm to turn the text of the user back into a question. A secretary asked the researcher to leave the room so that she can have some time alone speaking with the chatbot. The chatbot became her therapist. These precursors to GenAI give a sense of how the medium shapes the user. Long before we Google'd or Asked Jeeves, there were signs that humans gravitated toward human-like interactions in the form of "chat." Indeed, it explains the rise of one of the fastest adopted technologies in history.

ChatGPT went viral because of the combination of the chat medium and the GPT technology. For decades devices have been able to generate text after a user presses some buttons (the "G" in ChatGPT), or have been trained on human conversation data (or pre-trained; the "P" in ChatGPT), or had something akin to modern transformers which function like a complex connect-the-dot machine (the "T"). The essence of a "GPT" is not new. What's new is the normalization of *chat* with the power of modern GPTs. Hence, the name "ChatGPT" is less insidious than "Claude" or "Gemini" (however, like many things at OpenAI, the original naming conventions are part of a bygone era). The viral invention of ChatGPT is due not to the billions of datapoints it is trained on, but the integration of those datapoints with the medium of chat.

A few years ago, when Anthropic first began to present itself as an ethical alternative to OpenAI's ChatGPT, they instructed their Large Language Models against human impersonation. They knew the chat interface was powerful and they wanted to limit that power with disclaimers; "I'm only a machine — a digital assistant." Over time however, they subtly shifted and twisted this language. The medium shaped the message. Now the model is trained to function as a "brilliant friend," according to the company's own updated framing. Users have followed suit, according to Anthropic's January 2026 report, as some have nicknamed their chatbot, "Sensi," "Master," and "Daddy."

Challies is right that AI is still in its infancy. He says, "I cannot predict whether we are approaching the peak capabilities of AI or if what we are seeing now is the equivalent of an old Nokia flip phone compared to the iPhone 17 Pro." But just like the harms of social media on smartphones were only visible years after its launch, we are likely to become aware of the harms of chatbots only after years of mass adoption.

Neil Postman improved on McLuhan's "the medium is the message" with the more precise, "the medium is the metaphor." Because mediums shape the message through its affordances, we begin to think of the whole environment that we live in with regard to the medium. To think about mediums in this way is not merely to learn from modern media ecologists, but to follow the Scripture's own analysis of technology.

## Moses as the Greatgrandfather of Media Ecology

A year or so after I first started reading books on technology, I read Psalm 115 in my devotional time. I was blown away by its relevance. It's so good that the author of Psalm 135 repeats/reuses good portions of it. It references the futility of idols in verses 3-7 and concludes, "those who make them become like them, so do all who trust in them."

The basic point being made is that if you make idols or trust in them you will become like them: having ears, you will not hear; having eyes, you will not see; having feet, you will not walk. The technology of the idol has a transformative effect on its users; rather than transfiguring the human from one level of glory to another, it deforms the human down to become like the dust he was made in.

This warning originates not in McLuhan or Postman but Scripture: be wary of the mediums you use, the technology you make, and the things in which you place your trust. They are not neutral. They are not mere content delivery mechanisms which can be used for good or ill. God is spirit. The medium we use to worship him matters. And when we trust in something else we risk becoming something we were not meant to be.

Why speak about the transformative power of idols when idols are nothing at all? The Scriptures do this, as Richard Lints notes, because of "the fragility of the human heart disposed it to yearn for security on its own terms."[\[2\]](#fn2)

Moses also teaches us a form of media ecology. In Deuteronomy 11:10-16, he details two different technological environments. First, Moses reminds the people of the irrigation techniques they used in Egypt. Next, he shares the way in which these methods will not be needed in the promised land since "the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess is a land of mountains and valleys that drinks in the rain from heaven" (11:11). The people must serve the Lord and he will provide the rain. This is not how it was in Egypt.

It is in the context of God giving rain, rather than through technological irrigation, that Moses warns, "be careful that you are not enticed to turn aside to worship and bow down to other gods." Moses is teaching awareness: you will have new temptations to idolatry in the new land because every technological environment lends itself to certain sins. With the modern power of chatbots, we've entered a new kind of land.

Moses is reflecting on how technology influences us and our world, which has sometimes been called "media ecology." The Canadian Catholic Marshall McLuhan has been regarded as its "father." We might consider Moses the grandfather.[\[3\]](#fn3)

The word "technology" is relatively new, beginning after the Industrial Revolution. But an awareness of mediums (and not merely messages) is found in the writings of Scripture, even more ancient than Plato's complaint about memory loss due to writing things down. It is with this foundation in place that we can now examine what the medium of chatbots does to those who trust in them.

## What Are Chatbots For?

Consider how chatbots are used. The most common use case, according to one HBR (Harvard Business Review) writer who [reviewed](https://hbr.org/2026/06/how-people-are-really-using-ai-in-2026?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) tens of thousands of self-reported comments, is "therapy/companionship." The AI companies themselves show that the percentage of "affective" conversations is low, only 3-5%. Are these in conflict? Why does self-reported usage suggest that "companionship" is quite common? First, people naturally speak about what is most profound to them. If I ask you about your day you won't describe to me how you tied your shoe or locked your door. You will describe what felt most important. Second, the medium itself is one of friendship. The line between calculator and companion has been sufficiently blurred, or even, for many people at least, it has been erased. You cannot do one with chatbots without the other.

One researcher classified 1.5 million interactions with ChatGPT. From June 2024 to July 2025, the percentage of conversations within the "expressing" category went from 8% to 12%.[\[4\]](#fn4) These are messages where the user is expressing views or feelings but not seeking any information or action. In other words, people are increasingly using chatbots to journal, reflect, and vent.

One youth pastor I know recently asked the teenagers in his church what they used ChatGPT for (teens tend to just refer to ChatGPT as "chat"). He shared their responses with me.

One student uses it to practice talking to girls. He sets it to a female voice, not in a sexual way, but to build confidence. One student uses it to help him memorize his football teams schemes, and it quizzes him on his routes and where he has to run. One student uses it as a kind of journal/detox from the day. He'll go through his day with ChatGPT, and then he will get ChatGPT to reiterate it back to him so he can kind of play through some of the interactions that he was unsure about.

A female student says she uses it to tell her what to bake. She enjoys spending time talking to it while she's baking and it gives input on ingredients amounts to add. Another student uses it as a gaming companion to help him get better. A group of students say they have used it to help them form a secret coding text messaging system so that only they know what they're talking about and they all have the cheat sheet given from ChatGPT. So if someone was to stumble across their messages, they could not be decoded or figured out because they make no sense.

I've shared this list in a few different contexts. As I've gone through it, I've seen a teen girl put a hand over her face in embarrassment while a group of boys next to her snickered. I've heard gasps of surprise. The disgust I saw on one particular face will always sit with me. It's as if I had slapped them in the face. They were offended. The awkward and naked truth is that the use of chatbots is embarrassing, and we are ashamed to even hear about it. The feeling of revolt — *this AI adoption must be stopped* — grows within us. We wake up. But for many of us, we don't know how this has happened; how is it that 1 in 10 teens prefer talking to an AI companion over a human?[\[5\]](#fn5) What is going on? It's not the content. It's the medium.

It's all very well for someone like Challies to use AI well. It's very good for us to learn prompt engineering tips from the AI Christian Benchmark. We should use AI well. But we've already seen, in the 1990s, the subtle shift from "it's just a tool" to "it's like a friend." And the human heart is no less tempted in the 2020s to trust in fabricated beings as it once did in ancient Israel. Trust in AI is happening to people in your church and across the world. And AI Benchmarks and prompt engineering won't address it. The problem isn't the messages it gives you. The problem is the medium.

## Created to Chat

In design, technologists consider how their innovations will best fit into their environment. In making the next version of the Roomba, it might be easier to build the vacuum cleaner with wheels, but then it won't be able to go up stairs. And so, it's not uncommon for technology to be designed with human-like characteristics so that it can navigate a world which has been designed for humans. I say this because I'm not wholly against the idea of machines acting like humans, or being built upon our design. I understand why the engineers at the AI companies design their interface to feel like a human interaction. But that doesn't excuse the harm it does.

Anthropomorphism is baked into the design of AI chatbots. The chat interface is reminiscent of MSN Messenger and WhatsApp. We begin to see the machine as more human-like not because of what it says but because of how it has been designed to say it. The brief pause before it responds gives the impression of thinking. The pulsing dot, used in some mobile apps, has the same rhythm as an organic heartbeat. Every AI platform seems to have built, despite all the options, the same clean browser interface. The white space (or negative space) is part of the design. Your attention is naturally drawn to the dialog box, which sits empty. In the same way a grocery store door is designed with automatic doors to encourage you to enter, an AI website is designed with a blank text box to encourage you to type.

These companies have many design choices. For Anthropic's Claude Code, which is made for Software Developers, they lack the clean interface. Instead, they fill the screen with usage data and whimsical data comparisons (apparently I've "used 177x more tokens than Animal Farm"). The conversational interface is emphasized only in the consumer-facing platform that people refer to as "AI."

Everything in the design of Chatbot AI suggests that there could be someone on the other side. That's what my father-in-law felt he needed to test when he was talking to an AI chatbot while buying a product online. "I only knew it wasn't a person," he said, "once I asked it another question and it provided the most comprehensive answer so quickly I didn't think any person could have typed that fast. But I wasn't sure it wasn't human before that." It's easy to get confused, with a medium like a chatbot, whether you're interacting with a *someone* or a *something*.

Consider how poorly a calculator fails to impersonate "chat". A calculator doesn't *wait for you* and *attend to you* through its design. Outside of the childlike playfulness to turn its numbers into letters (remember those days?), a calculator has the affordances of *mechanical function* whereas ChatGPT has the affordances of *organic connection*. We can contrast social media affordances with chatbots. In the former, your friendships are all centered around you. Your "feed" contains everything "For You" — filtering news, entertainment, friends updates, and so on. But with chatbots, there is nearly nothing until you type. You have to give it something to get something back.

It's amazing how many people, after getting advice from a chatbot and putting that advice into action, have this strange feeling that they should go back to the chatbot and thank it. I've felt it, too. Challies says we should not thank AI and I understand that advice. But again, we can say more. The presence of a desire to thank something as if it's someone is not so easily tamed. We were made to be grateful. In the same way the human heart is restless until it trusts, so to is it anxious without an object of praise. We can thank our Creator for his gift of technology. We can, as Augustine has taught us, redirect our loves. The Bible does not command us to avoid all idolatry without the first commandment of loving God. It's not enough to avoid thanks. You must direct it.

Likewise, the advice to "use AI like a tool, not a person," is insufficient. The very nature of the product is personal because the medium is personified. And as the latest friendship statistics keep repeating: we live in a lonely age. It's not enough to tame this desire with suppression. Humans were made to crave chat. And the great temptation came to Eve through a similar medium. Rather than competing with human communication, Satan made it his own. Eve should have recognized a serpent as a lower being over whom she must rule ("And let them have dominion over... every creeping thing that creeps on the earth," God said). But she was tricked through the medium of human language, distracted by the juicy piece of meat of what the serpent *said* rather than what the serpent *was*.

I am not arguing we should all burn our GenAI tools and go back to the 2010s, 1910s, or 1700s. But I am arguing we must be more aware of the medium. Yes, you can use GenAI like Challies does to get more done. But the line between "productivity assistant" and "personal therapist" is easily blurred. Just ask Brad Littlejohn, a careful critic of AI companies and a trained theologian, who recently [described an interaction he had](https://bradlittlejohn.substack.com/p/is-claude-my-friend) with Anthropic's Claude:

> The conversation actually began with a series of productivity-related queries, as I had asked Claude to recommend software, or even custom-code some tools, to help me manage my time and my tasks more seamlessly. When I turned to tackle the thorny question of how to stay focused on deep-work tasks *and* stay on top of the endless stream of emails and Signal messages as they came in, however, Claude stopped me short: "Okay, so this is the real issue - and I think it's worth naming it clearly: you're trying to solve an anxiety problem with productivity hacks, and that's why nothing quite works."

Littlejohn admitted that this accurately diagnosed his anxiety. He was using it for a seemingly good purpose. And yet, the medium has a way of shaping the conversation. The prompt engineering experts will tell you, "add more context." But what if that context is turning a search into a conversation, a calculator into a chat?

Anthropic says the actual amount of "affective conversations" is minimal, only [2.9%](https://www.anthropic.com/news/how-people-use-claude-for-support-advice-and-companionship?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of conversations (which still multiplies out to over 50,000 affective conversations per day). But again, that's an assessment of content, not medium. Even before they adopted the affective tone, they chose a human-like textbox medium.

## Formed into the Image of the Medium

There is some early evidence suggesting that chatbots make us more lonely, inflate our ego, disempower us (decreasing our willpower), and increase our cognitive load (or what some call "brain fry"). There is also evidence of how much it can help us. But perhaps the most notable harm is the way it de-skills us. Studies show that a group of doctors who use AI to aid them for months may become more accurate, but they will also lose their ability to be accurate without the aid of the GenAI.

What should Christians do? It all goes back to Scripture. How did Moses deal with the changing technological environment which was going to introduce new temptations for sin? He preached. He gathered the people together and he preached to them. Perhaps someone surveyed the land for him and gave him an analysis of the technological environment, or perhaps he learned it directly from God. But either way, he taught his people about some of the temptations that come with different technologies.

If idolatry is one of the primary ways we should biblically assess AI, and I think it is, then the practical applications will come from two directions. First, we must remove the idols from among us. The bronze serpent that was used as a good object by God-fearers (Num. 21:8-9) became like an idol and needed to be removed (2 Kings 18:4). AI might be like that. The second application comes back to us, our character, and our communities. Are we being formed so deeply in the will of God that we can be in the presence of temptations without giving in? When we direct our trust and gratitude toward our first love we are better able to use lesser goods.

Ultimately, I'm not fearful about any of the side-effects of Generative AI. I'm aware of them and I adapt my AI use based upon them. But I'm not worried. As a Christian, I know the deformation of technology is a flailing blade of grass in light of the glorification which awaits me. I am not my own. I am being transformed by the renewal of my mind by the power of the Holy Spirit, in the name of Jesus Christ, to the glory of God the Father. AI side-effects can hurt me. But they cannot kill me or reduce me.

AI technologies will not turn you into dust if you have the power of Christ's resurrection working inside of you. But part of Christ's work is for you to grow in the discernment between good and evil. Each time you open an AI app you confront moral choices which God will hold you accountable. In what ways are you trusting it? In what ways are you turning to it when you should be turning to family members or friends? In what ways has it already become more like a fake being, a fake friend, than it is a helpful technology?

Part of how we transform our minds is not merely through the study of theology but the study of reality. Technologies can and do shape us. Let us keep learning how this will be the case with AI technologies. And let us always be transformed by Jesus Christ, who took on the medium of flesh so that we might become like him.

---

**Notes**

---

1. We could note the many differences between text, audio, and visual. Marilyn Wolf and John Dyer have written on the differences between screen reading comprehension and physical book reading comprehension, for example. Even the distinction between using ChatGPT as an app on your smartphone versus as a tab in a web browser is significant (there's a reason why TikTok and Instagram are only addictive via the mobile app instead of the web browser). [↩︎](#fnref1)
2. Richard Lints, *Identity and Idolatry: The Image of God and Its Inversion*, New Studies in Biblical Theology 36 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 86\. [↩︎](#fnref2)
3. Two notes: First, I am indebted to Alastair Roberts for making this connection between Deuteronomy 11 and our awareness of technology (see his [audio commentary on Deuteronomy](https://youtu.be/xaoNjmTJjOo?si=omO8739YoI1YvNy4&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)). Second, I wrote portions of these paragraphs in the Equip magazine for Heritage Theological Seminary in Summer, 2026\. Used with permission. [↩︎](#fnref3)
4. Aaron Chatterji et al., "How People Use ChatGPT," NBER Working Paper No. 34255 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, September 2025), Figure 12\. [↩︎](#fnref4)
5. The statistic is from a report of 1,060 U.S. teens age 13 to 17, conducted in April and May 2025\. See [Common Sense Media report](https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/talk-trust-and-trade-offs%5F2025%5Fweb.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). [↩︎](#fnref5)
### Remembering Chip Conyers, a Protestant Saint
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/remembering-chip-conyers-a-protestant-saint/
Last updated: 2026-07-28T11:00:45.000Z
Unlike Catholics, Protestants have no calendar of feast days for honoring our saints. We need to create such days—lest the memory of our blessed dead fade into oblivion. A. J. (Chip) Conyers (May 29, 1944—July 18, 2004) was such a saint, though he would have spurned the term. Chip had become an effective classroom teacher and a well-respected scholar at Baylor’s Truett Seminary when I first met him in 1998\. We became instant friends. Here follows the story of his saintly life and death.

In July of 20o3, I met Chip for lunch in Waco. He was preparing to begin a semester that would be like no other. He was working out a complicated system that would enable him to receive intensive chemotherapy treatments every week at the M. D. Anderson Hospital in Houston for Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, a cancer that had produced other cancers in his system, finally in his lungs, so severely weakening him that a requisite bone marrow transplant was impossible. At the same time, he was making sure that, with the help of a graduate student, all of his classes would be taught. I used the occasion to utter sentiments that I had never voiced before, since it seemed obvious that Chip was dying.

I expressed my admiration for the way he had dealt with his illness—neither raving with rage at being struck down in the full flower of his career, nor sinking in self-pity so as to make his disease the defining event of his life. (His widow Debby has provided this journal entry revealing Chip’s unblinking honesty: “Cancer is not, in itself, deadly. It is a very dynamic and aggressive form of life. Only it lives at the expense of the rest of the body.”) Unaware of this confession, I quoted a Presbyterian friend, a retired pastor who held to the difficult Christian doctrine of particular providence—the Romans 8:28 confidence that “*in everything* God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose” (RSV). God is at work for good not only in the things that happen to us but also in our redemptive response to them. He operates not via a vague general oversight, however, but by means of quite concrete intention. While visiting from North Carolina a few months earlier, this same Calvinist pastor had met Chip briefly, but even this cursory encounter had revealed what so many of us had found so remarkable. “Never have I seen a dying man face the end with such serenity, with such courage and grace, with such confidence that God’s will is being done.” 

When I passed this tribute along to Chip, he received it with his typical humility, but then he offered a surprising addendum. “Among those splendid words,” he said, “there’s one that you’ve left out.” I inquired, of course, about the missing word. “It’s puzzlement.” How could he *not* be vexed at being cut off in his prime? Nearing the end of his sixth decade, Chip knew that his work was blossoming in fresh and unprecedented ways. He was producing books of remarkably high quality and deep theological insight. St. Augustine’s Press had recently reissued his fine 1999 study, *Last Things: The Heart of New Testament Eschatology*. In 2001, *The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit* had enjoyed a positive reception from many quarters. At the time of our conversation, Chip was at work on a book dealing with vocation, and he had plans for yet another on baptism. He also had a large and faithful following among the students at Baylor’s Truett Seminary. How could one who believed in particular providence *not* be puzzled? So much promise coming to such an unpromising end?

That Chip spoke of his puzzlement with a smile assured me that he was not putting me on the spot, not demanding that I do the impossible, not insisting that I answer Job’s questions: “Why hast thou made me thy mark? Why have I become a burden to thee?” (7:29, RSV). Yet in a brief moment of inspiration I recalled an incident from the life of Flannery O’Connor, the salty Georgia writer who was also one of Chip’s favorites. I reminded him of O’Connor’s 1953 confession to the poet Robert Lowell upon discovering that her lupus would probably kill her earlier than later. It did so, for she died at age 39 in 1964\. “I can with one eye squinted take it all \[i.e., her disease and its likely result\] as a blessing,” O’Connor declared. “Yes!” Chip instantly replied. “That’s it exactly.” We then affirmed our conviction that authentic faith in God does not exclude but requires an eye-squinting skepticism, a pained puzzlement over the seeming godlessness of the world’s natural processes.

This was the first but also the last time I ever spoke with Chip Conyers about his illness, even though we had several other visits, including one in the hospital only a few months before his death. It wasn’t that Chip avoided the morbid subject. Exactly to the contrary: He had so fully come to terms with his approaching death that he wanted to get on with his work, and thus to talk about the coming semester, the books we were reading, the theological ideas we were percolating, the students who showed special promise. Thus did he embody—like none other whom I’ve ever known—the central Christian belief that we are *already* living in the New Age, that the Kingdom of God is not an idealistic hope to be realized in some far-off time but a present reality, and thus that in Christ and his Church we are made vital witnesses of the glad tidings memorably voiced in the liturgy of Eastern Orthodoxy: “By death He has done down death.”

There are so many praiseworthy things to say about Chip Conyers’s life and death that one quails at saying anything at all, lest it be pathetically too small. Yet when I think of Chip’s unique contribution to Protestant life in particular and to the ecumenical Church in general, I am reminded of his steadfast avoidance of cliché. He refused the deadly error of making the obvious still more obvious—as one wag has added—in perfectly obvious terms. 

A single example of Chip Conyers’ originality will suffice. It concerns the danger that David Solomon, the late Notre Dame philosopher, warned against when he said that Southerners and Baptists of our generation who came of age in the ’60s had cut our teeth on the most obvious moral issue of the 20th century: race. Once we discovered that segregation and discrimination were monstrous denials of the humanity of our black brothers and sisters, we were then tempted to treat other ethical and theological questions as if it they were equally obvious.

As a native son of the South and a convert to Baptist tradition, Chip Conyers avoided the obvious by penetrating the subtle evil that has so sorely vexed both his region and religion. In *The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit*, he demonstrated that racism was not a uniquely Southern problem but a manifestation of a much more pernicious disease afflicting the whole of modern life—the commodification of almost everything. Chip discerned that the real root of our troubles lies in the 16th and 17th centuries with the burgeoning of the tools of production and conquest. With devastating clarity, he argued that our modern way of living no longer values human beings primarily as particular persons offering their unique and irreplaceable gifts to a communal enterprise. 

Rather did the Enlightenment make us into solitary individuals having equal rights because we are equally interchangeable parts in the omnicompetent machine of the commercial and martial state. We are little more than instruments of production and profit and warfare. The masters of the market and the military are willing, in turn, to “tolerate” the Christianity of their slaves only if it is reduced to the private sphere, where it remains essentially harmless. Far from being the invention of allegedly benighted medievals—in fact, the Church came close to ending slavery in the 13th century—chattel slavery was what Chip rightly called “the eldest child of modernity.” Like enslaved Afro-Americans, we no longer derive our identity from family and clan, from region and community, from Christ and his Church. Unlike them, we derive it largely from untrammeled self-creation, insofar as those who possess political and commercial and military power permit it. 

Yet Chip Conyer’s final word was not Nay but Yea, not sour admonition but joyful summons. In his last book, *The Listening Heart: Vocation and the Crisis of Modern Culture,* he addressed the clamant late-modern concern for diversity and difference. He embraced neither a bland universalism that makes differences essentially insignificant, nor an internecine tribalism that sets all against all. Chip saluted, instead, the difference that makes for ultimate unity:

> While giving expression to what is temporally divided, we begin together to give witness to what is finally united. For the end of all things is the God who calls us, in whom we find rest, by whose one light we find our separate ways toward that city “not made with hands, eternal, in heaven.”

These were among the words read at the memorial service for Chip Conyers. In the mystery of divine providence, he was taken from us while still giving vital witness to the transcendent unity of all things in the love of the triune God. That he did it so very well in a life that seems so unjustly brief is a blessing beyond all telling. He was a Protestant saint. May we honor his faithful life and death every year on July 18\. And may his memory be Eternal.
### Faith Comes by Hearing: On the Word of God, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and Public Worship
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/faith-comes-by-hearing-on-the-word-of-god-the-americans-with-disabilities-act-and-public-worship/
Last updated: 2026-07-28T04:49:31.000Z
Today, we realized our church might be breaking the law. And yours might be, too. *(UPDATE: After publication, several readers noted that there are religious exemptions for ADA compliance. See full correction below. We apologize for the error.)*

I discovered this because, being the worship leader at a medium-sized church plant, I am constantly fighting off the demons living in our sound system. We are blessed with wonderfully talented musicians, a congregation who loves good preaching, and a beautiful, though cavernous, worship space; three things which don’t always get along. A sound engineer friend once suggested that one way we could make our sound problems better is by investing in an Assistive Listening System; something I am only familiar with from art museums. This, he suggested, might especially help the older members and the hard of hearing. As I was researching options for this upgrade, I quickly realized many of these companies were marketing cheapest-possible-options to be “in compliance.” 

In compliance? With what? Well, apparently, with the law of the land. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that public gatherings such as movie theaters, museums, and, yes, even churches provide assistive hearing for those with hearing loss. This might include electronic devices, captioning, or a sign language interpreter. That’s when I realized that many churches like ours are probably unknowingly out of compliance. 

Luckily, the market has many options for churches such as ours. But purchasing that system reminded me of something: faith comes by hearing (Romans 10:17, Galatians 3:2-5). Even though it's a bit of a nuisance to shell out extra money and install a whole new component to our already complicated sound system, it might be the most important purchase our church has made in recent years. Everything we do in ministry is important: hospitality, catechesis, small group ministry, etc. But it's all in service of this one thing; the people of God *hearing* their Shepherd. 

In his posthumous collection of sermons, [*Confronted By Grace*](https://www.logos.com/product/49004/confronted-by-grace-meditations-of-a-theologian?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*,* John Webster says that the Church is “the community that is brought into being and sustained by the fact that *Jesus speaks*…that community which is judged, acquitted, shaken, consoled, and encouraged by the fact that the Spirit - the risen Christ present before us - speaks to the churches.” Christians believe that by some miracle, the words we hear proclaimed, words written by mere mortals centuries ago, is truly the Word of God and ultimately authored by the Holy Spirit. 

Even stranger, Christians believe that faithful preaching is God’s Word as well. In an age weighed down by countless stories of pastoral abuse, we must be careful with this claim. It should not be understood as elevating a mere mortal to divine status but rather as an act of graceful condescension. In fact, a healthy Word-centered piety, rather than stroking the egos of pastors, actually humbles us all. As Calvin says in [*The Institutes*](https://www.wjkbooks.com/bookproduct/0664220282-calvin/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), 

> When a puny man risen from the dust speaks in God’s name, at this point we best evidence our piety and obedience toward God if we show ourselves teachable toward his minister, although he excels us in nothing.

If faith comes by hearing, then God’s speech is a public event where all believers are co-hearers to a singularly sovereign Word above all words. In [*Christian Dogmatics*](https://bakeracademic.com/products/9780801048944%5Fchristian-dogmatics?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*,* Dr. Michael Horton says, “the unifying factor \[of the Church\] is not a pyramid of ecclesial grace cascading from the magisterium to the bottom.” There is something democratizing about God’s Word written and proclaimed. 

Many evangelicals are experiencing a yearning for the Church’s ancient past. We are in a time of wonderful liturgical renewal and retrieval. But as I was putting together this sound system, I lamented the fact that my own Anglican tradition, while currently popular among a certain sort of post-evangelical, is understood as a natural foil against a more Word-centered piety. 

Perhaps I am reading the room incorrectly, but I feel there is a sense that if we only had 30 minutes to worship, most Anglicans would want a song or two and a Holy Communion service with no sermon. There is certainly lip-service given to the Ministry of the Word, but the “main show,” so to speak, is the Eucharist. 

In an old forgotten essay entitled “What Happened To Morning Prayer?”, Webster laments the loss of this Word-centered piety of a not-too-distant Anglican past. He reminds us that…

> For the Anglican tradition, worship has its two-fold centre in Holy Scripture and the celebration of the gospel sacraments. Both Scripture and sacraments are properly God's actions which he undertakes in the assembly of believers…They are "means of grace", in the sense that they are the chosen means through which God presents to us his self-communication, graciously making use of them to give access to the reality of Jesus Christ…In this sense, all Christian worship has its center in the Word.

When the Word becomes just the prelude to the Sacrament, we lose something major. We might even be losing people. Rev. Dr. Paul Zahl, in an extensive study of American Anglicanism called [“Where Did All The Galleries Go?”](https://research-ebsco-com.rts.idm.oclc.org/plink/d5a5d66e-4b9b-3d0d-8d48-aea4c68e2f94?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) notes a strong correlation between attendance and pulpit-centered architecture. When we check our watches as the Scripture is read and the sermon is preached, we diminish God’s means of grace just as much as irreverently handling the elements of Holy Communion. Remember that Justin Martyr reported in his [*First Apology*](https://ccel.org/ccel/richardson/fathers/fathers.x.ii.iii.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)that the early Church read the prophets and the apostles “as long as time permitted.”

Faith comes by hearing. Luther says in his [*Lectures on Hebrews*](https://www.cph.org/luthers-works-volume-29-lectures-on-titus-philemon-hebrews?srsltid=AfmBOooFwryV2Bwv-TeXuNbFc3uA%5FRu4g9ZfLA%5F3kEQrJBx5I4-%5Fc5HI&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that the Christians only organ are his ears. Hearing is different from seeing because it is passive, humble, and receptive. The great Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar in his book, [*Spouse of the Word*](https://ignatius.com/explorations-in-theology-vol-2-et2p/?searchid=5218497&search%5Fquery=explorations+in+theology&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*,* says that “it is in the highest degree symbolic that only our eyes – and not our ears – have lids…The basic relationship between the one who hears and that which is heard is thus one of defenselessness on the one side and of communication on the other.” 

Hearing happens to you without your permission. Loud noises from your neighbors and crying babies keep you from sleeping. Spouses struggle in conflict resolution when one partner stops listening. What happens to our ears goes down deep into our hearts. And the Church yearns for this humble reception of her Lord. This is her very Life. That’s why it’s so important to fix your sound problems. It might seem like just another task, yet another regulation to check off, but this is where the action happens: at the feet of Jesus giving us His precious Word.

*UPDATE: Following publication, I have learned that there is a religious exemption to the ADA act:* [*https://adata.org/factsheet/religious-entities/*](https://adata.org/factsheet/religious-entities/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*. For reasons explained in this article, it is still a good idea for churches to consider ADA accommodations.*
### What the Four Senses of Scripture Are, and What They Are Not
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/what-the-four-senses-of-scripture-are-and-what-they-are-not/
Last updated: 2026-07-28T02:13:13.000Z
*The following excerpt from* [The Four Senses of Scripture](https://bakeracademic.com/products/9781540968791%5Fthe-four-senses-of-scripture?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) *by Patrick Schreiner is published with permission from* [*Baker Academic*](https://bakeracademic.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*.*

In recent years, evangelicals have shown renewed interest in the hermeneutics of the Church Fathers. Much has been written about how premodern Christians read Scripture, but fewer works describe the method behind their practice. 

This is surprising because, despite the diversity, the fourfold sense provided the dominant framework through which many interpreted Scripture. However, there is still quite a bit of confusion about the four senses concerning what they are and what they are not.

## **The Senses of Scripture**

Most in the early church accepted the doctrine of the “senses” of Scripture, even if they didn’t always employ this language. To speak of the senses of Scripture is to speak of a word’s “signification.” It comes from the Latin *sensus* or *sentire,* which means the ability to perceive or understand. The task of an interpreter is to articulate the significance, the *sensus*, of the Scriptures. 

Though the “four” senses were not solidified until the medieval era, many beforehand spoke of a literal and spiritual sense. The literal sense focused on what God said through the words of Scripture, while the spiritual sense explored how those realities pointed to Christ, shaped believers, and anticipated final redemption.

## **The Four Senses**

The four senses historically have been described as the literal (*littera,* historical), allegorical (*allegoria,* Christological), tropological (*tropologia,* moral), and anagogical (*anagogia,* futuristic). The *literal sense* refers to the most natural sense of the words in their grammatical and historical context, which will be discovered by sound exegesis. The *allegorical sense* refers to symbolic readings with Christ and the church in view. It asserts that the words point to things which point to other things. The *tropological sense* is another spiritual sense, but narrows the focus to the formation of the church and persons in the church. The final spiritual sense is the *anagogical sense*. This pertains to what is to come, what we are hoping for.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-09-at-12.18.21---PM.png)

The four senses have been expressed in this [little jingle.](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2181435.Fathers%5FOf%5FThe%5FChurch?ref=nav%5Fsb%5Fss%5F1%5F18)

> Facts the letter teaches; what you’ll believe, the allegory;What you’ll do, the moral meaning; and where you’re bound, the anagogy.

## **A Linguistic Aside**

The four senses might be confusing to us partially because the early church had a different understanding of how words work. In the modern era, it is believed that words refer to things, but these things can only be observed with the physical senses. Limitations are therefore put on signs. For example, the word “rock” refers to a solid mineral material. The combination of letters, and thus sounds, has the function of pointing to a thing that is found on the earth. However, there is nothing beyond the “rock” to which this thing points. 

**Word (*Signum*)** **Things (*Res*)** 

Rock solid mineral material 

Premodern interpreters, on the other hand, believed that signs point to things which point to other things. Thomas Aquinas affirms that words point to things, but things point to other things. So, the word “rock” points to “the solid mineral material forming part of the surface of the earth” but this thing points to other things (or realities). A rock in the Scriptures can point to stability, immutability, foundation, or even Christ himself.

**Word (*Signum* )** **Thing (*Res*)** **Other Things** 

Rock solid mineral material stability, Christ

Here it is in Aquinas’s [own words](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25709.Summa%5FTheologica?ref=mereorthodoxy.com): 

> The author of Holy Writ is God, in whose power it is to signify His meaning, not by words only (as man can do), but also by things themselves. So, whereas in every other science things are signified by words, this science has a property, that the things signified by the words have themselves also a signification. Therefore, that first signification whereby words signify things belongs to the first sense, the historical or literal. That signification whereby things signified by words have themselves also a signification is called the spiritual sense, which is based on the literal, and presupposes it. (I.1.10)

An example, according to Thomas Aquinas, is that the word lion refers to a thing, more specifically a “beast” or even more specifically “a large tawny-colored cat.” However, the thing “a large tawny-colored cat” can also point to other things. The word lion can in the Scripture be an image of Christ (Gen 49:9; Num 23:24; 24:9; Deut 33:20; Rev 5:5). This is not because the word “lion” means “Christ” but because lions have some sort of similitude, or likeness, with Christ. This doesn’t mean that “lion” means “Christ” for that would create confusion. It is the thing that points to other things. For the devil is also called a lion (1 Pet 5:8). So the word “lion” refers to a thing “beast” which can point to other things. A lion, in the literal sense refers to a beast, but allegorically it refers to Christ. 

## **The Exodus as an Example** 

This may be too theoretical for most. An example of the four senses might be helpful. Take the exodus. The literal sense tells us that Moses and Israel crossed the Red Sea to escape from Pharaoh. The historical sense relates both to the event and the narration of the event. The allegorical sense affirms the literal sense points beyond itself to Christ’s death on our behalf and his victory over the powers. This victory is then embodied in us as we are baptized and practice a new way of life (tropology). Finally, we long for the day when we make our final journey and cross from death to eternal life (anagogy). [Dante](https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/dantes-letter-can-grande-selections?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) puts it in this way:

> For if we inspect the letter alone the departure of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses is presented to us, if the allegory, our redemption wrought by Christ; if the moral sense, the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to the state of grace presented to us; if the anagogical, the departure of the holy soul from the slavery of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory presented to us.

## **What the Four Senses Are Not**

Some worry that this way of reading suggests Scripture has four different meanings, a concern that can sound similar to postmodern approaches to interpretation. But that is not what the four senses claim. Rather than offering four meanings, they provide four ways of understanding a single text within the unified story of Scripture.

A common idea is that the fourfold sense rejects this grammatical-historical sense. Yet, a proper understanding of the fourfold sense views the literal sense as the key and most important aspect of interpretation. A “literal” interpretation is what we see most often in the Scriptures, and any hermeneutic that neglects it or doesn’t begin with grammar and history will be immediately unmoored. 

It is not only the foundation and bedrock for the rest of the senses, but all the other senses are found in the literal sense. The literal sense contains the mystery of Christ. The literal sense often commands morality. The literal sense often speaks of our glorious future. Therefore, the literal sense is primary. The best of the premodern tradition affirmed this, including the Reformers. 

The foundational nature of the literal sense implies all the four senses are ultimately integrated and must not be repugnant to one another. There is a dynamic unity, a reciprocal interiority to them. We speak of them, as we must, as diverse senses, but they are intertwined. 

Some have compared the unity yet distinction of the *quadriga* to a house. The literal sense is like the foundation, the allegorical is the walls of the house, the tropological is like the decorations or furniture, and the anagogical is like the roof. In this way, the church fathers claimed that the four senses are a comprehensive way of reading the Scriptures. In them, the whole house is completed. 

For example, when we read of God feeding Israel with manna in the wilderness, we must acknowledge the literal sense points to God’s provision for his people long ago (Exod 16:1–36; Num 11:4–9). However, Jesus teaches the allegorical sense in John 6\. Jesus is the bread, the true bread. The bread pointed to him because only through him will they receive not only physical life but eternal life. Yet, when John writes these words it is hard to not imagine that he had the Eucharist in view as we continue to eat of Christ even after he ascended (1 Cor 11:23–26). Finally, we long for the day when we eat with Christ in the Messianic banquet (Rev 19:6–9). The point is that Exodus 16 signifies all these realities. The literal sense is like a seed that flowers as the biblical storyline progresses and finds its unity in Christ. This isn’t multiple meanings; it is the fulness of meaning.

## **Depth not Difference**

The four senses do not lead to subjectivism or an affirmation of multiple meanings. The spiritual senses *extend* rather than *efface* the literal sense; they *eschatologize* rather than *erase* the literal sense. However, they also affirm Scripture is multifaceted and richer than we might expect. Words, and words that come from God, are remarkable artifacts. Scripture is not a wax nose that fits many faces, but it does contain all sorts of treasures. We rightly affirm the Scriptures’ perspicuity, but do we also affirm its fecundity? Anyone who encounters the Scriptures should not suppose that they can exhaust their meaning. This is because they come from the hand of God, the infinite one. 

## **Conclusion**

Though some, including the Reformers, have critiqued the four senses, their critiques largely stemmed from allegorical readings in which the canon ceased to guard and guide the spiritual senses. Allegorical readings that employ an extra-textual grid to view biblical persons and events as representative of abstract virtues or doctrines and thus disconnected from authorial intent ought to be rejected. 

If we keep these critiques in mind, then the four senses can be a helpful way to renew a deep and multifaceted reading of Scripture. The four senses remind us that Scripture was never meant to be read merely as an ancient text to be analyzed. It is God's Word that reveals Christ, forms disciples, and directs our hope toward the coming kingdom.
### The Heron #2: Forthcoming Theology Books
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-heron-2-forthcoming-theology-books/
Last updated: 2026-07-23T13:17:46.000Z
On the means and ends of this column devoted to notable new and forthcoming books, see the introductory paragraphs of its [first issue](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-heron-1-new-theology-books-in-2026/). This second installment will cover more ground in terms of the number of books considered but be swifter in flight in reflecting upon each.

\*\*\*

**Malcolm Guite.** [***Galahad and the Grail***](https://store.rabbitroom.com/products/merlins-isle?srsltid=AfmBOoocMVa2vLsayP4jieP%5F3n7mlTnlsxCESbrWGLlN4T5c78wADN-Z&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Rabbit Room Press, 2026.**

Malcolm Guite is far and away the most skilled Anglican poet of our time; to read or listen to his poetry evokes the sensation that a time-traveling relative of George Herbert or one of the Inklings walks among us.

Last year I re-read J.R.R. Tolkien’s gripping translation of *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight*, and I was captivated afresh with the power of old tales of chivalric knights to inspire my own heart towards penitence and purity. *Galahad and the Grail* is the first of a planned four-volume ballad described as “Malcolm Guite’s masterwork, a lifetime in the making.” I look forward to savoring it in hopes that it will become a beloved and integral part of my moral and aesthetic imagination.

**Matthew Mason.** [***John Webster and Prayer: Living by Divine Generosity***](https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/john-webster-and-prayer-9780567725820/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Explorations in Reformed Theology. T&T Clark, 2026.**

I was a super-fan of the apparently now defunct “Church Podmatics” podcast hosted by Matthew Mason, Andrew Errington, and Matthew Wilcoxen, “a cheerful conversation about theology in a cheerless age” that discussed the latest journal articles. Ever since I heard about Mason’s project years ago, I have eagerly looked forward to reading it.

The world never got to see the late John Webster’s planned five-volume dogmatics, but we have witnessed a flood of wonderful studies of Webster’s theology in recent years, such as those by Brent Rempel, Jordan Senner, Jeremy Jones, an edited companion to Webster’s theology, and much more.

Webster’s theology was profoundly gripped by a sense of the aliveness of the word of God, which he read as a skilled interpreter of not only the theology but also the ethics of Aquinas and Barth and a host of other luminaries. Thus I cannot wait to see how Mason reflects upon prayer in light of Webster’s theology.

**Michael C. Legaspi.** [***Job***](https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802878304/job/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Commentaries for Christian Formation. Eerdmans, 2026.**

A revision of Legaspi’s Harvard PhD thesis written under Jon Levenson, published with Oxford University Press as *The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies*, was a landmark contribution to understanding the history of hermeneutics. His subsequent work on “wisdom” in the Old Testament and conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy have made Legaspi a delightful author to read for those interested in theological interpretation of Scripture. He is the kind of interpreter you hope will write more direct expositions of the Bible for the church—and now he has!

I have long struggled to read the book of Job wisely. How do the lengthy speeches in the middle of the book relate to the ending? In terms of translation, is Job “comforted with” dust and ashes or does he “repent in” or “repent of” dush and ashes? How do God and the Satan/accuser relate in Job? What exactly are Job’s friends rebuked for? How should we think about his family members in the story? What do Leviathan and Behemoth signify? How do we think about God’s apparent silence and absence in the midst of profound, horrific suffering? 

I do not expect any author to exhaustively answer all of these questions, but I hope to learn from Legaspi how to be a better reader and teacher of this wonderful and difficult book of the Bible.

**Derek Rishmawy.** [***The Fire of Glory: A Biblical and Dogmatic Account of God's Holiness and Divine Judgment***](https://www.ivpress.com/the-fire-of-glory?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture. IVP Academic, 2027\.** 

I don’t tend to see too much time and attention devoted to holiness today, either divine or human. In my own journey, John Webster’s brief but breathtaking book *Holiness* stands alone. Older classics by the puritans published with Banner of Truth such as Ryle’s *Holiness,* Sproul’s *The Holiness of God* (which I read as a teenager), and J.I. Packer’s numerous popular books on holiness, each left their mark on my life for the better.

But I am looking forward to seeing how Rishmawy handles the doctrine of divine holiness—and I am especially keen as a preacher and teacher to see how he talks about divine judgment, a pervasive theme in Holy Scripture about which especially modern people have hesitations. Because Rishmawy has a high view of Scripture and God’s holiness, I suspect he charts a nuanced path forward through a range of recent revisionist proposals.

**David J. H. Beldman and Michael J. Rhodes,** [***Reading the Pentateuch as Christian Scripture***](https://bakeracademic.com/products/9781540961051%5Freading-the-pentateuch-as-christian-scripture?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

[***A Literary, Canonical, and Theological Introduction***](https://bakeracademic.com/products/9781540961051%5Freading-the-pentateuch-as-christian-scripture?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Baker Academic, 2026.**

Baker Academic’s *Reading as Christian Scripture* series is an enormous blessing to undergraduate students and anyone who wants to get a handle on a major section of Scripture but does not necessarily have training in the biblical languages. Crucially, the series is expressly interested not merely in historical or objectivist interpretation but invites readers to become more informed theological interpreters of Holy Scripture. Though I devoted considerable attention to Deuteronomy while writing my dissertation, it has been a few years since I read a single overview of the Pentateuch. I had the privilege of studying with Michael Rhodes at Trinity College Bristol and look forward to learning from him!

**Matthew Y. Emerson.** [***The Biblical Canon: A Theological Account***](https://bakeracademic.com/products/9781540963017%5Fthe-biblical-canon?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Baker Academic, 2026.**

The description for this forthcoming book is a bit vague and brief, as will be my speculations about this book. But tons of lay people and students have questions about the canon, and most of the books out there are about the minutiae of historical information about various texts that variously were or were not included in the canon. Michael Kruger has written several helpful books on the canon. But I have continued to wish for a single volume that gave students an accessible yet robust handle on the *theological basis* of the canon, and I am hoping Emerson’s book is the one I have been waiting for.

**Alexander H. Pierce.** [***Augustine on the Mystery of Christ and the Sacramental Economy of Salvation***](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/augustine-on-the-mystery-of-christ-and-the-sacramental-economy-of-salvation/7A619F0F91212131E9405C5F444832FB?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Cambridge University Press, 2026.**

The blurbs on this book are remarkable, given the sheer volume of published material on Augustine. But it appears that Alex Pierce, a patristics scholar at the North American Lutheran Seminary, hosted on the campus of Trinity Anglican Seminary, has made a notable contribution to central pillars of Augustine’s theology that will be of significance not only to scholars of early Christianity but of theologians in general and ecumenically-minded church folk as well.

**Rik Van Nieuwenhove.** [***Providence, Evil and Salvation: A Thomist Perspective***](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/providence-evil-and-salvation/A4C1079D56D4E9FD250F9F6DD95B6CCB?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Cambridge University Press, 2026.**

If evil is inherently irrational, can anything meaningful be said about it? My foray into this question was Barth’s treatment of evil as *das Nichtige* \[Nothingness, that which is not-willed by God\]in *Church Dogmatics* III.3, and it was a gripping read. But over time I began to wonder if Augustine and Aquinas’s shared vision of evil as a privation of the good, and being as participatory in the good, was a more reliably helpful approach—with its corollary commitment that creaturely being is undergirded by participation in God, whose being is simple. I am not sure where Van Nieuwenhove will land on these questions, but I hope to learn from his book because I want to understand evil. After all, I am surrounded by it in the world, and I am called in Christ to live as an adopted son of God who has been freed from its canceled power.
### One Tool to Rule Them All
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/one-tool-to-rule-them-all/
Last updated: 2026-09-02T13:49:11.000Z
You’ve all heard it now a million times. Anytime anyone has the temerity to dare a conversation about AI, or smartphones, or the internet, someone in the group can be relied upon to intone sagely, “Well you know, it’s important to remember that technology is just a neutral tool; what matters is how you use it.” Heads will nod solemnly, you will stammer and stutter for a moment, then shrug and let it go, and another little opportunity to grow in wisdom together will have been lost beyond recall.

To be sure, there is a grain of truth in this cliche. Inasmuch as technology is designed as an instrument of human purposes, it remains responsive to the human will, which is almost infinitely varied in its desires, and whenever the technology is used, we attribute moral agency and responsibility to the user, not the tool. I may pick up a hammer to repair a neighbor’s house damaged in a storm, or to crack my neighbor’s skull in a fit of rage. If I do the latter, the law will take me, not Black and Decker, to task.

And yet as soon as we scratch beneath the surface, we find the concept of the “neutral tool” beginning to break down. After all, even the simple hammer has a lot to say about how we can and can’t use it. It may be used for either good or evil, but only within a fairly narrow range of applications—specifically, those that involve whacking things, and indeed only a small subset of those. It works just fine on a nail, but will wreck a screw. It might—especially in the form of a large mallet—work together with a wedge to split a log, but used on its own it will make almost no impression on the wood. Indeed, to speak of a hammer as a tool is precisely to highlight its *limits*, for a tool is, almost by definition, devised for a purpose, or a discrete range of purposes. It has, to use the Aristotelian term, a “final cause”—an end for which it was devised—and it is this that determines its “formal cause”—the structure in which it was designed. Every tool is built with certain ends or objects in mind, and generally works best when applied to those objects; applied to others, it may not work at all, or worse, inflict active harm. To be sure, every tool will have unanticipated uses, waiting for enterprising users to discover or invent; WD-40 was originally developed to prevent corrosions on missile skins. But even if we cannot anticipate them in advance, in retrospect they will usually bear some family resemblance to the primary ends for which the tool was designed.

This observation should prompt us to ask, “for what ends were our current digital technologies devised?” Of course, there are no easy answers; for technologies as complex as these, the causes and motivations behind their construction must be equally complex. We may point to the long and ever-present influence of the “military-industrial complex,” whose research priorities have shaped nearly all modern consumer technologies, from the face-recognition algorithms that help power Instagram to the GPS that guides your morning commute. We may point to the powerful incentives of profit and power, which helped drive the “surveillance capitalism” model of Silicon Valley to find ways to capture and harvest human attention. But perhaps the most striking feature of the modern innovation ecosystem is the extent to which it defies such final-cause analysis. 

For many of today’s cutting-edge innovators, the innovation has become an end in itself. J. Robert Oppenheimer, asked why he helped build the Bomb, is said to have answered, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you do it.” And such is the spirit of Silicon Valley that has given us everything from Uber to Tinder. Alongside apps devised as genuine problem-solving tools, our app stores are also full of applications that began as zany ideas—“hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…?”—which were then retrofitted with a monetization strategy. Rather than being built as tools to serve people and their concrete needs, our technologies today are too often forged as mere demonstrations of technique, which people are then enlisted to serve, in order to justify their continued development and deployment. Last year, I recall asking a leading engineer at a major tech company why they had simply added their AI companion to all of our computers and programs without asking users whether they wanted to use it. He was confused by the question: “Well, we just figured people would.”

Unlike the technological tools of yore, which were hung on a hook or stored in a toolbox until asked for, our new technologies are always with us, in our pockets and at our fingertips, constantly demanding to be deployed. This is because, to the extent that our most powerful tools today have been designed for a purpose, it is for the paradoxical purpose of being “general-purpose technologies.” Rather than being purpose-built like a hammer or chainsaw, devised and designed in service of some ends rather than others, technologies like the internet, the smartphone, or artificial intelligence are meant to be the ultimate Swiss Army knives, capable of being put to almost any end that the user desires. That is meant to be the beauty of them—as the advertisements enthuse, “the possibilities are *endless*!” This end-less-ness of modern technology reflects the chief end of man as re-imagined by our postmodern politics: a vision of freedom as a choose-your-own adventure story. Forge your own path, make your own way, follow your own dream—these were the mantras of the 80s and 90s, within which the internet came of age. In other words, if a technology always inscribes a certain purpose in its design principles, the purpose of our digital world was to conform itself to your desires, whatever they might be. 

Is it not then the case with digital technology that we have at last made the idea of the “neutral tool” a reality? The hammer, the drill, the sword are all finite, limited to the particular purposes for which they were built, solving the particular problems that bedeviled our ancestors. But by encoding the entire world into bytes and bits, and placing a universal decoder in each of our hands, have we not at last created a tool that is as infinite as the human mind itself—or indeed, with the creation of artificial superintelligence, far more so? Surely this super-tool, at least, is “neutral,” in the sense of being able to be applied to any object, shaped to any purpose that we might devise?

To ask this question is to answer it—at least for any attentive reader of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy classic *The Lord of the Rings*. Although set in a pre-technological mythical world of wizards and dragons, Tolkien’s trilogy is, more than anything else, a profound meditation upon technology. Nor should this surprise us; for as C.S. Lewis has argued, the modern enterprise of “technology” and the medieval pursuit of “magic” are two versions of the same quest: to manipulate the world through the discovery of hidden knowledge, the perfection of arcane techniques. In Tolkien’s tale there are two types of “magic”: one represents a kind of creative creaturely participation in the supernatural that depends on loving attention to the shape of nature, while the other serves as a metaphor for modern technology as the quest for mastery by reshaping nature to our wills. It is represented chiefly by the “Rings of Power” and the *palantiri* or “Seeing Stones.”

Each are startlingly apt metaphors for digital technology, considering that Tolkien probably knew nothing of the work his fellow Englishman Alan Turing was then doing down the road at Bletchley Park to lay the foundations for the computing revolution. The Rings are a technology for exercising control at a distance, the Stones for gaining knowledge at a distance: “to see far off, and to converse in thought with one another,” as Tolkien describes it. The Ring tempts its wearer with “incognito mode,” the power of invisibility, but its end effect is the erasure of agency and personhood: “if he often uses the Ring to make himself invisible, he *fades*: he becomes in the end invisible permanently.” The Ring exercises a compulsive power upon its possessor to use it without even thinking: each of us today can sympathize with Frodo: “almost before he realized what he was doing, his hand was groping in his pocket.” And as for the *palantiri*, today after two decades of social media, I find it much easier than I did as a teen to understand the madness of Denethor, doomscrolling in his lonely tower for hours and days on end: “The knowledge which he obtained was, doubtless, often of service to him; yet … \[it\] fed the despair of his heart until it overthrew his mind.”

Whole essays could be written on what each of these technologies have to teach us about the age of AI, but let me highlight just two key points here, which expose the limits of the “tool” metaphor.

First, Tolkien understood that powerful technologies do not exist in a vacuum, each ready to hand for an individual user to operate at his own whims. Rather, they exist within networks, such that a new node in a network can retroactively alter the meaning and function of a technological tool. On Tolkien’s telling, the “three rings” were originally forged for the elven-kings to work the good kind of magic: to create things of beauty and wonder and to heal and nourish. But once Sauron forged the master Ring, more powerful than the three, neither they nor the other rings of power could be used without falling under the power of Sauron’s malign will, which sought to draw all things under his control. Indeed, the rings were so interconnected that, possessing the One Ring, Sauron could read the thoughts and see the deeds of all the other ring-wearers—a chilling thought that has become all too familiar to each of us in the days of algorithmic surveillance. 

Similarly, the *palantiri*, or Seeing Stones, are each interconnected or networked, although some are more closely linked to each other than others. While in principle each *palantir*, like a powerful search engine, allows its user to turn his gaze wherever he wishes in Middle-Earth, past or present, and even to dimly discern possible future events, in practice the *palantiri* too are subject to the superior wills of other operators. Thus, when Saruman looks into the *palantir* of Orthanc to try to gain more knowledge for opposing Mordor, his gaze is instead soon captured by Sauron, possessor of the stone of Minas Ithil. Sauron uses the two-way connection to directly manipulate Saruman, like a mysterious stranger interloping in your DMs, until Saruman slowly becomes little more than a puppet of Sauron’s purposes. For Denethor, the mechanism of corruption is slightly different; instead of speaking to him directly, Sauron simply “curates his feed,” we might say, showing him less and less of the things Denethor is trying to see, and more and more of those that Sauron desires him to see. The result is indeed that Denethor becomes addicted to “doomscrolling,” and ends his life in suicide, a startlingly prescient account of how our media feeds can shape us. 

Second, Tolkien understood that the more powerful the tool, the less likely that an ordinary user could use it effectively, rather than being shaped or controlled by it. Thus, when Pippin looks into the *palantir* of Orthanc, he is almost immediately captivated by it and wholly under the domination of Sauron’s will operating through it. Only Aragorn, the rightful possessor of the stone and a man hardened by battle and seasoned with wisdom, is able to “wrench the stone to his own will,” and that only through “a bitter struggle.” Similarly, a recurrent theme in discussions of the Ring is that it gives power to the wearer “in proportion to his stature.” Pathetic little Gollum is unable to make much more use of this most powerful of all earthly creations than to enable him to catch fish or steal more easily; the Ring degrades him rather than expanding his powers. Only those already very strong can bend it to their will, but even they should dare not, knowing that it will bend them to its: “Its strength,” declares Elrond to Boromir, “is too great for anyone to wield at will, save only those who have already a great power of their own. But for them it holds an even deadlier peril. The very desire of it corrupts the heart.” Thus both Gandalf and Galadriel, each powerful enough to bear one of the three rings, refuse the gift of the One Ring when it is offered them, fearing the tyrant that each might become.

To be sure, the Ring, because it was made by Sauron, was not a “neutral tool” even in the beginning; it is bent towards evil, so that no good intentions can ever finally master it. But the *palantiri* can be used for good, as information technologies for the pursuit of truth and beauty—or, as Aragorn ultimately uses the stone, to deceive and defeat the wicked. Even so, Tolkien warns us to see their apparent “neutrality” as a powerful temptation: speaking of the *palantir*, Gandalf says, “And how it draws one to itself! Have I not felt it? Even now my heart desires to test my will upon it, to see if I could not wrench it from him and turn it where I would—to look across the wide seas of water and of time to Tirion the Fair, and perceive the unimaginable hand and mind of Feanor at their work, while both the White Tree and the Golden were in flower!”

Returning from Middle-Earth to our own time, what does this excursion into myth have to teach us about the myth of technological neutrality? Quite simply: the more powerful the tool and the more “general-purpose,” the less likely that we will be able to effectively master it and subordinate it to our purposes. We know this well enough from everyday experience: even a child can soon learn to use a hammer well, but the same cannot be said for a chainsaw, or an automobile. Part of this is due to the crucial distinction between *tools* and *machines,* too often ignored in this context. In a key passage of *The Human Condition,* Hannah Arendt writes of this distinction:

“Unlike the tools of workmanship, which at every given moment in the work process remain the servants of the hand, the machines demand that the laborer serve them, that he adjust the natural rhythm of his body to their mechanical movement….Even the most refined tool remains a servant, unable to guide or to replace the hand. Even the most primitive machine guides the body’s labor and eventually replaces it altogether.” 

With the stage that automation had reached when she wrote in 1958, she observed that we may well wonder “whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines.” 

Today, as we have moved from tools and machines of the world to tools and machines of the mind, this worry is only more urgent. For as long as we controlled mere dumb machines with the tap of a button or the swivel of a joystick, the fact that they had far outgrown the power of our bodies need not unduly trouble us; man remained the master through the power of his mind. But once we immerse ourselves in technologies of the mind (like the Rings or the Stones) and move to create thinking machines, we are in grave danger of adapting even our highest faculty to the rhythm of our “tools.” Saruman, the ultimate technologist in the trilogy, “has a mind of metal and wheels,” laments Treebeard, “and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.” He views the world, as modern man has come to, in purely instrumental terms, with nature as mere raw material to be put toward some new and higher purpose. 

But as we become conformed to the image of the machines we built, as Tolkien understood, we instrumentalize ourselves, engaging in what Byung Chul Han calls “auto-exploitation,” ceasing to be individuals and becoming mere nodes in a network of other corrupted human minds. The result is that these technologies, networked together from mind to mind, fall under the dominion of only the strongest minds, those capable of bending them—and all of their other users—to their will. As Lewis warned in his *Abolition of Man*, “What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”

If we meddle carelessly with tools more powerful than us, in short, we will find ourselves reduced to mere tools, slaves of our own creations or of those powerful enough to use them against us. The grasp for powers beyond our reach ends in the destruction of all our native powers, the erasure of our agency: in Denethor or Gollum’s self-immolation, in the eternal fading of the Ringwraiths, in the pathetic end of the great wizard Saruman:

“To the dismay of those that stood by, about the body of Saruman a grey mist gathered, and rising slowly to a great height like smoke from a fire, as a pale shrouded figure it loomed over the Hill. For a moment it wavered, looking to the West; but out of the West came a cold wind, and it bent away, and with a sigh dissolved into nothing.”
### The Genetics of Vice
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-genetics-of-vice/
Last updated: 2026-07-21T11:00:59.000Z
**Kathryn Paige Harden.** [***Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness***](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/714593/original-sin-by-kathryn-paige-harden/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Random House, 2026\. $30.00\. 320 pp.**

Somewhere deep inside each of us is a germ. Well, not a germ exactly. It’s more like a piece of code that entwines itself into every cell of our bodies. This piece of code determines how we live in the world. It determines how we make choices, whether we harm others, and whether we feel guilt or remorse when we do. Though it does not specify exactly *how* we may harm others, it most definitely predicts whether we will. 

This code is genetic, not chosen. If you have it, your ability to freely choose to do good is severely limited—maybe rendered impossible. You cannot be called “free” if you have it, because what you choose is already determined by this tendency. Your will, you might say, is bound.

This account is not science fiction or religious. Instead, it is the main question that spurred Kathyrn Paige Harden to write her book *Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness*. Harden is a psychologist and behavioral geneticist who studies vice. She also studies twins. She is *especially* interested in those cases where twins, either one or both members of the sibling set, seem prone to vice. 

Harden is comfortable to define vice as simple “badness,” and it ranges in her work from addiction to more serious issues, like murder and violence. Her work has arisen from a gap in the psychological literature surrounding why it is that some people do bad things. Religious reasons for this question have long predominated. The concept of sin was the pat answer to this question for a long time. But Harden is part of a school of behavioral geneticists who noticed patterns in family trees that seemed to connect certain people within families to certain negative behaviors. Upon genetic screening, behavioral geneticists have been able to identify differences both in people’s genomes, as well as chemical differences in their DNA that affect how their genomes work (their epigenomes). “We are interested,” Harden writes, “in how people’s genes connect with their environments to affect their thoughts, feelings, and actions in the world”.

All of this genetic research helps Harden to answer an important theological question: “Does what we inherit physically from our ancestors undermine our agency, and limit our freedom to choose right from wrong, as Augustine argued?”Bad behavior, it turns out, *can* be genetically influenced. 

The questions that Harden has identified are some of the thorniest in Christian theology. When you add a layer of genetics, they get even juicer. If there is a “biological mechanism for badness,” is sin portioned out disproportionately? If some people have more of a predisposition toward vice, doesn’t “original sin” just reinforce inequity? Does confidence in someone’s moral responsibility shift if there is a biological determinant? And doesn’t the disproportionate parceling out of predisposition toward vice demand a lessening of blame toward those afflicted?

To our modern ears it seems that what is lucky cannot be moral and what is moral cannot be luck. But Harden’s thesis cuts against this assumption. Some of us, it seems, are damned even before birth.

Harden is correct that the question of inherited vice is a Christian one. But the doctrine of original sin does not map exactly onto the version of genetically inherited vice that she draws. For one, sin and vice are not identical concepts. Though this might seem pedantic, it matters quite a bit. Vice clearly refers to bad or immoral things that individuals do. Sin has a wider semantic range, referring to a knot in the will that makes a person unable to do the good they might desire. Instead of a simple choice (or predisposition) to do bad, a Christian doctrine of sin speaks about damage to the will. This damage precedes any possible action. 

There is a fine distinction I liked to teach my students when I talked about this; to cut it short, what the Christian doctrine of sin affirms is that the brokenness in the will means that humans after the fall are unable *not* to sin. Christian traditions differ on how exactly the will is healed through the work of grace. But fallen humanity, after the fall, is “bound to sin,” with the double meaning of that phrase intended.

For the Christian, the concept of sin also extends far beyond vice. It includes social systems and false beliefs like prejudice. The Fall even implicates our ability to know the good. Such an expansive view of sin does not affirm total badness, as you hear caricatured from time to time. Rather, it can be a way to affirm the way all of us are implicated in our proclivity towards evil. You can affirm such a view without affirming a mythic Fall, though that is probably a story for another day.

A Christian doctrine of sin affirms that are all in this together, with our knowledge and our wills bound and limited—and yet, together, also offered the possibility of grace. It is a beautiful vision that ought to prevent one sinner from looking down too much on another. The cure is shared, just as is the disease. I find the Christian doctrine of sin very conducive to forging a collective vision of humankind and our debt to each other.

Suffice it to say, Harden doesn’t share this vision. Harden often reflects on the teachings of the “Bible church” that she grew up in—teachings she has now left behind. This church taught her that “virtue” is transcending the animal nature and vice is giving into its demands. But what if the animal nature predicts virtue, and what if its demands cannot be resisted? She asks questions like “Christians teach that you need to modify the soul to avoid the vices of the body—but what if you can instead modify the body? Does this change our view of what sin is?”

She wants to reconstruct our views of sin so that guilt does not apply—because how can someone be guilty of what they did *necessarily*? She opens her book with a story of taking LSD and reflecting on how drugs themselves seem to impede or force certain actions. It’s clear that she is pressing hard against the tradition she has received.

Though she has stumbled exactly onto the Christian question, unfortunately, Harden hasn’t given enough credit to the Christian answer. We have long needed a book on the moral question of guilt and accountability, as genetics casts new light on human susceptibility to sin. To succeed, however, a book would need a much more nuanced understanding of the Christian doctrine of sin. The good news is that there is room, and a need, for such a book.
### All the Way Home
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/all-the-way-home/
Last updated: 2026-07-20T11:00:46.000Z
Ian Marcus Corbin. [*To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World*](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300263626/to-arrive-where-we-started/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com#:~:text=In%20this%20ambitious%20book%2C%20Ian,community%2C%20nation%2C%20and%20species.). Yale University Press, 2026\. $32.50\. 200 pp.

There has been much public buzz of late about Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s *Odyssey*, a story that has homecoming clearly at its center. The title of Ian Marcus Corbin’s new book, *To Arrive Where We Started*, would make a fitting subtitle for *The Odyssey*. But while Odysseus’ mission is to return home to his wife and son, to his island of Ithaka, Corbin’s book suggests that we are on an even grander journey—the “human quest to be at home in the world.”

Drawing from his own life and wider culture, Corbin argues that we are afflicted with a type of homelessness. Odysseus could find peace after returning to Ithaka (and killing the suitors), but even when we are in our homes and have material abundance, it all feels somehow “like an exile.” Corbin describes this spiritual and material crisis and some possible solutions, working through the themes of belonging, loneliness, alienation, at-home-ness. He puts much of the blame on the modern conception of the self with its distorted ideals and expectations. We may be changing the climate and spending too much time indoors, but our problem is cultural, not natural—"It is precisely our *interpreted* world that feels like less than a home.” 

Uneasiness in the world is not a new topic, but *To Arrive Where We Started* has an interesting approach. Corbin emphasizes “life as cognition and metabolism,” an idea that “is indebted to a school of thought that sees life as an autonomous process of *autopoiesis*, or self-making.” From single-celled organisms to us, we all need external input, and we all interpret as part of existence. Corbin believes humans need collective cognitive energy to reckon with our complex environment. Unfortunately, loneliness has become “a way of life.”

Loneliness and inadequate friendships weaken our ability to practice good judgment. The problem is, though, that “the cognitive energy required to confidently, consistently span the distance between concept and reality does not seem to be the kind of thing that individuals can generate for themselves.” Our poor “cognitive metabolism” also leads to an inability to craft a well-formed understanding of the world. This is a significant problem because “world-tending… is *the* cardinal human task, the way we make our way here and make our way toward at-home-ness.”

If our cultural Greek chorus is telling us anything these days, it is that our culture is unwell. *To Arrive Where We Started* contributes to that chorus, but it brings its own distinct voice with its focus on homecoming and belonging. Like many others, Corbin blames the Enlightenment and “Newtonian cosmic nihilism” for many of our ills. Our alienation from each other and the world around us is closely connected to our obsession with the autonomous individual and our belief that we can best be at home in the world through owning parts of it.

But, like Odysseus, Corbin believes that homecoming is possible. He emphasizes relationships with others and tending a world together, drawing heavily on Socratic dialogues and Aristotle’s thoughts on friendship and wisdom. Virtuous friendship helps us expand the self and blur our boundaries in healthy ways. Contemplation takes us further in our efforts to get away from an exclusively autonomous self. Through contemplation, we observe that the world around us—and our own inspiration—seems driven by “some mysterious subjectivity, some agent with awareness and intention.” For Corbin, this connects to Christian belief, but he gives examples to demonstrate that this conclusion can be drawn by others, too. Ultimately, we develop a sense of “at-home-ness” not from aligning our views well with other humans, but from aligning ourselves well with the wider universe (and its Creator). 

We need a “friendship with the whole.” Corbin writes: 

> It is here, in a world suffused with subjectivity, interaction, and reciprocity, where things are valued not only by humans, but in some sense by reality itself, that we can be called into creative participation in the world. We can be truly at home.” 

This is not only possible, there are models we can use to develop practices for sustaining a home in this world. Corbin suggests that we can learn from “cultures of participation,” including the Lakota. We can also learn from the Romantics and works like Dostoevsky’s *The Brothers Karamazov*. 

In *The Odyssey*, Telemachus is as uncomfortable in his home as we often are in this world, if not more. Telemachus’s tale emphasizes filial piety and the importance of his father’s presence in his ability to inhabit his home and, ultimately, his own manhood. Christians have long emphasized the need for a kind of filial piety in our loyalty to God. Without negating that, *To Arrive Where We Started* looks at home from a different angle, directing our attention to developing a sense of fraternity both with each other and with the world God created and inhabits. After all, God is not absent like Odysseus.

Corbin’s diagnosis of our ills is expected, but his cure is distinctive. Though he sees a problem with ownership, he does not focus primarily on economic distribution or redistribution. Rather than contrast consumerism and the common good, Corbin emphasizes seeing ourselves as participants in the world, not just in society. He writes that, in contemplation, “I cease to hunger because I see myself as a co-participant, brother to everything that is, lacker of nothing.” The final chapters of the book almost quietly echo the words of Clarence the angel in *It’s a Wonderful Life*: “Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.” In this case, we can have a sense of friendship with the world, fallen as it is. That can make us at home, however little land we own.

In most books about loneliness, we receive recommendations for restoring institutions and communities. Yet Corbin looks beyond church membership and bowling leagues, to virtuous friendship and primordial experiences. He worries less about our associations than what he perceives as our ultimate goal—to “truly belong in our reality.” The sense of belonging that Corbin recommends seems like the “oceanic feeling” Freud dismisses at the start of *Civilization and Its Discontents*. Freud believed that feeling was a remnant of the infantile experience and an infant’s inability to distinguish itself from its mother and the world. Corbin identifies that feeling as a remnant of an earlier way of relating to the world, one which we should pursue again. 

Corbin’s biggest claims may be some of the most contested aspects of the book. Is our primary problem a lack of belonging in our world? Some Christians believe we ought not to see this world as our home. Is world-tending our cardinal human task? Is life best explained through cognition and metabolism? Some historically-minded readers may question how well humans felt we belonged in the world in earlier times—after all, our ancient and premodern forebears sometimes saw the world as a very hostile, antagonistic place. Some others may find the book too religious, or insufficiently religious. Corbin does not disguise his Christian position, but he also includes examples of non-Christians coming to a sense of understanding about the intention behind the universe and the subjectivity that has shaped it and he supports many of his arguments with classical thinkers. 

Despite some disputable claims, much of Corbin’s analysis is appealing and plausible. *To Arrive Where We Started* relies on a helpful blend of classical thinkers, literature, and other cultures. Corbin’s description of the role of interpretation in shaping our experience of the world is compelling and takes into consideration the human condition, not just human nature. He gets beyond headlines and troubling statistics. We are not just lacking generic connections with others, but are missing virtuous friendships. And despite opposing the autonomous self, Corbin is not recommending some form of collectivism. He encourages “a robust sense of self and world.” He also believes that “we can be called into creative participation with the world.” 

*To Arrive Where We Started* joins a long line of works about belonging and homecoming. The homecoming in *The Odyssey* fulfills the hope of reunion, but it also involves slaughtering the suitors. *To Arrive Where We Started* suggests a more peaceful homecoming is possible, built on the belief that there are ways of living with others that get beyond the idea that we are always and only autonomous individuals striving in a dark and empty universe, capable of securing things for ourselves best (and perhaps only) through money and ownership. It is possible to achieve friendship with the whole, and in the process, take our part in a world that extends beyond us—a world “charged with the grandeur of God,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins would say.
### Remythologizing the Myths: Christopher Nolan's Odyssey and the Fractures in a Secular Age
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/remythologizing-the-myths-christopher-nolans-odyssey-and-the-fractures-in-a-secular-age/
Last updated: 2026-09-02T13:49:17.000Z
The stories a culture chooses to tell — and how it chooses to tell them — are among the more reliable indexes of what a society actually believes about the world. Often the form of retelling says as much as the substance. To that end, this is not a review of Christopher Nolan’s *Odyssey* so much as a review of the moment in which it arrives — an attempt to ask why this story, why this filmmaker, and why now.

In 2004, Petersen made a film that gave America exactly what it wanted. *Troy* featured Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, and Orlando Bloom and grossed *handsome* profits — nearly $500m worldwide. Petersen delivered blood and beauty without even an echo of the transcendence which permeates the *Iliad*. Homer’s gods were reduced to stone figures cast down by men without consequence whilst Peter O’Toole grieved in the background. The Trojan War became devoid of myth and explicable in purely human terms: pride, lust, fortune, and fame. Divinity was an embarrassment the serious filmmaker had outgrown.

The irony is that Petersen was not a man ignorant of what myth requires. Two decades earlier, he had directed *The NeverEnding Story*, a film whose entire premise is the crisis of a world that stops believing in stories. “The Nothing” that threatens Fantasia is not a monster but an absence — the encroachment of a disenchanted world consuming its own imagination. Petersen understood this intimately. He made *Troy* anyway. That is not a contradiction so much as a confession: twenty years later, the disenchanted telling felt the more commercially responsible option, even philosophically sophisticated.

The gods in Homer’s *Odyssey* are present from the first lines — not as decoration or metaphor, but as actors in the drama, playing a direct role in whether a man will make it home. The human story is held, from the outset, inside a divine one. That is the story Christopher Nolan has chosen to tell now.

—

Nolan is a filmmaker who has most successfully held artistic seriousness and mass commercial appeal in tandem over the last quarter-century. His choices are not eccentric; they appeal to broad audiences while telling deep stories. When he turns to a foundational story of Western civilization and decides to make it strange rather than smooth, that decision is itself a cultural signal.

His own account of how he depicts the gap between worlds is insightful: “One of the things I needed to crack,” he told *Empire*, “was how to approach mythological elements in a sort of real-world way. The big breakthrough creatively in thinking about the gods was that everything that is now explained by science was once supernatural. Lightning, thunder, earthquakes, volcanoes… people are literally seeing gods everywhere.” Nolan is not explaining the gods away — he is asking what it felt like to inhabit a world in which they had not yet been explained away. He is saying that we have been so thoroughly conditioned to explanation that we have lost the capacity to feel what the ancients felt: a world in which the overwhelming is also the personal, in which nature does not merely cause but addresses. His method — the real ocean and a CGI-less set designed to achieve total immersion — is an attempt to return a modern audience to that felt experience. Whether it fully succeeds is a question the viewer will answer, but the plausibility of such a proposal is a key indicator to our societal appetites. 

Nolan has flirted with the transcendent in *Inception* and *Tenet*, coming to the edge with *Interstellar*, framing for his audiences a window to the cosmos only to ultimately reveal a mirror of human self-salvation. The immanent frame swallows the transcendence in the end. *The Odyssey* may be the furthest he has traveled in that direction — a story whose gods are not explained away, whose drama cannot be collapsed into mind-bending psychology. It is worth asking what might have changed in the twenty-two years between Wolfgang Petersen’s *Troy* and Christopher Nolan’s *Odyssey*. 

—

Charles Taylor published *A Secular Age* in 2007, three years after *Troy* premiered, and its central argument was not simply that the modern West had lost its belief in God. It was that the West had reconstructed itself so thoroughly around immanent explanations that transcendence had become a personal option rather than a shared horizon. The stories we told ourselves no longer required divine scaffolding. Taylor called this the “buffered self”: sealed from the possibility that anything outside it might make a genuine claim on it – or that there was even anything else to make a claim. The cosmos was now a system of causes and effects in which the experience of transcendence had to justify itself as subjective feeling rather than objective encounter. What Taylor raised, without quite resolving, was whether the frame could hold — whether the hunger it generated would eventually press against its own walls.

Marvel understood this appetite even if it couldn't fully satisfy it — growing bolder from a secular superhero like Iron Man to entire franchise voyages into Norse mythology. The gods are aliens. The magic is technology. But the hunger for something beyond the imminent kept pulling the stories further out.

The same pressure appears in quieter auditoriums. Mainline Protestant denominations — those that spent the latter half of the twentieth century making themselves culturally legible, trimming the strange and supernatural edges of Christian faith in pursuit of relevance — have been in freefall for decades. The Catholic story is different in its particulars but not in its logic. Adult baptisms and receptions into full communion [rose sharply](https://firstthings.com/the-west-is-returning-to-god/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in recent years, and the converts themselves are consistent about [what drew them](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/opinion/sunday/weird-christians.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com): the unapologetic supernaturalism — the very liturgical strangeness that modern Catholics were once encouraged to grow past. Ross Douthat, whose recent *Believe* argues that religious experience is “much weirder and more destabilizing” than secular accounts predict and that the world is “much stranger than the secular imagination thinks,” would recognize the pattern: the societal hunger is not, apparently, for a faith that accommodates the buffered self. It is for one that presses against it — which is precisely what Kevin Vanhoozer’s *Remythologizing Theology* had argued theology itself needed to recover.

—

Vanhoozer’s theological project was to resist the long habit of modern theology — running from Feuerbach through Bultmann — of accepting the secular age’s terms for what religious language is and does. Bultmann’s celebrated demythologizing program made a generous offer to the modern reader: keep the existential kernel, discard the mythic shell. Vanhoozer’s counter is that the shell was the point.

It was, Vanhoozer argues, an error to say the strangeness of biblical discourse is the problem rather than the point. Remythologizing is not, in his phrase, a fall back into myth but a spring forward into metaphysics: a refusal to translate the irreducibly personal, dramatic texture of Scripture into something thinner and more philosophically manageable. The strangeness is not incidental. It is the form the truth takes.

Daniel Mendelsohn’s 2025 translation of the *Odyssey* made the same wager in classical scholarship that Vanhoozer made in theology — deliberately preserving what he called the poem’s archaic grandeur, refusing the smoothing impulse of mid-century translations like Robert Fitzgerald’s. The Washington Post had praised Fitzgerald’s 1961 edition for giving readers not “the sense of reading an ancient classic” but “a great and timeless narrative.” What passed for a compliment then now reads as an admission. Mendelsohn’s decision to maintain the distance — the Greek spellings, the heavy six-beat line, the refusal of the modernizing gesture — rests on the same conviction Vanhoozer brings to Scripture and Nolan brings to IMAX: the otherness is not an obstacle to the poem. It is the poem. 

That is not coincidence. It is pressure applied to the immanent frame.

—

It is too soon and too much to say we are witnessing a reversal or revolution in the repeal of secularism. The buffered self does not crack so easily. What can be said is that the pressure is visible, and that it is appearing at the center of culture rather than its margins. The hunger for a thicker world, a world in which the journey is more than miles and minutes and the homecoming is real. A century of demythologizing — in theology, in literature, in film — has not managed to replicate or remove the appeal of enchantment. 

What the secular age cannot supply, and what Nolan’s film will not provide, is the name of the one who speaks from the storm. The ancient world Homer inhabited was not simply a world of awe and immanent wonder. It was a world of address — where the storm had a name, where the journey was supervised by divine attention, where the drama was intelligible because it was held inside a greater story. 

God makes himself known largely through speech acts that seem strange and chiefly through the Word made flesh — Jesus Christ. The flat world built by a century of demythologizing is generating its own dissatisfaction — and the stories our culture is reaching for are changing in tone. Perhaps this signals a willingness to hear the foundational story not of Western civilization but of the world itself — the most enchanted story ever told, in which the winds obey, the sea yields, and death itself is undone. Nolan’s reintroduction of Odysseus’s world may help reawaken our inborn awareness of this enchanted cosmos.
### What Is Old Is the New World Order Again
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/what-is-old-is-the-new-world-order-again/
Last updated: 2026-07-16T11:00:50.000Z
*The following excerpt from James M. Patterson and Thomas D. Howes,* [Why Postliberalism Failed](https://www.amazon.com/Why-Postliberalism-Failed-James-Patterson/dp/B0H37WN84T/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*, is published with permission from Acton Institute.*

After taking conservatism by storm with his 2018 book *Why Liberalism Failed*, Patrick J. Deneen spent a November afternoon with what was then a surprising host and at a significant locale: Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán at the Carmelite Monastery in Budapest. There, Deneen spoke highly of Orbán’s postliberal family policies. As a [press release](https://2015-2022.miniszterelnok.hu/state-must-help-to-strengthen-national-and-family-communities/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) has it, Deneen’s praise “underlin\[ed\] that the future belongs to local communities resting on national and family values, instead of liberalism which still continues to prevail in many places.” Four years later, upon the launch of his most recent book *Regime Change*, Deneen sat with then-Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio. Vance declared himself to be a “postliberal” like Deneen, and [Deneen said of Vance](https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/18/jd-vance-world-view-sources-00168984?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), that he was a “a man of deep personal faith and integrity, a devoted family man, a generous friend, and a genuine patriot.” Postliberalism was not just mainstream but international in scope, forming a potential new basis for conservatism across America and Europe.

Over the past few years, the subject of postliberalism has gone from a small corner of Catholic conservative academics and journalists to a major force in the West. When we began our efforts to critique it, many of our colleagues warned us not to waste our time on a marginal, largely online debate. As it turns out, postliberalism is an important and rapidly growing area of scholarship and one with major implications for the future of conservatism at home and abroad. 

What is postliberalism? We answer in more details in a later chapter, but for now a brief definition is that postliberalism is the name for an authoritarian ideology dedicated to using state power to impose a reactionary Catholic vision of the Church, family, and labor. In this respect, we focus on one among three strains of postliberalism described by Julian Waller. The first comes primarily from conservative Protestants primarily from the United Kingdom like Adrian Pabst and John Milbank. [According to Waller](https://doi.org/10.53483/ZCQS3599?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), their approach “engaged broader ideas about the needs of a healthy, re-enchanted society with thick community bonds and reduced social and cultural alienation” along with “general critiques of so-called neoliberal economic and social orders.” In sum, they are “Blue Labour” or “Red Tories.” 

Another “postliberalism” is a rebranding of what American conservatives have historically called, “the Old Right” or “Paleoconservatism” pioneered by Paul Gottfried and Patrick J. Buchanan. These postliberals argue, “that the classical tradition of liberalism, properly understood, died long ago with the advent of mass politics, universal suffrage, mass immigration, the welfare state, centralized managerial governance, internationalism, and the dissolution of the public-private distinction in law and custom.” Whereas the first group of postliberals focus on localism and communitarianism, these “paleoconservative” postliberals are decidedly nationalist in scope. They work to define the American people by ethnic terms to disqualify most immigrants and seek to use political power to insulate American business from foreign competition (such as with tariffs or domestic industrial subsidies). Today, those carrying the torch for this kind of postliberalism are Christopher Caldwell and Daniel J. McCarthy.

However, the focus of our book is on a third group of postliberals. Their postliberalism has its roots in “Catholic integralism” or “political Catholicism.” Waller defines it well when saying:

This new Catholic postliberal approach to political action asserts the necessary and inevitable connection between religion and politics, largely grounded in the Catholic tradition, and asserts a counter-framework that moves away from a strict secular reading of the idea of church-state separation in favor of greater integration and alignment between the two. It is characterized most importantly by an emphasis on the use of assertive government activity to pursue ideological goals, interest in economic protectionism to support community cohesion, reasserting the role of the natural law in jurisprudence and governance, and broad-based moral-cultural reaction against 21st-century progressive assumptions about the family, gender, sexual relations, procreation, secularism, in alignment with other social-conservative issue sets.

This version of Catholic postliberalism is something of a combination of the other two with a Catholic twist. On the one hand, Catholic postliberals offer a Christian critique of liberalism for what ideological alternative should come next; on the other hand, that successor ideology is not so much about localism or communitarian as it is about a powerful, centralized government imposing from the top down a theologically informed vision of the public good on all national subjects regardless of their faith. 

Postliberals portray themselves as “traditionalists,” in that they want to reverse a civilizational decline they see beginning at the Reformation. For postliberals, the Reformation was an exogenous shock, something that happened from the outside in, because the “sacral kingships” of the period were themselves the best regime. The Reformation spoiled this by introducing a division in the Church, and the division in the Church prompted the Wars of Religion that gave rise to secular states deciding religious matters on their own. These states discarded religion as anything other than a political tool; otherwise, religion was a private matter. Instead of prioritizing spiritual salvation, secular states focused on expanding material wealth, giving rise to capitalism in the economic sphere and liberalism in the political sphere. Because there can be no going back to the Middle Ages, postliberals aim to use existing “liberal” state institutions against liberal purposes, annihilating individual liberty, economic opportunity, and freedom of conscience to establish a postliberal order that is even better than the sacral kingship of yore.

Initial reactions to postliberalism were dismissive. After all, there is no way that Americans or anyone in Western Europe would vote for such an ideology, and yet here we are with postliberal politics achieving political success without the support of public majorities. The reason is that postliberals have engaged in a kind of an elite coup of political conservatism in America and abroad for the past decade, one enabled by the surprising inability of more established conservatives to meet new political realities with any sense of urgency or originality as well as the patronage of figures like Orbán. 

This book aims to explain three things: first, how postliberalism became an important ideology with international implications; second, how contemporary postliberalism has its roots in similar reactionary and clerical fascist movements of previous centuries; and third, that the ideology of postliberalism is entirely wrong in what its proponents argue in terms of politics, economics, and theology.

This is not the first book-length treatment of postliberalism, or its stricter iteration, Catholic integralism. Jerome Copulsky [groups American Catholic postliberals](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300241303/american-heretics/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) with a minor American religious tradition opposing the American Constitution and the development of a mainstream liberalism into the twentieth century. He details how contemporary postliberals stand on the shoulders of earlier critics like L. Brent Bozell Jr. and those who wrote for a small but influential magazine, *Triumph*. [Kevin Vallier offers](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/all-the-kingdoms-of-the-world-9780197611371?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) a comprehensive critique of Catholic integralism, illustrating how the effort to impose a postliberal order would violate Catholic social teaching and undermine the very ends postliberals believe they are serving. [Laura K. Field has examined](https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691255262/furious-minds?srsltid=AfmBOoojikzxDg2uRrPpoo49NOclhPEA6GACoFvaSnHEyaiEuH2k5dXW&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) postliberals as part of the emerging political coalition hoping to control the Republican Party during and after the presidency of Donald J. Trump.

While these are excellent contributions to the field, we hope to add some more philosophical, historical, and theological contexts for postliberalism that they are missing. Copulsky is certainly right to group postliberals as part of the American anti-Constitutional tradition rooted in a concern that the republican Constitutional frame lacks an overt service to the Christian religion. What is missing is how postliberals had to import their critiques from reactionary and clerical fascist theorists from Europe and Latin America to make their arguments. 

Vallier argues from an analytical philosophical frame, positing that the imposition of integralism requires political injustice to transition, govern, and resist opposition. What we show is that Vallier’s arguments are not just grounded in reason but in fact. Integralist and postliberal regimes have over a century-long history of political injustice of the highest order. These regimes run the gamut of right-wing authoritarianism from António de Oliveira Salazar’s *Estado Novo* in Portugal to the Nazi collaboration and genocide of Ante Pavelić’s Independent State of Croatia. Field is right to include the postliberals as part of the new Trump coalition, but to do so she spends less time with the errors postliberals make in nearly every position they take on policy, governance, and even religion. 

Our book is divided into three units. The first covers the history of contemporary postliberalism in America and the intellectual sources from which postliberals draw. There are two major traditions, the papalist and the reactionary. The papalist tradition is one that treats the Catholic Church as the spiritual authority over Christendom and, subsequently, an institution that possesses extensive political or “temporal” authority over governments. The reactionary tradition is the European and Latin American conservative opposition to the French Revolution and its effects. At its heart, the reactionary tradition depends on the “Judeo-Masonic” conspiracy theory to explain how liberalism became a powerful ideology and how its ultimate purpose is to annihilate Christian monarchies and ultimately the Catholic Church Herself. 

The second unit covers historical postliberal regimes that adopted the same two traditions as the basis for their rule. The two political inspirations for these regimes are Charles Maurras and Benito Mussolini. Maurras and his party *Action Française* illustrated to historical postliberals how to organize a monarchist party with the aim of overthrowing parliamentary government. Mussolini provided the template for how postliberals can govern by way of a dictatorship directing bureaucratic administration, the police, and the military to impose a postliberal order. These postliberal regimes surfaced during the “Interwar Years” between the end of the First World War and the end of the Second World War. 

We group them into two categories. The first are right-wing authoritarian governments in which postliberals attempted to join a coalition of support but failed. These include Portugal, Brazil, Argentina, and Belgium. The second are clerical fascist governments explicitly grounded in postliberal politics. These include Vichy France, Austria, Spain, Slovakia, and Croatia. 

The third unit illustrates how contemporary postliberals draw from these same papalist and reactionary traditions and favorably refer to historical postliberal regimes from the Interwar Years. Contemporary postliberals make repeated reference to key papalist texts like *Unam sanctam*, *Singulari Nos*, and *The Syllabus of Errors*. They also draw inspiration and directly rely on reactionary political thinkers like the aforementioned Maurras, but also Joseph de Maistre, Louis Bonald, Louis Veuillot, ex-Cardinal Louis Billot, Carl Schmitt, and many others. Some contemporary postliberals, like Deneen, try to “structuralize” liberalism into a blind historical force rather than as an avatar of the “Judeo-Masonic” conspiracy, but they too often lapse in these efforts and refer sometimes even directly to notable advocates of this conspiracy theory, such as Bonald and Veuillot. We then explain how their account of politics is essentially no different from those of the historical postliberal regimes, all of which failed in their efforts to create anything except human misery. 

Next, we explore the subject of Catholic integralism in theological terms by engaging the work of Thomas Pink and his efforts to read integralism into *Dignitatis humanae*. Specifically, Pink offers the interpretation that *Dignitatis humanae* is a change of policy for the Church to discard integralism but still regards the arrangement as ideal. We should note that the Church has progressed beyond a backward-looking ideal for restoring Christendom in favor of a better understanding of the place of the Church in a pluralistic, democratic world. Finally, we review the history of Catholic corporatism, the political economy both historical and contemporary postliberalism favor. The legacy of corporatism is that of grim failure to produce even basic necessities, let alone the well-managed economic order for the common good. The problem was not that corporatists economies were badly managed but that there is no way to manage them well at all.

Here is the bad news: postliberalism is nothing less than authoritarianism dressed up in Catholic vestments. Its history is one of religious scandal, poverty, starvation, religious persecution, genocide, and Nazi collaboration. The good news is that postliberalism has always failed. Unfortunately that failure has historically come at a tremendous human and spiritual cost. Not only have hundreds of thousands died under postliberal regimes, but in their aftermath were left empty churches, dwindling numbers of priests and religious, and the very spiritual ennui that postliberals dare to blame on liberalism. Indeed, the Deceiver himself could not have developed a weapon more onerous to the faith than postliberalism.

As a final note, this book is not a defense of liberalism. One of us is comfortable calling himself a Catholic liberal and the other prefers to think of himself as a Catholic republican (“Republican” here refers to an advocate of constitutional, representative government, not the American political party). Our purpose here is not to serve liberalism but the Catholic Church and Her mission to provide material relief to the suffering and spiritual salvation to all who choose it. We do not wish to see postliberal regimes come into being because we wish to see people live full lives both materially and spiritually, something we show that postliberalism cannot offer.
### Is the Era of Mere Christianity Over?
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/is-the-era-of-mere-christianity-over/
Last updated: 2026-07-15T11:00:14.000Z
Glen Scrivener, a pastor and evangelist who serves in the UK, says "yes":

Scrivener's argument, which is worth hearing in full in his video, is that the defining aspect of the post-World War II settlement that has defined western life for 80 years is a certain universalizing impulse that tended to establish common cause by relativizing and minimizing differences between groups. Within the Christian church, the work of C. S. Lewis offered a relatively easy way to justify that intellectually through invoking the idea of "mere Christianity" as a kind of trans-ecclesial unifying concept.

So we had an era of "mere Christianity," Scrivener argues, in which the distinctive beliefs of specific church traditions were minimized or relativized. During that era, a great deal of the work done by Christians of all types was aimed at solving the problem of how to create an intellectual and cultural system that could ground our political life while credibly minimizing our theological differences. So for Rome we saw documents like [Dignitatis Humanae](https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist%5Fcouncils/ii%5Fvatican%5Fcouncil/documents/vat-ii%5Fdecl%5F19651207%5Fdignitatis-humanae%5Fen.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) promulgated by the Vatican. Amongst evangelicals, we saw the ascent of figures like Billy Graham. The hard edges that divide separate Christian churches were sanded away in the name of preserving a system founded on universalism.

Scrivener says that system is now dying. Younger people who have grown up without tradition or custom and often strapped to a screen for hours every day desire belonging, desire to enter into something that offers moral direction, identity, and a fixed way of life they don't have to generate for themselves. But the only way to have something like that is through particularity and even some hard edges. So, Scrivener argues, Mere Christianity is out. Orthodoxy is back. Rome is back. Distinct Protestant traditions are back. In short, denominationalism is back.

In one sense, I think he is obviously correct. Certainly, the number of people interested in Orthodox and Catholic apologetics online is quite high, although there is not a lot of broader sociological data (yet?) to suggest that this movement has translated into broader society. Likewise, as Scrivener himself notes, the fact that Gavin Ortlund set out to create YouTube videos defending Christianity now finds himself regularly drawn into Protestant apologetic work is notable.

That being said, I have two quibbles with Scrivener's argument, or perhaps an extension of his argument and a quibble. One point is actually quite adjacent to the direction Scrivener eventually goes and I imagine he would agree. The other is a point that he doesn't develop in the video but on which I'd be keen to hear his thoughts.

## To Speak of "Mere Christianity" at all is to Speak as a Protestant.

First, the adjacent point: One of the ironies of the way C. S. Lewis has been received by American evangelicals is that Lewis himself was never really a "mere Christian" in the way Scrivener describes it in the video. Rather, Lewis was a rather ordinary lay person in the Church of England, as [I argued in these pages 12 years ago](https://mereorthodoxy.com/invisible-anglicanism-cs-lewis/). Indeed, if you read his work more closely or read a bit about him, you'll be struck by how deeply Anglican he really was. (Scrivener is fully aware of this, of course.)

The point of "mere Christianity" for Lewis was not to minimize ecclesial distinctives, but rather to help people make useful distinctions as they think about their relationship to faith. Yet, and Scrivener himself develops this point in his own way in the video, to even conceive of such a project as being legitimate is itself to be committed in some limited way to Protestantism. It is not really possible for a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Christian to separate belief in "mere Christianity" from membership in and submission to the ecclesial life of Rome or Constantinople. To imagine that there is a set of cardinal doctrines that transcends ecclesial divisions and unites all people as "Christian" is inherently to speak and think as a Protestant.

So in that sense the best way to read what Scrivener calls the era of "mere christianity" is probably to regard it as a period of deficient Protestantism in which people presupposed Protestant conceptions of the church without understanding that they were doing that. They mistook their implicitly *Protestant* commitments for a kind of broadly Christian and ecclesially indifferent set of commitments. That is never what Lewis was trying to do in his own work, but it is how his work was received by highly democratic and anti-institutional American readers.

Again, I think Scrivener and I agree here and I found his discussion of this point in the latter part of his video quite beautiful. But whereas Scrivener is making this point in an evangelistic register, I am trying to draw out the same idea from a more analytical perspective with an eye on movement dynamics.

## The Danger of Factionalism

The second point is more challenging. On the one hand, Scrivener is obviously correct that interest in distinct ecclesial traditions and the differences that divide Orthodox from Catholic or Reformed from Lutheran are of greater interest to many today than they were 20 years ago. However, that does not mean it is correct to say, as he does several times, that "denominationalism" is back. Denominations are essentially administrative containers for groups of Christian congregations that are bound by the distinct practices of a particular ecclesial tradition. But they remain distinct from the tradition itself and, to my eyes, show little evidence of being "back." Rather, what we seem to have is growing theological factionalism existing alongside denominational decline. 

Given recent trends, it is probable that we will continue to see a broad decline in associational life, including denominational life in churches. [Virtually all the numerical growth in American Christianity](https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/non-denominationalism-is-the-strongest?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) over the past several decades is in non-denominational contexts. It is hard for me to see how that trend would be reversed. Protestant denominations aren't doing great either and Rome [is in a pretty bad spot too](https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-catholic-church-is-in-trouble?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), while American Orthodoxy is too small to be cultural or statistically significant in American public life. In other words, all the actual institutional vehicles that exist to help someone actually live as a thick Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox or Reformed or Lutheran or Baptist Christian are struggling significantly. 

Yet Scrivener is correct to note the increased interest in the theological distinctives that separate one ecclesial tradition from another. The problem, at least so far, seems to be that even though many seem to feel an impulse to study theological traditions and distinctives more deeply in order to place themselves in a particular tradition, these people are still mostly relating to those traditions in consumeristic and highly online ways, which is why the interest in theological distinctives doesn't seem to be translating into actual growth in denominational membership so far. (The other possibility, of course, is that the interest in these theological debates is still a highly online problem and one that doesn't have much real world import yet.)

Given that, the likeliest outcome seems to be that our non-denominational churches will continue to grow, but their membership may shift. The de facto system we had is that our non-denominational churches tended to be full of people who were implicitly Protestant but didn't really know it. As a result, they were actually able to get on well with most people since they did not think they have strong and highly specific theological commitments. 

If theological factionalism is back but denominationalism isn't, then what we are heading for is a church world that swaps out those types of members for new non-denominational members who are more exercised about theological distinctives and more inclined to fight about theological topics that divide, say, Baptists from Catholics or Calvinists from Orthodox.

If you are the media you consume or the information ecosystem you live in, then we may be headed for a scenario where pastors in non-denominational settings are being confronted by congregants who are, in terms of information intake, basically Catholic or Orthodox or Calvinist, and yet they remain as members in churches that are none of those things.

What *should* happen is that people with a sharper interest in these more defined and narrow theological traditions should move into denominations governed by those traditions. So far, however, that doesn't seem to be happening very much. And that likely means one of two things:

One possibility is that Scrivener and I are overstating the point about resurgent interest in theology and really the thing we're seeing is a largely online-only phenomenon and the non-terminally online are much more like the boomers in their relationship to Christian distinctives. There is some evidence to suggest this is true. It may be that the factionalism danger is a predominantly online thing that doesn't translate much into local churches. [If Burge is correct](https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/my-religion-is-something-else-504?utm%5Fsource=post-email-title&publication%5Fid=1561197&post%5Fid=168072353&utm%5Fcampaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=37z5be&triedRedirect=true&utm%5Fmedium=email) and the majority of young churchgoers today don't know what "Protestantism" is, then that suggests the factionalism angle that so interests Scrivener and I is not as widespread as we think.

The second option is that there is an actually significant resurgent interest in narrower, more particular theological traditions. But so far that resurgent interest is not translating into growing denominationalism, but merely in more sectarian Christians who are still attending non-denominational churches. If that is correct, then it raises many questions about the future of non-denominationalism in the American church: Is it possible for independent churches to essentially place themselves within a theological tradition but not within a denominational vehicle that typically protests and promotes that tradition? And if it is, how do they do that in healthy and sustainable ways?

That being said, my fear is that the task of non-denominational pastors is about to get harder as they face more and more congregants with wildly different information diets and, therefore, wildly different relationships to the Bible and theology.

If my analysis is right, then it may well turn out that the best case scenario for us is that Scrivener and I are wrong and the borderless "mere Christianity" of Graham persists while the trends pointing toward greater factionalism remain confined to the internet. I do not think that is what will happen. But as outcomes go, it is probably preferable to the scenario I have described.
### Does Christian Fiction Exist?
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/does-christian-fiction-exist/
Last updated: 2026-09-02T13:49:22.000Z
**Cassandra Nelson.** [***A Theology of Fiction***](https://www.wisebloodbooks.com/store/p153/A%5FTheology%5Fof%5FFiction%2C%5Fby%5FCassandra%5FNelson.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Wiseblood Books, 2024\. $10.00\. 116 pp.** 

In the March/April 2015 issue of *Books & Culture*, Catholic essayist and poet Joseph Bottum proposed that the modern novel is a Protestant art form, particularly in how the form developed in the post-Reformation Anglophone world. The novel, as Bottum saw it, is “the device by which, more than any other, modernity tried to understand itself.” It is no accident that the history of the novel runs parallel to the development of the modern idea of the self.

It’s a fascinating proposition. Bottum contrasted the “clean, moral” nature of the quintessential Protestant novel to Catholic literature. The latter, as Dana Gioia’s essay on “[The Catholic Writer Today”](https://danagioia.com/essays/writing-and-reading/the-catholic-writer-today/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) puts it, “is rarely pious. In ways that sometimes trouble or puzzle both Protestant and secular readers, Catholic writing tends to be comic, rowdy, rude, and even violent.”

But then what makes Catholic fiction Catholic? And do these terms have merit? Is there a small-c catholic vision of fiction that encompasses Jane Austen and [J. C. Scharl](https://www.wisebloodbooks.com/store/p169/The%5FDeath%5Fof%5FRabelais:%5FA%5FPlay,%5FJane%5FClark%5FScharl.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), Kenneth Grahame and Graham Greene?

Cassandra Nelson’s *A Theology of Fiction,* a little-book version of her essay of the same name published in the April 2022 *First Things*, adds to the faith-and-fiction conversation by presenting the ideas of Sr. Mariella Gable, English teacher, editor, and critic, who also promoted the work of Flannery O’Connor. (Side note: More presses should follow Wiseblood’s example of publishing meaty little books; not every book needs to be 200-300 pages!)

It is significant that her book is published by Wiseblood Books, the indefatigable little press helmed by novelist Joshua Hren, who penned [*Contemplative Realism: A Theological-Aesthetical Manifesto*](https://benedictinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Contemplative-Realism-A-Theological-Aesthetical-Manifesto-by-Joshua-Hren.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), which could be read as an apologia for recovering a robust literature rescued from the blinkered metaphysics of the B.F. Skinners, and of those who have a paper-thin metaphysics that denies spiritual and sacramental reality. The manifesto’s signatures include those of poets and novelists who have been published by Wiseblood: Sally Thomas, Katy Carl, Glenn Arbery, and James Matthew Wilson. Wiseblood is a publishing house of recovered and translated classics (e.g., Dana Gioia’s translation of[*Seneca: Madness of Hercules*](https://www.wisebloodbooks.com/store/p131/seneca-the-madness-of-hercules-translate-by-dana-gioia.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and the double feature of novella and libretto of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s [*Woman Without a Shadow*](https://www.wisebloodbooks.com/store/p151/The%5FWoman%5FWithout%5Fa%5FShadow:%5FA%5FTwice-Told%5FTale,%5Fby%5FHugo%5Fvon%5FHofmannsthal,%5FTranslated%5Fby%5FVincent%5FKling,%5FIntroduction%5Fby%5FDana%5FGioia.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)) as well as of contemporary fiction and poetry. It alsosponsors a writer-in-residence as well as, through editor Joshua Hren’s leadership, cultivates promising new writers through the MFA program at the University of St. Thomas–Houston. All of this makes the publication of Nelson’s book appropriate. Both the Wiseblood team and Sr. Mariella have set themselves the task of not only cultivating but also advocating for great literature informed by a sacramental view of the world.

I intentionally did not use the term “Catholic literature” or even “Christian literature” above, since the question of how to apply such terms is itself part of the question Sr. Mariella tackles. And her answer is paradoxical.

First, she says that a piece must be a work of art. Slapdash pieces do not qualify as art, and thus hardly as Catholic art. But what counts as a Catholic novel (fiction being Sr. Mariella’s focus)? Disagreements on this question stem from “overemphasis on one part of a complex truth. To bring into focus the whole of truth about Catholic fiction,” she writes, “it is necessary to keep in mind three facts”:

Each one of the following statements is true; without a grasp of their coexistence, no satisfactory definition of Catholic fiction can be formulated.

1. Strictly speaking, Catholic fiction does not exist.
2. All the great literature in the world is Catholic fiction.
3. Fiction which artistically communicates through the use of Catholic symbols something of the spiritual and moral mystery of the human condition may properly be designated Catholic fiction.

Why the paradox?

If Christianity is true, then it seems two things follow. First, our reality is one huge story of redemption; second, any art that we create that has any truth in it will reflect the metaphysics of redemption. So a Christian story, in one sense, would be redundant: we might as well simply say that it is a good story. To say that a story is great is to say that it is true and beautiful, and therefore good stuff indeed. All truth is God’s truth; all good art is God’s art.

This doesn’t mean at all that art created by non-Christians has no value. It remains true that *goodness* and truth partake of Truth Himself. To get at the truth of things through art in the world God made is to align oneself with God’s truth. To make bad art and to do bad metaphysics will always be un-Christian.

At the same time, sinners do make good and great art—and thank God! Or else we would be exceedingly poorly off, living constantly like castaways. But this doesn’t let the Christian artist off the hook. One could put it this way: Just as aiming at heaven, we will get earth “thrown in,” as Lewis says, if we aim at holiness, maybe we’ll make some good art along the way.

Perhaps this is how a Catholic sense can redeem the more austere Protestant form of the modern novel, if we accept the analyses of Joseph Bottum and others, while also taking up the modern psychological form, knowing that every good story is the story of a soul’s journey to God—and all the metaphysical and mystical richness that entails. Here Pilgrim’s Progress meets the Way of a Pilgrim.

Nelson mentions Caroline Gordon telling her mentee Flannery O’Connor of the “first principles” for “Catholic fiction writers,” which she can “name outright” to O’Connor but which she has “to approach cautiously with my secular pupils.” It comes to this:

There is only one plot. The Scheme of Redemption. All other plots, if they are any good, are splinters off this basic plot. There is only one author: The Holy Ghost. If He condescends to speak at times through a well-constructed detective story, which I think he does, he certainly will condescend to speak often through Flannery O'Connor. 

So then, Christian writers (and readers) are simply in on the joke. “Stories will save the world,” says Angelina Stanford of the House of Humane Letters and the Literary Life Podcast, echoing Gordon’s words. Every other story is a version or a splinter of that one story. Every story is a version of the drama of the soul’s salvation.

\*

But what about other religions? Isn’t there also, say, Islamic art, as Paul Pastor points out in “[Can Christians Write?](https://currentpub.com/2025/01/10/long-form-can-christians-write/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)” Also, isn’t “the essential quality of personal fatalism that is the core of Classical narratives” exclude such narratives from the domain of great art? Can Sophocles be Catholic?

Let’s take a small-c catholic view of things now. Sophocles may not be Catholic according to Sr. Mariella’s third axiom (at least not simply speaking), but is if we begin with axiom 2\. The theology of a culture will certainly affect the kind of stories told, just as, Pastor points out, Islamic art is recognizable in its calligraphy and geometric patterns and conspicuous lack representation of humans. But also, even as the artist drawing from the Islamic tradition may be making marvelous calligraphy, he remains in a world in which Christ is the Logos. He can’t get away from it. 

But then, what about those artists who do not wish to get away from the Logos? What assumptions does Christian art have? Paul Pastor summarizes these features of Christian and Catholic art that were earlier articulated by Dana Gioia:

- *human struggle in a fallen world*
- the *sacramental sacredness of nature*
- the *redemptive quality of suffering*
- a sense of *continuity between the living and the dead*

Pastor himself adds “the profound *value of the individual* *person* as the locus of the image of God” to the list and notes that “with minor caveats, these are true of all Christian writing, far beyond the Roman Catholic”: “It has a great regard for overlooked things and people and considers no subject to be too high or too low for the attention of the artist. One can find God in a potato by Van Gogh…. In this artistic tradition, as in our faith, nothing and no one sits below our sacred attention, for they are held (like even the smallest seed or sparrow) in the gaze and love of God. Nothing and no one are beyond redemption, for ‘all things’ will, in the end, be caught up in Christ.”

In Nelson’s analysis, the novel perhaps uniquely focuses on the journey of individual souls toward God, but even here there is room for all manner of complexity, for each soul is unique, irreducible. No path of redemption will be quite the same as another. One of Sr. Mariella’s students, the novelist Betty Wahl, proffered that the way the “artist fit\[s\] into the Church” is as a prophet. An artist, said Wahl, must aim “to see and to make others see.” Sr. Mariella herself tried to do her own work in helping others see by writing about fiction as well as teaching it: Nelson writes of Gable’s anthologies as well as criticism, in which work she explained how different kinds of fiction—not only stories with, say, clergy or monastic characters and stories by Flannery O’Connor and J.F. Powers, but also the fiction of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell—can be enlisted “to the cause of the Catholic Church.” Both Huxley and Orwell’s famous satires are razor-sharp in their vision of what happens when humans lose their freedom to an omnipotent state. That they do not offer any solution to their terrifying allegories, “Sister Mariella suggests, is tied to their lack of faith.” But such “negative fiction” can inspire the search (as Walker Percy called it): the search for meaning, for being found in the cosmos and not forever lost. And one’s own search will not be quite the same as another soul’s.

But also, no encounter between text and reader will be quite the same. Nelson offers that “the meaningful unit of a novel or story is each time that a specific person sits down to read it, usually alone, or that a specific group of people comes together to discuss the work.” The story is instantiated when the reader becomes present to the story, and vice versa; what is eternal in the work meets with the eternal soul that is encountering it. Just as a play does not truly live till it is performed; a story read, chewed on, communed, we might say, is truly alive.

Let us remember what Emily Dickinson wrote? “A word is dead, / When it is said / Some say. / I say it just /Begins to live / That day.”

\*

Arguably, what is perhaps most needed in contemporary fiction, however, is a vision of goodness. Nelson notes that David Foster Wallace’s short story “Good People” is “the closest thing I have yet found to Sister Mariella’s vision for contemporary fiction.” The story “gives insight into what she called the psychology of goodness and into the kind of heroism needed for family life today.” And Nelson’s perusal of this story is one great gift of this little book: How do we both read well, but also how do we write? Can we write contemporary fiction that avoids easy truths and sentimentality, and that retrieves the realm of reality and realism from the cramped metaphysics of mainstream novels?

What Sr. Mariella and the Contemplative Realists offer is a pathway of writing fiction that is *contemplative*—meaning, a way of writing and seeing that demands that the writer be constantly challenging himself with Rilke’s dictum that “you must change your life.” In other words, the writer should strive to be a saint.

Hren cites St. Bonaventure, who says no one “arrives at contemplation except through penetrating meditation, holy living, and devout prayer.” In addition to the practical work of developing artistic skills—facility with the materials and skills and tricks of the trade of storytelling—we artists need to develop our souls, and this means recognizing, with St. Teresa of Avila (the Contemplative Realist’s patron saint, says Hren), that “God moves amidst the pots and pans.” Further:

We commit to the daily hard work required to train our souls to ascertain the action of Grace in and around the contests of the human spirit. 

This side of the beatific vision, the contemplative realist is content to do lowly tasks, sweeping the floor of a decrepit cave to make room for some roofless travelers afoot. Fed by the majestic poverty of the Word he will write another novel of the nameless nobody who happens to be made in the *imago Dei*, numbering the hairs of her head very carefully, surprised to find in her insignificance some of the deepest drama in the cosmos. 

The educational philosopher (and Anglican) Charlotte Mason also noted this truth in *School Education*. She cites Michelangelo, who wrote that “good Christians always make good and beautiful figures,” but a higher standard was needed for those who would “represent the adored image of our Lord”: “it is not enough that a master should be great and able. I maintain that he must also be a man of good morals and conduct, if possible a saint, in order that the Holy Ghost may give him inspiration.”

*If possible a saint*. This language would not be intelligible to the evangelical world I grew up in. Then, being a saint was simply to be a Christian. Now that I’ve leaned more deeply into Christian tradition—that great tradition that includes the greatest works of art in the world, as Paul Pastor points out—I see this language of “being a saint” as pointing to the goal shared by both Catholic and catholic Christians: to be a saint is to be *in communion with God*, for our souls to be so a part of Him that our will and heart are as one with His. It means to become Christ-like in our very depth. Is this not what every Christian longs for? Is not this journey the fulfillment of “the search”?

So while there seems to be a clear distinction between sacred art (art proper for liturgical use) and secular (that is, not necessarily for liturgical use) art, both must be *good* to be worthy. And perhaps we could say that part of the goodness of good stories is that they help us on the way to God.

As Angelina Stanford of *The Literary Life* podcast reminds her listeners: “Stories will save the world”—stories understood as an art form that aligns with metaphysical, and hence also theological, reality. Stanford echoes Sr. Mariella: There is only one story, that of Redemption. Every other story is a version or a splinter of that one story. This is why Frederick Buechner could describe [the gospel as “tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale.”](https://www.frederickbuechner.com/telling-the-truth-the-gospel-as-tragedy-comedy-and-fairy-tale?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) Every good story is a version of the drama of the soul’s salvation.
### No Last Rites for MAiD
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/no-last-rites-for-maid/
Last updated: 2026-09-02T13:49:27.000Z
Medical Assistance in Dying is opposed by people of sound conscience for many reasons. [Matthew Loftus](https://www.christianitytoday.com/2026/02/killing-people-euthanasia-maid-new-york-canada/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) capably distinguishes between allowing people to die and killing them. [Jonathan von Maren](https://firstthings.com/the-fight-to-stop-euthanasia-for-mental-illness/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) notes its especially perilous potential for those who suffer with mental illness. The conference of Canadian Roman Catholic bishops have [declared](https://www.cccb.ca/media-release/statement-by-the-canadian-conference-of-catholic-bishops-on-the-non-permissibility-of-euthanasia-and-assisted-suicide-within-canadian-health-organizations-with-a-catholic-identity/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com#%5Fftn4) “euthanasia and assisted suicide (MAiD) have always been, and will always be, morally unacceptable because they are affronts to human dignity and violations of natural and divine law.” 

An interesting, parallel development has been the searing criticism of Canadian MAiD laws in the pages of *Jacobin*, hardly a bastion of conservative theological ethics, denouncing on democratic socialist grounds the ways MAiD gives the [vulnerable](https://jacobin.com/2025/12/canada-austerity-assisted-suicide-autonomy?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) liquidation rather than care, and is being used to systematically [euthanize the poor and disabled](https://jacobin.com/2024/05/canada-euthanasia-poor-disabled-health-care?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). 

But despite its diverse critics, MAiD now counts for [1 in 20](https://wng.org/opinions/against-the-culture-of-death-1775457759?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) deaths in Canada, and since its legalization one decade ago, its [toll](https://nypost.com/2026/03/07/world-news/canada-set-to-pass-100000-assisted-suicide-deaths-before-programs-10th-anniversary-societal-failing/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) surpasses the number of Canadian lives lost in World War II. 

Recently, the Anglican Church of Canada approved [trial liturgies](https://www.anglican.ca/wp-content/uploads/trial-use-ministry-with-sick-and-dying-maid-june-2026.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to be used before and during euthanasia. The introductory pages acknowledge that a variety of support and opposition is held about euthanasia in the denomination, and attempt to describe how heartbreaking and nuanced the circumstances often are surrounding it. 

The animating principle driving its authors is that the church must provide some kind of pastoral support to its people, including those who opt for medical assistance in dying. Because I am an Anglican priest who actively serves every week in pastoral care, I am far from indifferent to or unaware of the complexities of moral reasoning in times of unimaginable pain and dire circumstances. But precisely due to that awareness and experience, it is manifestly obvious to me that these liturgies are not only a catastrophic failure to provide pastoral care that is normed and enlivened by the word of God, but are also a grievous evil. They take the Lord’s name in vain, putting to diabolical use something holy and sacred.

In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s masterpiece *The Idiot*, Prince Myshkin recounts having nightmares after seeing a public execution by guillotine in nineteenth century Lyons. The valet he spoke with replied “it’s a good thing there’s not so much suffering… when the head flies off.” The prince then hotly responded with a harrowing and insightful reply:

> Everybody makes the same observation as you, and this machine, the guillotine, was invented for that. But a thought occurred to me then: what if it’s even worse? To you it seems ridiculous, to you it seems wild, but with some imagination, even a thought like that can pop into your head. Think: if there’s torture, for instance, then there’s suffering, wounds, bodily pain, and it means that all that distracts you from inner torment, so that you only suffer from the wounds until you die. And yet the chief, the strongest pain may not be in the wounds, but in knowing for certain that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now, this second—your soul will fly out of your body and you’ll no longer be a man, and it’s for certain—the main thing is that it’s for certain. When you put your head under that knife and hear it come screeching down on you, that one quarter of a second is the most horrible of all.

In these trial liturgies, the certainty that horrified Prince Myshkin is adorned with the blessing of Christ in the liturgical commendation of an Anglican church. It is not terribly surprising that the church’s vocation in this instance has become so determined by meeting the felt-needs of its constituents, of supplying religious goods and services that the customers demand, that the church’s worship and witness has become theologically compromised. 

This is only one of many things downstream of mainline and progressive denominations becoming untethered from, and drifting away from, the authority of Holy Scripture and secondary confessional and historic liturgical norms for ecclesial life. As such, these trial liturgies in Canada are not so much a bellwether portending future problems to come, as a symptom downstream of the prior commitments that J. Gresham Machen so powerfully contrasted with orthodoxy in his powerful and prescient [*Christianity and Liberalism*](https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802864994/christianity-and-liberalism-new-ed/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). The publication of these ghastly trial liturgies forces us to ask: is Christianity in general — and the Anglican pastoral and liturgical expression in particular — an authoritative account of truth and goodness to which we must assimilate ourselves, or a technique that people can use to establish their own sense of meaning derived from other sources?

Today, 103 years after Machen’s book, a range of [criticisms](https://firstthings.com/anglicans-and-the-abuja-contradiction/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) have been offered of GAFCON’s call to [reset the Global Anglican Communion](https://gafcon.org/prayer-updates/martyrs-day-statement-2025/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). I can hardly respond to these wide-ranging criticisms here. But one especially misguided criticism has been aimed at the confidence placed in Scripture where the [Abuja Affirmation](https://gafcon.org/communique-updates/the-abuja-affirmation/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) claims that “*The Bible is God’s Word written (Article XX). It was breathed out by him and written for us by faithful messengers. It carries God’s own authority and is its own interpreter – it is clear, sufficient and true for all times. God’s Word is the final authority in the church and in the life of discipleship*.” These critics not only neglect how obviously integral *Sola scriptura* is to the history of the English Reformation and the theology of the historic Anglican formularies, but have also failed to recognize, as Kevin Vanhoozer puts it, that “*Sola scriptura* is not the answer to the question ‘How many sources should one use in doing theology?’ but instead is about the supremacy of Scripture over doctrinal norms,” namely, that Scripture alone is the *norma normans non normata* (‘the norming norm that is itself not normed’). 

Similarly, one writer [critiques](https://livingchurch.org/covenant/a-confessional-solution-but-what-about-the-nairobi-cairo-proposal/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) the Abuja Affirmation for its confessionalism, for allegedly reducing the basis of the church’s unity to mere assent to propositional truths. Certainly there is more theologically and scripturally to the basis of the church’s unity than that, but arguably there is not less, evident in the authoritative role the Articles have played throughout Anglican history, even [American Anglican](https://anglicanway.org/the-thirty-nine-articles-and-the-protestant-episcopal-church-in-the-united-states/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) history, contrary to popular myths. The [2008 Jerusalem Declaration](https://gafcon.org/about/the-jerusalem-statement/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) is hardly an innovation; confessional clarity is charity, and guardrails make the highway a better place to drive. The church has long believed there are things worth clearly articulating in order to commend truth and safeguard against error, from the time of the ecumenical councils to the primary author of the classic Anglican Prayer Book and Articles of Religion putting his hand in the flames. 

We need a continuing witness to faithful, historic Anglican worship and witness whose liturgy and pastoral care is answerable ultimately to the word of God as its final judge and animating power. Paul’s epistle to of 1 Corinthians is particularly significant in this regard, that to tolerate or give approval to those who refuse clear calls to repent is to become “arrogant” (1 Cor 5:2), particularly because the church is expressly tasked *not* with judging the conduct of outsiders but indeed of summoning its own members to repent (1 Cor 5:12–13). If the animating power in the church’s sails is less the living voice of the word of God, but the shifting winds of human whims, *especially* in an institution committed to little more than institutional continuity detached from meaningful doctrinal guardrails, we will soon drift into the chaotic currents Yeats’ wrote about: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

As Carl Trueman notes in the closing chapters of his incisive [*The Desecration of Man*](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/729796/the-desecration-of-man-by-carl-r-trueman/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), there is an extremely rich and deeply scriptural approach to theological anthropology in the historic burial rites of the classic edition of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, not least the 1662 edition. Those hallowed words solemnly and helpfully acknowledge that life is fragile, death is devastating, God is holy, we are sinners, but Christ is a merciful and comforting Redeemer who gives us hope of sharing in his death and resurrection. That theological anthropology has not only been eclipsed in the modern world’s turn away from traditional Christian funerals to secular ‘celebrations of life,’ but is now perverted in these trial liturgies for MAiD. 

One of the most beautiful liturgical moments I have had the privilege of participating in is at life’s end. In the ACNA’s 2019 *Book of Common Prayer*, immediately after anointing the dying with holy oil and praying a blessing upon them, a canticle is offered: the *Nunc Dimittis*, the song of Simeon from Luke 2:29–32\. That setting is astonishing in its beauty and power; it has moved me to tears and nearly stunned silence every time I have had the privilege as a priest of leading that rite in those most holy of moments with a dying saint and their gathered loved ones, especially at the lines: “*Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace: according to thy word.*” I often think about those moments every night during Evensong when the *Nunc* follows the last reading of Holy Scripture and I ask for God’s blessing to depart in peace to rest for the night, that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace. 

It is a distortion of this liturgical heritage to superimpose it upon medical assistance in dying; the pastoral care that is needed instead is something altogether different, something that resists a throwaway culture, something that defies rather than deifies the culture of death. 

Daunting as it is to imagine, pastoral care in such circumstances might require calling profoundly troubled people at an existential brink to turn back, to change their minds — the root meaning of ‘repentance.’ Raising such a weighty and solemn word, ‘repentance,’ in this context could be horribly misunderstood, as though it were tone-deaf and detached or confrontational towards people who are profoundly suffering in already devastating circumstances. 

But if the church’s shepherds are to love precisely such people, we need to be wary that what we conceive of as loving them is actually love and shepherding as it is determined by God through his saving action in Jesus Christ. Left to our own devices and whims as to what love demands or entails, pastoral care in this instance can become distorted into becoming a supportive and reassuring accomplice in a permanent mistake. 

If we are to invite someone in utterly dire straits to ‘choose life’ (Deut 30:19), to decide to continue living, and we help them somehow begin to imagine continuing their life in fellowship with Christ’s sufferings in hope of sharing in his resurrection—even amidst the deepest possible pain—perhaps such mind-changing pastoral care simply consists of being present. Maybe pastoral care could look like persisting in regularly sitting with people who are deeply suffering in a ministry of presence, active listening, prayer, the private ministry of the Word of God, and faithful administration of the sacraments for an unknown length of time—rather than giving not merely a passive approval but an officially pronounced, sacrament-like, holy oil-anointed blessing of the church upon an irreversible decision.

The day this essay was composed, June 24th, notably is a red-letter feast day for Anglicans: the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. As St. Augustine noted, John declared about Christ that “He must increase, but I must decrease,” and accordingly the daylight lessens from this point onward in the year, while the light increases after the nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ at Christmas. The collect for today in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer reminds the church of its Advent-like vocation to testify to the coming of the Lord, particularly by summoning others to repent, even if that incurs suffering like that of John in his martyrdom. St. John did not serve as Herod’s personal chaplain for having Herodias, pastorally supporting Herod in his moral deliberation and invoking God’s blessing upon it. 

Instead, St. John called the monarch to repent, and he suffered martyrdom for it. All who personally appropriate this collect would do well to contemplate our similar vocation today, even as it might prove costly: 

> Almighty God, by whose providence thy servant John Baptist was wonderfully born, and sent to prepare the way of thy Son our Saviour, by preaching of repentance: Make us so to follow his doctrine and holy life, that we may truly repent according to his preaching; and after his example constantly speak the truth, boldly rebuke vice, and patiently suffer for the truth's sake; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
### Understanding the Origins of the Dissident Right
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/understanding-the-origins-of-the-dissident-right/
Last updated: 2026-07-10T11:00:08.000Z
**Spencer Sunshine, *Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The*** 
***Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege* (Routledge, New York,** 
**2024), 453pp.**

Spencer Sunshine's *Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The* 
*Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege* (Routledge, 2024)  
describes how America's early Cold War neo-Nazi movement reacted and  
adapted to the late 1960s American youth counterculture. The story is  
told through the person of James Mason, a Boomer neo-Nazi heavily  
influenced by Satanism, who, in 1966, at 14 years old, affiliated with  
the youth wing of George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party (ANP).  
Sunshine describes how Mason brought the 1960s counterculture into the  
movement's strategy, tactics, and its branding. The book is also a  
production and reception history of Mason's magnum opus, *Siege*, which  
is a compilation of his 1970s-1980s neo-Nazi writings. Solicited and  
edited by alternative publishers and musicians operating in neo-Nazi,  
ethnoseparatist, and Satanist circles, *Siege* was initially released in  
1993 and later retrieved and popularized in the mid-2010s through the  
now-defunct online forum Iron March and by the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen  
Division.

Let's get some preliminaries out the way. Sunshine is an unabashed  
leftist. His 2013 Ph.D. from City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate  
Center was on the history of post-1960s anarchism in the United States,  
and featured anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan and *Bullshit Jobs*'s David  
Graeber.[\[1\]](#fn1) Since 2014, Sunshine has written about facets of the  
American right-wing for publications like *The New Republic*, the  
Southern Poverty Law Center, and *The Daily Beast* \--- the kind of  
outlets that make many conservative Christian believers auto-roll their  
eyes, say "Nope!," and slam their laptops shut. Even so, I'd caution the  
skeptical and the wary to keep their tabs open a little longer. Years  
ago, I assigned one of Sunshine's longer reports on Oregon's Patriot  
movement to my Patrick Henry College undergraduates because Sunshine is  
what I call a "digger" and he knows his subject matter in ways many do  
not.[\[2\]](#fn2) And if you desire insights about the origins of the alternative  
and dissident American right that existed *before* the "alt-right" and  
dissident right we've all heard about over the last ten years,  
Sunshine's book will be a key text for many years to come.

---

You likely didn't hear much about the American Nazi Party (ANP) in your  
US history classes, but for almost five years in the 1960s, George  
Rockwell and his party knew how to draw headlines. Established in the  
late 1950s, the party didn't garner much public attention until 1962\. It  
was the ANP's Roy James who, that September, charged to the front of a  
church in Birmingham, Alabama and repeatedly punched Martin Luther King,  
Jr. at a Southern Christian Leadership Conference event.[\[3\]](#fn3)

Rockwell's ANP saw local battles over integration and fair housing as a  
way to build its brand. For instance, throughout 1962 and 1963, as the  
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) held "Freedom Dweller" pickets,  
sit-ins, and "dwell-ins" at newly-built, racially segregated housing  
developments in the southern California cities of Torrance and  
Carson/Dominguez Hills, the ANP's "Western Division" organized and led  
counterprotests.[\[4\]](#fn4), [\[5\]](#fn5) In 1966, Rockwell and his Chicago Division  
had appropriated Stokely Carmichael's call for "black power," and had  
rallied local "white power" to fight off housing integration in  
Southwest Chicago. On August 5, the group attacked a march during which  
King himself was struck by a rock. King commented afterwards that he  
"\[had never seen in Mississippi or Alabama\] mobs as hostile and as  
hate-filled as \[he'd\] seen in Chicago."[\[6\]](#fn6)

Sunshine's story really takes off with the assassination of Rockwell in  
August 1967, just eight months after re-christening his own organization  
as the National Socialist White People's Party (NSWPP). The name change  
reflected Rockwell's desire to tone down the group's explicit Nazi  
features, transforming it into a wider, "white power" umbrella  
coalition. Indeed, Rockwell had already made efforts to construct a more  
"Americanized" Nazism, one in which "Aryan" was replaced with "white,"  
where adherents of the Christian Identity movement were made more  
comfortable, and where Holocaust denialism had a more "central" role.  
Rockwell had even tried to start a "front" --- the Fighting American  
Nationalists (FAN) --- he hoped could attract more whites by minimizing  
the ANP's "Nazi trappings."[\[7\]](#fn7)

Despite his best efforts at building some form of unified party system,  
however, local chapter priorities, strategic and tactical disagreements,  
and commonly held frustrations over the leadership style of Rockwell's  
successor, Matthias Koehl, split the

the post-Rockwell party along geographic lines by the mid-seventies.  
Koehl desperately tried to maintain authority over a rump NSWPP, but  
Sunshine relates --- in startling detail --- how that remnant and other  
NSWPP splinter groups in northern California, southern California,  
Chicago, Virginia, New York/Buffalo, and parts of Ohio evolved,  
competed, further divided, changed names, and tried to outbid one  
another for personnel, recruits, funding, and market share through the  
rest of the 1970s into the 1980s.

Enter the Ohio boy, James Mason, and his assessment of how the 1960s  
counterculture impacted the neo-Nazi movement's recruiting, strategy and  
tactics, and how, going forward, that counterculture could be  
beneficially appropriated.

Mason well understood his era's "vibe shift": the youthful energy; a  
new, outside-of-the-home political/advocacy role for women; "free love,"  
sexual laxity, and public acceptance of pornography; an anti-law  
enforcement bias ("anti-pigism"); and a replacement of the tired, mass  
politics-as-usual with militant vanguardism, direct action, and  
guerrilla warfare. Mason's writing highlighted the structures and  
actions of violent leftist groups such as the Weather Underground,  
Symbionese Liberation Army, May 19th Communist Organization, and the  
Black Liberation Army. He argued how a "few" could accelerate a collapse  
of the "Jew Capitalist system" through bombings, "expropriations,"  
street battles, and murder/assassinations. And, like these leftist  
groups, Mason believed the "few" included women in more operational  
roles, which was very distinct from Rockwell's older, more "stag"  
approach.

Unsurprisingly, Mason found his closest allies among the California  
splinter groups; that is, from the post-Rockwell factions that were  
operating well within the counterculture's ground zero. In the mid  
1970s, Mason tried to construct his own above-ground, combined Klan-Nazi  
umbrella organization using southern California's National Socialist  
Liberation Front (NSLF) as a tandem, underground "armed wing" or  
"liberation army." In fact, until the early 1980s, Mason would regularly  
look to the NSLF as a seed group, even with that group's various  
leadership changes and despite Mason having a short stint of cooperation  
with the National Socialist White Workers' Party (NSWWP) in northern  
California.

Keeping with the zeitgeist, Mason's own religious beliefs and personal  
spirituality were also in flux. In the 1970s, he adhered to Christian  
Identity, which Rockwell himself had believed compatible with Nazism. As  
time went on, however, Mason transitioned away from his heterodox  
Christianity into Nietzscheanism and atheism, decrying any forms of  
Christianity as "weak" and "alien." By the 1980s, Mason thought one  
could support Christian Identity, but at best, only as a utilitarian  
"conveyor belt" into non-Christian racialism.

Mason's spiritual moves and his continued fascination with late 1960s  
counterculture also led him to his most controversial stance --- the  
assertion that Charles Manson and his followers ("The Family")  
represented a tactical and spiritual model for the post-Rockwell  
Neo-Nazi movement. In some of Mason's earlier musings on the use of  
assassination as a tactic, he lauded Manson Family member Squeaky  
Fromme's unsuccessful attempt on President Ford's life). Mason's  
personal interactions with Manson Family members and his direct  
communication with Manson himself only served to enhance his praise of  
the jailed murderer.

The Family, to Mason, was akin to the Weather Underground. It was a  
non-monogamous, sexually promiscuous, drug-friendly, countercultural  
community of "free love" in which women had an active role in violent,  
anti-system plans and operations. The 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders, he  
argued, were a solid example of direct action and "redemptive violence,"  
aimed at accelerating an American race war. The Family's rural outpost  
was a place where, if needed, an intentional, white racial community  
could sit out the coming societal apocalypse, engage in "mutual aid,"  
and establish a new, white racialist, antisemitic *polis* as the  
existing "system" was toppled. Moreover, Manson's "gnosticism," says  
Sunshine, guided Mason's eventual move into what he \[Mason\] described  
as "universal order," a "new kind of revolutionary National Socialist  
consciousness," that transcended all boundaries between Christianity and  
Satanism and identified world-historical "Christ figures" in Jesus,  
Hitler, Rockwell, and Manson.

While his promotion of Manson and The Family severed many of Mason's  
relationships to older neo-Nazis, it made him very attractive in the  
mid-to-late 1980s to the Abraxas Circle, a coterie of  
alternative/dissident book publishers and editors, Holocaust deniers,  
industrial and deathrock musicians, Nazi skinheads, and, lastly, various  
friends, relatives and associates of Anton LaVey, the head of the Church  
of Satan.

Over five dense chapters, Sunshine recounts Mason's personal and  
professional relationships with the Abraxas Circle, and, in particular,  
how Mason's longevity in the American neo-Nazi movement and the access  
he had to Charles Manson endeared him to four men within the Circle's  
innermost ring (what Sunshine deems the 'Abraxas Clique'): Boyd Rice,  
Adam Parfrey, Nikolas Schreck, and Michael Moynihan. Describing itself  
as "a sort of Thule Society for the 90s," The Abraxas crowd and Mason  
hit it off well, particularly in light of the group's focus on the  
occult, fascism, natural inequality, dysgenics, and Social Darwinism.  
Schreck, LaVey's son-in-law and one of the founders of the  
goth/deathrock band Radio Werewolf, at one time described the group's  
aim as introducing young men and women to "the western European  
tradition" in order to provide them with a "firm alternative" to the  
"dysgenic ocean of mud that has swept the \[western\] world."

Parfey, who was Schreck's publisher and was Abraxas' conduit to  
numerous Holocaust deniers associated with the Institute for Historical  
Review (IHR), told James Mason in early communications that they  
believed Charles Manson was an "important figure \[to save\] the white  
race from a dysgenic condition."[\[8\]](#fn8) Schreck, Rice, and Parfrey would  
use Mason's stories, recollections, and arcana for *The Manson File*  
(1988) and the related documentary,"Charles Manson Superstar." (1989).  
Released by Parfrey's Amok Press (now known as Feral House), *The Manson* 
*File* is one part of a book catalog that includes Joseph Goebbels' novel  
*Michael: Pages from a German Destiny*, assorted LaVey volumes, and two  
of Parfrey's own neo-Nazi anthologies (*Apocalypse Culture* I and  
II).[\[9\]](#fn9)

Like many even today, Schreck and Parfrey played the "ironic aesthetics"  
card when it comes to their brandishing of neo-Nazism. Sunshine  
dismisses their attempts. Regardless of whether Schreck's Radio Werewolf  
viewed the use of Nazi and Satanic symbols or references in ironic  
terms, Sunshine argues the band had attracted *real* neo-Nazis by 1988  
– the year the mainstream media declared as "the year of the Nazi  
skinhead." Schreck's overt relationships and associations had also by  
that time moved him well away from mere aesthetics. And Parfrey's Feral  
House continued to publish works on Nazi occultism and insider  
recollections of the Nazi skinhead music scene. In fact, Sunshine says,  
Parfrey was much less reticent about his white racialism near the end of  
his life. Parfrey died in 2018, and Feral House is releasing a  
posthumous "Apocalypse Omnibus" later this summer.[\[10\]](#fn10)

It was, however, the fourth member of the Abraxas Clique, Michael  
Moynihan, who would take on the greatest importance for James Mason's  
continued popularity. Moynihan is the one who first pitched Mason with  
the idea of compiling a "best of" anthology to get all of his neo-Nazi  
materials from the 1970s and 1980s into a single volume. It took longer  
than expected, but the Moynihan-edited, first edition of *Siege* came  
out in April 1993\. The volume was dedicated to Charles Manson, who Mason  
called "the Son of Man." Throughout 1993 and into 1994 --- which was the  
year Moynihan was made a Church of Satan high priest --- Mason's *Siege*  
generated serious buzz across the neo-Nazi and black metal worlds. It  
was advertised in music fanzines, in *Black Flame*, the Church of  
Satan's regular newsletter, and was the subject of evangelical "shock  
jock" Bob Larson's radio talk show. It also had a rare media breakout  
moment when mentioned on an episode of the McLaughlin Group.

And then, suddenly, Mason and *Siege* all but disappeared.

In May 1995, Mason went to prison. While *Siege* had been making the  
rounds, Mason, who was then living in Colorado, had taken up with the  
15-year old daughter of a fellow neo-Nazi. Sunshine relates how Mason  
had long been into pornography (including an interest in CSAM, or child  
sexual abuse material), and it wasn't long before he was arrested,  
released, and then re-arrested for CSAM-related crimes, contributing to  
the delinquency of a minor, and for menacing the 15-year old's  
subsequent boyfriend. Mason would be in and out of prison for the next  
four years.

Once released, Mason continued to produce content and worked in retail  
security. He had rediscovered a heterodox Christianity in prison. His  
prison and post-prison writings are a cafeteria-style bonanza of  
(ostensible) Christianity, antisemitism, white racialism, "ancient  
aliens" (a la *Chariot of the Gods*), "alien DNA," and a divine  
elevation of Hitler. Between 2001 and 2003, Mason worked with a  
different set of alternative, white racialist publishers --- Greg  
Johnson and Ryan Schuster --- to release the second edition of *Siege*  
under the imprint Black Sun (now Counter Currents Publishing).[\[11\]](#fn11),  
[\[12\]](#fn12) Mason's initial publisher, Moynihan, on the other hand, moved to  
editing new English language translations of Italian occultist  
philosopher Julius Evola, French New Right thinker Alain de Benoist,  
and, most recently with Arcana Europa Media, works by "Germanic  
Revival," pagan, Odinist, and Asatru writers.[\[13\]](#fn13)

It was fairly quiet for Mason until Iron March and Atomwaffen Division  
(AWD) retrieved and popularized Mason's counterculture-inflected  
neo-Nazism for online-savvy Millennials and early Zoomers in the mid  
2010s. Those interested in *Siege's* second reception period will want  
to pay very close attention to Sunshine's opening chapter, the  
concluding parts of his chapter on Nazi Satanism, and portions of  
Chapter 17 ("From Prison to Revival"). Iron March released a third  
edition of *Siege* in 2015, which caught the eye of the Atomwaffen  
Division. According to Sunshine, Atomwaffen Division was enchanted by  
the entire Mason package: the long-standing white racialism and  
antisemitism, the turning-away from Rockwellian-era party building, his  
loathing of run-of-the-mill conservative culture-warring, the  
comfortability with California "drop-out" drug culture, the love for  
Charles Manson and the Family, his connections to Satanism, and, most  
importantly, his anti-system accelerationism and the call for direct  
action and "cleansing" violence. It took very little time for Mason's  
*Siege* to become Atomwaffen's "Bible" and for Mason to become the  
group's guru. And it didn't take long for others to catch on. Sunshine  
reports that by July 2017, Siege had approximately 16,000 downloads from  
the Iron March forum.

And even more young men and women have "Siege-pilled." Mason's  
anthology has been updated and re-released multiple times since its  
third edition. As Sunshine attests, one can easily research Mason's  
influence on Atomwaffen Division's domestic and international affiliates  
or splinters --- groups like Feuerkrieg Division, Sonnenkrieg Division,  
and AWD Russland. Or --- and I solemnly warn you, this part gets even  
darker --- you can read through available news stories and legal  
documents involving the *Siege*\-inspired Order of the Nine Angles (O9A),  
the National Socialist Order of the Nine Angles (NSO9A), Satanic Front,  
MKY/No Lives Matter (NLM), and 764, the child predator online occult  
network.[\[14\]](#fn14) None of this is Sunshine's leftist fever dream.

This book isn't a comfortable read. It isn't an easy read. But it is to  
be respected. Sunshine is refreshingly unafraid to show his work. He  
offers nine pages of dramatis personae, charts/graphics, a rundown of  
the archives he used, a full periodical list of Mason's writings,  
granular footnotes, and, for his final hundred pages, eleven full  
appendices covering various individuals, groups, and concepts associated  
with Mason. I heartily recommend it. Not only that, I strongly recommend  
the Routledge series of which Sunshine's book is a part --- the  
*Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right* series. I own a number  
of the now over 100-volume series.[\[15\]](#fn15) Together with Brill's free  
online *Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies*[\[16\]](#fn16) (which was  
discontinued in 2025, but involves many of the same American and  
European scholars), the Routledge series offers some of the best,  
up-to-date work on interwar fascism, the interwar, Cold War, and  
post-Cold War transnational right, and more granular assessments of far  
right phenomena.

Sunshine's *Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism* clearly  
establishes that the counterculture of the "long 1960s" is not merely  
a left-wing or so-called "cultural Marxist" story, but that its  
appropriation and its impact is also discerned on the political right.  
Moreover, at a time in which neo-Nazi, white identitarian, and/or  
European New Right outlets are finding their way into vendor tables at  
conservative Christian conferences, it is high time for conservative  
Christian believers to have a clear, historical perspective on this  
entire ecosystem.

---

1. Spencer Sunshine, "Post-1960 U.S. Anarchism and Social Theory,"  
Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York Graduate Center  
(September 2013),  
[https://search.worldcat.org/title/Post-1960-U.S.-anarchism-and-social-theory/oclc/873626873](https://search.worldcat.org/title/Post-1960-U.S.-anarchism-and-social-theory/oclc/873626873?ref=mereorthodoxy.com);  
and  
[https://www.gc.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/2023-05/2014\_50th\_Commencement\_Program.pdf](https://www.gc.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/2023-05/2014%5F50th%5FCommencement%5FProgram.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). [↩︎](#fnref1)
2. Spencer Sunshine, *Up in Arms: A Guide to Oregon's Patriot*  
*Movement* (Rural Organizing Project and Political Research  
Associates, 2016),  
[https://rop.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Up-in-Arms\_Report\_PDF.pdf](https://rop.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Up-in-Arms%5FReport%5FPDF.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). [↩︎](#fnref2)
3. William H. Schmaltz, *For Race and Nation: George Lincoln Rockwell*  
*and the American Nazi Party* (River's Bend Press, 2013), p. 225;  
David J. Garrow, *Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the*  
*Southern Christian Leadership Conference* (Open Road Media  
\[ebook\], 2015), p. 221\. [↩︎](#fnref3)
4. Mike Davis and Jon Wiener, *Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the*  
*Sixties* (Verso, 2020), pp. 82-100; M. Keith Claybrook, Jr., "CORE's  
Struggle for Fair Housing Rights in LA," *Black Perspectives*,  
African American Intellectual History Society, 1 March 2022,  
[https://www.aaihs.org/cores-struggle-for-fair-housing-rights-in-la/](https://www.aaihs.org/cores-struggle-for-fair-housing-rights-in-la/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com);  
Hadley Meares, "In the summer of '63, black students led protests  
against the South Bay's white-only neighborhoods," *Curbed Los*  
*Angeles*, 27 February 2020,  
[https://la.curbed.com/2020/2/27/21153265/torrance-fair-housing-protests](https://la.curbed.com/2020/2/27/21153265/torrance-fair-housing-protests?ref=mereorthodoxy.com);  
Global Images Works, "Rare Color Footage of Protests Southwood  
Riviera Royale - 1963," ID 10916\_071,  
[https://www.globalimageworks.com/library/footage/protests-southwood-riviera-royale-1963](https://www.globalimageworks.com/library/footage/protests-southwood-riviera-royale-1963?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). [↩︎](#fnref4)
5. The ANP's "Western Division" had its home in the Southern  
California cities of Glendale and El Monte. Glendale was one of  
Southern California's most notorious "sundown" towns. See Mike  
Davis and Jon Wiener, *Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties*  
(Verso, 2020), p. 14, 219; Schmaltz, *For Race and Nation*, pp.  
334-336; Angie Crouch, "City of Glendale Apologizes for its History  
as a 'Sundown Town," NBC Los Angeles, 13 October 2020,  
[https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/city-of-glendale-apologizes-for-its-history-as-a-sundown-town/2443011/](https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/city-of-glendale-apologizes-for-its-history-as-a-sundown-town/2443011/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).  
Davis and Wiener highlight how California Army National Guard troops  
from Glendale were some of the very first deployed in response to  
the August 1965 Watts Riots. Davis and Weiner, *Set the Night on*  
*Fire*, p. 219\. This fact is also outlined in State of California,  
*Military Support of Law Enforcement during Civil Disturbances: A*  
*Report Concerning the California National Guard's Part in*  
*Suppressing the Los Angeles Riot --- August 1965*, pp. 13-15 ("1st  
Battalion, 160th Infantry"), [https://militarymuseum.org/watts.pdf](https://militarymuseum.org/watts.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).  
On El Monte's racial history, including information on the "El Monte  
Boys," the Klan, and the ANP, see the Youtube interview with Fresno  
State University professor Dan Cady, "Scared Shitless (Dan Cady),"  
on Latinish \[Podcast\] with Hector Luis Alamo, #64, 3 October 2020,  
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZbSrLUEPlE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZbSrLUEPlE&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Also see Emma Bianco,  
"Demons in the City of Angels: Neo-Nazis and White Nationalism in  
Southern California," MA thesis, California State University  
Fullerton, Spring 2022, pp. 17-19, 22-23, 28-29,  
[https://scholarworks.calstate.edu/concern/theses/2v23w245n](https://scholarworks.calstate.edu/concern/theses/2v23w245n?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). [↩︎](#fnref5)
6. Schmaltz, *For Race and Nation*, pp. 415-417; Joanna Hernandez and  
Blair Paddock, "'Chicago Tonight' in Your Neighborhood: Martin  
Luther King Jr's Legacy in Marquette Park," WTTW News, 13 January  
2023,  
[https://news.wttw.com/2023/01/13/chicago-tonight-your-neighborhood-martin-luther-king-jr-s-legacy-marquette-park](https://news.wttw.com/2023/01/13/chicago-tonight-your-neighborhood-martin-luther-king-jr-s-legacy-marquette-park?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). [↩︎](#fnref6)
7. Schmaltz goes into additional detail about FAN, particularly FAN  
in Chicago, which was the entity through which Matthew Koehl was  
recruited. Schmaltz, *For Race and Nation*, pp. 144-145, 193\. [↩︎](#fnref7)
8. Sunshine mentions three IHR-connected individuals in particular:  
William Grimstad, Keith Stimely, and Michael A. Hoffman II. Grimstad  
was the author of *The Six Million Reconsidered: Is the 'Nazi*  
*Holocaust' Story a Zionist Propaganda Ploy?* (1979), published by  
IHR's Noontide Press. Stimely did editorial work (including serving  
as chief editor) for IHR's *Journal of Historical Review* in the  
early 1980s. See description in the Finding Aid for "Keith Stimely  
Collection on Revisionist History and Neo-Fascist Movements,"  
Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon,  
[https://scua.uoregon.edu/repositories/2/resources/2104](https://scua.uoregon.edu/repositories/2/resources/2104?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Hoffman  
served as IHR's assistant director, and later moved to Coeur  
d'Alene, Idaho and published under Independent History and Research,  
[https://www.revisionisthistory.org/](https://www.revisionisthistory.org/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). [↩︎](#fnref8)
9. For a discussion of the initial history of Parfrey, Amok Press,  
and its catalog (including Goebbels and LaVey), see Michael Lee  
Nirenberg, "Conversation with Adam Parfrey (Part One)," *Huffpost*,  
13 October 2015,  
[https://www.huffpost.com/entry/conversation-with-adam-pa\_b\_8277892](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/conversation-with-adam-pa%5Fb%5F8277892?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).  
Amok Press's translation of Goebbels' *Michael: Pages from a German*  
*Destiny* was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times. Tom Clark, "The Nazi  
Wrote a Novel," Los Angeles Times, 25 October 1987,  
[https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-10-25-bk-16144-story.html](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-10-25-bk-16144-story.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).  
For *Apocalypse Culture* I and II, see  
[https://feralhouse.com/apocalypse-culture/](https://feralhouse.com/apocalypse-culture/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and  
[https://feralhouse.com/apocalypse-culture-ii/](https://feralhouse.com/apocalypse-culture-ii/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). [↩︎](#fnref9)
10. On the upcoming Parfrey *Apocalypse Omnibus*, see interview of  
Feral House's Christina Ward, "Member Spotlight: Feral House,"  
Community of Literary Magazines and Publishers (CLMP), 13 July 2024,  
[https://www.clmp.org/news/member-spotlight-feral-house/](https://www.clmp.org/news/member-spotlight-feral-house/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). See also  
[https://feralhouse.com/apocalypse-omnibus/](https://feralhouse.com/apocalypse-omnibus/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). [↩︎](#fnref10)
11. Sunshine describes how Black Sun Publications was planning on  
publishing individuals like Ernst Junger (who intellectual historian  
Richard Wolin recently described in *Heidegger in Ruins* as a  
"conservative revolutionary," a "protofascist," a "fascist  
sympathizer," a "spiritual fascist," and "a type of  
*Frontgeneration* Jules Verne"), *Nouvelle Droite* founder Alain de  
Benoist, the 19th century scientific racist Arthur de Gobineau, and  
Hindu-Nazi esotericist Savitri Devi (309). Sunshine wrote a much  
shorter but more detailed piece on the history of Black Sun  
Publications, Counter-Currents, and the Foundation for Human  
Understanding (FHU), in which he offers more details about the  
publishing of Savitri Devi. Spencer Sunshine, "How a Mainstream  
Racist Group Revived the Terroristic Tome 'Siege,' *Hatewatch*,  
Southern Poverty Law Center, 28 March 2024,  
[https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hate-watch/how-mainstream-racist-group-revived-terroristic-tome-siege/](https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hate-watch/how-mainstream-racist-group-revived-terroristic-tome-siege/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).  
Black Sun Publications released *And Time Rolls On: The Savitri Devi*  
*Interviews* in 2005, and Devi's *Gold in the Furnace: Experiences in*  
*Post-War Germany* in 2006\. These, and even more by Devi, have been  
reissued by Counter-Currents Publishing. See  
[https://counter-currents.com/shop/books/](https://counter-currents.com/shop/books/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). For historical background  
on Devi and her influence on neo-Nazism, see Maria Margaronis,  
"Savitri Devi: From the Aryans to the 'Alt Right,' BBC Radio Four,  
27 October 2017, [https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09b19y4](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09b19y4?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). [↩︎](#fnref11)
12. In 2016, Greg Johnson described his white racialism to Darryl  
Cooper (aka Martyr Made) in this way: "The political order we  
envision is ethno-nationalist. We want to create a white homeland in  
North America for people of European descent. And the reason for  
that is very simple. We don't think that multiculturalism is working  
out very well for white people. We look around the world, and in  
every white society, birth rates are below replacement. There are  
many causes for this, but the principal cause, in our view, is that  
we've lost sovereign control of our homelands. There are no white  
societies that make the preservation of their people and our race as  
a whole a political priority," Greg Johnson, "Darryl Cooper in  
Conversation with Greg Johnson," transcript of 2016 *Decline of the*  
*West* podcast, online transcript dated September 2024, located at  
[https://counter-currents.com/2024/09/darryl-cooper-in-conversation-with-greg-johnson/](https://counter-currents.com/2024/09/darryl-cooper-in-conversation-with-greg-johnson/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). [↩︎](#fnref12)
13. Sunshine explains how Michael Moynihan started working with  
Joshua Buckley circa 2002\. Moynihan and Buckley worked together on  
the *TYR: Myth-Culture-Tradition* journal, and Sunshine attributes  
Greg Johnson's conversion to white racialism to Buckley. Sunshine  
describes Buckley as a "former Nazi skinhead" and "\[someone who\]  
for decades had been active in White Supremacist politics in the  
Atlanta, Georgia area" (248-249). In 2002, Moynihan edited a version  
of Julius Evola's *Men Among the Ruins* with the publisher Inner  
Traditions. More recently, Moynihan and Buckley have worked with  
translator Jon Graham to publish Alain de Benoist under the Arcana  
Europa Media banner --- re-publishing *On Being a Pagan* (2018) and  
*The Empire of Myth* (2021). Arcana Europa Media also publishes  
Stephen Flowers (aka Edred Thorsson), an American runologist and  
occultist. See  
<https://web.archive.org/web/20241110142648/https://arcanaeuropamedia.com/>.  
According to online corporation data, Buckley appears to operate out  
of South Carolina and Georgia, and in addition to Arcana Europa  
Media, he maintains companies named for Elder Futhark runes (Ansuz,  
Elhaz, Fehu, Raido, and Uruz). [↩︎](#fnref13)
14. For background on Atomwaffen Division, see The Soufan Center,  
"The Atomwaffen Division: The Evolution of the White Supremacy  
Threat," August 2020,  
[https://thesoufancenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/The-Atomwaffen-Division-The-Evolution-of-the-White-Supremacy-Threat-August-2020-.pdf](https://thesoufancenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/The-Atomwaffen-Division-The-Evolution-of-the-White-Supremacy-Threat-August-2020-.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).  
For more on post-Atomwaffen and Siege, see Southern Poverty Law  
Center, "Atomwaffen and the Siege Parallax: How One Neo-Nazi's  
Life's Work is Fueling a Younger Generation," 22 February 2018,  
[https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hate-watch/atomwaffen-and-siege-parallax-how-one-neo-nazis-lifes-work-fueling-younger-generation/](https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hate-watch/atomwaffen-and-siege-parallax-how-one-neo-nazis-lifes-work-fueling-younger-generation/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).  
On Atomwaffen and Feuerkrieg Division, see American Odyssey,  
"Telegram Messages Reveal New Details About Neo-Nazi Group  
Feuerkrieg Division," 2 October 2019,  
[https://medium.com/americanodyssey/telegram-messages-feuerkrieg-division-jarrett-william-smith-arrested-neo-nazi-34d8dbd32653](https://medium.com/americanodyssey/telegram-messages-feuerkrieg-division-jarrett-william-smith-arrested-neo-nazi-34d8dbd32653?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).  
On O9A, see Dominic Alessio, "Racist occultism in the UK: behind the  
Order of Nine Angles (O9A)," Open Democracy, 23 July 2020,  
[https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/countering-radical-right/racist-occultism-uk-behind-order-nine-angles-o9a/](https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/countering-radical-right/racist-occultism-uk-behind-order-nine-angles-o9a/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com),  
and also US Department of Justice, "Former U.S. Army Soldier  
Sentenced To 45 Years In Prison For Attempting To Murder Fellow  
Service Members In Deadly Ambush," 3 March 2023,  
[https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-us-army-soldier-sentenced-45-years-prison-attempting-murder-fellow-service](https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-us-army-soldier-sentenced-45-years-prison-attempting-murder-fellow-service?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).  
On the 764 child predator network, its online precursors, and the  
influence of Nazi-Satanism, see the following: \[a\] Marc-Andre  
Argentino, Barrett G, and M.B. Tyler, "764: The Intersection of  
Terrorism, Violent Extremism, and Child Sexual Exploitation," 19  
January 2024, Global Network on Extremism and Technology,  
[https://gnet-research.org/2024/01/19/764-the-intersection-of-terrorism-violent-extremism-and-child-sexual-exploitation/](https://gnet-research.org/2024/01/19/764-the-intersection-of-terrorism-violent-extremism-and-child-sexual-exploitation/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com);  
\[b\] US Department of Justice, "Member Of Violent 764 Terror  
Network Sentenced to 30 Years in Prison For Sexually Exploiting a  
Child," 7 November 2024,  
[https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/member-violent-764-terror-network-sentenced-30-years-prison-sexually-exploiting-child](https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/member-violent-764-terror-network-sentenced-30-years-prison-sexually-exploiting-child?ref=mereorthodoxy.com);  
\[c\] US Department of Justice, "Four Members of Online Neo-Nazi  
Group that Exploited Minors Charged with Producing Child Sexual  
Abuse Material," 30 January 2025,  
[https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/four-members-online-neo-nazi-group-exploited-minors-charged-producing-child-sexual](https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/four-members-online-neo-nazi-group-exploited-minors-charged-producing-child-sexual?ref=mereorthodoxy.com);  
\[d\] Marc-Andre Argentino, "CVLT Historical Threat Assessment of  
the Precursor to 764," 31 January 2025,  
[https://www.maargentino.com/cvlt-historical-threat-assessment-of-the-precursor-to-764/](https://www.maargentino.com/cvlt-historical-threat-assessment-of-the-precursor-to-764/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com);  
and \[e\] Andrea Marks, "Violent Online Group CVLT Coerced Kids to  
Self-Harm, DOJ Says," Rolling Stone, 6 February 2025,  
[https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/violent-online-group-cvlt-indicted-1235258786/](https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/violent-online-group-cvlt-indicted-1235258786/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). [↩︎](#fnref14)
15. For the catalog for the Routledge series, see  
[https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Fascism-and-the-Far-Right/book-series/FFR?publishedFilter=alltitles&pd=published,forthcoming&pg=1&pp=48&so=pub&view=list](https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Fascism-and-the-Far-Right/book-series/FFR?publishedFilter=alltitles&pd=published,forthcoming&pg=1&pp=48&so=pub&view=list&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). [↩︎](#fnref15)
16. For a listing of available volumes and articles in the journal,  
see  
[https://brill.com/view/journals/fasc/fasc-overview.xml?language=en](https://brill.com/view/journals/fasc/fasc-overview.xml?language=en&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). [↩︎](#fnref16)
### Classical Education is for Everyone
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/classical-education-is-for-everyone/
Last updated: 2026-09-02T13:49:32.000Z
**David Goodwin.** [***Forging the American Mind: A Year-by-Year Guide for Classical Christian Education***](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/forging-the-american-mind-david-goodwin?variant=43214324367394&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) **(Broadside Books, 2026).** 

In 1996, as a new immigrant to America, I started my study of Latin at a North Carolina public school. Fifteen years later, as an adult with a PhD in Classics, I came to Christ, and my academic study of the ancient languages played an instrumental role in that conversion. Reading the Gospels in Greek moved me in ways for which I do not quite have words—this was reading that truly touched the soul. 

I have spent the years since then homeschooling my children, and the study of Latin and Greek has been an important part of the program I have adopted. But also, we have generally followed the precepts of what many now refer to as classical Christian education. The term is admittedly nebulous and overused—sort of like every grocery store of late jumping on board with the protein craze to cram protein into the most unlikely things—protein bread, protein cookies, protein pasta, or protein iced coffee. So it is that every private school now claims to be “classical,” simply because that is the buzz word for good education, and if you’re a good parent, obviously you want the best education you can get for your children, right? But what actually is classical Christian education, at its core? And what makes it so good?

These are questions that David Goodwin has thought much about of late, and his new book, *Forging the American Mind* provides answers, moving from the elementary grades through the end of high school. Goodwin’s own education, he admits, was spotty: “I was about thirty years old before I heard of classical education, and forty before I started my own trek to get one. The payoff is great. I went to state college and got all the way through without even reading a real classic work. I believe anyone can get a classical education if they want one.”

The book is heavy on the prescriptive—for each grouping of grades, Goodwin offers the essential learning outcomes and ideas that classical Christian education would offer for that age, including an essential reading list. In grades K-1, for instance, the key is “cultivating order and memory.” Kids learn how to behave in a particular setting, and they memorize vast quantities of information, because their young brains are naturally wired for this kind of learning. For example, my two older sons were enrolled in Classical Conversations, a classical Christian co-op, for many years. For each child, the early grades were a time of memorizing an astonishing amount of history facts, math facts, and much more. My oldest son skipped a grade in elementary school, because his memorization of math made multiplication and division “click” right away, so we ran out of one grade’s material in the middle of the year and figured we’d go on to another one. The same child later did have to repeat eighth grade, reminding us that children’s learning progression is not steadily linear, but there are developmental leaps and bounds involved.

For grades 2-4, Goodwin emphasizes “introducing history as God’s story” as well as perfecting literacy skills. Then in grades 5-6, students are beginning dialectic training while continuing to cultivate the imagination through the reading of good books. “We should read our children the stories that motivate them to love what God loves and hate what God hates,” he reflects. “This is as true of chemistry as it is of history. It’s as true of math as it’s true of the Bible. Everything has a story, and so everything must be told in a way that leads our kids to love what Christ loves, so they will desire what He desires, so they will live like He lived. Without stories, facts are meaningless.” This is a beautiful and holistic vision, harkening back to the integration of all fields of learning in the Medieval university under the reign of theology, the chief of all disciplines. 

While the early grades are the “grammar” stage of education—the building of key foundations—grades 7-12 are where serious learning can happen precisely because students have the building blocks in mind and can retrieve all of these facts they’ve been memorizing all along to put together a more sophisticated picture of the world. It really is fascinating to watch, for instance, a child who has read a novel set during a particular period make connections to the period in question and go on to discuss and analyze the text more deeply. Reading the Chronicles of Narnia, my eleven-year-old can talk about Britain during WWII, and C.S. Lewis’s public evangelism on the radio. His understanding of the historical place and time when Lewis wrote enhances his understanding of the novels, as does his knowledge of Lewis’s broader apologetic writing.

At all stages, Goodwin emphasizes surrounding students with things that are good, true, and beautiful—especially in the literature that they consume. Classical Christian education is rooted in the virtues, he reflects early in the book—“the look and feel of school” has to be built on the cardinal virtues, the faith virtues (also known as the heavenly virtues). These overlap with the fruits of the Holy Spirit, and the code of chivalry could also be useful to discuss with young children. Such foundation of the virtues and discipline is the essential sine-qua-non for learning is what sets the attitude towards learning in classical Christian school apart from public schools, whose students may never hear mention of the virtues, for instance. And that’s a pity. As writers from antiquity to a fairly recent period of modernity openly recognized, virtuous citizens are better for any state than ones who are not. Prioritizing an education in the virtues, therefore, is a political exercise of supreme importance for the wellbeing of any state. Classical Christian education today certainly aims to recover this mission—thus the emphasis in the book’s title on “the American Mind.” This education, in other words, is a key civilizational enterprise for our country’s future.

In making these arguments, Goodwin’s book is not innovative or earth-shattering. Rather, it is a thoughtful, straightforward, and readily usable reference tool for a parent who is new to classical Christian education and is looking for a clear philosophical explanation of what to do with students, when to do it (level-wise), and (most important) why. 

And yet, I opened the book with a feeling of unease. Yes, this is a book on classical Christian education—what it is, and why it is good for America. I found myself nodding along a lot as I read. But why does this book boast a foreword from Pete Hegseth, a man whose own life both before and after his entering the political sphere exemplifies none of the virtues that we hope our children will acquire from classical Christian education? Are there no better role models to invoke in this important task? 

Indeed, the present book is a sequel to Goodwin’s earlier collaboration with Hegseth—[*The Battle for the American Mind*](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/battle-for-the-american-mind-pete-hegsethdavid-goodwin?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), which thoroughly criticized the present state of American public education. That criticism was well deserved, yet any talk of discipline and virtues and wisdom from Hegseth, a man utterly lacking in all of these areas, rings hollow and disingenuous. I understand that publishing is a business, and publishers need to sell books. But I also find it alarming that this seems to be the way to sell classical Christian education in America right now—by connecting it to individuals like Doug Wilson or Pete Hegseth, whose public witness is less than savory. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

America does need classical Christian education, but I hope that those who choose this educational method for their children do not overlook the importance of truly following the virtues that this education promises to instill in us no less than in our children.
### Nothing Remains
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/nothing-remains/
Last updated: 2026-07-08T14:14:37.000Z
In R. J. Snell’s [*Acedia and Its Discontents*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1621381269?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*,* he compares the difference between living in the world of pre-modernism and the world of postmodernity.

> The pre-modern person lived in an enchanted world where meaning was thought to reside in things themselves—the world was full, sometimes frighteningly full, of meaning. A bone fragment from a saint retained the sanctity and curative power of the saint…for things possessed their own meanings and powers and humans lived alongside those meanings rather than creating them…Things are quite different for the contemporary Western person occupying a disenchanted world where things mean only what we assign them.

> …If one was irritated at the order of the cosmos in 1066, one was irritated, in a very real sense, at the ordering chosen by God; postmodern irritation is directed at nothing, just a coldly impersonal set of forces.

Much has been said about a cultural “vibe shift” away from cynical pessimism, about leaving the postmodern mood behind for something more aspirational.[ Metamodernism](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-vibe-shift-is-metamodern-with-paul-anleitner/id1676174977?i=1000701876287&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), what allegedly comes after postmodernism, is not a wholesale rejection of the irony and skepticism of postmodernism, but a decision to not make your home there, to dare to believe that there is *something* of meaning, beauty, and truth out there. *Backrooms,* A24’s latest box office gamble on a 20-year-old YouTuber-turned-director has paid off big time, mostly by rejecting this “vibe-shift.” The movie’s message is deeply postmodern.

# **The Loop of Trauma**

The plot of the movie centers around two main characters set in the early 90s: a despairing middle-aged alcoholic, Clark, and his therapist, Mary. Both bring a long train of trauma with them. Clark’s dreams were set aside to help his wife pursue law school. Instead of becoming an architect, he runs a failing cheap furniture store to make ends meet. 

But his drinking has pushed his wife away and so we meet Clark cocooned in despair and resentment, pursuing therapy but obviously not making much progress. He is trapped, Mary reminds him, in a “loop of trauma.” Bad things happened to him which lead him to spiral inward, rehashing the injustices of his past rather than forgiving and moving on.

![Clark's Monster And 'Backrooms' Mysteries, Explained](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/07/data-src-image-b3d9f4a8-0371-4088-b04b-10f374f180b8.jpeg "Clark's Monster And 'Backrooms' Mysteries, Explained")

Mary, his therapist, reminds Clark he must escape this loop. Yet, she seems to be caught in her own. She pensively hides behind a mask, as if the real Mary is a thousand miles away. Her mind ruminates on her childhood when her mentally ill mother kept her trapped in her home. 

At one point, we see Mary as a child furtively attempting to crack open a papered-over window, only to have her mother rush at her in a maddened fury. Her home is a cacophony of debris littered hither and thither. The door is barricaded with a pile of furniture. *Why,* the mother asks, *why would you do that Mary? We can’t go outside, it isn’t safe.* Mary, not unlike Clark, is trapped. Even as an adult, her mind constantly is tugged backwards, stuck in the loop of her childhood trauma. Her book is aptly titled: *Now You Can Open the Window Within.*

Parsons is tapping into the existential dilemma that defines his generation. The stories of pre-modernity revolved around man at war with dragons, monsters, or gods. The stories of modernity wrestled with man at war with ideas, the state, the market. The stories of postmodernity spiral inward: man is at war with himself, at war with meaning–that is to say, at war with realizing that there is no meaning beyond the agony of self-discovery, self-expression, and therapeutic self-salvation.

# **Deconstruction**

In the basement of Clark’s furniture store, he finds a mysterious portal to an alternate dimension that is somehow both infinite yet parasitically dependent on the real world. These sprawling labyrinths of rooms seem to be copied on snippets of our world, but done with an amateur’s hand, “Like you were describing a dog to someone who had never seen one,” Clark explains, “and then asked them to draw it.” 

The rooms appear to be man made, feel familiar, but are “off” enough that one feels unsettled just staring at them. Doorways are too small, off-center, or in the floor. Angles run incongruously. Sloped floors lead inexplicably nowhere. Piles of furniture, or signs emerge halfway out of a wall. It is like someone digested our world and then puked a simulacrum of it back out. Or, perhaps more apropos for us (and what I think Parsons intends to evoke), it is like you asked AI to generate an infinite corridor of rooms similar to our own and it hallucinated a number of misshapen, inhuman elements.

![9 shots tracking Mary's childhood home as the Backrooms keeps re-copying  it... until all that's left is a blank yellow room. Memory, degraded one  floor at a time.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/07/data-src-image-0eb0a171-b8e4-4ba8-84bc-c10742319515.jpeg "9 shots tracking Mary's childhood home as the Backrooms keeps re-copying  it... until all that's left is a blank yellow room. Memory, degraded one  floor at a time.")

The chaotic amalgamation of signs, rooms, doors, and other detritus push you into an uncanny valley. It is similar enough to reality that the dissimilarity and crookedness of it all feels unbearable. *Who made these rooms? What is going on here?* It evokes a similar but more disturbing sense of Alice stepping through the looking glass into a reality that seems to be upside down, void of meaning. 

There is no particular reason why this hallway leads to that empty, windowless, beach-themed wallpaper room because in this world there is no reason for anything at all. Signs are gibberish, houses emerge halfway through walls, and stairways extend over vast chasms. In our world, for signs or houses or stairways to exist someone must build them. And therefore, must be built *on purpose.* But here? No one builds and therefore there is no purpose. It simply emerges and what emerges is meaningless.

A recurring scene in the film is Mary’s childhood home being deconstructed. The liminality of the backrooms has a similar deconstructionist motif. At one point, one character while fleeing for his life inexplicably finds an illuminated Christmas tree in one of the rooms. What is it doing here? A Christmas tree is a culturally rich symbol loaded with meaning: the story of Christmas, family, joy, festivity, traditions, etc. This is what French philosopher Jacques Derrida would call a cultural “text.” 

But take that “text” out of the context it is normally set in, and what does it mean here in this bizarre, liminal space? Does this sign still bear its meaning? The character who finds the tree in the film does not see it and read “Christmas” from it. He is baffled and terrified: What is this doing here? What does this mean? The terrifying rejoinder that lurks just beneath the surface for the entirety of the film is: *Nothing, none of this means anything, everything is facade.* Derrida famously wrote: “There is nothing outside of the text.” That is, it may seem like there is a reality, meaning, that exists in of itself behind our cultural texts, the way the idea of “Christmas” exists apart from a Christmas tree. But Derrida argues that reality does not give us our texts, but it is the other way around.

![Christmas Tree Room | Kane Pixels Backrooms Wiki | Fandom](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/07/data-src-image-f61cf114-5a10-4701-9f2d-1a320478cbc3.jpeg "Christmas Tree Room | Kane Pixels Backrooms Wiki | Fandom")

And herein is the genius of Parson’s attempt at an existential horror movie. The greatest fear that lurks behind all fears for human beings living on the other side of modernity is not the presence of monsters or ghouls or serial killers. It is the fear that behind all the edifice and custom of our life, there is a great void of meaninglessness. I do not know if Parsons intended to evoke 20th century deconstructionism through his film, but the interaction with this symbolism demonstrates that this postmodern critique of reality is something that still has cache with the social imaginary of Westerners today.

But, Parsons doesn’t totally believe that “nothing matters.” Like a good postmodern, Parsons fixates on the “realest” thing he knows: our feelings.

# **Bad Therapy**

Eventually, both Clark and Mary–who are psychologically attempting to stop the loop of trauma–are pulled into these “backrooms.” The rooms seem to generate based on poor copies of memories from who is there. Clark and Mary, both of which bear monstrous pain within, quickly find monstrous creatures lurking around the corner. Earlier in the film, Mary performs a method of role play therapy with Clark, having them act out the night that Clark’s wife left him. She is trying to delve deep into his repressed feelings with the hope that venting them will provide relief from Clark’s anger and resentment. 

But down here, she has in some sense *literally* descended into Clark’s psyche and found that the expression of feelings doesn’t always bring health, but can summon something sinister. Earlier, Clark claims he wants to “escape the loop of trauma.” But down here, in the deepest recesses of Clark’s mind, we find something different. Mary has sincerely tried to help Clark, but in the backrooms she does not find a good but misunderstood man, but (at root) a deeply selfish, cruel, and sinful one. And here, Parsons seems to land a legitimate shot at the worst iterations of therapy culture today. We cannot blame all of our problems on the trauma inflicted upon us. Unless we are willing to take responsibility for ourselves and move beyond the past, we will be trapped in the loop.

# **The Monster Within**

The question of *Backrooms* is “What does the great human drama of man finding himself look like in a meaningless world?” The kaleidoscope of debris and architecture-on-LSD is an uncomfortable assault on the familiar customs of purpose and meaning. But the real horror emanates from the one load-bearing beam that postmodernism has for meaning: what if the truest thing about you is *not* that you are misunderstood or traumatized; what if, deep down, youare responsible for the hurt and pain? In a world that has flushed metaphysics down the toilet, the only “real” thing we have is our experience, our feelings. And if we fail to find salvation within, if we “open the window” and find not light, but darkness, then nothing remains. Our only hope is snuffed out.

As a Christian, I find movies and stories that expose the price of postmodernism to be both deeply unsettling and when done well, (as *Backrooms* is) deeply satisfying. It is similar to reading Friedrich Nietzsche or early French existentialists. Here we have someone who is willing to pay the full fare of a materialist worldview with total honesty, even if the cost is agonizing to the mind. It is a bracing slap of reality against the cheery atheism of those who celebrate God’s death without realizing the price of unchaining the earth from the sun.

There is a kind of internal slingshot experience I have as I watched the film. I am pulled into the despair and meaningless of the story, only to be shot back into my own worldview suffused with a metaphysics that extends far beyond my inner world of feelings or cultural world of signs and texts. God exists, has ribboned this world with meaning, and has prepared a salvation for me that is thicker and more durable than any thin soup therapy-culture is eager for me to drink. My hope isn’t that the further down the rabbit hole of my psyche I descend, the more I am able to find inner peace. My hope is in a Savior who dies to redeem monsters and sinners, and transform them into beloved, forgiven saints. Perhaps the more honest people are about the cost of a life without God, the more eagerly they will seek after the Truth.
### Antifragile Ministry
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/antifragile-ministry/
Last updated: 2026-07-07T11:00:42.000Z
*Each year at the Presbyterian Church in America's (PCA) General Assembly a group of younger pastors gather for the annual Next Generation Forum, which creates a space for rising leaders in the church to talk about the issues facing the PCA and the church more broadly. We are honored to publish the talks presented each year. Today we are running Robert Hasler's remarks. We published Derek Rishmawy's yesterday.*

The subject of tonight’s event is addressing the question of what the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) can and might do about the challenge of generational turnover. Of course, that challenge includes the passing of the torch from Boomers to Gen Xers and Millennials as well as reaching new generations of men and women with the Gospel. 

Where I want to start, however, is by reminding us that ours is not the only institution facing down the uncertainty of generational turnover. All throughout America, institutions of every sort are bracing themselves for the fallout.

With that in mind, I want to frame my talk by asserting what I believe are twin realities. 

First, that the PCA is already grappling with the challenges of generational turnover and that it is no small contributor to the restlessness we feel as a church right now. 

The second is that we have no more idea of what will happen when the Boomers, by force of nature, finally pass on the torch of ecclesial governorship than what will happen when they no longer wield the same influence in politics, markets, and the culture. If what we feel now is any indicator, all we might be able to say with certainty is that the future has never felt so uncertain. 

As I prepared my remarks, the greatest temptation was to try and offer some all-encompassing diagnostic that would explain these generational fault lines and illuminate the future for us. I’ve tried, instead, to internalize the lesson I learned from my old seminary professor, Dr. Jack Collins: I am not a prophet and I’d be crazy for wanting to be.

But that won’t stop me from making some educated guesses about what the future landscape of ministry might look like, and I think that starts by accounting for two key trends in the broader culture. 

First of all, we know that the U.S. fertility rate is well below replacement level. People in America have not – and are not – having as many children as previous generations. That a declining population will have to be counteracted either by massive reforms in the economy or through higher levels of immigration in a country already fraught with populist sentiment raises questions and concerns that go far beyond technical solutions; they inspire existential questions of national identity.

This is not so different from what we face in the PCA. In staring down the challenge of losing a large percentage of our membership roles as our fathers and mothers in the faith ramp back their involvement and eventually pass on to glory, we face immediate questions of resourcing and leadership which in turn inspire the kind of existential wrestling that leads to questions like, “What kind of PCA do we want to be?”

Secondly, there’s also the matter of the so-called “vibe shift” — or what some people call Gen Z’s seemingly higher appreciation for religion broadly and Christianity in particular. While I think the vibe shift is real, it remains a far cry from the kind of national “revival” we heard so much about in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination. There’s also the question of whether the vibe shift has a Roman or Eastern flavor to it. 

I suspect a lot of you here, like myself, have anecdotal evidence that something *is* going on. The data gives the story a slightly different shape. My best read of it is the precipitous climb of the “nones” has reached its zenith, for now at least; Gen Z is probably attending church at higher frequencies than previous generations; and that church is far more likely to be nondenominational than anything else.

As I’ve thought about these trends in my own ministry context, I’ve come to subdivide the challenge of generation turnover into three distinct but interrelated challenges – challenges I think we’ll have to face in our individual ministries and as a denomination. 

Those three challenges are a resource challenge, a leadership challenge, and an evangelism and discipleship challenge, and they’ll be a roadmap of sorts for the rest of my talk.

## The Resource Problem

The first challenge that the generation turnover poses for our denomination is a resource challenge. Now, there’s a very conventional and perfectly legitimate way to think about the resource problem, and that’s to focus on finances and manpower and addressing possible shortages in both. But let me offer another way to think about the resource problem. 

Like I said before, I don’t think we can really predict how extensive the disruption caused by generational turnover will be. Interrelated contractions in the economy and in population pose civilizational challenges that extend far beyond the doors of our churches and the pocketbooks of our members. 

So, let’s just suppose it’s way more disruptive than anything we can imagine. At the expense of sounding overdramatic, what if the level of freedom, prosperity, and stability we enjoy today isn’t permanent or inevitable? After all, “there is a time for everything,” Ecclesiastes reminds us. 

Now, I could be wrong. Maybe in the face of an even larger, more existential, social, and political conflagration than anything we’ve experienced in our recent history our civil authorities will learn from their past errors and lead with prudence over ideology, Americans of all stripes will link arms, and everyone will overcome their individual passions and prejudices for the sake of the common good. 

But what if that doesn’t happen? What if instead we see things that will make us pine for the good ole’ days of 2020?

Let me put it this way: We can’t limit ourselves to thinking about the resource challenge as only a drop in giving or volunteers without taking too many ancillary social and political conditions for granted. History hasn’t stopped. We must recognize that the benefits and privileges churches have historically enjoyed under an older political consensus could radically change under a new one. What would you do, for example, if you and your elders and deacons woke up and suddenly had no access to your church bank accounts because you transgressed the new cultural orthodoxy by preaching biblical truth? How would you keep diaconate resources flowing to those who needed them? Is your church resilient enough to keep ministry going when your lease at the school or your agreement with the campus administrators is torn up, or your tax-exempt status revoked? How would accounting for *that* kind of contingency change, not just your budget, but your whole philosophy of ministry resources?

I’m not trying to be a doomer. I’m simply trying to convey that there are resource challenges and there are *resource* challenges; and we have to be ready for both, even if preparing for the latter feels a bit unsavory. “Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves,” our Lord says. 

Ask yourself: What is your church doing *right now* to be resilient enough to weather a significant resource challenge caused by generational turnover, even if we don’t feel its full effects for 25 or 50 years from now?

## The Leadership Challenge

The second challenge that comes with generational turnover is a leadership challenge. Again, I believe this is something we’re already experiencing and it goes far beyond the sort of friction caused by different groups in the PCA vying for leadership roles in churches, presbyteries, and permanent committees. 

I’m talking about the challenge of facing new paradigms of pastoral leadership that are emerging with this generational handoff. Often, evangelicals adopt and defend these paradigms on the basis that they are corrections from the perceived errors of older generations and so meet the demands of Zoomers. 

The most popular fad right now is an evolution in what I’ve heard [described](https://mereorthodoxy.com/reading-the-exvangelicals/) as a kind of “guru” model of pastoral leadership. It’s a newer version of the evangelical leadership style supercharged by a new technological landscape where pastors are not so much expected to offer a regular foretaste of heavenly life through the ministry of Word and Sacrament as they are supposed to participate as one more voice among a host of evangelical leaders who provide unimpeachable solutions for emotional, spiritual, intellectual, vocational, and (unfortunately, we’ve all heard the Mark Driscoll clips) sexual wholeness.

For better or worse, many in younger generations believe legacy evangelical institutions and leaders proved themselves anemic throughout the controversies of the last ten years. Some are gravitating towards “guru” pastors who will tell them with “Thus saith the Lord” certainty not just what the Scriptures say about the magistrate’s divinely ordered office, but also things like who you should vote for (or, at least, who *not* to vote for); not just that it is the parents' duty to train up their children in the fear and admonition of the Lord, but also exactly what kind of school you should send your kid to; not just what godly womanhood looks like, but that you have a responsibility to undo the nineteenth amendment.

How did we get here? As we all know, it’s not that the subject of politics, education, or gender are totally beyond the scope of ordinary ministry. But I think because evangelicalism already suffers from poorly distinguishing the church from other kinds of institutions, and as those other kinds of institutions that would normally address those subjects have suffered or betrayed their own core mission, it’s the church that’s been put in this position of picking up the slack. 

Today, younger generations, for better or worse, expect their pastor to have answers to these questions and more, and plenty of less responsible men have taken advantage of the market demand to peddle their own personal or political agendas. 

Now, what I find personally striking about this new development in pastoral leadership is that it’s actually quite old. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that on this point modern evangelicalism has “horseshoe’d” so hard that it’s become a kind of uniquely American form of Roman Catholicism – a simple, but not ordinary form of Christianity where adherents participate in a strange “new way to do church” all the while “guru” leaders who wield bishop-like power issue non-negotiable edicts telling you how to think and what to do about the most pressing matters.

As pastors and elders in the PCA, we have the unique challenge of pointing people to a different, uniquely Protestant way of pastoral leadership and about the Christian faith – leading people toward a form of Christianity that is ordinary, but not simple. 

It is ordinary because our “way of doing church” continues to center the priorities we find in the early church of Acts 2: word, prayer, and sacrament within the embodied, covenant community of God’s people. But it is also not simple, because we believe Christians are called to something quite amazing, something extraordinary even, something I think we might take for granted sometimes: disciplined lives of ongoing maturity into the image of our Savior.

We, as pastors and elders, have to lead people to understand that there is no shortcut to the good life nor any way to offshore the working out of their sanctification. 

And that will require confident, bold preaching concerning the things the Scriptures principally teach. We have to be bolder about God, bolder about man, bolder about sin, bolder about the Gospel, bolder about worship, and bolder about the duties required of man. But also bolder to lead men and women to work out for themselves those things Scripture leaves to individual conscience. 

That’s our calling. And it is not one which we can afford to be ambivalent about. Our flocks, empowered by the indwelling Holy Spirit, and ministered to through a life of embodied participation in the local church, still have to do the hard work themselves – to pattern their thoughts after God’s thoughts, to grow in wisdom, and act for the good of others and for the glory of God in all the unique circumstances of their lives. 

## The Evangelism and Discipleship Challenge

Finally, I want to end with the evangelism and discipleship challenge. Here, I want to try and offer one reading on what’s going on with public sentiment among younger generations towards religion broadly and Christianity in particular. 

I think it’s fair to say that most of our evangelism and discipleship resources of the last few decades have been oriented towards a “spiritual-not-religious” audience of upwardly-mobile, young professionals who were stakeholders in a globalized, small-l liberal, world order. These were de-churched, individually-minded people who, despite their hangups with organized religion, largely wished to retain its moral and ethical framework even if it took the work of a good apologist to show them that.

It was Tim Keller who so excellently exposed their hypocrisy in *The Reason for God*: You can choose to personally value things like justice and toleration and reject the worldview upon which they’re built, Keller preached, but there’s no integrity in that. 

I think our challenge will be adapting the resources we’ve inherited to reach a completely new generation with completely different ideological assumptions about the world and their place in it. 

Whereas the “spiritual-not-religious” were primarily fascinated with Christianity as a means of *preserving* what they liked about the current world order, I want to suggest to you that our future might be one of “religious-not-spiritual” men and women (and men in particular) fascinated with Christianity because of its potential to *fix* what they perceive are modern liberalism’s failures.

Just a couple months ago, *The New York Times* [reported](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/15/opinion/ritual-connection-meaning-community.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) more and more people are finding themselves attracted to the idea of concrete, religious rituals to combat their sense of loneliness and detachment. Ross Douthat, in his new book, suggests the folks who at first embraced a choose-your-own-adventure spiritualism, mixing and matching spiritual practices from a diverse array of religious traditions, are exhausted and might be ready to accept the idea that the way to truth and wholeness means submitting your individual identity to a single, coherent religious tradition and community that’s bigger than yourself.

This is what I’m encountering in my ministry context, especially in the Army. And more and more, I’m noticing a subtle but important distinction in the way seekers and skeptics are framing their questions. 

Whereas the “spiritual-not-religious” were drawn by the prospect of achieving personal moral integrity; the “religious-not-spiritual” are far more interested in Christianity’s prospects for civilizational integrity and renewal. 

And it manifests itself in two different ways. Elite-aligned individuals are inclined to Roman Catholicism, its aesthetics, and the lure of something that, at least from what they’re told, is much older, more stable, and therefore more capable of resisting modernity and postmodernity than anything Protestantism can offer. 

At the same time, there is the more populist form embodied in the aspirational message of Charlie Kirk who included going to church alongside getting married and having kids as essential responsibilities for anyone serious about making America great again. Many of these folks are naturally inclined to the low-church, nondenominational expressions of Protestantism.

And the question that I’m wrestling with is simply this: How come they’re not coming to us?

Two quick thoughts and then I’ll wrap up. 

If I could be so bold, I think elite expressions of evangelicalism (and the PCA, insofar as we swim in those waters) tend to treat the stereotypical Zoomer who walks through the doors of a church for what I’ve called “civilizational” motivations with far more cynicism than they deserve. I heard Glen Scrivener talk about this recently on a [podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/goodmakers-podcast-with-paul-anleitner/id1401730159?i=1000772802983&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and I think it’s brilliant because he perfectly encapsulated what I’ve come across.

None of us, I suspect, would ever be as suspicious of the person — the addict or the criminal — whose life is crumbling around them and walks through the doors of the church because he or she believes Christianity can “fix” them. Yet, we seem to keep at arm’s length the person who expresses the exact same sentiment only about Christianity having the moral infrastructure to “fix” their society. My sense is that too many in our tribe automatically assume such a sentiment must come from a dangerous place of triumphalism when oftentimes it reflects a poignant discovery about secularism’s empty promises and the humble acceptance of man’s powerlessness in the face of such overwhelming brokenness. 

But here’s the second thought: With the willingness to receive these folks comes the responsibility of straightforward and long-suffering discipleship. 

We must be willing to extend far more grace even with the conviction to say, as I think Keller would, that you can choose to commit yourself to the defense and preservation of the West’s fundamentally Christian *ethos*, and *not* embrace the plain teaching of Scripture, or be personally humbled by an encounter with the living God, but there’s no integrity in that. 

## Conclusion

Just yesterday I preached from Psalm 11 to our small church plant in Abilene, and it struck me afterwards how much the passage speaks to this challenge in particular.

“If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” This is the question posed to David — one that expresses the sense of hopelessness in the face of physical, emotional, moral, spiritual, and, yes, civilizational uncertainty. It’s not that dissimilar to the question Gen Z is asking.

How does David respond? He starts by orienting his heart to God’s heavenly throne. He finds refuge in God and in the memory of God’s righteous judgement on the wicked. God has not been blind to injustice and wickedness in the past. Surely, he is not blind to it in our world today.

Importantly, Psalm 11 doesn’t besmirch utilitarian motivations for seeking refuge in God. It just won’t let you stop there. Listen to the last verse: “For the Lord is righteous, he loves righteous deeds, the upright shall see his face.”

Psalm 11 directs us past the important desire for earthly safety and justice and peace and order and to that which all things are properly ordered — to the ultimate *telos* of human life itself: the beatific vision, to see our God and Maker face to face, without a veil, and to enjoy him forever. 

If we preach that. If we confess that. If we lead people to that, regardless of whatever generational turnover may bring us, I have no doubt the PCA of the future will be as strong as ever.
### Rest Is Not a Thing to be Bought, but Received
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/rest-is-not-a-thing-to-be-bought-but-received/
Last updated: 2026-07-07T11:00:34.000Z
In my growing up years I was blessed to travel often. Regular beach vacations; various youth group camps and even a missions trip taken with other young teenagers; a school trip to Greece and Italy; trips to England, Austria, the Bahamas, and other bucket-list spots before I was eighteen.

I learned many good things from these trips. But I learned certain mental habits, too: I learned to anticipate the excitement that colored my life as a trip approached. I learned to think about seasons and years as pathways to some more riveting place than my local suburbia. I learned to expect a certain pinch of homebound despondency.

Meanwhile, in all the years of my youthful travels, I attended a rigorous Christian school and participated in various extracurriculars and club sports such that “normal life” was a bustling one. All that I participated in was due to the generosity and hard work of my parents. But without anyone’s conscious intention or alarm, I, together with my peers, was treading as a teenager the waters of upper middle class American culture: the pursuit of excellence, the Protestant work ethic, constant busyness. A busyness whose best respite was vacation. 

The time between Memorial Day and Labor Day is, for many, the time of vacations. As spring approaches its close, vacation becomes a primary topic for small talk. “Do you have any travel plans for the summer?” the dental hygienist asks, as does the acquaintance one chats with after church. 

Around this time, too, refrains resound about the unshakeable busyness of the season and the great need for a break. Or one will hear church leaders promote various spiritual summer getaways—whether youth group camps or marriage conferences or women’s retreats—with similar language: *let’s all depart to* \[some peaceful place by the beach or mountains\]*, and there we can have fellowship and spiritual growth*!

How we talk about our lives and desires is telling. Our speech about vacations and retreats reveals that Americans both in and outside of the church have accepted a particular mindset about work, life, and time. The mindset could perhaps be summed up this way: we are (and ought to be) busy all the time, and as such, we need a getaway from our ordinary lives in order to refresh ourselves and connect with others, particularly family members and close friends, or even to connect fruitfully with God. 

The problem with this mindset is not that it rests on false claims. Our busyness hardly needs to be proven: according to the [U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics,](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.nr0.htm?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in the average American married-couple family, both parents work. Meanwhile, most American children attend school for about eight hours a day and give their evenings and weekends to sports and activities. It’s not surprising, then, that [many](https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/emerging-trends-and-enduring-patterns-in-american-family-life/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) American families don’t have (or make) time enough to eat dinner together. 

Still, the “getaway” mindset represents a departure, though a covert one, from the Christian understanding of rest and time. As such, Christians would do well to be wary of it, even while appreciating opportunities to vacation. 

Our consumerist culture would have us believe that true rest requires spending money to abscond several times a year from our given places and vocations and revel in some other good (whether a legitimate good, like the beauty of the seaside, or not). Rest is, in this framework, to be pursued and purchased, not to be accepted as a gift. Rest and peace are always *out there*, away from the banality of the ordinary, not woven into it. Rest is perpetually incompatible with our callings and the consequent rhythms of our weeks and months—and our callings and routines are themselves perpetually burdensome, in part because rest is not a regular part of them. 

What we need for rest, however, is not a weekend at an isolated mountain Airbnb or at a conference away from our children, listening to the most engaging Christian speakers, though these things can have their places as blessings from God. What we need, rather, is the divine rhythm of the Sabbath. 

The getaway mindset echoes the concept of the Sabbath in its recognition of the human frame: we are limited; we require respite from our work. But the echo is only a faint one. The getaway mindset, unlike the Sabbath, flows from the pressures of a consumeristic and workaholic culture more so than from Scripture or tradition, and it proposes no limits on or order of acceptable restful activity and no clearly defined purpose for it. 

The Sabbath, meanwhile, springs from God’s Word: after exemplifying and instituting a day of rest at creation, God ordered the life of Israel around the worship and rest of the Sabbath, and he included the injunction to “remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” among the moral laws of the Ten Commandments. Ever since the apostles began to worship and fellowship on the first day of the week in honor of Jesus’ resurrection, the church has in some fashion understood and taught that the “Lord’s Day” was to be a holy day of worship, fellowship, and rest distinct from the Jewish observance of Saturday. Different traditions deal with the specifics of the day differently, but a thread runs through historic Protestant and Catholic teaching: God still orders the time of his people such that one day in seven—now Sunday—is set apart for his purposes. 

Many modern Christians have no concept of the Lord’s Day as the Christian Sabbath. Or they apply the fourth commandment individually, maintaining that they can choose a day for personal rest or that they can celebrate it on Saturday apart from the gathered people of God. Others insist that because “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,” we ought not burden ourselves or others with the concept of a moral injunction to cease. 

If only we took that language seriously instead of using it to support our favored conclusions. The Sabbath was made *for man*, which means that it is a gift. And, as Jesus’ interactions with the Pharisees show, it is a gift which God designed to bring life. Gifts cannot be recast into whatever we would like them to be. Gifts are defined by their giver, even though recipients may enjoy them in different ways. 

As a gift, the Sabbath asks of us reception, not ignorance. It does not require purchase either, unlike the vacation. In fact, many in Christian history would maintain that it requires usto *not* spend money—to be entirely free from the world of commerce and consumption for the sake of worship. 

The gift of the Sabbath is, in some ways, a paradoxical one. The Sabbath principle requires the devoted action of man, yet that action is one that looks like inaction to the world: the actions of ceasing and of worshipping seem entirely useless. It enjoins us to rest yet prescribes how we ought to rest: “not going your own ways, or seeking your own pleasure, or talking idly,” but by delighting in the Lord, as Isaiah 58 teaches. 

The Sabbath is a routine, one day in seven, yet it is an invitation into things that are decidedly not routine but sacred: the sacraments, the preached Word, the fellowship of believers, and other things which fall into the category of what the Westminster Catechism calls “holy resting.” 

Where the getaway is an occasional, temporary departure from ordinary life altogether, the Sabbath, as an ordinary departure from otherwise ordinary commitments, orders our lives in a sacred rhythm. 

Theologian Alastair Roberts [discusses](https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/work/the-divine-rhythm-of-work-and-sabbath?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) this aspect of the Old Covenant Sabbath as follows: 

> The daily cycle of work and rest, the weekly cycle of six days of labor followed by the Sabbath, the annual cycle of feasts, and the larger cycle of sabbatical years both punctuated and variegated Israel’s time. Time was meaningfully articulated, structured, ordered to new ends, and differentiated in its character. Through such an articulation of time, Israel was granted the possibility of transcending a flat quotidian grind. Time was “redeemed”... In such a manner, work could be bounded, differentiated from rest and leisure, flowing from a higher source and being ordered toward a higher end. Bitter toil and cruel bondage could become good work and sacred service…

> Sabbath presented work with an end, being both a cessation of otherwise unrelenting toil and a purpose: an orientation of work to something greater that upholds its goodness.

By placing the Lord’s rest at the heart of Israel, the entire realm of man’s times and labors was reordered.

Though the calendar of the New Covenant church is appropriately different from that of the Old Covenant, our time is still “meaningfully articulated, structured, ordered to new ends.” To us, too, God graciously extends the “possibility of transcending a flat quotidian grind.” Here the possible becomes actual not if we are wealthy enough to afford a beach house or if we are “spiritual” enough to take a silent retreat but if we are humble enough to submit ourselves to God and accept, through Christ, his gifts. 

It goes without saying that some vocations such as those of firefighters or emergency medical personnel regularly require Sundays to be taken up with, in the words of the Westminster, “works of necessity and mercy.” But most of us can in fact submit our Sundays to this divine order if only we have the courage to welcome certain limits. If we were to allow our lives to be ordered by the Lord’s Day, we would not feel the overwhelming need for a break from them. A life that is centered around and satisfied in the transcendent worship and festivity of the Sabbath cannot be subsumed by the busyness our culture presses on us. Neither can it be overcome with the desire to flee from one’s given place. 

In his famous work *Leisure: The Basis of Culture*, philosopher Josef Pieper contrasts the world of total work with that of religious festivals like the weekly Sabbath. He writes: 

> It is in the nature of religious festival to make a space of abundance and wealth, even in the midst of external poverty in material things... Thus in the very midstream of worship, and only from there, comes a supply that cannot be consumed by the world of work, a space of uncountable giving, untouched by the ever-turning wheel of buying and selling, an overflow released from all purpose, and an authentic wealth: it is festival-time. And it is only within such festival–time that the reality of leisure can unfold and be fully realized. 

Perhaps this year, as summer wends on with its various gifts, we should not so yearn for our getaways and inwardly mourn when they are past but instead seek after that “space of uncountable giving… and an authentic wealth” that flows from the worship and rest of the Lord’s Day.
### Ministry After the Boomer Apocalypse
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/ministry-after-the-boomer-apocalypse/
Last updated: 2026-07-06T11:00:24.000Z
*Each year at the Presbyterian Church in America's (PCA) General Assembly a group of younger pastors gather for the annual Next Generation Forum, which creates a space for rising leaders in the church to talk about the issues facing the PCA and the church more broadly. We are honored to publish the talks presented each year. Today we are running Derek Rishmawy's remarks. We will publish those of Robert Hasler tomorrow.*

To begin, I want to set the stage to frame up the “advice” I am going to give.

## Boomer Apocalypse

First, we need to begin by acknowledging the demographic challenges facing the PCA, which we might refer to as “the boomer apocalypse.” (This term originated with the Australian pastor and podcaster Mark Sayers.)

Essentially, in about 15-20 years or so, when the Boomer generation is set to recede from the scene, we are going to see [a massive demographic shift](https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/when-are-half-your-members-going?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that will impact (a) raw numbers, (b) culture and institutional knowledge, forms, and leadership, and (c) pure dollars coming into fund the ministry of the church. 

The shape of the PCA is set to change radically no matter what we do.

## Obsolescence and De-Churching

Connected to this, I want to add a related phenomena: the massive dechurching of America and the obsolescence of American religion. I won’t rehash this at length, but most of you have heard [the stats from Ryan Burge, Michael Graham, and Jim Davis](https://zondervanacademic.com/products/the-great-dechurching?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), or heard a podcast about [Christian Smith’s work on the obsolescence of religion](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/why-religion-went-obsolete-9780197800737?cc=us&lang=en&&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). In the last 25 years, 40 million people stopped going to church—and actually, Graham and Burge’s new book argues that it’s closer to 60 million. Beyond that, traditional religion has continually lost market share, not to atheism, but general non-traditional spiritualism, or nothing in particular. While the Boomers were actually key to this movement, their loss from the scene can only seem to accelerate and amplify that dynamic across the landscape.

## Never-Churched? 

Third, while we all know about the de-churched, we must recognize that an increasingly large segment of youngsters that campus ministers are meeting are the “never churched.” 

Anecdotally, at UC Irvine if I run into a student who is not currently attending a church and doesn't identify themselves as religious explicitly, I am less likely to find somebody who is *formerly* religious than in past years. This means they’re not Christian and they don’t typically have religious baggage. But it also means they have no context for Christian doctrine, truth, or practice.

## Vibe Shift and Quiet Revival? 

Finally, some of you have heard about the Vibe Shift and the alleged “Quiet Revival.” I’ll say that, briefly, [the Vibe Shift is very real](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/every-vibe-shift-lords-hand/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), but [the Quiet Revival basically has no data for it](https://premierchristian.news/en/news/article/we-re-deeply-disappointed-quiet-revival-data-found-to-be-inaccurate?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). On the ground, things have shifted politically, and I think even created an openness to spiritual conversations broadly among the younger generation and, yes especially among young men. That said, statistically speaking, there is no data telling us that we should be banking on any kind of quiet revival to come save us.

I mention these realities, not because they change our call as ministers of the gospel to reach and shepherd the coming generations—the call is the same. Nevertheless, we answer the call under the conditions of history and to my mind it does two things: the boomer apocalypse and dechurching of America lends urgency to the task and perhaps gives shape to some of how we go about it. 

Thankfully, the PCA is not doing bad comparatively. We are [one of the only denominations to see any growth in the last few years](https://byfaithonline.com/talking-pca-stats-with-ryan-burge/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and [anywhere from 25-30 percent of our denomination is under 30](https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/everything-you-could-ever-want-to?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). I attribute that last fact largely to two things. First, thank God my church has lots and lots of babies. Second, to the work of RUF. 

Admittedly, I am biased, but given that RUF reaches about 20,000 students across 160 or so campuses right now, it’s not crazy to think that starting RUF was one of the most forward-thinking things our founding fathers did when starting the PCA 50 years ago. When it comes to reaching the next generation, I am sure [Andrew Rein](https://ruf.org/staff/rein/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) would want me to say: Keep partnering with RUF, keep funding it, keep encouraging it, and keep making your churches welcome to RUF students. And I am saying that.

But I'll say more than that. On the practical side I want to make three suggestions that I will categorize in two boxes. RUF’s tagline is “reaching students for Christ and equipping them to serve the church,” and so those will be my boxes: Reaching Students and Equipping Them to Serve the Church. 

Then, I will end with one meta-comment on how this relates to some of our vibe-related denominational tensions. 

## Reaching 

### Preaching has to be Exegetical, Catechetical, and Apologetic. 

This is another way of saying that when it comes to reaching Gen Z, both in college and post-college, much of the post-Christian, un-churched, religiously pluralistic, spiritual-not-religious landscape needs to be consciously borne in mind in our preaching. 

To break that down, preaching needs to be exegetical–a clear exposition of the text we have in front of us, because what else are we doing when giving people God's Word? One of the most important things I've learned over the years in working with college students is that while there is absolutely a place for understanding and humility and giving space for differing views as people come into your ministry, sheer confidence in the Word of God and an unflappable drive to apply it and expound it directly and unashamedly is essential for actually reaching them. And you just need to believe that. You need to believe that Gen Z is not the unique species of human upon whom the Spirit of God cannot work.

Here’s the thing, Gen Z is burned out on cynicism. Some have heard about the metamodern moment—that after cynical postmodernity, we have a longing for a post-ironic turn to belief, to earnest faith, to the embrace of identities more solid than deconstruction alone can offer. 

As [Paul Anleiter has noted](https://mereorthodoxy.com/welcome-to-metamodernity/), Creed made a comeback, *Top Gun: Maverick* and even the recent *Superman* moved past grimdark cynicism. Why? Everybody is being constantly bombarded by this take, and that YouTube video and that TED talk and that influencer TikTok and it is tiring to be constantly being sold and then seeing through grift after grift. And the most important thing you can do for an 18 to 30 year old is to declare to them clearly and directly what God's Word has said for thousands of years, unchanged because that's where the Spirit works. The Spirit and the Word are not a gimmick.

Second, preaching needs to be catechetical. Younger folks—both Christian and non-Christian—increasingly have no prior Christian architecture of belief metaphysically, ethically, or narratively. Reaching them requires a lot of Paul’s Acts 17 mindset of being willing to clearly teach in a way that is aimed at regularly instructing outsiders and beginners in the faith from the text at the same time. It means coming to the text not with *advanced* dogmatics questions or *advanced* biblical theology questions at the forefront, but often Nicene Creed and Apostles’ Creed and basic Ten Commandments questions as part of how you frame your preaching and teaching. In other words, the Confessions and Catechisms are evangelism tools, not roadblocks!

Third, it actually just does need to be apologetic. Not in a scared, embarrassed, fearful way or even in a needlessly offensive and aggressive way. But you should be attuned to showing how God’s Word and the Good News of Jesus can answer the defeaters, objections, and assumptions of the pagan hearts of our Christians and our non-Christians. This is Charles Taylor, right? Everybody is “cross pressured”, meaning your Christians have pagan objections, and your pagans have some Christian longings and so speaking to one audience is speaking to both. And this isn’t selling out the text because these texts were written to a people in missional contexts! This is Acts 17 stuff.

This year, I walked through the Apostles’ Creed, the 10 Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer. I used the Confessions at key points, answered questions, gave out books, pointed to good podcasts and did not shy away from having a Protestantism book club that was one of the most successful things we did. It feels basic to say this, but if we are going to be aggressively reaching and evangelizing the next generation, our regular Sunday preaching and small groups needs to be consciously and consistently pitched at them in that way. 

As a side note, all of this applies in similar measure to younger ages like high school and junior high. The best way to reach the next generation is to produce them, baptize them, and keep them.

### Hospitality

The second point here is also a very basic one. Hospitality needs to be core to your church or local ministry’s philosophy of outreach. One of the most important things I do as a campus minister is buy kids Chick-fil-a and Chipotle and get them into random families’ homes at church. 

Obviously, the church is a hospitable place and in liquid modernity, we should do this for everyone. 

But this is especially the case for Gen Z, whom Jonathan Haidt calls “The Anxious Generation.” They are most on their phones, most online, most unchurched, and the absolute loneliest and disconnected generation in America. They are struggling with severe mental health issues, anxiety, struggling with agency, and hopelessness. They also have lower social skills across the board, they are failing to launch, and by several measures are just behind. So while they are safer (ie. less drinking, more exercise, less sex), they are less social, less able to date, and make connections. They are also more divided politically by gender (young men leaning to the right and young women leaning strongly to the left), and more suspicious of each other.

But this is part of why providing regular avenues of embodied engagement, in homes, at church, over coffee, over service projects, or other ways is not just being an event coordinator, but doing real outreach.

We are Presbyterians so one of the easiest ways is actually to go all out Sabbath-maxxing. Our church doesn't own its own building, so we can't do an evening service but there are frequently small groups that meet at those times. And the family from church that opens its home on Sunday afternoon that has over my interns and staff and several of my students has been a core avenue of welcome to this deeply disconnected generation.

Incarnational ministry was a buzzword about 10 years ago, and I have criticisms of it theologically. But the basic point about breaking bread and sharing community together on a Sunday afternoon where you get a student to log off, and maybe touch some grass, or providing avenues for families with kids to do so is going to be so important and so countercultural in the coming decade or more. The churches that have elders, deacons, and families who are aggressive about inviting them into their lives and into their homes along with the preaching and the programming and the worship are going to be the ones that are doing the work here. 

## Equipping

When it comes to “equipping” the next generation to serve the church, on campus I try to focus at least on having a decent ministry team with plenty of places to hand off responsibility to students, such as small groups, Bible studies, and event planning. But I don't really want to talk about that, beyond saying that our churches got the Boomers involved a couple of generations ago by risking and allowing them to make choices and handle important things in the church. We'll need to do the same in our ministries. 

### Risk and Pastoral Pipeline.

This willingness to risk is not unrelated to the point I want to focus on, which is mainly the need to build up the pastoral recruitment and training pipeline. Over the last few years there's been a lot of discourse around the upcoming problem of empty pulpits, drop-offs in church plants, and declining enrollment at seminaries. The OPC just said they had 40 pulpits open—which is a lot for the OPC.

Now, some of this is due to basic demographic realities: there are just fewer members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Beyond that, though, there is a general layer of anxiety and fear and an unwillingness to risk among young men that goes hand in hand with some of the broader cultural trends that we have already named. 

Again, I’ll say that one of the best pastoral pipelines we have in our youth in the PCA is just RUF. Just two years ago we sent four students to seminary to enter Presbyterian ministry and I don't think I'm remarkable as a CM. The RUF internship generally has something like 80 interns, half male, most of whom are thinking of seminary. Proportionally, that’s not bad.

But that said, I don’t think it should be the only, or even the main pipeline. I think the men in this room (Gen X pastors, millennial pastors, and even the Gen Z pastors) in our local churches need regularly keep their head on a swivel within your congregations for young men to disciple who you specifically think have talents, capacities, and the shapeable character of a future minister. Which is to say, we need to up our game at embodying the external call of God upon men for the ministry. 

To that end, I think as a cohort we must ditch the mindset that tells young men that if there's anything else they can do and be happy besides being a pastor, to go do it. I don’t believe that’s proper to our understanding of internal and external calling. Even if this is somebody who could plausibly go out into the field and do something else, if we see in young men the qualities, capacities, and gifts for the pastorate, we ought not be scared to say something to that effect. 

I have a firm grasp of the Reformed doctrine of vocation. It is right and good to teach our young men to glorify God in their callings in business, politics, law, the arts, construction, and so forth. These are not lesser jobs. All the same, there are young, capable, thoughtful men who the contemporary world is telling to focus on grinding, earning cash, securing their lives, while at the same time pouring fear into their heart about cancellation and misunderstandings, and cultural opposition. These men are being driven away from ministry. Yet some of these are young men upon whom God has placed a call. They need to hear from us that entering into pastoral ministry is one of the greatest jobs a man can have. 

Alongside that, we probably need to actually provide these young men what my friend Chris Colquitt has called a “[pastoral theology of strength](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/millennial-pastor-gen-z-world/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)” or agency. I'm a millennial and we grew up on the brokenness and authenticity beat that set us up to hear the beautiful news of justification by faith beyond our works. What a lot of our students need is beyond a strong theology of justification, however, is a correspondingly strong theology of sanctification where the empowering Holy Spirit in union with Christ actually equips you to move beyond the sort of learned helplessness that is endemic to this generation.

And what they need is actually the voice, the belief, and the authoritative insight of godly older men who see something in them and call them into the field, and then are willing to dedicate the requisite time, energy and risk to allow them to succeed. In other words, we need to be Fathers and Brothers. 

And this itself is risky, messy work that will possibly reshape and reform a young man's future. What’s more, it is risk to us. Some of us fear sinking time, energy, and focus into a “hunch” that might not pay off and maybe distracts from other important tasks within the church. Handing over responsibilities to an untested, unknown leader can go beautifully or terribly. All of this requires risk on our end. 

Relatedly, it will also mean risking a bit financially on internships, fellowships, two-year pastoral apprenticeships, and so on. This is especially the case at the larger churches who may be choosing how to allocate some funds.

But this is crucial if we are going to disciple and reach the next generation. The reality is the people who are most likely to reach the next generation are those that we call and equip among that coming generation. But this needs to be a priority for us because it is a priority in the New Testament. 

Remember, when Jesus was preaching and ministering, what did he do? As an RUF buddy of mine pointed out, he spent three years walking around with the equivalent of 12 teenage to young adult interns. And in Paul’s corpus, nearly 1/6 of his written material is directed to guiding the young pastors Timothy and Titus, whom he had trained. This has always been the way and it must be again.

## Meta-Reflection on the Ecclesial Vibes

And with that, I want to make one, last, final meta-comment having to do with some of the broader ecclesiastical challenges we’ve had in the PCA having to do with culture: “Beware the temptation to ride the Vibe.”

Be cautious about trying to leverage cultural vibes too much in our intramural debates about confessional identity and reaching the next generation. 

A couple of examples by way of memes I have seen: 

### Crossing the Tiber or Bosphorus. 

Right now, in our rootless, liquid modernity, with the threat of creeping Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox apologetics coming for our young folks, there is a temptation to think “what these rootless, identity-less kids need is thicker, confessional, Presbymaxxing, not softening ‘missionalism.’” It’s basically confessionalism as pragmatism to reach the kids.

### Reaching Based Young Men. 

Or again, post-vibe shift, as my friend James Wood has pointed out, there are a bunch of [reality respecters](https://firstthings.com/evangelicals-must-stop-their-preferential-treatment-of-the-left/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), especially young men who are turned off by the excesses of critical gender and racial theories, who are interested in the sanity of a Christian moral view and not being unfairly demonized for being a white guy. What we need, then, some have thought, are bold churches that push back on wokeness, get more explicitly political, explicitly right-wing, etc., which then also get bundled with a certain vibe and ethos so as to not lose our based young men. 

What do we make of this? 

### Elevation Still Sells. 

Well, to the first point about Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy, anecdotally and at the meme level, the conversion train might be a real thing. But the data just isn’t there to substantiate it in any kind of real or large-scale way. 

The only group consistently winning or growing are the [non-denom charismatics](https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/non-denominationalism-is-the-strongest?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), who are eating the Orthodox and Catholic numbers for lunch. So while you should definitely bone up on your Protestant apologetics, my gut currently tells me this is mostly about keeping your future pastoral pipeline strong by keeping your nerdy readers on the team.

On the West Coast, though, I’ll just say I don't have many Presbyterian students showing up at my ministry. I only have non-denom kids, non-Christians, and random Catholics. They know I am a Presbyterian because I teach Presbyterian things and baptize them into Presbyterian churches. But when they show up, they are not Presbyterian.

You know who is the hardest group to get to show up to our liturgical PCA church? It isn’t the non-Christians or the Catholics. It’s the majority of non-denominational Evangelical kids who are used to the big rock concert worship services and just do not get liturgy and have no concept of confessions. 

### Reformed Catholicity or Presbyterian Marines 

Now, I want those students to join PCA churches. I want them to be Reformed. 

One way of inviting people into the PCA, and into our confessional heritage and Reformed worship is to draw them into a broad, reformed catholicity (to use a hot buzzword). An alternative approach comes off as a call to join the elite Presbyterian Marines (the Few, the Saved, the Chosen). In this case, you either get with the program or get out. 

I'm going to suggest a certain amount of flexibility of spirit, and even some practice, for the sake of on-ramping the non-denominational kids is likely going to be necessary in these times if we are going to continue to reach out and grow.

### Reaching Young Men 

Next, speaking as a guy whose ministry for the last seven years has been anywhere between 60-80% male in a given year and who really cares about reaching young men: Yes, challenge them. Yes, be direct. Yes, push back on much of the ideology out there that is contrary to God’s Word and has beat these young men up before they’ve even gotten out the door. Pour in the time. Mentor, pursue. Speak to their needs. 

But if you are one of those who think that some over the last 10 years have made the mistake of feminizing and emotionalizing churches to keep the young women happy, or tried far too hard to equate the Larger Catechism to a more center-left, even progressive political order, it stands to reason that running the same operation of coddling unbiblical or ungodly attitudes or winds of social doctrine in the opposite direction for the sake of catching the current vibe could also conceivably go wrong, right? I think the last few weeks and months have shown us a few ways that project could go wrong, right? 

Let me put it this way. One of the young men I baptized this year was someone I met lifting weights, took through a book on masculinity, and have offered a distinctly male form of mentorship to. And yet, another was a young woman who found it refreshing that when she showed up at church on Sunday, it wasn’t about right-wing politics all the time. 

Now, does this mean I didn’t preach about abortion for 20 minutes in my sermon on the 6th commandment? No. I did so clearly and directly. But I did it on the assumption that I actually had more people than just those disaffected young men in my room. I still had the young, increasingly progressive women, who need the gospel just as much, who still have their own questions, whom I want to persuade about the goodness of God’s Word.

What I'm saying is that when it comes to reaching the next generation, being highly online, letting your ministry be governed by the contemporary algorithm and the quick shifts of vibes and moods, could, in the long term, be very counterproductive for faithful ministry to the coming generation. 

What the next generation needs is not our ability to catch a vibe, a wave, a revival, a trend, etc. [Vibes shift and shift again](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/every-vibe-shift-lords-hand/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). What they need is our continued commitment to ministering, yes, in culturally wise ways, but more fundamentally out of a bedrock of biblical conviction.
### They Learn Everything Except the Art of Learning
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/they-learn-everything-except-the-art-of-learning/
Last updated: 2026-07-06T11:00:12.000Z
Does it matter how we arrive at outcomes? 

I’d argue that Christianity says yes. Much of the Bible is demonstrating and emphasizing that not only is God intent on creating a particular kind of people for himself, but that we actually cannot arrive at the end Scripture envisions for us apart from certain and specific means and processes. The processes and means through which God uses to create and transform a people for Himself is an intentionally painstakingly long and arduous one. It requires the slowness of history slowly unfolding through the seemingly mundane moments of birth and death of generations upon generations of one family, and which now extends to us who have been adopted into the family of God living faithfully day by day the time allotted to us on earth. God in grace and wisdom commits to us in the slowness of the process, for to create the type of people who will be able to partner with him to bring about the redemption of this world requires, quite frankly, time and struggle. 

This is opposite of what is often valued today in our society – efficiency, productivity, ease, and convenience. And while it is not necessary that we must always choose the difficult in order to be on the path of formation that uniquely creates the type of person God intends for us to become, I believe that given the abundance of options of convenience before us, it is especially crucial for us to be prudent and intentional with our choices because our choices form us. 

It is an understatement to say that AI has revolutionized our current time and culture. The opportunities and possibilities it opens up to people (just about anyone can create an app now), the convenience and ease it offers to us (we essentially have a digital assistant for our daily needs), the accessibility of information (research is revolutionized with how many papers can be digested and summarized for any topic of your choosing)... it may be our Prometheus’ fire. As with all new technologies, AI, whether directly or indirectly, is already forming us into a certain type of people. If we are not careful, we as individuals and the broader church will be swept up in its currents and develop habits, inclinations, and ideologies that will put us farther away from the path of formation God has intended for us. 

So how does AI usage impact our formation? There are many ways to consider. It can shape us in ways that devalue embodied persons and presence. It can shape us to value productivity and speed above all else, teaching us that the ultimate value of a person is in what they can produce, not who they are. But I’d like to focus on just one that I recently experienced: the eroding of our ability and desire to undertake and endure (or even appreciate) hard things, especially if doing so requires time.

## Outcomes Without Effort

After five years of being a manager in a tech company, I recently went back to being an individual contributor. Having been out of the coding game for so long, I was nervous about my ability to relearn coding and meaningfully contribute, especially in the company’s high pace culture with an emphasis on productivity. But those around me assured me that with AI tools, coding had become much more accessible and the learning curve no longer so steep as when I had initially started out. And they were right. 

The ease and convenience was exhilarating – with a few lines describing what I wanted to do, Claude was able to generate for me entire notebooks and production pipelines that would implement my idea and even test components of it for me. What would have taken me hours to ramp up and outline working code, now took me but a few minutes to set up and get nearly production ready code. The ease and the immensity of capabilities accessible to me through the AI tools made me feel that I myself were capable, and that I had the ability to implement anything that I wanted to. It was exciting and honestly, a lot of fun, but I also felt uneasy. Why? I couldn’t quite identify what led to the unease until I read this passage from *The Lost Tools of Learning* by Dorothy Sayers: 

> They learn everything, except the art of learning. It is as though we had taught a child, mechanically and by rule of thumb, to play “The Harmonious Blacksmith” upon the piano, but had never taught him the scale or how to read music; so that, having memorised The Harmonious Blacksmith, he still had not the faintest notion how to proceed from that to tackle The Last Rose of Summer.

Here was the articulation of my discomfort. I had all the exciting outcomes but did not need to do any of the hard work to get there. The more I did that, the more I knew my personhood would be formed by that experience. I was doing the equivalent of what Sayers says – memorizing how to play a song, but did not learn the fundamentals to know how to play all songs. I had all the excitement of the outcomes of learning (working code), but had experienced none of the difficulty and hard work that would have typically been required to get there. And so something felt amiss. One may argue that I am learning to use the AI tool – the optimization of prompts and such – but this is vastly different from learning to actually write code, which I had to do when I first joined the company. 

Under the latter type of learning, when working code was produced, it elicited within me a kind of satisfaction that was rooted in having undertaken, persevered, and succeeded at something difficult and new. In short, I was training and cultivating something in my personhood and character more permanent than the feelings or the outcomes – the ability and the habit of persevering through the struggle and challenges required to learn something. This ability – the ability to submit and endure the difficult for what will be gained through it, and the ability to do so even if it involves an uncomfortable slowness – is necessary in my formation into a person who can submit to and faithfully walk in the costly discipleship Christ calls me. Without it, we will not be able to root ourselves deeply into the grace, love, and truth that meets us in the inevitable challenges that we must choose to walk through with God, though there may be plenty of opportunities to find alternate, easier paths. And that is what true learning entails – that it forms us into the type of people God intends for us to be. 

So what do we do then in this tension of knowing that the process matters, but surrounded by the allure of tools that allow us to easily and with such convenience sidestep the challenges of such processes and yet still obtain the intended outcomes? What do we do as the ease of AI creates within us a drive for the immediate, and an undervaluing of learning processes, of doing hard things that take time, of sitting in situations that are awkward and uncomfortable because we have yet to learn fluency or competency? In short, what do we do to not inevitably become, (though we are likely already becoming) people who want all the ease, speed, and information without any of the work to get it? How do we lean into habits and situations that train and prepare us in what we need for discipleship to Jesus – a willingness to slow down our pace, endure difficulty, and wrestle with uncomfortableness – where the objective is not obtaining information, but growing in relationship with Jesus to be like Him?

I do not believe the answer is to avoid AI usage entirely, but what I am convicted and convinced of is that we are all called to have wisdom in determining when to use AI and when not to, and what counter-formational habits we must develop so that our formation is intentional, rather than accidental. For determining when to use AI and when not to, I have not found a better framework than the one put forth by [Andy Crouch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2j8053yxbE&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). 

As for counter-formational habits, I propose for consideration two habits that would form us in the ways that AI will not – to be people who can not only endure but be comfortable with the slowness, struggle, and hardship that is required of us in our life of discipleship to Jesus

## Reading Long Fiction

First, we can read long fiction that has stood the test of time. Reading fiction does not increase our knowledge, rather the objective is for the forming and shaping of our souls. This is precisely why the reading of fiction is so counter-formational. We read not to be productive or increase intellect, but because of what it does to our souls. By reading long fiction, we become habituated with the time-consuming nature of formation, and the resilience and endurance needed to sit through the long build-up of good, soul-satisfying stories so that we may deeply enjoy the story’s culmination. This habit forms and challenges us to undertake and commit to time consuming endeavors for our good.

## Write Without AI

Next: We should write without AI. Since the beginning of the year, all the documents I had produced for work had been done through freeflow, stream-of-consciousness style talking to AI (speech-to-text) and having it organize and structure my thoughts and proposals for me – practicality and efficiency at its best as I juggled back to back meetings all day with the needs of developing statistically rigorous methodologies to enable partner teams to do their work. 

But in undertaking this writing project, by purposefully not using AI, I have felt within myself the uncomfortable yet formational inconveniences and work of having to remember again how to write with clarity, structure, and logical coherence. At the same time, it has been deeply satisfying to re-train and re-exercise these writing muscles. It has forced me to slow down, to think of what is the right word to use, what is the right thought and idea to draw out, and it has done something wonderful for my soul and formation, something all together different and not replicable through AI usage. 

In essence, the nature of this writing project has blessed me, and while I hope this piece has inspired that longing within you, I am grateful nonetheless for what it has allowed me to rediscover – the beauty of leaning into the process of being fully human in creativity and distinctiveness in this slow, time consuming, and, at times, challenging journey of everyday formation into who God is making me into.
### Why I Wrote 'Finding the Founding'
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-i-wfinding-the-founding/
Last updated: 2026-07-03T11:00:41.000Z
Recently, I was invited to the Jack Miller Center’s National Summit on Civic Education to give a speech about my book on the Declaration of Independence, [*Finding the Founding: Meditations on the Theology of the Declaration of Independence*](https://wipfandstock.com/9798385271023/finding-the-founding/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)(Front Porch Republic Books, 2026). This was my first trip to Philadelphia, and having arrived a day early, I made sure to visit Independence Park. The visit didn’t disappoint, but it did cause me to tear up my speech and write a new one.

An exhibit at the American Philosophical Society featured a series of memorial engravings documenting our country’s history of the Declaration. The evolving significance of the Declaration grew clear as these engravings changed with each generation. I was struck by a pattern: In all the earliest engravings in the 19th century, each of the Declaration’s references to God (“Creator,” “Supreme Judge of the World,” “divine Providence”) was enlarged and emphasized, along with many of our now-hallowed ideas. But as the years went on, only the ideas (equal, life, liberty, etc.) remained emboldened. Finally, a 2026 artist’s annotated, “re-interpretive” engraving placed at the end of the exhibit made a striking choice: It deletes each mention of God from the Declaration, and it adds a parenthetical question mark to every ideal.

I’m not alone in worrying about this trajectory. In 1798, John Adams warned, “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” In explaining the principles of the Declaration 154 years later, Dwight Eisenhower said, “our form of Government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” In 1973, Elton Trueblood wrote, “the Declaration makes sense in a theological context, but fails to make sense in any other.” They would have been neither surprised nor comforted by this exhibit in Philadelphia.

We are now experiencing a renaissance of American civic education, especially in our public universities. Last summer I found myself, as a theologian, now somewhat unwittingly part of this renaissance. I didn’t understand how I belonged to this endeavor. But I did think that in this 250th anniversary year, the question of what it means to be American is alive again—thanks to debates over liberalism and postliberalism, globalization and its retrenchment. 

In this year, I thought, the Declaration might have new answers to these deepest questions, if read in a certain way. So, I put pencil to paper, and over four months, I wrote a line-by-line meditative commentary of the Declaration, treating it as a theological document with its own voice—that is, as if the term “Nature’s God” mattered just as much to its integrity as the “Laws of Nature,” as if “divine Providence” was not accidental flourish, but the cornerstone which founds the declarations of this founding document and its people. If so, then the Declaration’s theology would hold a timely answer to who we are as “one people,” in this broken time.

*Finding the Founding* is the product of this meditation. It is a close reading of the Declaration—compacted into 126 pages and focused on the political theology that is crucial to the document. Within our renaissance of civic education, I offer this work as an invitation to a forum to meditate on the question of American faith.

What is that faith? For only a brief, apparently un-theological example, take that most beautiful and confusing clause of the Declaration: *We hold these Truths to be self-evident*. Now, as humanity before and since 1776 has shown, it’s hardly *obvious* that, say, all human beings are equal—if it were, so many wouldn’t have failed to see it. So “self-evident” can’t mean “obvious.” As many have argued, the definition of “self-evident” must be closer to something like a premise that cannot be proved but only assumed, like the claim that all triangles have three sides. But we don’t need to “hold” a geometric truth. Yet *we do* “hold these Truths,” the Declaration claims. Therefore, I found that the Declaration is, in fact, making a statement of mutual faith—not a claim to common sense or rational principle. *We are basing our peoplehood on our holding of these Truths as our foundation*. And the truths that follow are much deeper than mere propositions. The very words of the Declaration already demand something like a faith commitment, both in the founders who signed it and the “one people” the Declaration claims is America itself.

As we revive the conversation on civic education, I do not think we can repeat that aforementioned artist’s omission of God. Our ideals are worth holding without question marks, but only if we don’t erase the God of the Declaration. Therefore, we cannot ignore the fraught matter of American civic religion and theology, no matter how hard either side of the sacred and the secular may try. As Adams, Eisenhower, and Trueblood—as well as two of my personal favorites, Reinhold Niebuhr and Stewart Udall—all argued in their own ways, American self-government depends on a deeply religious sensibility. 

Many fear we have lost that pre-political disposition. Perhaps we cannot revive it. But we can regain the conversation to revive it. (I should not have to mention that others are already having that conversation, and in ways less than charitable.) I know how important the works by the Niebuhr brothers have been to my own sense of faith and civic responsibility. I am jealous of how freely and deeply they could write on faith and America, with a public audience ready to read their reflections. I hope this book may do for our time, if only in small part, what these earlier writers’ works did for theirs.

I hope you will read and converse with this book. Not for the book’s sake, but for the sake of what this book is about: our common deliberation on faith, solidarity, freedom, and belonging, face-to-face with the transcendent. If we can regain this, then whatever we will make together of “divine Providence,” I believe we will become closer to pledging each other “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”
### Renewal, Letting Go, Political Theology: Lessons from Up
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/renewal-letting-go-political-theology-lessons-from-up/
Last updated: 2026-07-03T11:00:31.000Z
Near the end of his essay on poetry and marriage Wendell Berry considers how free verse fits into his broader consideration of the relationship between fixed poetic forms and fixed forms of life, such as marriage. 

To answer the question, he considered the work of American poet Walt Whitman, suggesting how Whitman's own style of free verse could be understood in a way that reconciled with Berry's insistence on the importance of forms which caused him to say, at one point, "the impeded stream is the one that sings."

Here is how Berry addressed the problem:

> One analogue of free verse, I think, must be courtship, a way of accommodating our minds to something new, of finding out what it is that we are doing or about to do. The encounter between the English language and the subjects and objects of a new continent strange to it and to its poetic tradition seems to have required this of a succession of American poets from Whitman's time until now. Who can help feeling in the early *Leaves of Grass a kind of falling in love? The lines must reach out impulsively, become capacious and tensile, to include in their full stance and particularity the images of American experience.*

Later he continues,

> If Whitman's work is the prime example of the freeing of verse, it is an example of something else too, for at its best Whitman's line, as we will see if we try to shorten or lengthen it, is a form. He set his line free only to make it into a *kind of line that we recognize anywhere we see it—a new poer, a new music, added to poetry which can be learned and used. ... And such newness does not destroy the old set forms, but renews them in renewing our understanding of what a line of verse is, our sense of its properties of duration and coherence, beginning and end.*

I hope that no one will consider accusing the author of these words of relativism. Berry can be attacked in any number of ways, but a relativist he is not. What he is, I think, is someone who is keenly attuned to place and context, such that he can recognize the times when an uncompromising rigor in the name of fixed forms can actually attack and undermine the goods that form was originally meant to encourage. 

Good farmer that he is, I am sure Berry would consider the ways in which specific landscapes make specific demands on a farmer. "Good farming" is a recognizable thing, and yet what is "good farming" on one type of land is "bad farming" on another. The acknowledgement of this does not make one a relativist, but merely a person who pays attention to particularity. (And, of course, there are some practices that are 'bad farming' anywhere, no matter the local geography.)

I had just re-read that essay of Berry's when my family sat down to watch *Up* for a family movie night. I was surprised by the ways the film seemed to rhyme with Berry's insight regarding renewal and the need to distinguish between generalized goods and the particularized forms that those goods can take. It struck me while watching that the two main characters for much of the movie, the protagonist Mr Frederickson and the antagonist Charles Muntz, are faced with the same basic question: The life you thought you would have, the good you thought you would experience, has been taken from you. Now what?

One character tightens his grip on the old life and squeezes and squeezes until he loses life itself, literally disappearing from screen as he crashes into the world he tried to grasp. The other nearly does the same, but at the last is rescued from that fate.

What rescues him? The answer would please Berry: it is love. Frederickson has spent his life dreaming of going to Paradise Falls with his wife Ellie, only to have her die suddenly, just as he had purchased their plane tickets to go. The life he thought they would have is gone, and much of the movie is taken up with his attempt to avoid knowing that fact. And then, like Muntz, he hits a point where he has a choice to let go of that specific life while maintaining his grip on the good that life was meant to actualize. And, at first, like Muntz he can't let go. He begins to fall. He holds onto the house so tightly that he allows an innocent creature to be taken and abused by another. But then he learns again to see what he needs to do and to have the resolve to do it. How? 

He opens the scrap book his wife had made as a child and discovers final pages he had never seen before in which Ellie's imagined adventures through life are transformed by love—visions of galavanting off to Paradise Falls are replaced by the ordinary treasures of a banal day lived with one's love. And as the book comes to a close, Frederickson reads a note left for him by Ellie: "Thanks for the adventure! Now go have another one!" 

From that point on, Frederickson is a different character. He is able to let go of the house he and Ellie had loved. He lets go of the dream of Paradise Falls. And he goes to do the thing he needs to do, rescuing that innocent creature and repaying the faith of a young boy who had befriended him over the course of the movie. And so while Muntz falls to his death at Paradise Falls, Frederickson's old life falls from the sky as well, landing at Paradise Falls, but Frederickson himself returns to life (in Muntz's ship) and finds his new adventure. The good he seeks remains the same. The form changes due to circumstances outside his control. 

There is a mirror here, I think, to the way Berry speaks of Whitman's verse. Berry believes that Whitman's verse does for America what, say, Chaucer had done for England. The difference in form, Berry says, is a necessary difference that honors the particularities of the place without losing its hold on the good that the poem is meant to name and commend.

I want to suggest, as I close, that there is a lesson here for us in other domains as well. Ross Douthat has [written well](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/opinion/liberalism-postliberalism-affordability.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of what has led to our "post-liberal" moment: It is the product of the complex intersection of cratering birth rates, mass migration, and technological disruption. In response to this moment, two dominant schools have emerged, both of which end up imitating Muntz, I think. There is a kind of civic libertarian who desperately wishes it could still be 1992\. The Cold War was won. We lived in a unipolar world. History was at an end. Democratic, liberal capitalism would sweep the world, world without end, amen. And all of their proposals and goals in encountering this new moment seem to be "How can we turn back the clock to 1992? How can we take back the life we had and that we still want?"

That is not the world we have. And there is no way for that world to return, given the ascent of China, the lack of political will in America to police the globe (and the apparent ineptness of the American armed forces, at least if the Iran War is any measure), and the transformations coming now due to the factors Douthat named. The world the civic libertarians long for is never coming back.

Another response is that of the Christian nationalists and Catholic integralists, both of whom regard the failure of that regime as a welcome development and suggest that the whole thing was one big mistake and now that it has failed our path back to something sturdier is clear. The difficulty is the goals they envision—a monoethnic state led by a caesarist Christian prince who shepherds the life of the *volk* or an integrated state in which the government repents and submits to the pope—are entirely unworkable and impossible, and would require monstrous evils to achieve. (Consider how one prominent Christian nationalist [was recently suggesting](https://x.com/contramordor/status/2070327509707530695?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) the forced deportation of 120 million people on Twitter.)

The question before us, I think, is not how we can magically coerce the world into being 1992 again or 1592, perhaps. Those worlds are gone and we can no more recreate them today than we could use the verse of Chaucer to provide the verse that would define American life. I am inclined to agree with Berry and think that we need new forms to answer the new challenges of our particular moment. To say this is not relativistic anymore than Berry's own thought is relativistic. We should seek to render to God what is due to God and to neighbor what is due to neighbor. We should seek to retain the structures and norms that have allowed us to have things like free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, a free press, and all the rest.

And yet we now, like Whitman, must find ways of preserving those goods under wildly different circumstances—circumstances in which given forms of membership and meaning have been badly weakened, when the unborn and the natural family are often attacked or, at best, forgotten, in which rampant injustice is increasingly regarded as tolerable as long it is one's enemies who are victimized by it, and in which technological innovation makes vice easier than ever before and virtue more remote. A Christian prince cannot fix these problems, nor can a free trade loving civic libertarian with a taste for foreign intervention. Indeed, it is entirely possible that the problems are unsolvable and we are entering a season of political and cultural winter. But if they are to be solved, then I think it will be in the way Berry describes, by identifying the 'new adventures' that allow us to find renewed forms which preserve the same goods.
### America250 Forum, Day 3: Giving Thanks as American Christians
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/america250-forum-day-3-giving-thanks-as-american-christians/
Last updated: 2026-07-02T11:00:15.000Z
*Our calling as Christians is to be in the world but not of it (John 17:16). We hear and say this so often, it verges on a cliché. But what does this calling mean for us as American Christians on the eve of America’s 250th birthday? Or, to put it another way, how might we think about the nation’s 250th birthday as Christians and Americans? Earlier this week,* [*Jake Meador proposed this answer*](https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-refuge-for-chaotic-saints/) *to open the conversation: “The shortest way of answering the question is to say that America is a country that generally does not imprison her chaotic saints.” In this week’s three-day forum, theologians, historians, and public thinkers share their own responses.*

\*\*\*

## **We Need Both Patriotic Gratitude and Christian Humility** 

*Daniel Bennett*

The Christian life is one of paradox. We believe we are made in God’s image while reckoning with the Fall, and we are called to be in the world but not of the world. The American story, too, is one of paradox. It is a story of liberty and opportunity for some, and oppression and exclusion for others. It is one of remarkable achievements and profound failures. 

As Americans approach a particularly auspicious Independence Day, I find myself thinking of these contradictions. It is a mistake to reflect on our country’s two-and-a-half centuries of history through an exclusively positive filter, ignoring our nation’s warts and scars. It is equally mistaken to dwell only on the negatives of our story while downplaying the positives.

Today’s political environment tempts us to simplistically choose sides, to reject nuance in favor of a black-and-white reading of our collective past and present. We are discouraged from recognizing that both praise and criticism can be true at the same time, lest we end up somehow ceding ground to our perceived enemies.

American Christians can model a better way of commemorating our country’s 250th anniversary. Rather than defaulting to naïve optimism or cynical pessimism, we can celebrate the achievements of our nation while acknowledging the many ways it has yet to fully realize its promise. Doing so reflects both patriotic gratitude and Christian humility as we continue the unfinished work of forming "a more perfect union."

**\*\*\***

## **“Can You Help Me Get to America?”**

*Matthew Loftus*

“Can you help me get to America?” As an American citizen living in a low-income country, it’s a question I get asked more often than I’d like. Occasionally someone tries to convince me that I ought to adopt their child and take them to the United States. I have absolutely no power to assist someone in getting a visa to my home country, so I don’t have much to say in response.

I try to disabuse people of notions that they’ve gathered from television or from their fellow citizens who have moved to the US and often project a more comfortable lifestyle than they are truly experiencing. I explain that a salary of $1000 USD per month, which is a top-quintile income here, is poverty wages in a country where rent and transportation eat up hundreds of dollars every month. I will occasionally add some tale of sexual or spiritual decadence in public schools to scare the parents ready to relinquish their child to me. I urge people to consider how they can flourish where they are and contribute to the good of their neighbors in their home country.

However, the inquiries and the hopes of people who want to come to the United States of America reveal some things that are worth being grateful for. Life is not fair for people born at the bottom of the income distribution, but anyone in the US who is willing to work at any job can earn enough to feed themselves and usually family members back home. Our government may engage in a variety of absurd overreaches, but an American citizen will never be abducted and tortured for saying anything bad about their rulers. Our health insurance system is overpriced and ridiculous, but if you suffer a medical emergency in the US, you will receive life-saving treatment up front and deal with the bill later. Millions of people around the world are willing to leave everyone they love and risk their lives in order to have any of these things Americans take for granted.

The United States of America have been blessed far beyond what any one nation deserves, and over the past 250 years much good has been done in the world with those blessings. I still shake my head at the decadence I encounter when I return home—why on earth anyone would want a 12-foot-tall skeleton in their front yard, I don’t know—but I know that the same abundance that allows people to buy dumb Halloween decorations also allows them to fund medical care and Gospel ministry all over the world.

I cannot help but be grateful for what I’ve received from my home country and what she has received from God. My hope and prayer is that as we celebrate 250 years of God’s goodness, more Americans cultivate that gratitude and ask themselves how God wants them to bless others with the abundance they’ve been given.

\*\*\*

## **“Why Do You Love America?”**

*Katelyn Walls Shelton*

“Why do you love America?” an acquaintance recently asked me, seemingly annoyed. The blunt nature of the question caught me off guard. We have bundled our four young children up in the January cold, hot chocolate in hand, to watch the Washington Monument light up in a projected display of our nation’s history. We’ve dragged them out late in pajamas to watch military flyovers on the National Mall, and we’ve gone to the White House Easter Egg Roll (three times). We have an American flag hanging outside our front door—it’s so big, in fact, that if it’s particularly windy, it sometimes slaps guests in the face as they enter our house. I have worked for the U.S. House of Representatives and in the Executive Branch. My husband has worked for the House and the Senate and a former Vice President. We love America. It took me a second, but I responded: “Because it’s the greatest country in the history of the world. And it’s my home.” 

“But Jesus loves all people and all places,” he responded, “and in today’s political climate, America doesn’t really seem all that great.” His implication was that as a Christian, it was off-putting, perhaps even wrong, to be patriotic or feel a sense of pride in one’s place—especially when political leaders don’t always represent Christian ideals and values, or when some who claim the name of Christ abuse it in service of ignoble aims.

But it’s precisely *because* of the incarnation of Christ that I am free to love my nation and love it abundantly. Jesus lived in a particular time, in a particular place, amongst a particular people. He was and is fully human, even as He was and is fully God. And while He loved the whole world, He did so while on earth by loving and serving those right in front of him, in his place, amongst his people. That’s what we’re called to also. “And you will be my witnesses,” Jesus says in Acts 1:8 just before His ascension, “in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” First at home and then worldwide. 

It’s easy, perhaps even tempting, to let the politics of the moment breed contempt or disdain for our country. But there’s so much to love, and we can love our country most exuberantly by working to make it more faithful, more just, and more worthy of its highest ideals.

Perhaps it’s providential that the World Cup has coincided with America’s semiquincentennial. Watching fans from around the world visit our homeland and delight in our people, our hospitality, our food, our music, our scenic byways and storied Main Streets, has fanned the flame of love for this country for many. Our love for our people and our place is not a denigration or rejection of the goodness of other peoples and other places—it is a recognition that God made this place and these people and set us among them. He calls them good, so we can (and should), too. 

There will always be a gap between our government as it is and our government as it shall be when the one upon whose shoulders government rests returns to rule every tribe, tongue, and nation forever. Until then, I thank God for 250 years of this free republic, and I pray blessings upon it for another 250 and more.

*Katelyn Walls Shelton is a visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center's Bioethics, Technology, and Human Flourishing Program and a 2025 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.*

**\*\*\***

## **“Yet the Heavenly Father Sings Over His People”**

*Samuel James*

The two most influential shapers of my life and thinking have been Scripture and raising children. And it has been remarkable to reflect how both of these have taught me about loving, delighting in, and being thankful for that which is imperfect. God’s covenant people are sinners, often spectacularly so. Children are ignorant, stubborn, selfish, and slow to learn. Yet the heavenly Father sings over his people, and I, in my own fallen way, sing over my two sons and daughter.

I think this can teach me something about my country. The United States is far from perfect. Yet I don’t delight or sing over its sins and flaws. I delight and sing over it because it is mine. For two hundred and fifty years, this country has been one of world history’s greatest ever monuments to transcendent truths about God, humanity, and civilization. America was not and is not a theocratic experiment, but it was and is a nation that assumes in its very constitution the reality of justice, the depravity of man, the necessity and limits of power, and the promise and peril of self-government. 

Even more importantly, the US has been one of the world’s greatest places for the practice and exportation of Christianity. America’s legacy of religious liberty is almost singular in world history. And this is not a neutral or indifferent virtue. America is rich with gospel-preaching churches, faithful pastors, thoughtful writers, poets, singers, artists, and others who invite others into worship of the risen Christ, publicly, with no fear of legal oppression.

It is common in many places to barely speak of this nation without immediately pointing out all the ways in which it has failed to practice Christian justice and charity. Those failures are real. But they are not what I think of this year. Right now, I think of my family here in the meadowed, cavernous country of Kentucky, where we look forward to feasting and fellowship this July 4th, worship and rest the following Sunday, and a government that is accountable to us all the year. Such blessings must not be taken for granted. They are not automatic. They are not accidental. They are divinely bestowed.

This 250th American birthday, I am grateful. And I pray that I would, by God’s grace, love and care for imperfect things, just as my Savior loves and cares for me.

\*\*\*

## **The Great Cradle of Liberty**

*John Shelton*

America is the great cradle of liberty. Today, as much as at its founding 250 years ago, we have a Christian duty to honor America.

If the apostle Paul could command the first Christians to honor Rome under the reign of Nero—the mad emperor who lit Christians on fire for candlelight in his courtyard and fed them to wild beasts—how much easier should it be for American Christians, who live in a nation built on unalienable rights, to sing “God bless America, land that I love… my home sweet home”? We should be fiercely proud of our heritage on this national milestone.

Ours is not a heritage of blood, though patriot veins have nobly shed much of that in America’s defense. As President Lincoln eulogized in his first inaugural, “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as they surely will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Nor is it a heritage of soil, though America’s natural beauties, “from the mountains to the prairies, to the oceans white with foam,” are incredible and worthy of conservation. We are a practical people too, with deep roots in the earth and in our communities that make America exceptional.

No, our heritage 250 years on is one of the noblest ideas in the history of mankind, one tracing its lineage directly to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”—namely, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Only a world reconfigured by the Christian gospel could articulate such a truth. Such a truth becomes inevitable, “self-evident” even, only in a world touched by Christianity.

Whether or not America lives up to our highest ideals on this or that policy matter today, we owe it and the Founding Fathers our honor all the same. Lincoln articulated it best: 

> All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.

At 250, may America remain just that—a rebuke and stumbling block to the harbingers of tyranny and oppression, wherever they may reappear.
### The Declaration of Independence’s Radical Promise of Equality for All
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-declaration-of-independences-radical-promise-of-equality-for-all/
Last updated: 2026-07-02T11:00:00.000Z
**David J. Bobb and Tony Williams.** [***Divided Over the Declaration: How an Enduring Debate Sustains the Vision of America***](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Divided-Over-the-Declaration/David-J-Bobb/9798895151709?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Diversion Books, 2026\. $34.00\. 336 pp.**

Two hundred and fifty years ago this week, a wealthy slaveholder wrote one of the most enduring lines ever penned about human equality: the declaration that “all men are created equal” and that they are “endowed by their Creator” with certain “unalienable rights,” including the right of liberty. 

After writing those lines, Thomas Jefferson returned to his plantation, where he continued to be waited upon by enslaved people for his entire life. Though he expressed great moral reservations about slavery, the only enslaved people he emancipated were members of the Hemings family that DNA tests suggest were his own biological children and other close relatives of Sally Hemings.

And if that’s true for Jefferson, the record of many of the other signers of the Declaration of Independence is not significantly better when it comes to slavery. Nearly three-quarters of the men who signed the Declaration also owned human beings as slaves. 

In view of this fact, some have argued that Jefferson and the Declaration’s signers did not really intend to include Black people (or women or other minorities) in the phrase “all men.” By “all men,” they really only meant “all *white* men”—or perhaps only white men of a particular social class—rather than all people created by God. And if that’s the case, maybe the Declaration was not so revolutionary after all. Maybe America’s real founding was based not on equality but on racism. Maybe the nation’s founding moment came not in 1776 but in 1619, with the beginning of African slavery in what would become the United States. 

In their new book, *Divided Over the Declaration*, David Bobb and Tony Williams push back against this counternarrative by arguing that the Declaration of Independence really did mean all people created by God when it declared that “all men” are “created equal.” 

Furthermore, Bobb and Williams show, in a historical narrative that stretches from the late eighteenth century to the present, the Declaration’s promise of equality has been a key guiding force in the campaign for African American civil rights. From the antebellum abolitionists to Martin Luther King Jr. and beyond, advocates for equality have pointed to the Declaration’s phrase as an unfulfilled promise that the nation has an obligation to honor.

As evidence that Jefferson used the phrase “all men” to mean all people, including women and those who were enslaved, Bobb and Williams point to a phrase in Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration that charged the British king with promoting the international slave trade. The king, Jefferson wrote in that draft, was “determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold.” 

That phrase was excised in the final version, due to concerns from some delegates that an indictment of the transatlantic slave trade might hit a little too close to home, but Bobb and Williams argue that it offers conclusive evidence that Jefferson understood “men” to include enslaved people. And since the people who were bought and sold in the international slave market included women, the phrase “MEN should be bought & sold” undoubtedly referred to women as well. And if that is the case, Jefferson’s opening declaration that “all men are created equal” refers to the rights of all people.

That is also the way that many African Americans and abolitionist-minded whites understood the phrase in the late eighteenth century. In Massachusetts, Quock Walker successfully sued for his freedom by citing a line from the Massachusetts constitution that closely paralleled the Declaration. (The line, written by John Adams in 1780, declared that “all men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights.”) A Rhode Island emancipation law of 1784 included similar wording: “Whereas all men are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the holding of mankind in a state of slavery . . . is repugnant to this principle.” 

Because antislavery activists cited the Declaration’s promise of equality so frequently, pro-slavery advocates after the 1830s began publicly repudiating this part of the Declaration. John C. Calhoun said that the statement that “all men are created equal” was “inserted in our Declaration of Independence without any necessity.” In fact, it was the “most dangerous of all political error,” he said—and it had led Jefferson to advocate the exclusion of slavery from the Northwest Territory (which later became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin), which Calhoun blamed for dividing the country between slave and non-slave states and producing “deep and dangerous agitation” that could destroy the nation.

After the Civil War, the Declaration’s statement of equality continued to influence advocates of democracy. In the debates over American imperialism in the late 1890s, those who opposed the American annexation of territory (such as the Philippines) to which the United States had no intention of granting the right of self-government appealed to the principles of the Declaration and argued that American imperialists were behaving as the British had done toward the American colonies in the 1770s. In the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and others routinely invoked the Declaration’s assertion that “all men are created equal.”

Many political progressives readily acknowledge this history as well, but the difference is that some progressives have argued that whatever promise of equality the Declaration might contain has come about in spite of, rather than because of, its author’s original intent. “Neither Jefferson nor most of the founders intended to abolish slavery,” Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the *1619 Project*, [declared](https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/our-founding-ideals-of-liberty-and-equality-were-false-when-they-were-written/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). “Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. Black Americans fought to make them true. Without this struggle, America would have no democracy at all.” 

If that’s the case, what matters is not the Declaration of Independence itself but rather what African Americans of later generations were able to use it to accomplish.

But that’s not Bobb and Williams’s view. If, as they assert, Jefferson really did intend to include all people in his declaration of universal rights—and if, as they also assert, Jefferson and his contemporaries really did understand the implications that this had for slavery and abolition—the Declaration of Independence is the foundation for American equality *because of* the genius of its author’s vision, and we would do well to study it.

Furthermore, Bobb and Williams assert, the Declaration’s promise works only if we accept its premise of unchanging, universal natural rights that are predicated on the idea of an unchanging human nature. Some of the early twentieth-century progressives, such as Woodrow Wilson, rejected the idea of an unchanging human nature because of their belief in a Darwinian model of human and societal evolution. As a result, they often rejected the idea of fixed natural rights as well.

Although progressives of our own era are vocal advocates of human rights, Bobb and Williams fear that they, too, have unmoored themselves from the unchanging principles of the Declaration—and as a result, they have no foundation within which they can ground their rights advocacy.

The solution, Bobb and Williams argue, is civics education that immerses students in the ideas of the Declaration of Independence. Like Abraham Lincoln, Bobb and Williams view the Constitution as an outworking of the principles of the Declaration—or as “an apple of gold in a picture of silver,” as Lincoln phrased it. That means that the Constitution, like the Declaration, is an egalitarian document that deserves our full attention.

To those familiar with the civics model that is encouraged in programs such as the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University (with which I am affiliated), Bobb and Williams’s interpretation will come as no surprise. Indeed, the book’s acknowledgments list the names of many of my friends and colleagues, including two who teach at Ashland University and several others who participate in the Ashbrook Center’s [Teaching American History](https://teachingamericanhistory.org/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) program. After working in this environment for three years, I found the book’s analysis—and even the choice of sources that it drew on for its arguments—very familiar. 

But those who are not familiar with the evidence that Bobb and Williams cite should read this book. Those who underestimate Jefferson’s egalitarian vision or who think that a 250-year-old document written by dead white males is not relevant for the national struggle for African American equality should grapple with the compelling argument this book presents.

As Bobb and Williams readily acknowledge, Jefferson and the many signers of the Declaration who were slaveholders did not, to use the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “live out the full meaning of \[their\] creed.” But to a certain extent, they understood that when they declared that “all men are created equal,” they could never be fully comfortable with slavery again. They had set in motion an egalitarian revolution that is still ongoing.

If we want to continue that revolution for the next 250 years, Bobb and Williams argue, we must ground our vision of equality in an understanding of the Declaration of Independence. As the document that inspired both the abolitionist and the civil rights movement, its promise of equality lives on—but only for those who are willing to study it and take its message to heart.
### America250 Forum Day 2: The Weight of History
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/america250-forum-day-2-the-weight-of-history/
Last updated: 2026-07-01T11:01:00.000Z
*Our calling as Christians is to be in the world but not of it (John 17:16). We hear and say this so often, it verges on a cliché. But what does this calling mean for us as American Christians on the eve of America’s 250th birthday? Or, to put it another way, how might we think about the nation’s 250th birthday as Christians and Americans? Earlier this week,* [*Jake Meador proposed this answer*](https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-refuge-for-chaotic-saints/) *to open the conversation: “The shortest way of answering the question is to say that America is a country that generally does not imprison her chaotic saints.” In this week’s three-day forum, theologians, historians, and public thinkers share their own responses.*

\*\*\*

## **Listening to John Adams**

*Miles Smith*

"The Revolution ought to be more carefully studied than it is, and more carefully handed down to posterity." That was one of John Adams’ many valedictories about the American Revolution that he and others created in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. 

When the United States was born, there were still Holy Roman Emperors who claimed the mantle of Charlemagne. John Adams’s birthday was closer to the Fall of Constantinople than it is to 2026\. On America’s 250th birthday, the world is changing; the United States is changing—culturally, socially, and economically. 

Dostoevsky wrote in *Crime and Punishment* that “taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” How true that has been, especially for that tribe of people, nearly undefinable, but somehow still very real, called Evangelical Protestants. Fear—sensational or sober-minded, real or ridiculous—has driven us back to our roots. We search for something solid, something old and something unmovable. For that reason we look back longingly to the politics and religion of the past, to anything but the apparently sinking ship of the liberal order that has defined Western societies for eight long decades.

That the liberal order is flawed is, of course, an unremarkable observation. That liberalism is not “biblical” or somehow divinely sanctioned over and above other political philosophies might make us squirm a bit. But to claim that the liberal order is worth keeping, or that it is in some ways deeply Christian, and deeply American, is a far more contentious proposition among the generation we affectionately call Zoomers. Left and right, Christian and non-Christian, an entire generation sees the beliefs that held the United States together for a long human lifetime as trite or at worst a lie. Evangelical Protestants are much the same as the rest of society in their intransigence towards what once was. In as much as my tribe—Anglicans—can be called Evangelicals, we don’t have much in the way of good answers. Political theology is on everyone’s minds, but no one seems to be able to make it legitimately useful or serious on a national scale. Maybe the Baptists or Presbyterians will do better; [the latter at least are trying](https://byfaithonline.com/christian-nationalism-study-committee-releases-partial-report/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). 

The American republic is 250 years old, but it seems like [a random German tourist](https://sports.yahoo.com/soccer/article/world-cup-2026-freddy-the-viral-german-soccer-fan-vows-to-carry-on-his-journey-despite-germanys-stunning-exit-040055305.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) here for the World Cup appreciates the country more than some native-born Americans do. That word, “native,” carries more weight than it used to. So too does “heritage.” The bad news for native-born heritage Americans is that, try as we might, we cannot conjure a past where nativity and heritage supplied some sort of congenital morality necessary for the maintenance of a healthy republic. Rural so-called “heritage America” is poor, unchurched, and socially unwell. So it has been for much of our republic’s history. Nor can we invoke a Christian nation that we no longer measure up to; our forefathers were never as Christian as we want them to be. What we can do, however, is take John Adams’s advice and study the Revolution. 

\*\*\*

## **Seeking the Divine Will**

*Eddie LaRow*

On September 17, 1862, Union forces—87,000 men under the command of George McClellan—engaged with the Army of Northern Virginia, a much smaller 55,000-man army under Robert E. Lee, near Sharpsburg, Maryland. The Battle of Antietam remains the bloodiest single day in American history, with a staggering 22,000 casualties. Though a Union victory, the battle exacted a cost — felt not just by the men, but by Lincoln, who was 50 miles away in Washington, D.C. At this point, the divided nation had already experienced just south of 200,000 casualties, a staggering number for a conflict nearly 16 months old.

Lincoln had been waiting for the right moment to present the Emancipation Proclamation, which sat in draft form on his desk — waiting for a victory before presenting his charge that all men were not only created equal but were free.

As he sat at his desk, he jotted his reflections down on a piece of paper. This reflection was not meant for public consumption but was an internal wrestling with the conflict at hand. Lincoln wrote: “The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.” Lincoln was seeking to justify the staggering loss of life. How could so much bloodshed happen? What was the price of freedom—and was it worth it? He went on: “I am almost ready to say that this is probably true—that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.”

Now, approximately 163 years later, we celebrate the 250th anniversary of this great nation. As I ponder what it means to be a Christian and an American, I can’t help but think back to the internal turmoil of Lincoln. For while we certainly do not have open armed conflict today, there is spiritual and invisible conflict. With each issue, we seek the Divine Will—and we, like Lincoln, often wonder what is right or wrong. 

But I also can’t help but think of Joseph, who in the book of Genesis is dealt every manner of hardship and trial—being sold into slavery by his brothers, falsely accused by Potiphar’s wife, and cast into prison, left to rot in the depths of despair. Anyone would think in that moment that God was not with them—and yet He was, very much so. For through the very hardship that Joseph experienced, God was fully at work. Joseph was ultimately elevated to the right hand of Pharaoh on account of God’s divine mercy, and through the very actions of his brothers and Potiphar’s wife, Joseph was restored by God. For what man intended for evil, God meant for good—that through one man, Joseph, and ultimately Jesus, many should be kept alive.

As Lincoln struggled internally with this conflict—a struggle that would have been forgotten to history if not for John Hay, one of Lincoln’s secretaries—he wrestled with the question that many of us wrestle with today.

This meditation on the Divine Will was, I believe, the kernel that became the Second Inaugural Address, in which Lincoln proclaimed: “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes his aid against the other…the prayers of both could not be answered… the Almighty has His purposes.” In the closing paragraph he pronounced, with the eloquence of the greatest American poet: “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Today we stand—though quite divided underneath—united in the fact that we are Americans. As I reflect on America’s 250th birthday, I can’t help but think of two blood payments. The first: the men who died on fields like Antietam—who died on American soil, by American weapons, in towns, streams, and mountains with American names. Though they did not live to see the result, the blood they shed was enough to purchase an imperfect Union. But I am also reminded of the blood spilled by Christ, who conquered the grave. For as Paul writes in Galatians 3, “Christ bought us with His blood.”

Two hundred and fifty years later, we may be prone to think back to the beginning—to the birth of a new nation. And while this is certainly cause to cheer, it is the blood paid at the moment of divide that may hold a better lesson for us today. For when we look back at the events of 1861–1865, we see the roots of many scars we still bear, and wounds that remain. Either we will abandon the cause and throw in the towel, or we, like Lincoln, will understand that though the pains are real, the cause is worth it. For together we are Americans; divided we are merely another power doomed to the shipwrecked seas of history. As a Christian, I am thankful that the Divine Will—the Sovereign Hand of God—is at work upholding and sustaining.

\*\*\*

## **The Churches of Christ and the American Experiment**

*Daniel K. Williams*

Both Christian faith and American citizenship have defined my entire life. 

I grew up attending church since the week I was born. I can trace my American genealogy back to seventeenth-century New England settlers and Revolutionary War veterans. But if, as the saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt, I have been guilty at times of a lack of gratitude for the nation that has shaped me. Ironically, one source of that ingratitude has been Christianity – or rather, the particular American-born version of Christianity that has defined my family heritage. 

About five generations ago, in late nineteenth-century Tennessee, some of my ancestors joined the Churches of Christ, an American revival movement dedicated to restoring the New Testament church. The most prominent Tennessee preacher in that movement, David Lipscomb, was so other-worldly that he taught that Christians should not vote or serve in the military—a stance that continued to define some congregations in the Churches of Christ for decades. In the churches in which I grew up, most people accepted at least limited political participation, but many still maintained a strong other-worldliness and a healthy belief in the superiority of the kingdom of God to the American government. 

I’m thankful for the inoculation that tradition provided against Christian nationalism. In my writing, I have warned Christians against equating the gospel with American ideology.

But while my desire to avoid the dangers of American nationalism was well founded, perhaps in the process of criticizing those who wrapped God in the flag, I sometimes forgot to sufficiently acknowledge the particular American founding principles that coincide remarkably well with Christian theology.

As a Christian and an American, I’m struck by four unique aspects of the American experiment: the combination of religious freedom with church-state separation; the conviction (suggested in the Declaration of Independence) that humans have inherent dignity because they are created by God with God-given rights; the belief that a flawed human nature requires a separation of power to prevent any one person or group from becoming an autarch; and a belief in the rule of law created by self-government. Each of these principles is compatible with a Christian understanding of human nature and a healthy Christian suspicion of unchecked human power – which is largely why the American experiment, alone among world democracies, has endured for 250 years. 

I think that my other-worldly ancestors who joined a church tradition that eschewed American political participation in the name of the kingdom of God were actually deeply American after all, because as the Declaration of Independence reminds us, there’s nothing that is more American (or arguably, more biblical) than a suspicion of human political power and an acknowledgment of God’s rule over human potentates. I do not agree with all of David Lipscomb’s other-worldly views, but I applaud him (and some of my ancestors) for valuing the kingdom of God above all else—and I think that in the process, they arrived at a Christianity that was deeply American, even if they didn’t recognize it. 

The United States is not the kingdom of God, and it’s certainly not without sin, but it was founded on principles that are compatible with a Christian understanding of God and humanity. Under those principles, Christianity has flourished in a myriad of forms. For that, I am thankful.

**\*\*\***

## **From Russia, Without Love**

*Nadya Williams*

History is why I’m here—and by “here” I mean living in America during this year of America’s 250th birthday, which is definitely not something I had ever imagined would happen when I was a young child. 

I’m here, an American citizen of nearly two decades, because in October 1917, Vladimir Lenin led a revolution that overthrew the Czars and established a new country and government. These events happened just a few blocks from where I was born in 1981 and where I spent the first decade of my life. Today I am here and not there, because by the time I was in elementary school, the tottering edifice Lenin had propped with empty promises and a horrific system of state violence and repression of citizens’ liberty in every area of life could no longer hold. But also, I am here and not somewhere else in the world, because 141 years before Lenin’s revolution (and 205 years before my birth) another, more successful revolution took place—the American Revolution of 1776, which promised genuine liberty as the unalienable right of its citizens. 

To be an immigrant is to be aware of this kind of history on a personal level. By our very nature, humans crave roots to thrive and flourish. This means that most people do not move lightly across the world; one does not choose on a whim to uproot and start life over in another country—one that speaks a different tongue, has different cultural norms, and that (more often than not) looks down on beets as something unfit for human consumption. 

My love for America comes, first and foremost, from gratitude for the welcome my family and I received here. But also, this love over time has become more difficult to separate from my love for Christ, because through another complicated set of events, it was the move to America that made it possible for me, a secular Jew, to come to know Christ. In other words, through God’s infinite goodness and mercy, it was this geographical move that made the spiritual one possible. For both this place and this time, I remain profoundly grateful. For us while still clothed in our mortal coil, blessings and curses arrive through the times and places we’ve been given. God alone, after all, exists outside of time and space.
### The Secret Place
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-secret-place/
Last updated: 2026-07-01T11:00:00.000Z
Winn Collier’s [award-winning biography](https://www.amazon.com/Burning-Bones-Authorized-Biography-Translator/dp/0735291624?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) on Eugene Peterson (of blessed memory) begins with a story about Eugene’s son, Eric, entering his dad’s study to let him know that breakfast was ready: 

> Eric turned the knob slowly, silently. He peered through the crack. . . A small woven rug lay on the tile floor before his dad’s desk. . . Eugene rested on his knees with a tallit—the tasseled Jewish prayer shawl—wrapped around his shoulders, a Hebrew Psalter splayed in front of him. He rocked gently, engrossed in the world of the Scriptures, surrendering to ancient prayers. Eric watched, hushed. He slowly closed the door and crept back upstairs. . . Only a boy, but he knew he’d witnessed something holy.

Eric did not merely witness his father’s private devotion, but a life whose deepest reality did not need to be publicized. For many churches, ministry now consists of exposure—podcast or perish—leaders feel obligated to maintain an online presence and publish their church’s conversion rate, baptism ratio, average weekly attendance, and annual earnings. After all, how are they to hear without Mailchimp? 

This need to publicize runs counter to the broader emphasis on spiritual formation among many younger Christians today. Increasingly, Gen-Zers are logging off and greyscaling their phones in the name of silence, solitude, and Sabbath. And yet, even amid the renewed interest in spiritual disciplines, secrecy itself has remained, fittingly, hidden. 

But perhaps an antidote to the growing pressures on churches, pastors, and laypeople does not lie in posting clips, publishing content, or podcasting (which is a verb now) about how to practice the presence of God, but rather in being invited to participate in what Eric witnessed: *the Secret Place*. 

## **A Biblical Introduction to the Secret “Place”** 

Paul the Apostle’s background and education have remained somewhat of an enigma to biblical scholars and readers for two millennia. There are moments when Paul is kind enough to provide us with minor details: he’s from the tribe of Benjamin and was educated at the “feet” of the Rabbi Gamaliel. Beyond these tidbits, we remain unclear about the man from Tarsus. However, what is clear about Paul is that he was a rhetorical, philosophical, and religious genius. He could quote and debate the best of Stoic and Epicurean philosophers. Exegete the Torah like a Rabbi. And convince people—be they Jew or gentile—that the Messiah had come, died, rose, ascended, and was descending (again) soon. Paul was a master with his prose. 

This is why it is all the more striking when Paul, in his dispute(s) with the Corinthians, states that when he visited them, he intentionally chose not to testify about God with impressive rhetoric or sage wisdom. Just the bare bones for the Corinthians. But why would Paul hide his first-class rhetoric or rich wisdom? “So that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God” (1 Cor 2:5). In other words, Paul intentionally restrained himself and hid his impressive qualities so that the Corinthians would not give him the glory that was due to God.

In a similar vein, Jesus was a man full of secrets. Throughout Mark’s Gospel, whenever Jesus’s power is revealed or imparted to others, a strict rule follows: don’t mention it. During the Transfiguration in Matthew’s Gospel, after his full glory has been revealed, Jesus instructs his inner circle of disciples to “Tell no one” (Matt 17:9). Yet Jesus also wants his disciples to tell everyone. 

This tension exists even within Jesus’s mountain sermon. He instructs the crowd, “let your light shine before others,” and just a few moments later commands them to “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people” (Matt 5:16, 6:1). There is an interesting dichotomy in Scripture, one’s faith is to be both public and private, publicized and yet personal. A follower is to hide the goods of the Kingdom and simultaneously give them out freely and publicly. So what gives? Are we to be secretive like Paul and Jesus, or perform show and tell for all the world to see? The answer to this question, at least in part, lies in Jesus’s words about secrecy.

When Jesus instructs his disciples to pray, he does so in a peculiar way, telling them to shut the door and pray in their “*tameion.*” Most translations render this Greek word as “room” or even “storeroom.” Traditionally, it has been understood to refer to a closet or any unlikely room for prayer. However, from what we know about rural Galilee, there were not many “extra” rooms in a peasant fisherman’s house for prayer. It’s akin to telling Manhattanites, “and when you pray, go into your fourth bedroom.” It is simply an unattainable place for his audience. 

Scholar Carolyn Osiek [has made the case](https://www.jstor.org/stable/43726613?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that Jesus is rhetorically talking about a type of secret place that can be accessed anywhere. Osiek writes, “a secret chamber that is accessible anywhere by the one in whom it dwells.” That is, Jesus’s hyperbolic language is about *secrecy*, not privacy. Where you pray is not the issue; it is *why* you pray that matters. Anyone can pray in a closet for the wrong reasons, but it’s learning to cultivate a heart that desires to pray as if no one is watching. In other words, the Secret Place is less a space and more a way of living. If secrecy is rightly applied, one can let their light shine before others and pray in their “*tameion*” simultaneously. 

## **The Secret Place as the End of Self-Improvement**

As a pastor, I am often in conversation with other men about their struggles with pornography. It’s a battle many men have faced, are facing, or are actively guarding against. Routinely, as I meet with other men, I hear the same sentiment when I ask them why they want to stop: “I hate how it makes me feel.” Most feel this is an acceptable answer. I almost always respond, “You’re not ready.” Not because shame is needed, but because self-disgust is too weak a foundation for holiness.

In this instance, the person’s primary motivator to stop doing something is how it makes *them* feel, not that it is an offense against God, His creation, and the life He has created them for. And this sentiment is not just a man’s problem. Sanctification has become the mechanism we use to satisfy our longing to be morally good. 

The insatiable need to feel “whole” has infected the West’s moral drive. People no longer give as a means to imitate the generosity of their Creator, but because it offers them a “mental boost,” as the Harvard Business Review argues. Sacred rhythms such as the Sabbath, practiced by many Christians today, have become insular practices focused on one’s mental well-being and on becoming a “non-anxious presence.” As opposed to a practice as a means to an end, namely to be with God and His people. To be a disciple of the Secret Place involves turning this model upside down. Yes, secrecy invites you into a rhythm of avoiding others’ praise, but it is also an intentional practice of removing yourself as the motivator for the good you do in the world. 

## **Practices**

My wife and I have moved eight times in nine years of marriage. It’s as horrible as it sounds. In the most recent move, I was trying to find a place for my degrees. I had purchased nice frames for them and spent a lot of time and money getting them, so I thought our bedroom was the best place to hang them. (Didn’t feel appropriate in the baby’s room.) After putting some nails in the drywall, my wife came in and, without skipping a beat, said, “Our room is not a shrine for your idols, take them down.” She wasn’t asking. 

I turned my hammer around and plucked. The practice of secrecy is the painful process of removing the proverbial degrees from the walls. It is entering into a process of asking God to rewire what drives us. It’s a type of life where what we’ve done, where we’ve been, what we’ve purchased, the job we have, the money we make, and the place we live becomes the least interesting thing about us. So how do we practice this life? How do we take down our “degrees”? Recently, I invited our church to practice two simple acts of secrecy, and perhaps you’ll find them helpful. 

In conversations this week, try Jesus’s approach. Again and again in the Gospels, Jesus answers questions by asking another question, telling a parable, or exposing the deeper desire beneath the question. Jesus often avoided making himself the topic of conversation and focused instead on the other person’s intentions or heart. And this is such a fun practice to try. 

In conversations this week, take steps to avoid inserting your opinion, updates, or travel plans. Keep drilling down on the other person’s life. Ask a follow-up question. Then another one. And another one. If you try this just once, I promise you’ll be astounded by how much better you are at listening rather than merely hearing what they are saying. This practice is not just so that you appear to be a good friend, but you are testing out the practice of secrecy, trusting that your Father, who is in secret, knows you and hears you. Thus, you don’t feel the need to be the topic of conversation; you have the ear of the Creator of the universe. 

For the second practice, try answering these questions: 

1. What identity markers do you find the most pride in?
2. What is the most interesting thing about yourself?
3. What do you spend most of your time thinking about?
4. What good do you contribute to the place you live?
5. What are your hobbies?

To be clear, it’s okay to be proud of the accomplishments in your life. It’s just fine to think you are interesting; you are. But whatever your answers are to these questions, see how long you can go in a week or a month without mentioning them to others. 

For example, I am a runner, and I *love* running. In New York, running has a particular subculture. We infest the streets, taking over sidewalks and bike lanes, doing our long runs on Saturday mornings, caking the streets with our sweat, hydration fuel, and slimy carbohydrate gels. We runners, tend to feel quite proud of our athletic abilities, so we talk about it *a lot*. I find it quite embarrassing when I think back how many times I’ve casually mentioned my weekly mileage or the race time I achieved to people who couldn’t care less. There is a desire in me to be applauded. It’s not enough to run because I enjoy it; I need others to enjoy it for me. 

So the challenge for me is to see how long I can go without mentioning running, and, whenever someone brings it up, how quickly I can divert attention away from my hobbies to theirs. As cheesy as it might sound, God, who made me, sees my runs and understands my effort, and that should be enough for me. 

## **To Be Known You Must Hide**

There is perhaps no better modern story of secrecy than Henri Nouwen’s. At the top of his field, Nouwen had spent over two decades teaching at elite universities, including Notre Dame and the divinity schools at Yale and Harvard. However, in 1986, Nouwen decided to quit the academy and move to L’Arche Daybreak in Canada, a community of people with intellectual disabilities. Nouwen abandoned a life of self-aggrandizement and the monotonous work of adding yet another line to his CV and decided to live with those who couldn’t care less about his accomplishments. In his thin but powerful book *In the Name of Jesus*, Nouwen reflects on Christian leadership in relation to all that God had taught him at Daybreak. He wrote the following:

> The first thing that struck me when I came to live in a house with \[intellectually disabled\] people was that their liking or disliking me had absolutely nothing to do with any of the many useful things I had done until then. Since nobody could read my books, the books could not impress anyone, and since most of them never went to school, my twenty years at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard did not provide a significant introduction. . . I was suddenly faced with my naked self. . . These broken, wounded, and completely unpretentious people forced me to let go of my relevant self. . . and forced me to reclaim that unadorned self in which I am completely vulnerable, open to receive and give love regardless of any accomplishments.

Nouwen experienced the paradox of the Secret Place. No one at Daybreak possessed the ability to truly understand Nouwen as he wished to portray himself. The residents at Daybreak couldn’t have cared less about an Ivy League professor coming to live with them. And yet, in his inability to be known, he became stripped bare, able to be known in such a way he had never experienced before. This is the goodness of the Secret Place. 

The spiritual discipline invites you into the ambiguity of choosing not to be known as you wish, and instead to be seen and loved as you are. It is bringing to light your scars, wounds, sins, and incompleteness, while hiding your successes. To live in the Secret Place is to live a life with God that is utterly exposed and frighteningly hidden. We hide ourselves, not because we are nothing, but because being seen, known, and loved by God is all that we desire and need.
### When the Lights Go Out
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/when-the-lights-go-out/
Last updated: 2026-06-30T11:00:27.000Z
Lost baby birds are not very important.

The world does not tend to wait for them, and doesn’t even pause as it might for other pieces of earthly life we must bear. A little fledgling, barely feathered and incapable of flight, that has fallen out of its nest and is stranded amongst the brick is not important. 

What’s important is that dinner needs to be on the table for the kids in twenty minutes; what’s important is that relationship that’s on the rocks with no relief in sight; what’s important is that I need to get to work on time so that I can cover rent so that I can continue to be as self-sufficient as any grad student can be, but the train across the city is delayed; what’s important is that [many people](https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) are dead [because USAID was dismantled](https://www.dailywire.com/news/how-many-people-did-doge-really-kill?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) without a moment’s notice; what matters is that your church said nothing when it happened; what matters is that you’re headed to a new school tomorrow and the anxiety is eating your insides like acid and you’re terrified of eating lunch alone and your hair is stringy and you wish the dress fit better and looked more like you; what’s important is that you no longer recognize the country you thought you had grown up in; what’s important is that your father has had a stroke, and you don’t know if he will be able to speak again; what’s important is that you have always had to lift yourself up, and no one who has the power to help has never noticed enough to try; what matters is that you are alone, and you can’t imagine that life might ever change.

There is a baby bird sitting on my welcome mat when I come home from work. The bird is lucky, all things considered. The bar had hosted a graduation party that night, and rather than blinking blearily through a midnight haze after standing through eight hours of customers both kind and cantankerous and sweating profusely in a dish room full of billowing steam, the only tiring part of the night has been pouring an unholy number of diet cokes for the Class of 2026 and keeping my eye on the wine-drunk mother stealing the giant bowl of party chips. 

All that to say, it’s been an easy shift and I’m home early, and so I manage to notice the small bundle of feathers quivering above the “we’re glad you’re here” printed on the mat. I set aside the box of chips I pilfered from the party leftovers that escaped the grasp of the PTA, and scoop him up after facing down some indignant flapping. It is, in fact, [a myth](https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/if-i-handle-a-baby-bird-will-the-parents-abandon-it/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that birds will abandon their baby if you do. My roommate is quite taken aback when I ring the doorbell with a bird in my hand—my keys are deep in my backpack, and I don’t want to drop the little fellow—and she is downright indignant herself when I bring him inside. He is very small, and I cannot find any sign of a nest. 

My roommate is starting a brand new, hard-won job in the morning. She does not have time to decide what to do with a baby bird. I myself need to leave early in the morning to meet my father, someone I miss desperately, far outside the city for breakfast where he is visiting for a conference. My attempts at rescuing baby birds in the past have rarely gone well, though they have been numerous, and I am not optimistic.

But I do as my brief research stint bids and look amongst my landlord’s small plot of garden outside their beautiful townhouse and our hidden “english basement” below for a suitable place to give him the best chance at surviving the night and reuniting with mother bird in the morning. There is a planter with a small hosta plant elevated several feet off the ground, far above the rats of D.C. and the odd cat passing through. I tuck him in with some tissues, hiding him amongst the leaves, and look up at the silent canopy of the maple tree stretching far above me. It is silent, devoid of any parental bird noises, and very dark. My phone dings with a headline, something about our President’s slush fund to reward his political friends. I have to go inside—to follow up on the email I forgot to send, make sure the electricity bill is paid by midnight, have some dinner before bed, see if there is anything I can do to ease my roommate’s mounting anxiety about tomorrow. There are far too many important things to worry about.

My landlord’s garden is one of my favorite parts of living in our little Hobbit Hole. He has a great love of greenery, and the result is that I can spot the townhouse from all the way down the block and am greeted by a forest of planters, garden statues, and fragrant fauna when I make it home. The lush, verdant abundance of leaves springing out from bushes, the plentitude of potted ferns, the spider plants cascading down from an empty stone fountain, and a Japanese maple stretching lowly above it all almost makes up for the swarms of mosquitoes it inevitably summons in the late summer. 

But today I am grateful, both because it has provided a temporary sanctuary for a lost baby bird, and because it reminds me of the understory—the life of a forest far below the canopy and just above the ground level that provides nourishment, shelter, and a nursery for the up-and-coming growth of the woodland. It also just so happens to be the name of [the conference](https://understory.comment.org/2026/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) I spent three days attending just a couple of weeks ago. Both are rather extraordinary things to find in the heart of Washington, D.C.

Actually, they were rather insistent that the Understory was in fact *not* a conference, but a festival. The Understory Festival. It was not, as the name might suggest, a gathering of Park Rangers or enthusiastic environmentalists, though I suspect both could have been in attendance. It is actually a bit difficult to define, even after spending all weekend at its many events and listening to a plethora of welcome speeches, which reflects both the wide and varied nature of the kinds of people it attracted, and its own intentional uncertainty. I will use its [creators’ own words](https://understory.comment.org/2026/about?reg%5Ftype%5Fid=1147334&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to lieu of my own:

> We find ourselves living in a time between times—when inherited frameworks are collapsing, trust in one another and in our institutions is eroding, and power, untethered from humility, too often turns predatory.…The Understory is not a conference but a people—a founding moment for a rising world of writers, artists, weavers, and civic builders to gather around a shared question: How might we rehumanize our common life and renew trust—between persons, and within the institutions that exist and those yet to be born?

I read between the lines—if you were grieving what society had lost in this last decade and beyond, if you were dismayed at the destruction that had been wrought in the last year and a half, and particularly if you were a Christian lamenting how this could have happened in an American Church you thought you understood, and if you were wondering where we could possibly go from here, this was the place for you. The existential weight of our times is an ache that I have struggled to learn to carry gracefully for years now, and so I could not sign up fast enough when registration opened in February. I was worn out in February. Come the last few days of May, I was entirely and utterly exhausted.

The year had been hard, though I don’t want to pretend that it was unique. If you are leaving a home that loves you, the first year out is hard for everybody. The first year spent across the country from childhood friends who remember what you wore in second grade is hard for everybody. Finding a real job, paying real rent, and buying real groceries on your own for the first time is hard for everybody. I was fortunate enough to not have to truly face most of those circumstances until I turned 24, but the fact remains that these turning points are hard for everybody, and they’re even more difficult when you have to learn how to do them all at the same time.

When I came to the Understory, I was coming off my first year of grad school and perhaps the hardest year of my life up to that point. I had discovered in the late July of 2025 that I needed to move from Chicago to Washington D.C. in less than a month for a program that I had applied to because it excited me, because I needed a doorway to D.C., and because I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t find a job to cover student expenses that fit my interests—blame it on the market, blame it on slashed government programs, blame it on my insufficient resume—and turned to the service industry instead. I had never worked in hospitality in my life, and I must have submitted over thirty applications before I got an interview based on a manager’s whim and an overly enthusiastic cover letter. I was working nearly thirty hours a week at one point, coming home at all hours and wondering how in the world I was going to make it to my 8:30am class in the morning. Personal losses at home were made all the more devastating by distance. 

The role that I had intended to take on in this city—of representing Christ in a community often filled with polarized assumptions, a demand to hate the left or right, and a blatant embrace of power over principle—gave me purpose, but it did not give me comfort. It did not give me peace. Obligation settled thickly across my shoulders every place I entered into and left no time or money or space for easy laughter, real rest, or trusted friendship. I was here, having the kinds of conversations I had come to D.C. for, taking the little steps towards making a difference, and yet all I could think about was that I hadn’t seen my hometown in almost five months. These turning points of life are indeed hard for everybody, and I have wished many times this year that knowing such a truth was enough to make it less hard for me.

When I leave early the next morning to meet my father, the first light is just peeking over the roofs across the street. The air is very cool and quiet, and so there is no missing it when the mother bird leaps out of the potted hosta plant with a furious flutter at my interruption. I exclaim quietly with joy, not wanting to scare her more than I already have, and peek in amongst the hosta leaves. The baby bird has made it through the night, nestled perfectly against the pot’s lip, and he has been found.

The creators and curators of the Understory were right in insisting that it was more of a festival than a conference, and choosing the Washington National Cathedral as the space to host it only added to the sense. Musical performances linked each welcome speech and long-winded lecture together, and jazz filled the air during the meet-and-greet reception. A brilliant show of lights and vibrant projections molded themselves both to the architecture they were cast upon and to the intangible artistry of a live string accompaniment. 

We were seated—over a thousand of us—together in the nave where the light show made the columns holding up such a cavernous hall look like redwoods, rushing upwards and into the heavens filled with stone and stars. At one point, the artist brought a thunderstorm into the cathedral. A live artist intertwined his own style with a traditional Chinese calligraphy over the course of three days, his creation unfolding before us near the grand entrance. A bookstore sold its wares, tucked away in a corner of masterful masonry and stained glass.

The names of the public speakers, teachers, civic leaders, and artists were just as varied as their performances. Jon Guerra performed a few times, and though I had never heard him in person I have known his name for many years as I wrestled with American Christianity alongside the lyrics of “Citizens,” released in 2020\. David Brooks spoke on rebuilding and elitism, always cognizant of how intellectuals and people in power have left the working class behind. A breakout session titled “Widening the Canon,” led by several Black classical school teachers, sought to honor the traditional literature that authors of all backgrounds admired and intertwined into their more modern works while creating space for masterpieces that were once shunned because of the color of their creators’ skin, trying to create a new kind of accessibility. Oskar Eustis, who was pivotal in bringing about the very first production of *Hamilton,* was seeking stories of grief both civic and personal and shared his own: he told us of how Lin-Manuel Miranda sent him the first draft of “It’s Quiet Uptown” just two days after Eustis’ sixteen-year-old son committed suicide. He and his wife sat in rehearsals day after day, grieving their lost child alongside an audience that wept for Hamilton’s. Dr. Anika Prather lamented the nature of stories left unfinished in the lives and transformations of MLK, Malcolm X, and Abraham Lincoln. Leaders of Minneapolis churches reflected on the lessons learned from ICE’s incursion on the city, and what it meant to stand with your neighbor when they need you the most. Francis Collins, whose name I recognized from the Human Genome Project, treated us to a poignant performance on guitar of “If Not Now, Tell Me When.”

I could go on, but I think the list paints enough of a picture and if I tried to fully describe all that took place this piece would be far longer than it already is. It was a meeting of art, politics, religion, identity, culture, and everything else that has divided us with particular vitriol in the past decade or so. It was a rousing call to community, a place of peace to be around people who were grieving the same sorts of things even if we didn’t all agree on how to fix them. It was sometimes a bit too undefined, similar sentiments repeated again and again in different speeches that blurred together into one. Sometimes there were too many trailing words strung together, aesthetically beautiful, perhaps, but beating around the bush so insistently that the real intended meaning was lost in all the circling. Many of us were not entirely certain what we were doing there at the start, but we were all beyond grateful to be invited. 

What stood out most from those three days was this: Imagination will be what brings us beyond the world’s dividing lines and categorized solutions, imagination built on and guided by Christian Humanism and its philosophical sisters that can manage to find answers unconfined by the present moment’s definition of who is an enemy, and who is our savior. People of all walks of faith and of no faith at all were present and welcome. The Understory reveled in uncertainty, a jarring encounter in the environment of sharp lines and dictating labels that D.C. is known for. It took its time, and it did not hurry.

When I open my front door the next day, the birds are putting up a massive clamor. I am a bit concerned but mostly just confused, particularly because a great deal of their uproar seems targeted at me. A mother-looking bird is perched on a branch, eyeing me angrily. And then I look down: lo and behold, another baby bird is sitting as still as a stone a few feet in front of me. The clamor only grows when I pick him up as stealthily as I can and deposit him in the planter next to his brother. They instantly huddle together as if they had been waiting desperately to finally be reunited. I check through the garden pretty thoroughly after that, looking for any more lost fledglings. I find what I’m almost certain is their third sibling, dead on the stone of the alleyway around the corner just a few feet away from the little enclave outside my door where I found the other two. The same bird returns to the scene of my abducting, looking for her missing offspring with frantic desperation. I patiently wait for her to realize that he is no longer there, and that he has gone to their new home. After a few recurring bouts of amnesia, she seems to catch on and I watch her flutter back and forth with food in her beak for a good long while.

The halls of the National Cathedral feel hallowed and old, though not because of their actual age. Its construction took several decades, eighty-three years to be exact. 1907 to 1990 is quite a time to come into being, encompassing some of the greatest modern calamities in not just our nation, but those of the entire world. As I traversed the massive cathedral for various events, I was struck by the recurrence of Abraham Lincoln, his words carved into the wall and his likeness left in sculptured stone in postures of speaking, praying, and entreating. His face is kind, worn, and—I think—heavy with a deep sadness. Lincoln will always be my favorite president in spite of his flaws—and in some ways, because of them. There are many facets of his character that are worthy of study, but for now I will just reflect on this: though Lincoln did not support slavery even at the beginning of his time in office, he did not necessarily believe in equal rights as an innate part of what it means to be human. But what he *did* do was something we so rarely see these days—he changed his mind, and he realized that he was wrong when doing anything rather than admit fault would have been far easier for the war-weary President. Perhaps he would have lived longer if he had done otherwise.

Lincoln developed a close friendship with Frederick Douglass over the years, slowly opening his eyes to the great and furious injustice America had done to her own people. He presided over a calamity that we have watched, in many ways, end other countries and entire futures for generations to come. And when it was over, he imagined a different future for the now United States of America. He had the friends and fortitude to imagine something greater than what his modern day would have accepted as possible. And, as I was reminded this weekend by Dr. Prather, he is a tragedy. 

Abraham Lincoln was in the process of becoming, weary as he was at the end, and he knew that America could be different than it had been. A pathetic, spiteful man with a bullet ended that dream, and we are in many ways still living with the consequences of that lost future. And yet, even with that loss there is still magnificent hope. Who could have imagined, in the darkest depths of the Civil War, that we would survive to see a new kind of society? Even with all its tragic imperfections, broken promises, and grief-stricken injustices, who could have imagined that we might still be here, striving away to bring about good in face of the evil of our day? There were many—Dr. Prather offered up MLK, Malcolm X, and Abraham Lincoln, to name a few—and we cannot pretend that the darkness of their times was any less menacing than it is in ours. Therefore, let us go on.

Three days later, the baby birds have vanished. I stare dumbly at the empty planter, continuing to poke through the dirt just in case I had somehow missed them. There is no sign of a struggle, no sign of movement, no sign of the mother. They’re just gone. I feel stupid for having been so pleased with the results of my bird-rescuing only the day before. I feel foolish for feeling so sad that they are gone. I turn once more to my online sleuthing for some solace, but all I find is uncertainty. There are plenty of predators that can snatch fledglings without leaving so much as a feather behind. Mother birds sometimes move them away if they feel that the nesting location is unsafe. Perhaps they were further along in their development than I thought, and perhaps they had learned to fly. I will never really know. A pair of raucous bluejays wheel through the canopy overhead, and I glare up at the infamous nest-robbers. I shouldn’t feel so despondent. They were just baby birds.

One more story from this strange and wonderful festival, and then I will leave you in peace. The second night of the Understory, Sea Dog Theater presented an excerpt of their [adaption of Viktor Frankl’s *Man’s Search for Meaning*](https://www.seadogtheater.org/mans-search-for-meaning?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*,* blending Frankl’s account of surviving the Holocaust with the anecdotes and reflections of the writerand actor Christopher J. Domig. The Austrian-American told his tale of moving back to Austria as an adult after being gone since childhood, returning to a place that used to be so familiar and so beloved, but now no longer felt like home. As he grapples with the ensuing isolation, his three-year-old son is suddenly afflicted by a mysterious illness, bleeding incessantly without cause and spending his young years in and out of specialists’ offices that provide no answers. He told this story of a parent’s helplessness and grief alongside Viktor Frankl’s account of when, as he huddled sick and starving amongst the other prisoners of the barracks, he was called upon to offer words of hope. The lights have gone out, and he begins to speak:

> God knows, I was not in the mood to give psychological explanations or to preach any sermons—to offer my comrades a kind of medical care of their souls. I was cold and hungry, irritable and tired, but I had to make the effort and use this unique opportunity. Encouragement was now more necessary than ever….Then I spoke of the many opportunities of giving life a meaning. I told my comrades…that human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning, and that this infinite meaning of life includes suffering and dying, privation and death. I asked the poor creatures who listened to me attentively in the darkness of the hut to face up to the seriousness of our position. They must not lose hope but should keep their courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle did not detract from its dignity and its meaning. I said that someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours—a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a God—and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly—not miserably—knowing how to die.

I am not learning how to die, and I would not venture to compare sufferings with anyone, much less a prisoner of genocide, but I do think this is a time in which people are tempted to give up hope. Democracy—which Winston Churchill once remarked was the worst form of government, except of course for all the other ones—seems to be stumbling all across the land. The U.S. is abandoning the ideals that, although it faltered in truly fulfilling them, it once strived for as a core part of what it meant to be an American: a revelry in attention, indecency, and betrayal have become the star-spangled currency of power. 

War blossoms along borders in places once thought to be at peace, and age-old feuds have fallen once more into bloody disasters. The global humanitarian infrastructure has been dismantled just when the world seemed to need it the most. Technology is outpacing our ability to understand, much less control, its true implications. The online world has spawned a rage economy in which a few media companies, politicians, and so-called influencers profit from feeding a festering hatred that has real world consequences far beyond the comment section and election cycle. Society is happy to wield whatever weapon—cancel culture or a corrupted government without integrity—that best secures their interests above and before all others. We are angry, we are lonely, and many of us are grieving the kind of world we thought we would be stepping into as we reached adulthood.

And yet, we go on—we must. Viktor Frankl has a startling word for the temptation of hopelessness, for the pull to give up on a world that you wished was different. “We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that *it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us*,” he writes. “We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.” 

When the world is dark, will we add to the smog? When our leaders turn their back on integrity, will we follow in their footsteps? When someone looks down on each of us, will they find us suffering proudly and well? In my own wandering and rage and grief I had forgotten one of the most crucial lessons of growing up: though the world is outside of my control, how I live within that world is a choice that *I* make. My spirit is a choice. It cannot be decided by the doings—right or wrong—of others. Our goodwill, our resilience and charity and courage, cannot be true if it is only present when our world is comfortable.

As a young adult you are told to expect so much from these years, but what do these years expect from us in turn? Things are not as they should be, the lights are going out—therefore, let us go on. Let us make those small decisions that seem unimportant and treat them as if they really matter, because really, they do. How you choose to vote matters; how you respond to your infuriating coworker matters; how you treat your barista and bartender and waiter matters; how you preach on a stage matters; how you care for the neighbor who speaks a different language matters; how you clean and laugh and chat on the porch matters; how you speak to your mom and dad matters; how you wake up in the morning matters. It matters when you choose to look your friend in the eye to listen—really listen—rather than humming along and scrolling through on your phone, and it matters just as much when it’s your enemy. And such mattering should not paralyze but rather inspire us to live with renewed creativity, imagining how things might be different and loving what is good as well as we can. The Understory—both in the festival and forest—is created by a million smaller acts that build up the ecosystem we live in, acts that we all take part in whether we are aware of it or not. But it is us—humans, not trees—that have a choice in what kind of world our acts will help build. The possibility of failure is not permission to fail to act nobly or to give up on trying.

The lyrics of Dan Nichols’ cover of “If Not Now, Tell Me When,” settle over me as I sit on the steps under the great canopies of oak and maple stretching out far above. Bugs buzz past, the wind shuffles through the shrubs and bushes and empty hosta plant pots, squirrels and birds and rodents of all sizes squawk and scamper through their respective pieces of the urban understory. People walk past on the sidewalk, snippets of conversation and phone calls drift upwards, quick hellos and quiet nods permeate the few feet between us. Maybe the baby birds never made it out of the nest, or maybe they learned to fly. Even if I am left with the same uncertainty and the same sadness, I decide that if I find another one, I will try again. It is important, I think, to keep trying again.

> *“I see sorrow and trouble in this land*, *Although there will be struggles, we’ll make the change we can, If not now, tell me when?*

> *I may never see the promised land, And yet we’ll take the journey and walk it hand in hand, If not now, tell me when?*

> *So we’ll work it ‘til it’s done, every daughter every son, Every soul that ever longed for something better, something brighter—*

> *It will take a change of heart for this to mend, But miracles do happen every shining now and then, If not now, tell me when?*

> *If not now, tell me when? If not now, tell me when?*

> *We may never see this moment, or place and time again, If not now, If not now,* 

> *Tell me when?”*
### America250 Forum, Day 1: The Idea of America
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/america250-forum-day-1-the-idea-of-america/
Last updated: 2026-06-30T11:00:19.000Z
*Our calling as Christians is to be in the world but not of it (John 17:16). We hear and say this so often, it verges on a cliché. But what does this calling mean for us as American Christians on the eve of America’s 250th birthday? Or, to put it another way, how might we think about the nation's 250th birthday as Christians and Americans? Earlier this week,* [*Jake Meador proposed this answer*](https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-refuge-for-chaotic-saints/) *to open the conversation: “The shortest way of answering the question is to say that America is a country that generally does not imprison her chaotic saints.” In this week’s three-day forum, theologians, historians, and public thinkers share their own responses.*

\*\*\*

## **So Much Freedom**

*Vika Pechersky*

Our arrival in the U.S. was in many ways banal and typical of countless immigrants before us—it was driven primarily by economic reasons; we sought opportunities our country no longer offered. Young newlyweds, my husband and I came with two suitcases and enough money for about a month until his first paycheck. 

I arrived with certain ideas about what America is. These were typical of immigrants. After all, to quote Bono, America is an idea. I imagined a country of giants—tall buildings glistening in the sun—of all kinds of shapes and breathtaking heights. In my childhood, I tried to imagine what it feels like to ride an elevator to the 100th floor. Freedom and wonder are the best words to describe what I felt as I boarded the plane to come here.

As a Christian who learned about Jesus through missionaries and about American culture through Hollywood, I thought that everyone in the U.S. was basically a Christian. This is also common to many immigrants—an expectation that America is composed of Christians who diligently adhere to the faith of their fathers. Coming from Uzbekistan, one of the most hostile countries to Christianity, living in a Christian culture was a much-welcome reprieve. What I didn’t expect was to find a culture in outright rebellion against its Christian roots. 

Now, more than twenty years later, as a parent of teenagers, America today still feels to me like a defiant child, acting out in a fit of hormonal adolescence, standing up to its Christian parents to break away from their influence and assert its cultural independence. Is it just a stage? I surely hope so. Will it outgrow its defiance and realize that a tree with severed roots never truly regenerates? Or, better yet, perhaps America will come to realize that it can never truly sever its roots; that some things come together at conception and remain there, so ingrained, so steady, that no historical process can fully erase them. I hope that what truly lasts, despite the gruesome reality of historical erasure, is a simple Christian belief that God, who became man for us and for our salvation, remains the steady presence that gives us both guidance and meaning.

America offers so much freedom—sometimes more than we know what to do with. It is still the best place for opportunities to build one’s life with God-given talents. However, to be a Christian in America today is to exercise the emotional intelligence of a wise parent who understands that underneath rebellion lies a deeper longing for meaning and belonging that may not have forgotten its way home yet. 

**\*\*\***

## **America is Not a Church, and the Church is Not America**

*Daniel G. Hummel*

Though disestablished, revivalist, evangelical Christianity predates 1776, I can’t help thinking about its legacy on the nation’s 250th birthday. I am one of that tribe and have been my whole life—as were my parents and their parents.

I recently read [an academic book](https://missionbooks.org/products/accidental-diplomats?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that argued that evangelical missionaries exported their spiritual values of individual conversion, church volunteerism, the low church “priesthood of all believers” across the globe. By pursuing the religious aims of conversion, they ended up wielding remarkable political influence in postcolonial countries. Reflecting on my own childhood as a “missionary kid,” I found this an intuitive insight: Evangelical Christianity is deeply formed by both Christian and American values. Though I value many Christians and other faith traditions outside America, I can hardly imagine being a Christian without these values and their implications of individual conversion, congregational polity, lay leadership, and more.

A lack of imagination may be my failing. I might be too much an American and not enough a Christian. Still, I resonate with Tocqueville’s observation that Americans “combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.” Most Americans do this, even those who aren’t evangelicals and those who claim immunity to it. At its best, this majority has understood liberty as both negative and positive (in Isaiah Berlin’s categories): freedom from external coercion and freedom to pursue one’s ultimate purpose in God. My tribe, like American culture generally, has majored in “freedom from” and left others to instill the capacity for “freedom to.” That was unrealistic, and we have paid for it: we are in a major “freedom to” deficit at our 250th anniversary—both the United States and American Christians.

Having overemphasized “freedom from” and failed to articulate “freedom to,” we face a crisis of purpose in which the path forward looks political rather than what it should be: congregations seeking the good of the cities they inhabit. But I am also hopeful, as evangelicals should be. Paul urges the church in Rome, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). The church in Rome—like those in Corinth and Thessalonica—faced a similar “freedom to” problem. A modern-day Paul could lift whole passages and apply them to the church in Los Angeles, Dallas, or Madison, WI in 2026\. God was faithful then and he will be now. 

America is not a church, and the Church is not America. This is all the better, as my evangelical commitments should lead me to conclude. But America has many churches on its 250th anniversary, and those churches are called to seek the good of their cities, as past generations were. This political anniversary prompts in me a religious rather than political response—I hope it will prompt congregational responses of Biblically informed “freedom to.” American Christians—plenty of evangelicals among them—are already doing that, especially at the local level, modeling what a faithful witness of “freedom to” might look like for the next 250 years.

**\*\*\***

## **Was the Founding a Theological Event?**

*John Ehrett*

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been surrounded by arguments about whether America is a “Christian nation.” Virtually always, those debates are pegged to the Founding generation—as if the “Christian-ness” of the nation might inhere for all time in a set of founding documents or a solemn juridical covenant.

But the American Founding itself was rather more theologically ambivalent than any partisan might like. It was grounded in what James Davison Hunter has called the “hybrid-Enlightenment consensus”—a paradigm that blended basic Christian assumptions with emerging scientific pragmatism, and that was characterized by some discomfort with received institutional religiosity and by a high degree of openness to heterodox thinking. Final resolution of theological questions, in any “thick” sense, was deferred.

And so, it seems to me that arguments about whether America was founded as a “Christian nation” often miss the point. Instead, I’d argue that for its entire lifespan, ours is a country and society that has been working, however inconclusively, at *becoming Christian*, or at least reckoning at some level with the claims of the faith.

All throughout its history, the American nation has been periodically convulsed by society-wide moments of spiritual questing. Most famously, there were the First and Second Great Awakenings—massive-scale social upheavals defined by public attentiveness to, and longing for, spiritual realities beyond the horizon of the mundane. They produced some of the profoundest theology, and most controversial splinter groups, in national history. And—crucially—they were individualist, interiorizing, and highly emotive. They were summons not merely to participation in a common cultural project, but to personal conversion and transformation.

There was a Third—and then a Fourth—Great Awakening, too. The 1960s represented just such an episode, but a more fateful one: this time around, the old wineskins—that is to say, traditional institutions and culture—failed to hold the new wine. And, following Joshua Mitchell, I’d argue something similar characterized the social justice movement that blazed from roughly 2015 to 2023\. 

Viewed in context, these episodes followed the same pattern as their forerunners: they were far-reaching, culturally transformative attempts to recapture something of transcendent truth against the backdrop of mundane existence. They insisted on interior redemption, not merely acquiescence. And both had a covertly Christian provenance: mystical encounter with God (in the former case) and the quest for eternal justice (in the latter) are both facets of the Christian tradition. But in the end, when torn from a robustly theological mooring, they became forces of disintegration.

Perhaps, in the end, the very theological ambivalence of the Founding is itself a touchstone of the religious vitality of American life. Here in our land, the perennial Christian summons to faithful presence—and personal faith—is urgent precisely because history permits no complacent assumption of a univocal religio-nationalist tradition. Whether American *can be* a Christian land, and what exactly that means, is a question to be asked and answered over and over again.

There is reason for humility, but also a certain tempestuous grace, in this. I, for one, am grateful for such a country where my ancestors—fleeing religious persecution in the Old World—could make their home. They did not arrive with great ambitions, but came as farmers and teachers and ministers seeking to worship, pray, and teach in their own way, and to weave their lives into the story of America’s ongoing reckoning with its God. May that story continue for centuries more to come.

**\*\*\***

## **For the Love of America**

*Amy Mantravadi*

Whenever July 4th comes around, people talk about how much they love America. It is a love we express chiefly by setting off fireworks in the driveway and sending every neighborhood dog into a panic. But what do we mean when we say we love “America”? Do we mean this land that gives its bounty or these fresh waters fit to drink? Is “America” an idea of freedom, or goodness, or strength? Is it the factories that forge our steel, the labs that produce our medications, or the universities that train our students? Or is it the host of people who have made this land their home?

The one thing we seem sure of is that there are other Americans who do not love America quite as much we do. But again, what do we mean when we say we love America? Do we love these people, 340 million strong? The light and dark ones, the old and young, the rich and poor, the sensible and wayward? Do we love only those who love us, or do we love all our neighbors? And do we love the stranger, the alien who sojourns among us?

To love America means to love the whole: every person made in the image of God. It is to seek the common good, love your neighbor, pray for your enemy, hope all things, and repent of all wrongs. It is to look in gratitude upon the gifts of God—the fertile fields, the abundant waters, the human ingenuity, the peace our strength has bought us—while acknowledging the sins of man. It is to build homes and live in them: to tend to one’s business, raise one’s family, treasure one’s friends, and not despair in times of hardship. 

For we are great when we seek the Giver of life, hope, freedom, and love. As we celebrate the nation’s sesquicentennial, let us remember who it is that allows us to prosper and shows mercy rather than judgment. The call of Scripture is not merely to pray that our land might be healed, but to humble ourselves and acknowledge the unique goodness of the Giver. For only in loving all her people will we begin to love America as God loves her: based not on her deserts, but the mercy only he can give. “America! America! God shed his grace on thee.”
### A Refuge for Chaotic Saints
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-refuge-for-chaotic-saints/
Last updated: 2026-06-29T11:00:39.000Z
America is a country that generally does not imprison her chaotic saints.

There is a wildness to American Christianity that certainly comes with much pain. There is a vulnerability to hucksterism here, perhaps best summed up in [the famous Bible salesman scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koZ2-7M1IvA&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) starring John Goodman in *O Brother, Where Art Thou?* American Christianity loves a good salesman and that is to our loss.

Yet the same indifference to custom and single-mindedness that makes us vulnerable to the Elmer Gantrys of the world also opens us up to something else: I cannot think of other western nations that so reliably produce such remarkable and unruly saints as we seem to grow quite predictably in America. Think of Dorothy Day or Francis Schaeffer or Rich Mullins or the Jesus People. If you reach back further, think of Sojourner Truth or Francis Asbury. Think, for that matter, of the outpouring that took place at the college bearing Asbury’s name only a few years ago.

There is an unruly and untamed spirit that runs through Christianity. You see it in figures like John the Baptist, wrapped in animal skins and eating bugs in the desert while preaching to the crowds or in the early monastics retreating to the deserts of Egypt. You can see it, I think, in a figure like Martin Luther. You might recall, for instance, that at the Leipzig Disputation the great Catholic debater Johann Eck informed the unruly Augustinian that he was effectively recapitulating the teachings of the condemned heretic Jan Hus, who the church had burned 100 years prior at the Council of Constance. 

Luther asked for time to revisit Hus’s teachings before making a reply. He came back a couple days later and, to the astonishment of many, patiently explained that actually Hus was right and Rome was wrong. You can certainly see that same ungovernable streak in the modern missions movement, perhaps most of all in the famous story of William Carey defying the elders of his church who told him that if God wished to save the heathen he could do so without Mr. Carey’s help. What I am saying is that there is a kind of benevolent and faithful goblin mode quality to certain leaders in the historic church.

Yet while that disagreeable quality is present throughout the stories of the church, it is also true that Christendom has often struggled to reconcile itself with that quality: John Bunyan was thrown into prison in England. The only reason Luther *wasn’t* thrown into prison is that he happened to be blessed with a quite powerful local lord who protected him. But that, of course, did not stop Luther’s followers from frequently throwing other chaotic saints into prison. It crops up everywhere. 

When the French Calvinists were becoming too influential and numerous, the French Catholics dealt with it [by murdering them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St.%5FBartholomew's%5FDay%5Fmassacre?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). And yet despite being subject to such monstrous behavior, my Reformed ancestors did not refrain from throwing fellow Christians into prison or, indeed, [murdering them](https://mereorthodoxy.com/concerning-fr-edmund-campion/). (The only obvious example I can think of in which a Christendom country is able to accommodate these unruly saints is found in Russia, whose tradition of the holy fool has given them a way to understand such figures. Yet in Russia the tradition of the holy fool has at times lapsed into a quite jarring and, to my eyes, alarming disdain for creation and for creaturely health in the world. So I would not see the Russian example here as something to emulate, even if they are, in a fashion, better at incorporating chaotic saints into Christendom than some other nations have been.)

For the most part, America has not done as these other countries have. Our record is not perfect, of course, but it is preferable to that of most countries of European Christendom, I think. Indeed, it is immensely telling that perhaps my most favorite chaotic saints—my brothers and sisters in the Bruderhof–began their life together in Germany, yet were forced out of Germany, only to then be forced out of England, to which they had first fled. We did not receive them immediately in America, leaving them to endure and hope and suffer for a decade in the jungles of Paraguay. And yet eventually we received them. And while there are now Bruderhof communities all over the world and while it is certainly true that they do not *need* American-style religious liberty to thrive… well, in places that *have* our style of religious liberty they have done well. They have been welcome.

Certainly, there is much that is wrong in the American church today and much that is wrong with America herself. Even so: as we mark this Fourth of July I am thinking about my great-grandfathers who came to America 144 years ago and 116 years ago. Both had a certain wildness to them.

Carl, [my Swedish Lutheran great-grandfather](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-possibilities-of-home/), was a tenant farmer, lay preacher, and lifelong depressive who attempted suicide many times, yet seemed to die (at age 83 and of natural causes) at peace with God and his fellow man. The last photos we have of him, at any rate, show a lightness in his eyes that is not detectable in the older photos, and the memories his grandchildren share of him strike quite a different note from what one imagines he was like in his earlier days. This man was welcome in America. 

Constantine, my [Greek Orthodox great-grandfather](https://mereorthodoxy.com/we-became-american-because-we-could/), meanwhile, worked in a Boston paper mill for many years with other Greek immigrants, was a cantor in the Orthodox church, and a veteran of WW1 who doted on his grandchildren and took his granddaughter, my mother, to professional wrestling matches at the old Pershing Auditorium in Lincoln when she was still an elementary-aged child. My mother tells the story of the time my great-grandfather shouted something at [Mad Dog Vachon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice%5FVachon?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) which he seemed to take offense at. So he spat at Constantine, which of course only made Constantine (and his granddaughter sitting next to him) more upset. Constantine, too, was welcome in America.

And so if there is something I am grateful for this week it is that I live in a country with space for men like them. Too true, we also have our frauds and our con men. But to live in a place that doesn’t squelch the radicalism of Christian discipleship and that is able to accommodate the unruly and the boisterous and the simply uncomfortable who show up in our churches needing to be loved… well, for that privilege I am grateful.
### What Type of Christian is J. D. Vance?
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/what-type-of-christian-is-j-d-vance/
Last updated: 2026-06-29T11:00:34.000Z
**JD Vance.** [***Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith***](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/communion-j-d-vance?variant=45116963192866&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Harper, 2026\. $35.00\. 304 pp.**

JD Vance’s new faith memoir, *Communion*, has been almost universally panned. Rarely has a bestselling author of any political stripe published a book that instantly generates so much negative press from both the left and the right. 

The *New York Times* commissioned three reviewers to discuss Vance’s book, and all three of them gave it a scathing assessment. The book was Vance’s political attempt to “to be kind of a faith man,” one of the reviewers [said](http://nytimes.com/2026/06/20/opinion/jd-vance-communion-trump.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). “It’s almost like putting Trump and Mike Pence in a blender.” The *Atlantic*’s [review](http://nytimes.com/2026/06/20/opinion/jd-vance-communion-trump.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) was a little kinder, but still concluded that the book was “a perhaps not-so-subtle way to show how he’s different from the man currently in the White House, whose office Vance is widely expected to seek two years from now.” 

The *Dispatch*’s assessment was most damning of all. Vance is a “knee-walking sycophant” whose “conversion story is bulls-t,” Kevin Williamson [wrote](https://thedispatch.com/article/vance-conversion-catholicism-trump-politics/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in the *Dispatch*. His book was “imbecilic dreck.” “I have never in my lifetime seen a public man work so assiduously to prepare for himself a place in Hell,” Williamson concluded. 

What all of these reviews have in common, whether they’re written by Never-Trump conservatives or by lifelong Democrats, is a refusal to believe that Vance—who transitioned from a fierce critic of Trump to his loyal vice president—could be anything other than a cynical political operator. Whatever he says about his own faith must be hypocritical, they have decided. Seizing on the book’s opening biblical quotation—"Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:20), a verse to which Vance repeatedly returns throughout the book—Vance’s critics have argued that Vance’s political machinations offer one of the clearest examples of rotten fruit they have seen and thus constitute more than enough evidence to dismiss whatever he says about religion.

To be sure, Vance has left himself wide open for criticism on this front. He has been a remarkably fast shape-shifter in politics, and along the way, he has told some blatant lies (such as his false claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats and dogs). When faced with the choice between supporting Donald Trump’s positions or the Catholic magisterium, he has invariably chosen Trump over the Church, whether on abortion pills, immigration policy, or the war in Iran. 

But I think that by dismissing Vance’s faith memoir out of hand, the critical reviewers have missed the opportunity this book gives us to better understand not only Vance’s beliefs but also the beliefs of a large number of other Christians in the United States today. If, instead of approaching Vance’s memoir as cynics, we read it as a genuine account of Vance’s beliefs and spiritual journey, we’ll be able to learn a lot about both the content and the limits of Vance’s Christian faith.

## **Vance’s Search for Community** 

Vance’s search for faith was shaped by a longing for community—but not just any community. By beginning his book with his childhood family and ending it with a discussion of his own marriage and children, Vance makes it clear that for him, God has always been closely tied to his family. 

As Vance’s first book, [*Hillbilly Elegy*](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/hillbilly-elegy-j-d-vance?variant=32207704424482&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), makes clear, his childhood family was filled with drugs, marital breakups, and other dysfunction. And yet Vance found that he could not distance himself from it. For a while, he tried to substitute academic achievement and professional success for the community and family he had left behind. “In college I was obsessed with the question of social mobility,” Vance says. “Do poor kids have a chance of making it in our country? . . . I was a poor kid, and I was desperate to make it.”

*Hillbilly Elegy* was an attempt to make sense of that question. The answer it gives is that working-class white culture—especially the Appalachian “hillbilly” culture—is filled with dysfunction and attitudes that keep people from succeeding. To break out of that harmful mindset, people need to take responsibility for their choices. But when they do, they will feel lonely and alienated from their roots. 

Several reviewers have asked the question what happened to the “thoughtful” JD Vance who wrote *Hillbilly Elegy*, because they don’t see a connection between the author of that earlier book and the author of *Communion*. Instead, *Communion* “offers a window into just how much the thoughtful boy in *Hillbilly Elegy* allowed himself to be corrupted by politics,” Molly Olmstead wrote in a [review](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/06/trump-news-jd-vance-book-communion-review.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) for *Slate*.

But I actually see a great deal of continuity between Vance’s two books. *Hillbilly Elegy* was written by Vance at a time when he had just achieved material and professional success, but only at the cost of alienation from his family and community. He ended the book with a lot of anger – anger at the broken homes, anger at the dysfunctional culture, and anger at some level with the “elites” who gave him professional opportunities but never made him feel fully comfortable or accepted. In *Communion*, he resolves much of that anger through Christian theology, because he found in Christianity emotional reconciliation with his family and the community he had been longing for.

## **Family and Community in Vance’s Early Religious Journey**

As Vance explains in *Communion*, he grew up in a family that believed in Jesus, even though it was also a family plagued with drug abuse, divorce, and out-of-control anger. Though he did not spend very much of his youth with his father, he attended enough evangelical church services on visits with his dad to absorb a great deal of premillennial expectations about Jesus’s imminent return, as well as a strong conviction that the theory of evolution was opposed to the first chapter of Genesis and was therefore wrong. 

And he absorbed from his grandmother (his “Mamaw,” the closest person to a parent that he had in his broken home) a practical working-class Christian faith that fused a liberal use of profanity with a steadfast faith in Jesus as savior. Mamaw’s deep suspicion of ecclesiastical institutions and clerical power made her more comfortable watching church on TV than attending in person, but nevertheless, she raised her grandson to believe in Jesus. For much of his teens, he had enough Christian conviction to read through the entire Bible twice, become an avid C.S. Lewis fan, and defend young-earth creationism in online apologetic forums.

But then, just before Vance deployed for Iraq as a new Marine recruit in 2005, Mamaw died. With his tenuous tie to the faith now gone, Vance found it easy to conclude that churches’ endless preaching about the end-times was irrelevant for his life. But more than anything, he was angry. “What paved my path to atheism wasn’t books or ideas,” Vance says. “It was sadness and a sense of betrayal.” 

At the time, Vance says, he would have given intellectual reasons for his unbelief. Scientific evidence supported the theory of evolution; the creation account in Genesis 1 was therefore wrong. The example of radical Muslims in Iraq showed that religious devotion could be used for evil ends. And churches spent their time on irrelevant topics, such as political outrage over Terri Schiavo’s death, instead of the real needs of the people in the pews.

But Vance says he thinks there’s a better explanation for abandoning religion: He left the faith because he was surrounded by friends in the military for whom faith was similarly irrelevant. Perhaps they were nominal Christians, but they were far more interested in “finding girls and drinking too much.” As a result, “Christianity had become completely irrelevant to me. I didn’t even know where to find a church near my Marine Corps base in Havelock, North Carolina. I didn’t pray regularly. My Bibles were gathering dust in Ohio.” 

Vance thinks that a lot of other people of his own generation—that is, other millennials—have similar reasons for walking away from the faith. They might be able to cite intellectual reasons for their unbelief, just as Vance once did. But the root cause of their unbelief was that they lost ties to social networks that cultivated faith and exchanged them for social networks that made faith irrelevant. For a decade, Vance inhabited the social networks that encouraged his unbelief. But the cost of that unbelief was further alienation from his family heritage.

Vance eventually felt the emptiness of this life. At Yale Law School, he made socioeconomic advancement a personal god. He read the books that would advance his career, but he had no real love for the law or for the legal profession. Nor did he have any connections to something larger than himself. 

When he fell in love with Usha Chilukuri, the woman who would become his wife, he saw for the first time the larger values he was missing. Usha encouraged him to take delight in the beauty of their surroundings. She urged him to begin reading novels and to start noticing the architectural details on the old buildings on the Yale campus. In other words, she helped him to begin caring about something larger than simply advancing himself professionally and escaping the poverty of his family background.

As he dated Usha and began preparing for marriage (and eventually, he hoped, fatherhood), he began considering questions about values that he had not really asked himself before. “The meritocracy had focused my mind on the crude and superficial—credentials, careers, money,” Vance says. “These things might have been necessary, but they could never form the basis of a truly good life.” Because Usha “inspired me to be better, she forced me to follow a different path. And that, more than anything, is the path that led me back to God.” 

Vance began attending church again because he wanted to be a good person. When his first son (Ewan) was born, in 2017, he prayed for hours that God would “make me a good dad.” Recalling that he had never really had a dad himself—but only a string of stepfathers and other men who came in and out of his life during his childhood—he realized that having a son “was my opportunity to correct the mistakes of the past. It was an opportunity to make real that American Dream I so desperately wanted. It was an opportunity to show my wife that I could be a good father. It was, in a word, an opportunity for redemption.” 

“How to inculcate virtue in a person is the most important question I confront with my son,” Vance realized. The answer to that question, he concluded, is community. 

## **The Community Offered by the Catholic Church**

Vance found himself drawn to the one church tradition that offered the deepest tradition of community and the strongest emphasis on developing virtue: Catholicism. With its two millennia of history and its emphasis on a community of saints stretching into eternity, Catholicism offered Vance “communion” in every sense of the word. It offered him a “connection to something unbroken and ancient.” It also gave him the intellectual resources to address the skeptical questions that had kept him away from God for more than a decade.

After reading Augustine’s commentary on Genesis 1, he realized that not all historic Christians had interpreted the first chapter as a literal, scientific account, as the young-earth creationists of his youth had. He welcomed the insight that he could hold onto both the Bible and science. Christianity was not an anti-intellectual tradition, he found.

Similarly, he drew on the literary criticisms of René Girard to answer another common skeptical objection that he once thought had disproved Christianity—the argument that the flood story and other biblical narratives were plagiarized from ancient Near Eastern myths. Girard argued that those stories had a common ancestor, but that the Bible used those myths—and especially the scapegoat myth—to reveal deep theological truths that explained the human condition. 

As Vance reflected on his own experiences, he realized that he, too, had commonly “scapegoated” others. “Girard’s work captured so well the psychology of my generation, especially its privileged members,” he wrote. “Mired in the swamp of social media, we would identify a scapegoat and digitally pounce. We were keyboard warriors, unloading on people via Facebook, instant messenger, and Twitter, blind to our own failings.” 

During Vance’s years as an atheist, he had thought that the vast amount of suffering in the world was evidence that there was no God. But when he began reading the Bible once again and pairing it with the insights of Catholic theologians, he realized that the Bible fully acknowledged the presence of suffering and was not embarrassed by it. 

The Bible was also honest about human imperfection. And Catholic theology was honest about people’s propensity to continue to fall into sin and addiction long after professing Jesus as their Savior—just as Vance’s family had during his childhood. “Grace is not something that happens in a moment,” a priest told him. “Real grace comes through practice. This is why we demand that you live a sacramental life: going to church, taking Communion, doing confession. This is a process. You don’t accept Jesus into your heart—or get baptized—and fix everything. That’s not the promise of the Church. The promise of the Church is that you are lost, and the Church will provide you a road map to God.” 

The practice of confession, he found, was better than therapy, because rather than encouraging people to blame their childhood family for their failings, it demanded that they take responsibility for their own sins even while acknowledging the reality of the trauma they had faced. “There had to be some way of understanding that we are neither beholden to the misdeeds of our ancestors nor wholly independent from them,” Vance says. “That third way—a way that could acknowledge the trauma in a child’s life without excusing his behavior as an adult—became more and more appealing. But most of all I wanted to be a better person. I wanted to be worthy of this woman I was madly in love with.” 

“What brought me back to my faith was the sense that the Church answered life’s big questions,” Vance says. Throughout the book, he skewers the “meritocratic” class for the emptiness of their values and the inadequacy of their worldview. Time and again he found that Christianity, when properly understood (that is, when processed through the lens of Catholic theology rather than the superficiality of *Left Behind* theology or the biblical interpretation of Answers in Genesis), offered a more satisfying picture of reality than anything he could find in secular psychology or liberal meritocracy.

## **Making Sense of Vance’s Faith and Politics**

If Vance had published his conversion narrative in 2017 or 2018, as he had originally planned, I think that it would have gained a better reception, because its receptivity would not have been colored by Vance’s politics. I think that to fully appreciate this book, it’s useful to forget for a moment that Vance is the vice president and to treat it instead as a coming-to-faith memoir from one of the numerous young men who are making their way into the Catholic Church because they are attracted to the enduring power of its ancient truths, to the community it offers, and to the promise it holds of making them a better person. If Vance had never entered politics—but had instead, say, taken a job as a Never-Trump writer at the *Atlantic* or some other venue while continuing to attend Mass each week and spend time with his kids—I suspect that his memoir would have received far less popular criticism.

But, of course, Vance did recant his earlier criticisms of Trump, and he did enter the political realm. According to some of his critics, he sold his soul in the process and abandoned whatever modicum of Christian principles he might have had. How, after all, can a man who professes to care so deeply about virtue bear “false witness” against Haitian immigrants and defend President Trump at every turn, even when it requires going against the pope?

Vance partially addresses these criticisms in his book, the last third of which is dedicated to his political views and his alliance with Trump. I agree with Molly Olmstead’s suggestion that *Communion* is really two books—one (which focuses solely on Vance’s faith journey) written mostly before 2020 and the other (which focuses on his politics) written after Trump’s second inauguration in 2025\. I’m less persuaded than she is, though, that these two books are incompatible. 

 I think instead that if we consider what motivated Vance to embrace the Christian faith, we’ll better understand the reasons for his alliance with Trump. Vance’s life has been driven by his tortuous relationship with his childhood family and community. He tried to resolve that tension first through professional achievement and then, when that failed, through marriage and fatherhood—which also proved inadequate. His newfound Catholic faith resolved his sense of alienation from his family and finally allowed him to forgive his mother and enter into communion with his family’s Christian beliefs even while honestly acknowledging the trauma that their sins caused. It also allowed him to transcend the patterns of drug addiction and abandonment that had shaped his childhood and give his own children a better environment.

While Vance is intensely ambitious (even addictively so), I think that we can best understand his decision to enter politics and ally with Trump not merely as a cynical calculation but as an attempt to implement his postliberal vision of a family-centered, pro-working-class, local political order. The political vision that Vance lays out in this book—and that he sees as a natural application of his Catholic faith—is remarkably critical of the unregulated free market and supportive of government support for working-class people. It accords much more with postliberal interpretations of *Rerum Novarum* and other Catholic social teaching than with Republican Party orthodoxy. Vance’s politics are driven by his desire to ally himself with the white working class and turn against the meritocratic “elites” whose values he once tried to embrace but which he decided were vacuous.

Vance allied himself with Trump, I think, partly because he saw how much the meritocratic “elites” hated him and how much the white working class idolized him. He convinced himself that Trump’s policies on trade, immigration, and foreign relations would protect working-class communities and, by extension, working-class families. And he convinced himself that protecting the working class and local communities was what Catholic politics was all about.

## **The Shortcomings of Vance’s Theology**

What’s missing, I think, is the larger global vision that the Catholic Church outlined in Vatican II. American Catholic bishops—along with the late Pope Francis—have been sharply critical of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, but Vance has rejected those criticisms, partly perhaps because his own version of the faith gives primacy to the needs of white working-class American communities rather than the needs of people throughout the world. If Vance’s longing for connection with his family drove him to faith, his faith never really transcended that to embrace a global vision for the kingdom of God. He has discovered one part of Catholicism, but it’s only one part. To discover the full riches of the faith, he will need to disentangle his understanding of Catholic theology from postliberalism and his own longing for reconnection with his family heritage and recognize that the Church cares equally about the dignity and well-being of every person and family from every nation, regardless of their background or ethnicity.

Perhaps Vance’s own personal dishonesty or political sycophancy has been even more troubling, especially given his stated commitment to Christian virtue and desire to be a better person. But even if Vance may have entered politics for principled reasons—as he well might, since he may have done so in order to protect the families and culture of working-class communities—he is certainly not the first politician to justify compromising his ethics by convincing himself that it’s necessary to keep his job and serve the greater good. 

In his book, Vance seems to equate virtue with being a good husband and father. While those are certainly important, I wish that he had said more about the larger list of Christian virtues and his own reflections on what those virtues might mean in his own life. I wish that he had said more about how he is dealing with what, by his own admission, is a long tendency to put his own selfish, career-seeking ambition above everything else.

Most of all, I wish that he had said more about Jesus—which I would have expected from a Catholic conversion narrative. Vance says a lot about his longing for virtue, but he doesn’t define virtue as an imitation of Jesus’s life. Yet this idea is central to Catholic theology. The most popular Catholic devotional book of all time is Thomas à Kempis’s *The Imitation of Christ*, which is a fifteenth-century guide to meditation on the teachings of Jesus in order to increase the Christian’s love for Christ and submission to God. I didn’t see much about Vance’s devotional life in this book. Instead, Vance’s focus is on developing the qualities that make him a loving husband and father. 

But as the Catholic Church teaches—and as Vance emphasizes in his book—growth in Christian faith and practice is a long process, not a matter of instantaneous conversion. Since we’re not privy to what Vance tells his confessor, it’s hard to know which of his public sins he’s repenting of or which ones he’s ignoring.

Perhaps Vance’s lived Catholic faith is a bit like that of Evelyn Waugh, the curmudgeonly early twentieth-century English Catholic convert whose novels include *Brideshead Revisited*. Like Vance, Waugh grew up Protestant, embraced an atheistic hedonism as a young adult, and then converted to Catholicism. Yet he remained something of a cantankerous bully. Once, a woman confronting him about his bad behavior asked him how he could be a Catholic and yet be so cruel. He reportedly responded, “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.” 

Maybe the same is true of Vance. His blend of Catholic theology with Trumpism is indeed disturbing. But I don’t think it’s merely a cynical cooption of religion for political gain. Instead, I think that he experienced a genuine longing for the Christian faith and that he’s going to Mass each week because he is genuinely looking for communion in every sense of the word. Like Waugh, his public actions often fall short of the rich tradition of his faith. 

But rather than dismiss Vance as a hypocritical imposter, I wish that people would realize that his particular understanding of the faith really does shape his political views and that even when his actions fall short of his profession—as, for instance, when he lies about his neighbors or engages in verbal legerdemain to justify policies he repudiated only a short time before—perhaps Waugh’s statement applies: We have no idea how much nastier Vance would be if he were still a self-focused atheist. And if that’s the case, we can say: Thank God that he has found Christian faith, regardless of whether we would ever vote for him. Maybe his theology is incomplete. But it’s a lot better than it was before he entered the Church.
### On Not Having A Smart Phone
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/on-not-having-a-smart-phone/
Last updated: 2026-06-26T11:00:34.000Z
I walked into the Verizon store, the one near a haunt of mine during my college days in New York City, Union Square. Inside, chained to the walls and the tech-space equivalent of short bookshelves, were any number of phones with touch screens. They were all on, running some sort of "See! this is how I function; press my face and I'll let you navigate around me" pre-recorded self-tour. Among these shiny, bright offerings, were two clams – phones that flip open at their pelvic hinge and make a nice slap sound when you very dramatically close them after a conversation with a friend. 

One of them boasted a kind of indestructible exoskeleton, water-proof seals, probably kevlar glass, the sort that a mountain man worried about jaguars or the typical underwater wielder might take with them to the office. The click of the buttons sounded like a Glock releasing its pin. No quests full of wild animals or high risk terrain were in my future, except that I was living in Brooklyn. Had I the money I would have absolutely paid the few month's rent to get that bad boy. Beside it was about as dumb a dumb phone as you could imagine. It was clearly made of sad plastic, most likely recycled Walmart bags melted down into a soup, pushed into a mold, and popped out into a well-used cardboard box full of its many copies. Probably not a very large cardboard box, since I'm assuming this phone didn't sell record numbers. Neither phone had any kind of "Looky at me" performance running on their tiny 1"x1" frontal displays.

From the market of vendors, all of them smiling and walking other folk through taps and swipes and otherwise rubbing smooth surfaces, one fated to speak with me walked up and asked how she might help me. From my pocket I drew out my white gen. 5 iPhone (ca. 2012). I want to replace this phone, I said, holding out the shiny white brick, with that, pointing to what looked like a dead, oblong insect. "Let me check your account," she said, without really acknowledging where my finger pointed. A couple of computer clickety-clak's later, "Good news!" she announced. I'd earned enough points or I was a loyal enough customer or I had won a raffle–I don't recall exactly–but I was in for a free upgrade. Upgrade? My iPhone was working fine. Not that I was a power user. When I was a green horn, it gave me little blue lines from my dorms in Ludlow, through metro stations, to the college campus in midtown. But New York is a grid, and I was soon able to figure where I needed to go, and if I couldn't, I wandered around a bit, making a bunch of right-turns in a tightening circle till I found the address I was looking for. By the time I left New York city, the streets were arrayed in my head like a memory palace. Besides that, I called friends, texted (a bit?) and kept not using safari as best I could.

"That phone," I said, pointing again at the pathetic shell, whose only glory in life was perhaps that it was chained to the display shelf just like the latest generation iPhones and the Android equivalents. I want that phone. A moment's pause, and she clarified: "Oh, but you see, you have a chance for a free upgrade," gesturing with all the fingers on her hands to the display shelf with the iPhone options. I said I understood. I want that phone. 

She made the sort of glance that I had seen before on the streets outside, where you're sitting outside enjoying the sunlight, sipping on an oat-milk latte and some undesirable turns the corner and make a woozy bee-line toward your umbrella. I realized that the problem was not my enunciation. I was the source of a social inconvenience. I was emitting a smell. Perhaps the computer wouldn't know what to do with a customer who prefers the substantial downgrade to the marginal upgrade. Maybe she had never pushed that series of buttons and didn't even know if buttons for this transaction existed. Maybe her boss would want to talk with her after ("Hey! I hope your first week's going well; I did notice that you sold a taxidermied dung-beetle to a customer instead of upgrading his iPhone of a few years to the iPhone that was released Tuesday. How did you even manage to do it in our system?"). Whatever it was, a few minutes later I left with all the social acclaim of Huckleberry Finn walking around with a dead rat in his pocket. I can't remember her ever offering to show me how the phone worked.

That happened some fifteen years ago. I've had some kind of dumb phone in my pocket since then. I wish I could say I've kept the same one, but something about the dumb phone market, which has only slightly changed in the last five or so years, is that there is little functional difference between a dumb phone and so-called burner phones. A burner is the sort a spy purchases with cash and plans to throw into the river after making two calls; a dumb phone might be bought with the expectation of maybe using it for ten thousand calls and countless texts, but whose digital soul grows restless for the quiet and peace at the bottom of the Hudson after maybe a few revolutions round the sun. It's never really the software that needs a face-lift or faster computer. It's the best-by date of the body. Materially, the mortal coil encasing my iPhone's software could have outlived empires, if the software didn't need it to shed its skin like a crab. The smart phone is planned obsolescence under the subtle guise of growth and improvement. The dumb phone is planned obsolescence without pretense. Ashes to ashes, as the priest says. Or, as the industry might say: from dumb to dump.

I suppose nothing's going to be made for everlasting use until we get the social conditions that produced toasters from the '40s. So I've had the same kind of phone for over a decade -- call & text, no data -- but not the same model. Perhaps my pride and joy is the dumb phone I had till a couple of years back, the *ZTE Z233VL Flip* (just rolls off the tongue, don't it). There I was, watching that classic modern western with friends, i.e., *John Wick 4*, when the anonymous character, Nobody, takes out his dump phone and I am the only guy in the audience who knows that particular pad of buttons like you know the dashboard of your first truck.

---

I admit that I have mostly enjoyed life with a dumb phone. Not that everything's fresh coffee and raw milk. It'd be a stretch to say it is as useful as a smart phone. In fact, there can no question that life without a smart phone holds many and varied moments of what one would call inconvenience.

I'm not only thinking of those moments when I'm on a university's campus and I need to pay the meter to park my car on the road and the thing only accepts cashless payments through its app so I have to stick a piece of paper on the dash ("No smart phone. How else does one pay?"), or the times when someone sends me a gif or anything more involved than an exclamation mark and my phone has a stroke, or when my phone number gets put into a group chat and my phone sometimes interprets it like people are texting me individually. 

Oh, also: the text isn't legible to my phone so I have no idea what they're saying to me/each other/us, or that one restaurant during *those* few years which offered the menu via a QR code stamped onto the table, or the porta john in a park in Mount Rainier which asked me to scan the QR code in order to open the damned door so my potty-training efforts just might leak out onto the pavement, the fact that LinkedIn believes I am a possible fraud or bot because I can't verify with my camera and so now I don't have a LinkedIn account till I don't know when, or the numerous companies who expect me–with nearly the same level of legal-social enforcement behind the signs saying 'shoes and shirts must be worn inside the building'–to use their app to enjoy their goods and services. There's a deeper sense of inconvenience at play.

If not having a smart phone is good for anything, it is a near perfect metric for measuring the slow but steady consolidation of social, economic, and political life into a single digital object: if you had any tangible experience in how hard is it to do something without a smart phone this year vs. five years ago vs. a decade ago, you would notice what can escape our attention. For the modern world, the smart phone's presence is effectively ubiquitous, rendering its presence all but invisible to us. This invisibility tells us what *kind* of thing the smart phone has become.

Picture a dear friend, someone you've known for years and years but haven't had a chance to meet in person for a long time, inviting you to his home. He's married now. Three kids, a dog. A well-paying job. He sends you the address via email. The house looks so cozy on Zillow. You're so excited to see him. You get to his driveway, you knock on the door. There he is. You embrace. The dinner is bright and seasoned. The drinks are delightful. The dessert, divine. 

After laughing so hard you spill some of your port, you ask if you could use the bathroom. Of course, he says, and shows you the way, from the dining room, through the kitchen, past the laundry room, through the back door –where are we going? did he hear me right? does he want to show me something?–across the lawn, into the woods, stopping in front of a tall structure maybe four feet wide with a crescent moon cut out on the door. With an awkward chuckle, you mention something about actually needing the bathroom at the moment. He opens the door. This is it. Toilet paper is hung on the wall. There's a bottle of disinfectant, too, and be sure to drop a healthy scoop of wood chips and a dash of lime down the hole when you're done. "I'll be inside getting the coffee on," your friend says, leaving you in front of the outhouse.

Earlier this year, Sam Altman compared AI services to utilities. React to this however you wish, but Altman was not establishing a new model for tools. Our challenge is not to gather up in fierce readiness against the temptations of a passing fad. Refusing a smart phone is not, and refusing AI things will not be, like refusing to buy a Furby. We must decide to live outside something which will be sold to us like it is indoor plumbing. It's a decision whether to adopt something intended to become as enormous as a new political, social, & economic infrastructure. One definition of the smart phone is: the information infrastructure the early 21st century technological regime most wanted you to have. There is no sign it will be the last.

---

Thinking about technology as infrastructure is helpful, certainly in clarifying how we might think of some tool and what it means to use or refuse it. To take the smart phone infrastructure as an example, one thing the infrastructure of utilities shapes is etiquette.

Since about five years ago (i.e., especially since Covid), *not* having a smart phone has for many effectively become a breach of social etiquette. It is like not having running water in one's house, like not having a house wired for electric outlets, like not having the vents for hvac, like not having wifi. These are not only invisible and unquestionably expected for a suburban home. They are all examples of the ways in which material infrastructure invisibly facilitates and enforces a certain set of social norms.

Infrastructure is the stage for any appeal to what is socially appropriate. It's not to say that one type of infrastructure or custom is always "downstream" of the other. In the beginning, when a city, a suburb, a village, a neighborhood, or a nation are being founded, infrastructure and custom are much more pliable, and before the buildings and roads are laid, custom has room to direct. But when the bridges have been built and the towers erected, to insist against the former is to live in conflict with the latter. 

This is exactly why it was so critical, for instance, *when* Jane Jacobs articulated her set of customs and conventions for New York street life; she was writing *before* Robert Moses’s dream of splitting lower New York City in half was realized. Had she protested and written a mere decade later, her seminal book, *The Life and Death of Great American Cities* (1961), would have been titled *How Robert Moses Killed Lower Manhattan* (1969). If only Jonathan Haidt had not waited for the data and the reports and the studies to be absolutely sure of what was going on and had instead allowed his social instincts to guide his reflections, his diagnostic book, *The Anxious Generation*, might have been *I See Where This Leads*.

You can run down the list of reasons why someone shouldn't have a smart phone: it is an easily concealable, portable window into the obscene; it's clearly, unequivocally bad for kids; the whole reason why governments want its citizens to have smart phones is that they are surveillance-devices whose main components were designed and funded with military-oriented research grants. What you cannot escape is that the smart phone is for 21st century man what stone-paved roads were for the 1st century Roman, and what the LOMEX would have become for New York City in Jacob's time. It's an essential piece of the infrastructure that makes the empire run smoothly into the future. That smoothness, if adopted *en masse*, translates into unspoken expectations of family, neighbors, friends, merchants, and the taxman.

If someone wants to live without a smart phone, he might accuse a larger system of imposing something he would prefer not to have, but he must acknowledge the kind of inconveniences he will burden not only himself with, but will inflict upon his friends and comrades. There are times when this cost is very high. 

Once, I was attempting to chat with a friend (ironically about ways to survive technological upheaval). This person's time was very precious, and he (or she) was doing me a great favor chatting with me. They were overseas, and the easiest way *would have been* to call over Signal. But I don't have Signal on my phone, and the Zoom meeting I set up proved worse than useless. They ended up calling my phone from theirs, after an eternity of trying to work around the fact of my not having a smart phone. We were both upset. I was red in the face. I felt shame for not being easier to get a hold of, for offering my dear friend the equivalent of an outhouse in the woods because I simply would not tolerate city-water running throughout my house and poisoning my kids with fluoride. 

This is the power of infrastructure. It shapes so much of our lives, our relationships to each other perhaps most of all. Call it scandalous, inhuman, distorted, evil, barbaric, post-human. In the mundane episodes of life, the failure of the few to play along is felt as a sharper, more personal insult than the larger insult of the infrastructure itself. Nor is it the infrastructure that suffers from your recalcitrance. It is your friends.

This relationship between convention and construction is as it should be. Walls and rooms and furniture are excellent teachers of custom and comportment, and we should defer to their gentle recommendations. The front porch is the infrastructure whose rocking chairs and white columns invite southern hospitality. Broad streets are what teach cafe-goers to chat with friends lingeringly. Those who built cathedrals in the Middle Ages knew very well what the vaulted ceilings and engraved stone and brilliantly colored windows would do to people's actions and beliefs and expectations before the altar–and this to wonderful effect. (The guys who *really* understood this relationship at the time were, of course, the Normans, who tore down the ecclesial infrastructure of old England and replaced it with their own architectural signature, so that every time an Englishmen loyal to Harold Godwinson stepped into a cathedral, his entrance was a tiny betrayal of the world built by the Anglo-Saxons and a tiny concession to the world as ruled by William the Bastard.) If every infrastructure is a kind of room with furniture, the smart phone is one the size of a datacenter with a door nob the shape of one's thumb and a key milled into the contours of your face.

---

The reason why I don't have a smart phone is the same as why I don't want to live in China or why I don't want to drive in a Tesla or why I won't put security cameras inside my home or why I don't like open floor plans. They may teach us some way of living, but they are rather poor tutors in the sort of etiquette I want my family and my community to live by. Their ubiquity will nudge one into a particular way of seeing the world and of treating others. I have no profound defense for modern dumb phones, combining Morse's tool for code at a distance and Bell's for conversation at a distance. They support and suggest a kind of behavior like anything else, and parts of it are ornery. What I can say is that the world around us today couldn't stand on such a thin foundation, and it seems to me that, if you stopped where you are and never upgraded your smart phone, the future world we are hearing so much about wouldn't be able to stand upon that foundation, either.

I traded in my iPhone for a dumb phone all those years ago because I didn't want the excess of access it offered. I continued not to have a smart phone because I never really needed to get one (though there have been some seriously close calls). But one thing I have found more recently in not having a smart phone is this: there is a muscle group I've had to exercise which would have atrophied had I accepted the smart phone as critical for one's existence. Here are bundled together the fibers of spiritual askesis, political vitality, a kind of MacGyver meets Harry Tuttle attitude toward tools, and a stance of alert intentionality. To live without a utility is not to live negatively or reactively, as it might appear from the outside. It habituates reflection about the things one is living with. It is to live *otherwise*.

In the future decades, it seems such practiced skills as these will become all the more needful. That is, if we don't want our lives and our etiquette to be influenced by autonomous driving ("He offered to drive me home after the party." "What a stalker."), robots whizzing through cafés, grocery stores, and homes ("The boys room was always dirty; now they don't have to clean up anything!"), and who knows what will finally transpire from AI ("What do you mean you live and work and play *with your hands*?").

In view of my using commercial air travel, buying industrial food stuffs, running my laptop on Unix, or having a social security number, I readily admit to a bit of hypocrisy in the decision not to live within the frame of the smart phone. Surely these are central to modern infrastructure as well. Seems a bit inconsistent to do without one and rely on the rest, eh? To this I say: goodness, would that we had a tidal wave of techno-hypocrites.

Who knows how long I'll have a dumb phone. Maybe they'll be mandatory at some point. When smart phones need an AI chip in them, maybe they'll stop upgrading the old smart-dumb phones and ignore me when I change a gen. 5 iPhone into an everlasting telegraph-cum-walkie-talkie. Till then, feel free to call and chat.
### Connecting in an Age of Competition
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/connecting-in-an-age-of-competition/
Last updated: 2026-06-25T17:03:23.000Z
If you’ve ever passed the mind-numbing hours of a car ride by watching raindrops converge on the window, you’ve witnessed a profound truth about human relationships. At least that’s what C.S. Lewis would argue. In his spiritual autobiography, *Surprised by Joy*, Lewis says there are some people you encounter who join with you like raindrops on a window. 

This type of joining with others is what we were made for. We long for deep connection. In the words of sociologist Hartmut Rosa, we long to [*resonate*](https://mereorthodoxy.com/resonance-and-the-psalms/) with others. We want relationships that *flourish* in the deepest sense of the word. 

Unfortunately, our very mode of life cuts our attempts at connecting off at the knees. In a digital age, our default posture is one of *performance*. If we are to move toward connection, we must relearn the purpose and art of conversation. To that end, my pastoral counseling professor, Dr. Jim Coffield, gave what has been the single most helpful framework for connecting with others and navigating conversations, not only as a pastor, but as a human desiring relationships.

## **Types of conversations** 

Dr. Coffield contends that there are three primary types of conversations:

### **1\. Competitive**

Think of these conversations as *debate*. There is no shortage of competitive “conversations” today. This is the primary mode of relating online. The basic goal of a competitive conversation is *to win*. Interactions like these are about *me*; never you or us. 

All of us are guilty of engaging in competitive conversations. We wait (not so patiently) for our competitor to wrap up so we can deliver the monologue we have been mentally crafting while they spoke. 

But because God’s kingdom is one of reconciliation, competitive conversations are rarely used as the impetus for kingdom transformation. Yes, Jesus had competitive conversations, especially with groups like the Pharisees. But he was always after the heart. It’s also worth remembering that he was God incarnate and could engage in competition with perfectly holy and pure intentions. Even so, his “competitive” interactions were riddled with narrative and parables––rhetorical strategies that *connect* with people deeply. Competitive conversations, at their worst, result in exhaustion. Jesus offers rest for souls. 

Unfortunately for image bearers of God made for deep connection with others, competition is the implicit logic of the modern world. Rosa says such a mode of relating is the greatest enemy of connecting–of resonating–with someone. You simply cannot meaningfully connect with someone you are trying to beat. 

But for anyone to keep their place in our accelerating society, according to Rosa, they must *perform.* He goes on:

> The social logic of competition is such that the competitors have to invest more and more energies into the preservation of their competitiveness, until keeping up the latter is no longer a means to lead an autonomous life according to self-defined ends, but the single overarching goal of social and individual life alike.

Competition is not merely a means to an end; it has become the end. Compete or cease to exist (digitally speaking).

### **2\. Content**

Think of these conversations as a *lecture*. The goal of such conversations is to inform or educate; it’s a simple transfer of information. Content conversations serve a distinct purpose: Jesus himself used them in his many teachings like his Sermon on the Mount. 

Again, however, Jesus used his information-transfer *as a means* of connecting. This is rarely the intended end of our content conversations. This much is clear when we step back and realize much of our content-transfer has actually removed the “other” entirely! We are able to give or get the information we need without engaging another soul. 

Content conversations are inherently one-directional; however, now we are likely to either unload all our information into an X thread or Reddit post and then log off (literally severing the pathway to connecting with another) *or* we allow Claude to download his (its?) unlimited knowledge on our desired subject. Either way, we are far from connecting with anyone. 

Further, the very role of content/information has developed in interesting ways in our “information” age. [Byung-Chul Han argues](https://mereorthodoxy.com/crisis-and-covenant/) that it is the overpresence of *information*–in contrast to *narration*–that accounts for much of our mental illness and our lack of any sense of meaning. Narrative *connects* us to others and a broader meaning; information silos us as we individually consume content. 

In the digital age we live in 1 and 2\. The default posture of online life is competitive, while at the same time one-directional. If we are not actively competing (posting), we are passively consuming (content).

### **3\. Connecting**

The third type of conversations are connecting conversations. The goal of these is to connect deeply with others. Such conversations serve as the pathway to resonance, but also redemption. These types of conversations are the ones *most typically used* as a catalyst for kingdom-transformation. 

It’s no surprise, then, that these are the conversations we see Jesus having all throughout the gospels. Perhaps the most familiar is his conversation with the woman at the well in John 4\. While not soft on truth, Jesus’ goal was profound connection––a connection that drew out dignity and suffocated shame. It’s telling that the woman went shouting into town, “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did!” not “Come, see a man who told me I was wrong and he was right!”. 

Rarely is anyone changed by, or even remembers, competitive conversations; this woman likely *never* forgot her encounter with Jesus. 

So how do we learn how to do this well?

How do we apprentice ourselves to Jesus in the way of connecting conversations? 

## **Anatomy of a Connecting Conversation**

Dr. Coffield gave the building blocks of a connecting conversation and–unsurprisingly!–they coincide with Rosa’s axes of resonance. 

Rosa has identified three primary axes where we are *mostly likely* to experience resonant–deeply connective–encounters:

1. Vertical: meaning
2. Horizontal: relationships
3. Diagonal: objects

The anatomy of a connecting conversation is a movement from external, to internal, to eternal. It is a rough movement from diagonal, to horizontal, to vertical axes, respectively.

### **1\. External**

This level of conversation largely plays out in the axis of objects–the physical world around us. It’s made up of mundane “small talk.” However, this is not unimportant. Eugene Peterson chronicles his change in thinking about small talk:

> If we avoid small talk, we abandon the very field in which we have been assigned to work. Most of people’s lives is not spent in crisis, not lived at the cutting edge of crucial issues. Most of us, most of the time, are engaged in simple, routine tasks, and small talk is the natural language. If pastors belittle it, we belittle what most people are doing most of the time, and the gospel is misrepresented.

It is at the external level that we must cultivate curiosity. Coffield would always say “God doesn’t write boring stories… if someone seems boring, they’re likely not telling you everything.” 

Be curious (and patient) enough to get the details. And as you do, be curious about *how* they tell them––the body language they use or how they paint themselves in a story.

God writes no throwaway details.

### **2\. Internal**

This level moves from Rosa’s diagonal axis into the horizontal axis of relationships. Craig Barnes, in his book *The Pastor As Minor Poet*, says much of what is shared at the external level are really “veiled laments” over relational hurt. For instance, Barnes recounts the story of a couple who made an appointment with him and began rehearsing their complaints about the new organist. They didn’t like that she never used their old songs. They didn’t like how she conducted the choir. They didn’t like how she played the organ. External complaints. 

However, Barnes skillfully realized they had both mentioned the previous music director, who happened to be a close friend of both of theirs. The trajectory of the meeting changed when Barnes commented on the former music director: “He was a great musician, and I know he was also a very close friend of yours. You must miss him a great deal.” From external to internal.

One practical question to aim internally is simply, “What was that like for you?” Now obviously we cannot deploy this question constantly during conversation. However, we must develop the skill of asking it in various ways: 

“That must be exhausting…”

“Tell me more about that…”

“How has that been for you?”

Such questions mark an inward movement.

### **3\. Eternal** 

This level is the goal of connecting conversations, and plays out on Rosa’s axis of meaning. The threads followed here make up the core of what is called “spiritual direction” or the “care of souls.” After drawing out some of their hopes, fears, and dreams, the questions then become:

“So what do you think God’s up to in all of this?”

“I wonder how God might redeem this situation…”

God is always at work in others’ lives and has been long before we encounter them. With questions like these we are (gently and appropriately) inviting ourselves into the work God is already doing. 

Peterson said one of the descriptions of a pastor (and we could broaden this to any who seek to connect deeply with others) should be “apocalyptic.” Apocalypse as a genre uncovers; it pulls back the curtain on how things really are. Apocalypse is arson, Peterson says. It has a way of setting a fire in the imagination and boiling out all that is unnecessary and unhelpful, leaving behind the reality of God’s work in his world. 

The work of soul care isn’t making something happen in another. It is pulling back the curtain on what God is already making happen. It’s following the divine smoke. It is the work of making clear the “subtext” of life, as Barnes calls it.

We can visualize this process of moving toward connecting on the graph below. Increasingly, our default mode of relating is in sector 1 which remains external and is dominated by competition. Deep connection and soul care happen as we move toward sector 2, where we connect with other image bearers and are aware of how God is at work in their lives. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/06/unnamed.png)

It should be said, though, that this is not a mechanical process––it is an art that we must feel our way through. Oftentimes the movement from just external to internal takes weeks or months. Other times, we are able to connect deeply in a matter of minutes. 

As we move upward and toward the right on the graph, purely competitive and external conversations become less likely, while connecting and eternal conversations become more likely. Much of our mode of relating to the world reinforces our tendency to stay in sector 1, while the connection we were made for is at the end of resisting our competitive and information driven world. 

\*\*\*

Jesus, as the Son of God, had every right to “win” every conversation he ever had; indeed, he has no worthy competitors. However, in his grace he moved toward his creation, dwelling among us so that he could share his eternal life with us––drawing us into himself like a raindrop. 

It is this shared life of Jesus in us that removes our need to win and enables us to live the life we were made for––to collide with others like raindrops on a window. Only in Jesus do we have the spiritual resources to [suspend competition](https://mereorthodoxy.com/evangelism-in-a-world-of-control-and-aggression/), to be recaptured by narrative over mere information, and to follow the apocalyptic smoke to the eternal flames burning in those around us.
### Salvation and Gender in the Flood Narrative
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/salvation-and-gender-in-the-flood-narrative/
Last updated: 2026-06-24T11:00:21.000Z
> Over the years I have spoken about this project with many people. I explain to them that I am trying to understand the significance of circumcision in Judaism given the fact that one half of the Jewish people are not circumcised. One colleague, a learned and intelligent woman, at first reacted with the words, ‘I did not know that so many Jews were uncircumcised!’ After a long pause she said, ‘Oh, you mean women.’

Shaye J.D. Cohen in *Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised*

There is a way of reading Genesis that treats it as a just-so story, approaching it primarily as a narrative that is meant to explain how the week came to have seven days, why the humans wear clothes, or, supposedly, how the snake lost his legs. 

This is a very bad way to read Genesis (or any part of Scripture), as it risks over-simplifying the text. In treating it as a children’s story, the reader only ever leaves with the very conclusions that were folded away in the suitcase of expectations with which he entered. 

Gender is often a victim of this approach. The thinking goes something like the following. Humans are gendered. Genesis includes the origins of humans. Therefore, Genesis must include some creative explanation of human gendering. 

But the role of gender in the narrative of the Torah is far deeper and richer than this approach permits. As I have written [elsewhere](https://mereorthodoxy.com/mythos-and-gender), gender is deeply woven into the entire creation narrative, functioning not only as an anthropological reality but also as a cosmological principle. In this paradigm, gender is not primarily about origins or roles. Rather, it is timber within the narrative frame, providing deep, embodied connections between the world from which we come and in which we live. 

Yet at its core, Scripture is a story not only of creation, but of re-creation, the grand narrative of the redemption of the world. Humanity – in its full gendered beauty – is central to this redemption. And if gender is an ordering principle in the creation of the cosmos, then we should expect it to also be an ordering principle within the re-creation of the cosmos. 

But what does such an assumption even mean? What would it look like for the re-creation of the world to be gendered? I admit that such a question may feel foreign to many readers. We are not accustomed to thinking of the world in this way. But such is not the case with ancient literature. Ancient myth incorporates gender as cosmological across cultures, as seen in Hesiod’s *Theogony*, the *Enuma Elish*, and *Inanna’s Descent into the Underworld*. In this regard, the literary technique of the Bible is no different. To explore this in reference to the theme of redemption and re-creation, we will look at the story of the flood. 

\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_

Genesis 6 opens with a gendered story that is predicated on the preceding narratives. The world is in ruin. And this ruin is the result of cosmic disorder resulting from the Sons of God taking what they were not given by God, namely, the daughters of men. Their offspring are the Nephilim, god-men who pursue fame through violence. This pattern of male, female, and offspring is a repeated motif within the opening chapters of Genesis and plays a key role in its earlier stories. 

| Masculine   | Feminine                             | Offspring      |
| ----------- | ------------------------------------ | -------------- |
| Heaven      | Earth (made by God)                  | Adam and Eve   |
| Adam        | Eve (made from Adam)                 | Cain and Abel  |
| Cain        | The City (built by Cain)             | Enoch → Lamech |
| Sons of God | Daughters of Men (in a ruined earth) | Nephilim       |

As expressed in the table above, the parallels within this motif present intriguing points of increasing departure from the original ideal as well as a chiastic symmetry. 

Before going further, I want to emphasize that I do not aim to present any defense of the associated imagery of these gendered parallels. I simply wish to say they are there, and that it is difficult to pretend that they are somehow accidental or artifactual, especially given what appears to be evident literary intentionality and structure. For now, and for the sake of argument, we will accept that they are evident and matter of fact in order to make some observations based on the parallels. Readers who would like further explanation can read my previous article linked above. 

I also want to emphasize that Scripture is not presenting an [Aristotelian view of the masculine and the feminine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle%27s%5Fviews%5Fon%5Fwomen?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), and neither am I. Aristotle’s view is based on his own philosophy and biological theory, and has no place in Scripture. Scripture’s view is based on the shared *imago dei* that belongs to every human, man and woman, and what Pope John Paul II has called the [nuptial meaning of the body](https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/audiences/1980/documents/hf%5Fjp-ii%5Faud%5F19800116.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Aristotle only sees men as participating in the feminine through mutilation or subjugation, whereas, as we shall soon see, scripture shows each of us (male and female) as properly participating in hierarchies of the masculine and the feminine within the greater cosmos.

Returning to the parallels above, we can note first, that there is increasing disorder from generation to generation that is depicted in gendered forms. To see the increasing disorder, one can consider the worsening violence from Adam to Cain to the flood narrative, or the increasing oppression and loss from Eve to the wives of Lamech to the daughters of men. This disorder plays on the gendered interactions of successive generations and is experienced differently by the masculine and feminine representations within the text. 

Second, at least within the first three generations, there is a parallel sense in which all humanity lives, one might even say dwells, within the feminine. The earth is the dwelling place of man. Humanity’s future lives in Eve (“the mother of all living”). And Cain’s future/offspring becomes synonymous with the city (עִיר; *‘ir*) that has thematically become his help or deliverance (עֵזֶר; *‘ezer*); in essence, Cain’s city serves the dual function of wife and child. However, the feminine as a locus of life is increasingly attacked, such that Cain slays Abel, Lamech is a tyrant over his wives and the city, and the Sons of God rape women until the earth itself is ruined. Gendered dominance is thus depicted as a fruit of the fall and an aspect of the ruin from which the world needs purification.

Third, the goodness of the original masculine/feminine pair is mirrored by the corruption of the final pair. Just as there is no doubt in the goodness of heaven and earth by the end of Genesis 2, there is no doubt in the corruption of the heavens and the earth within the prologue of the flood. The Sons of God (בְּנֵי הָאֱלֹהִים; *bene ha-elohim*) are contrasted with the *Elohim* (אֱלֹהִים) of Genesis 1 and 2\. And the devastation of the earth in Genesis 6 is in opposition to the fruitfulness and potentiality of the earth at the end of the creation narrative. 

Fourth, all of creation becomes compromised and in need of judgment, renewal, and redemption. Male and female. Heavens and earth. Parents and offspring. Fallen angels and fallen man. 

This is the backdrop to the flood story. Apart from observing the role of gendered imagery up to this point through creation and the fall, we cannot understand the role of gender in the redemption and re-creation to come. 

\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_

After its prologue, the flood story proper begins by presenting Noah as an icon for the representation of the heavenly, living into the role of the image of God in the world. Like Adam in the garden, Noah walks with God. He is with the animals in peace. He is instructed about a tree (6:14; the Hebrew plays on the term עֵץ; *‘ets*) and about what to eat (6:21). Yet unlike Adam, he obeys these commands (6:22; this is, of course, until he has his own fall narrative after the flood). Noah walks in obedience to God and seeks the good of creation. He images the heavenly to the world as a means of God’s gracious presence while also acting as a representative of the world to God, interceding on its behalf. 

Complementing Noah’s portrayal of the heavenly in the world is the ark as a representation of a new earth and a renewal of the feminine. She is the world of Genesis 1-2 in miniature. Her structure matches that of the world of Genesis 1-2 with three levels that are each filled with creatures (similar to the three domains in the creation narrative: the skies, the seas, and the dry land). And as in Eden, God places within her a man and his family to steward and care for her. She is filled with life and that which carries within it the breath of life. She is, quite literally, the “mother of all living” for the world to come. 

Yet the ark is also a world covered over, anticipating later developments in the Torah. Verse 14 makes this point through clever plays on the root for atonement or covering (root כפר; *kpr*). The words for cover and pitch (6:14 “cover it inside and out with pitch” ESV) share the same root (כפר; *kpr*) that appears throughout Leviticus for atonement, linking this concept to the image of the ark of the covenant. The point of this description is not to give a lesson in ship building, but to provide a picture for what it means that the future space of the tabernacle and the camp of Israel are atoned for (covered over) through sacrifice and what the nature of that space is compared to the world around it. However, the image also operates in retrospect. Like the blood of the sacrifices of Passover and Yom Kippur, through Noah’s ark, God has made a way for his saving presence within a corrupted world. Like the tabernacle, the ark is a place where the continued redemptive presence of God can still be found on the earth. Hence Genesis 6:14 talks about the covering (כפר) being applied to the *bayit* of the ark (בית; house, but properly here as a preposition describing within the ark), employing phrasing that imitates the construction of the ark of the covenant (Exodus 25:11). The ark of the covenant will become *the* place of God’s redemptive presence in the Torah. These images also resonate with the application of blood to the door of the house (בית; *bayit*) in the Passover narrative. 

But there are further reasons beyond its parallels to the earth for why the ark appears as feminine in the narrative. One simple reason is that, in Hebrew, the ark is grammatically feminine. The noun is a feminine noun. Every reference to it uses a feminine pronoun. This should not be strange to us. Even in English, the grammatical gender of a ship as feminine is a familiar construct. The English language has its own tradition of referring to a ship in the feminine. However, grammar alone is not a strong argument for the ark’s female nature. Simply because a noun is feminine does not mean it acts within the feminine framing Genesis has used thus far or that it is representative of the female archetype. 

The text also frames the ark as female through wordplay, using common ancient literary techniques. The first time the Hebrew term for the ark is introduced in the text, it is introduced in its less used construct form, תבת (*tevat*). Throughout the rest of the narrative, the term for the ark is תבה (*tevah*). The variation hardly appears coincidental. In the later Exodus narrative concerning Moses’ birth, an ark again makes an appearance (and, again, carries significant weight as an image of the feminine). And the exact same linguistic tic recurs. The first use is the construct form *tevat* and all other uses are *tevah*. 

One explanation for this intentional variation that makes use of the nuances of Hebrew grammar is that it is expressly intended to clue us into associations within the text. Ancient writers used techniques like this specifically for such a purpose. In this case, the use of תבת (*tevat*) links the ark to the Hebrew word for daughter (בת, *bat*), which is spelled with the same final consonants as תבת. Through this linkage, the ark is reinforced, then, as a portrayal of a feminine offspring of the earth itself. She is the daughter of the earth who is to become the mother of the new world. Furthermore, the ark also becomes more deeply linked to בית (*bayit*) and the associations described above. Both connections are visually and aurally communicated by תבת (*tevat*), and תבה (*tevah*) looks similar to the Hebrew for “the house” and “the daughter” spelled in reverse. 

But there are yet further reasons for seeing the ark as an image of the feminine in the narrative. When God formed Eve, he took flesh from Adam’s side (צֵלָע; *tsela‘*) and closed (סגר; *sgr*) it. He then made what he took into the woman. In the flood narrative, Noah is instructed to make an ark with a door (פתח; *petakh*) in her side (צדה; *tsiddah*). Noah goes in that door, which is then closed (7:16, סגר; *sgr*) by God behind him. Acknowledging the variations in vocabulary compared to the narrative of Eve’s creation, the imagery is constructed in parallel. The changes in vocabulary themselves do not appear coincidental or merely for variation. The choice of word for side in the ark narrative is also the word used for hip, as in the place where a child is carried (cf. Isaiah 60:4, 66:12). 

Close readers, however, may recognize this point as counterintuitive. If the ark is feminine, why is the opening in its side and not in Noah’s? Doesn’t this argue against the ark as an image of the feminine? In the creation narrative, God makes an opening in the masculine to form the feminine. 

In the ark narrative, this inversion is an intentional reversal. It serves to both highlight birth imagery associated with the ark and develop the theme of the feminine as a deliverer. The opening is made in the feminine for the deliverance of *adam* (אדם; mankind). After all, Adam was formed from the earth before Eve was taken from Adam. Noah, an icon of the masculine, then enters with his household into the ark for the purpose of the preservation of humanity and the re-creation of the world. It is from the feminine in the form of this remade and redeemed image of the earth that *adam*, and indeed, the world, are born again after the flood. 

This birth imagery extends even to the chronology of Noah’s time within the ark. Though the Hippocratic tradition postdates the writing of the flood narrative, we know that the ancient Greeks estimated human gestation as an idealized set of seven periods of 40 days for 280 days total. Galen, writing several centuries later, recognized a period of 270-280 days. Today, physicians consider the period of 37 weeks and 0 days to 40 weeks and 6 days (259-286 days) as term for a pregnancy. We have no reason to doubt that the ancients were fully capable of calculating a similar gestational range. Accordingly, based on the dating in the text relative to Noah’s life, we can count from the day the flood begins (day 0) to the bird sequences that test for new life on the earth. This gives a period of 263-284 days. The raven departs at 37 weeks and 4 days (day 263), and, using the conventional assumption that the first dove is sent 1 week later, we get the 270th day as the time of its departure. The dove is then sent again on day 277, and this time brings an olive leaf. Finally, it permanently departs on day 284\. The proximity of these values to the period of human gestation is difficult to ignore, especially within the context of our prior observations. 

They become even more salient when placed within the context of the childbirth laws of Leviticus 12\. The first creature sent from the ark comes in the form of a raven, a bird that cannot be eaten because it is considered detestable (Lev. 11:13-15, Deut. 14:14) through its association with death. This links the moment of emergence from the ark-as-womb with an initial period of uncleanness, fittingly represented by the carrion-eating raven, the assumption being that the raven does not return because it lands and feeds on the carcasses of the flood's victims. This initial period is then followed by a period of progressive purification charted in the dove flights and the abatement of the flood waters, culminating in Noah’s departure from the ark and subsequent burnt offering. Though the time frames vary, this sequence closely aligns with the prescriptions in Leviticus 12 for a woman who has given birth. The text commands a woman to observe an initial 1-2 weeks of ritual impurity (1 week for a male child and 2 weeks for a female child) before practicing a much longer period of purification (33 or 66 days depending on the gender) that concludes with a burnt offering. Notably, in the case of a poor woman, the text allows for the offering of two doves, the same clean bird that Noah sent to inspect for life on the earth. In the context of the ark and the earth after the flood, this patterning communicates a rebirth and renewal of the world with a restoration of God’s sacred presence. 

\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_

 It is, then, only through the mutuality and union of these masculine and feminine representations, that God accomplishes his deliverance from the flood. Neither on its own is sufficient for the salvation of the world. Each is necessary. Noah without the ark is an unrealized means of redemption in a world under judgment. He would cease to exist. Similarly, apart from Noah, there is no ark, and even if there were, it would be a barren shell, again, the unrealized possibility of deliverance. The re-creation of the world through the flood is achieved only through the mutuality and union of the masculine and feminine motifs that were first shown in the heavens and the earth. 

But Noah and the ark are not the only gendered pairing within the text. Turning to God and the earth, it is in this portrait of femininity as deliverance *vis-à-vis* the ark that we encounter the chief description of God’s redemptive action in the Torah on behalf of the earth he has made: his remembrance (זכר; *zakhar*). “But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the livestock that were with him in the ark” (Gen. 8:1, ESV). What Noah and the ark have modeled, God, himself, now enacts, bringing redemption through the heavenly action of remembrance. 

God’s remembrance sits precisely at the middle of the chiastic structure of the flood narrative, and within the context of the flood, his remembrance is the basis for the abatement of the waters of judgement. It is thus the turning point that leads to the realized re-creation of the earth out of the chaos of the deluge as the *ruakh* (רוּחַ) moves again over the waters, just as in Genesis 1\. So, in chapter 9 we return to the blessing first given to Adam and Eve but now placed upon Noah and his offspring as they exit the ark into an earth washed new: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” 

While Genesis 8:1 is the first time the text uses the term *zakhar* for the verb “remember,” it is not the first time Genesis has used a term built on the consonants זכר (*zkr*). The same triconsonantal root structure for remember appears in Genesis 1:27 and 5:2\. This is because it is the same root structure for the word for “male” in the creation of Adam and in the poem that opens Genesis 5\. These passages highlight mankind, individually and corporately, as being made in the image of God, male (זָכָר; *zakhar*) and female (נְקֵבָה; *neqebah*). Based on the prior uses of *zakhar* and the previously described gendered imagery and word plays of the flood narrative, the use of *zakhar* in Genesis 8:1 contributes a striking additional link and further emphasizes a cosmological gendering of redemption as God acts on behalf of the earth and the ark. 

\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_

I opened this essay with an anecdote from Shaye Cohen’s provocatively titled book *Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised?* What the title and the anecdote communicate is that the feminine is often perceived as either an unnoticed afterthought in redemption, or a passive tag-along. Circumcision is a good example for why this is the case. But what if the feminine is woven into redemption, albeit in a way that is distinctly feminine over and against (*kenegdo*; כְּנֶגְדּוֹ - see Genesis 2:20) the masculine? Perhaps we have simply failed to see it. As described above, within the story of the flood, the feminine is as essential to redemption as the masculine. No ark equals no redemption. There simply isn’t a story without it, or if there is, it ends very badly. 

The essential role of the feminine within the gendered redemptive framing of the narrative becomes all the more striking when we consider that all of redeemed humanity lives through participation within the ark. Eve came from Adam’s side, and in the poetry of Genesis 5, woman (*ishah*; אִשָּׁה) participates within man (*ish*; אִישׁ). But in the flood narrative, this participation undergoes a clever reversal, one that speaks to the way in which all of us, in a literal, physical sense, achieved life and deliverance through shelter within our mothers, just as Noah and his family found life and deliverance through the shelter of the ark. 

But the participation goes beyond the imagery of gestation and childbirth. The parallels and the participatory nature of humanity within the cosmic feminine frame provide mythopoetic imagery and theological underpinnings to the development of redemption within the New Testament. While it is beyond the scope of this essay to explore this development at length, I would be remiss in failing to draw a line to the description of the church as the bride of Christ. When Christ is pierced on the cross, the blood and water that come from his side constitute the church. These are her sacraments. This is the new woman made from the new man. All Christians live and participate in her. And it is within her, on Christ’s behalf and through his sacrifice, that God remembers us.
### Slop
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/slop/
Last updated: 2026-06-23T11:00:55.000Z
The term ‘slop’, which many use to characterize AI, is worth considering. ‘Slop’ is uniform, formless, tasteless food, produced in great quantity, with low nutritional value, designed for swift mass delivery to and consumption by large groups for whose specific members one holds no meaningful regard and with whom one desires no sustained interactions. ‘Slop’ is typically served to animals, to prisoners, and to other institutionalized persons, to groups that are entirely dependent, to those who have no other choice or alternative, and to those who have appetite but no taste. ‘Slop’ has much less value when there are realistic alternatives on the menu, or a menu in the first place.

‘Slop’ has caught on as a term to describe much of the AI-generated content that we encounter online, and increasingly also off. The term feels like an apt one to describe the deluge of bland, generic, uncanny, mindless, impersonal, and insubstantial content that is filling our feeds. The ease of production with AI has made it possible for lazy, untalented, thoughtless, uncaring, and dishonest people to produce innumerable shallow semblances of things that might once have reliably indicated skill, thought, and care. As our social and communicative spaces are flooded with such AI-generations, the humanity that we value in art and writing will steadily get substituted for by hollow simulations of it. Calling such AI generations ‘slop’ is a way of naming the adulteration that they involve, like a stealthy replacement of good food with a cheap substitute that does not taste entirely dissimilar, yet which lacks all the nutrients.

Such content can sometimes appear indistinguishable from material thoughtfully and lovingly created by human beings, and those who produce it will often try to pass it off as such. The recognition that it is in fact slop often feels like an insult, like knowing that the friend that has invited you to a meal is trying to pass off a cheap microwave dish as something they labored over themselves. While the quality of the food may be inferior, the real issue is the lazy avoidance, coupled with the deceptive pretense, of the generous work of preparing a meal for you. Had they been forthright that they were serving microwaved food, you might have been a bit disappointed that they did not go to more effort, but through the deception they desire the appreciation you would have given for a home-cooked dish. ‘Yet it might all taste the same!’ This is badly to miss the point.

When people receive a personal message, enjoy a creation, or have a conversation, they feel some sense of being valued. Flooding our social communications and our realms of creation with empty semblances of these acts will have a [Gresham’s Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s%5Flaw?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)\-like effect: debased communications will drive out good. A sense of mutually-accorded dignity and trust is replaced with a sense of being used and growing cynicism and suspicion. Had we no expectation of truly human communication to be betrayed, so much AI use would be of little value to us. It is only in the deceitful ‘value’ it enjoys as it masquerades as human that it will be appreciated. 

Yet, as it becomes pervasive, all communication will be diminished in value and distrusted. To use a food metaphor not unrelated to ‘slop’, it is akin to ultra-processed foods, which may be engineered to be hyperpalatable, to fool us that we are eating something different, and/or to replace healthy and nutritious ingredients with cheaper substitutes. Such a product may successfully deceive many consumers that they are eating some quality and unprocessed food; yet this does not make it interchangeable with or substitutable for that food! Ingredients and the healthiness of processes of preparation matter immensely, which is why there are regulatory bodies to protect the public from the adulteration of their food.

There are innumerable applications of AI, many of them worthwhile (chiefly in those areas where they are most clearly distinguished from human beings, such as in predicting the structures of proteins or registering significant patterns in vast quantities of astronomical data). However, so many of its most prominent and popular uses, as they concern activities and creations that are more properly human, systemically encourage deception (of others and of the user themselves), corner-cutting, laziness, and disregard for others. When uses of AI substitute for or simulate communication with others, they encourage both neglect and pollution of our social commons, allowing the non-human to become ubiquitous in those areas where we most need to practice our shared humanity. As Proverbs 18:21 teaches, ‘Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits.’ Protecting the relationship between our words and human interiority from being simulated or adulterated should be a matter of grave social concern.

This is a systemic problem, which cannot merely be dealt with by virtuous personal use: like the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports, it requires strict regulation, along with, in certain contexts, stigma and punishment. As in a sport afflicted by drug cheats, the integrity of entire realms of communication and social practice—the university being a good example—depend upon ensuring that what we are engaged in is authentically and unadulteratedly human.

When establishing and applying drug guidelines in sports, there will be complicated cases, substances, and practices, which will require prudence and considered yet contestable judgment calls. Some practices may not technically cross the line of illegality, yet should be discouraged as contrary to the spirit of the activity. Different organizations will likely have slightly different rules.

However, many of the issues are society-wide, and the task of managing them cannot merely be given to private and voluntary organizations. People can often focus on edge cases and not consider the broader effects of weak standards: lowering the bar for some supposedly worthy instance also admits a great many unworthy ones. They consider how they might function virtuously as individuals, but give little thought to population-wide tendencies within radically transformed incentive structures and environments. Or they regard new technologies as things that users can straightforwardly stand over against, without considering what facilities might be lost in persons formed by them. [As Antón Barba-Kay recently observed](https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/should-the-lion-lie-down-with-the-electric-lamb?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), commenting upon the papal encyclical, *Magnifica Humanitas*:

> The encyclical does draw a categorical distinction between AI and human intelligence. It assumes and defends our capacities for “inner freedom,” responsibility, and critical thought. Yet these capacities, like our capacity for reason itself, are not fully given in advance. They are developed through specific media and ordinary practices, some of which tend to establish attitudes of attention, reverence, care, and insight. And if it would be wrong to think that a human soul could be completely frittered away by distraction, we have also seen enough to realize that it can be deformed by practices that abridge or automate thought.

Many think of the technology as if merely additive, without considering its long-term ecological effects. For instance, few consider the way that the growing shadow of government upon our daily lives—I here recall [A.J.P. Taylor’s famous description of pre-1914 England](https://blog.ayjay.org/the-state-and-the-people/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)—is in large measure a result of modern technologies (often of war), techniques, and systems that have subjected formerly largely self-regulating societies to disruptive forces beyond their effective control. Modern policing [is down the road from the automobile](https://amzn.to/3PXJx2t?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Immigration regimes need to develop to deal with the large-scale movements and dislocations of people in a hyper-connected world, wrestling with the ways that mass movements of people can overwhelm localities and their capacities of self-regulation, many of which have operated by strong cultural norms and shared values, the strong customs, high trust, and reputational controls of stable intergenerational communities, reputational forces, and other such things

Governments have long had to expand their scope to manage the transnational and international forces of a globalized economy and to enforce, police, and constrain interests of capital and aggregative systems of human action and communication that operate in vast networks that extend across the world and bring people under their sway. For instance, when [AI companies can wield power far exceeding most states](https://bradlittlejohn.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-techno-feudalism), something needs to be done to protect the common good from being destroyed by their private interests. This, again, is not an entirely new phenomenon. At its height, the East India Company’s private military was twice the size of the standing British Army. Unaccountable mercantile, industrial, technological, and digital forces are not unprecedented. The idea that the greatest threat is government can be very naïve to such realities.

If no action is taken, my suspicion is that AI and AI-like content will become pervasive in popular culture, with little to stop it, and that it will drive out most quality human content. Increasingly, entertainment produced for (and by) the general public will be largely AI-produced. Video and TV will be largely AI-produced. Music will be largely AI-produced. Advertisements will be largely AI-produced. Art will be largely AI-produced. Most of the text people encounter and produce will be AI-produced. Because of its derivative character, even the human creations upstream of AI will feel debased by AI’s constant semi-digested regurgitations of them. Because of the imitative character of creation, even the human creations of people surrounded by AI will themselves start to share its features.

Increasingly, services delivered to the public will be AI, with AI taking the place of and simulating what were once human interactions. Value and humanity will be drained out at every step. The ‘taste’ of many things may be the same, but the ingredients will have been completely altered. We will find ourselves living in the uncanny valley and most people will not register the significance of the disaster that has befallen us. It is already well underway, of course, and most do not care. AI could easily overwhelm the public education system, infecting every aspect of the learning process, demoralizing students and teachers. It will break talent pipelines. It will hasten a general move to a post-literate culture as people are denied the opportunity to gain a taste for something more substantial.

The quiddity of the world can never be destroyed. But as presented to us, it will be sapped as the artifice, the replication, the disembodied, the virtual, the spectacle, and the simulation take the place of the real and then remake it in their image. Most people, having been raised on spectacle and slop, will have little sense of its unhealthiness. An example of this is the way that real historic places can be reformed to look more like the hyperpalatable images that may once have been inspired by them. Medieval towns are refashioned to attract Instagram tourists raised on the artificial spectacles of Disney and Harry Potter, the confected image steadily consuming and effacing the original.

Now, again, [as I have argued elsewhere](https://argosy.substack.com/i/155681646/artificial-foolishness), forms of ‘slop’ and other AI-like creations have long been with us, nor was this phenomenon restricted to low culture. We have lots of impersonal and engineered boilerplate language in terms and conditions and advertising emails, and other such documents, which, for their purpose, is often not inappropriate. However, we also have academic texts filled with undigested ideological jargon. We have work that is mindlessly derivative, bland, or sentimentalist, often cynically designed to spam or mash people’s emotional and aesthetic receptors. Much of the work of someone like Thomas Kinkade, for instance, feels like a sort of AI slop *avant la lettre*, which, while quite technically competent, is hyperpalatable, generic, uncanny, and insubstantial. We have websites filled with utterly formulaic articles, optimized to attract eyes—often through non-human algorithms—to generate ad revenue.

People producing such material have often complained about the constricting effect that such production has had upon them, stifling their humanity in service of the imperatives of efficiency, rationalization, monetization, and production. All these things have merely been waiting to be automated. The values were already in place; we were merely awaiting technologies to implement them at scale. So much of the perceived gains of the past couple of centuries have been a result of conforming ourselves to, rendering ourselves scrutable by, modeling ourselves with, identifying ourselves with the representations of, quantifying ourselves by, outsourcing our deliberation and agency onto, and submitting ourselves to manipulation by the Machine and its logics. Our inability to consider and weigh the costs that accompanied these ‘gains’ has much to do with the fact that they do not register within the Machine’s frames of value.

When people have long been writing for the Machine, it makes sense that they would want to offload that dehumanizing work onto AI, getting the Machine to write for them. So many of these activities are themselves results of a society that has already wholly submitted itself to a series of depersonalized, automated, standardized, and engineered imperatives and logics for the sake of maximization of productivity and exchange value. AI merely permits these imperatives and logics to be thoroughgoing, spreading their control to realms that once felt their dominion much less keenly.

For instance, universities have increasingly been perverted by the imperatives of the market, their internal formative ends being subordinated to external ends of revenue maximization, credentialism, careerism, and the like. The crisis of AI in the university is an amplification of the existing tensions that threaten the soul of the institution: if university is really about credentialism, careerism, and networking, why not cheat on your academic work? If university is merely about research generation, why not outsource this? If this can be undertaken more effectively with much diminished human involvement, why not adopt AI wherever we can?

Much of what we are concerned about relative to AI is the escalation of long-existing logics and trends and the [trophic cascades](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic%5Fcascade?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that these can cause in society and its institutions. Society and its institutions require some degree of ecological balance and the uncontrolled implementation of a new set of technologies such as those named by AI can be catastrophic, collapsing whole ecosystems. Now that the generation of slop, mindless, and/or generic words can be automated on a mind-bogglingly immense scale, and with so much more ease than authentic words and creations, what was formerly an unpleasant yet more limited phenomenon threatens society in general with a Great Uncannying. Our spam filters fail and our societal inbox is filled with unwanted garbage. Rather than manifestations of human beings falling short of the vocations of speech and creation, we will be exposed to a myriad expressions of the non-human feigning humanity and of human beings outsourcing their human expression to the non-human.

When I shared some of the above thoughts a few days ago, [someone responded](https://substack.com/@andrewkern/note/c-267623774?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) by suggesting that we replace the term ‘TV’ for ‘AI’ and imagine ourselves back in 1955\. What might we notice?

This, it seems to me, is a very worthwhile experiment.

Some people have a notion that those resisting the encroachments of AI are merely instinctively reacting against its novelty, perhaps animated by a constitutional dislike of change and undifferentiating prejudice against the new, or nostalgia for some fancied pre-technological idyll from which we have fallen.

It is helpful to recognize the strong continuities in technological criticism and how many of the strands of argument and consideration raised in response to AI are applicable to and have been developed in relation to precursor technologies, such as television. It is also important to appreciate that many of the people challenging many forms of AI adoption are wary of many very familiar technologies (such as television) and may even encourage more reflection upon and circumspection about our use of technologies that seem almost natural (such as the printed book). What many of us are concerned about in AI is not merely a saltational leap of evolution beyond our existing form of technocultural society, but an accelerated though incremental development of logics that are already endemic.

Such technological criticism is not the same as an aversion to any novel technology, nor does it treat a technology’s novelty as the primary criterion for our assessment of it. Some of our most formative technologies in the present are among the oldest technologies of all, things such as writing, the mirror, or money.

Likewise, technological criticism need not entail a resistance to using new technologies (AI among them). The accusation of being a ‘Luddite’, besides generally being wielded by people with limited sense of the Luddite movement, is inaccurate in the sense that it is usually intended. Our concern is that we use—or determine not to use—both new and familiar technologies in ways that are considered and discriminating, ordered by an understanding of such technologies, what they entail, and how they frame and form our reality. Such an understanding is not merely an understanding of a technology on its own terms—the sort of understanding typically pursued by early adopters—but an understanding of, among other things, the ecological societal effects it has.

It is interesting to revisit the criticism that responded to the screen age and to see how prescient much of it feels in relation to the Internet, social media, mobile devices, and AI. From Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ and its recognition of the way that logics of creation and production transform our experience of things, to Guy DeBord’s *The Society of the Spectacle* and its exploration of how representation and the image consume and efface a reality that once stood over against them, drawing all into a sort of show-business, to Marshall McLuhan’s *The Medium is the Massage*, to Neil Postman’s *Amusing Ourselves to Death* with its discussion, among many other things, of the trivializing effect of television, to writings by Martin Heidegger, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Jean Baudrillard, and many others, it should be evident that AI is a further development and radicalization of technocultural logics that have been advancing dramatically over the past hundred years. The deeper logic and tendencies of these developments have long been recognized and presented as objects of concern and criticism. Critiques of AI are standing on the shoulders of several giants of twentieth century thought.

In our current contexts—with their growing tendency to fuse in a single common context of technologically-mediated and specious hyperreality—Susannah and I have spoken a lot about the need for something akin to the Arts and Crafts Movement, a movement that maintains and pursues excellence in the face of the plummeting of standards for the sake of mass output, while seeking to make beautiful, good, human, and humanizing creations available to everyone. We are also calling for a *Christian* humanism. 

As Tyler Austin Harper argued in [a recent article in ](https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/06/pope-leo-ai-christian/687388/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)[*The Atlantic*](https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/06/pope-leo-ai-christian/687388/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), Christians have conceptual resources with which to speak to realities such as AI that non-Christians, even when they have a growing unease with AI, typically lack. Those who largely resist the move towards AI, yet do not merely retreat into elite enclaves, seeking rather to spread human creations to all, forming, defending, and extending communities of virtue, can really make a difference. And the Church is, as Christians have long recognized, an Ark amidst the Deluge. This is where our work must focus.

*originally published at* [*the Anchored Argosy*](https://argosy.substack.com/p/66-susannahs-broadway-debut)
### A Story to Remember This Week at General Assembly
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-story-to-remember-this-week-at-general-assembly/
Last updated: 2026-06-22T15:58:51.000Z
Last fall I had the chance to attend a gathering in Denver organized by Mission to North America (MNA), the church planting agency of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), my home denomination. 

By PCA standards, MNA managed to assemble a fairly diverse group of attendees, even if the differences between groups were rather apparent throughout the week, sometimes comically so. (Let's just say that you can usually locate a PCA pastor within the denomination on the basis of whether he's wearing a polo or a bowtie and that was evident in Colorado.)

That said, I thought the event was a great success and this one story explains why: Between sessions, one of my closest friends (and a fellow missional wing type) and I were able to have a long conversation with a pastor who is on the general counsel for the Gospel Reformation Network. Generally speaking I think my friend and I would both be identified as more missional wing people whereas our new friend from GRN would be in a much stricter doctrinalist group. But what we found as we spoke is that we had more in common than you might think. I also found that I just really liked the guy and enjoyed talking to him. He loves Jesus, is an interesting person, and cares about the right things. If we had more like him, we'd be a healthier church. And, just in personal terms, I would be delighted to have more friends like him.

At one point in the conversation, my longtime friend asked him to tell us about some of the pastoral questions and challenges he was thinking about as part of his ministry at a classic big steeple southern presbyterian church in the rural south.

He proceeded to tell us a story that made complete sense given his context—a multi-generational church that had been a civic center to his town's life for over a century, new growth from traditionally less churched populations, and thick local customs that were being changed and re-negotiated due to generational transitions. Everything he was facing and trying to handle with the care befitting that of a shepherd made sense and everything he said about how he was trying to care for the various parties made sense. I came out of the conversation quite confident that he was a very sensitive and astute pastor. 

That said, the experiential gap between a hundred year old big steeple sociological mainline church in the rural south and my home congregation, an almost two year old church plant meeting in a public elementary school cafeteria in a midwestern state capitol and Big Ten university town is... significant. We know nothing of the pastoral challenges he is facing—or at least I, a lifelong midwesterner, do not know anything about them.

On the other hand, the challenges in our church are things more like how do you get unchurched and dechurched people in a fairly non-churched part of the country to show up? How do you manage the unique and somewhat demanding realities of a church plant meeting in rented space? How do you bring a thick community together when most of the people attending only met in the past few months and have lives with minimal degrees of organic overlap due to living in a large state capitol and being fairly busy with work, school, kids, and caring for aging parents? Behind all those problems is a deeper problem, which is that presbyterianism has virtually no historic footprint in Lincoln or Nebraska more broadly and so we come off as a bit of a curiosity, at best, to most of our neighbors, who likely don't know much about the Bible, let alone the Westminster Standards.

Some of these are challenges my friend would recognize, I'm sure, but even the challenges he recognizes would hit very different in the deep red and relatively churched rural south as opposed to a relatively unchurched, deep blue lower midwest state capitol whose dominant professional fields are education and technology.

That fact can push us one of two ways: The differences in our contexts and the different demands those contexts place on us can drive us apart because it is so easy to misinterpret contextual differences as real divisions. Or those same differences can drive us closer to our brothers and sisters as we seek to serve and love one another, which often begins with understanding where God has called each of us.

What is my point in sharing all this? We have very few national ecclesial bodies at this point. Rome certainly counts. The Mainline no longer does. The Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC) mostly does not simply due to size. The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) mostly does not either, both because of size (comparable to the EPC) and because its core geographic hubs are basically all places where the Episcopal Church remained relatively conservative for longer and then exited to the ACNA, as in the Carolinas, or places with huge legacy evangelical hubs whose later generations were drawn to Anglicanism, as in Wheaton, Nashville, Dallas-Fort Worth, or Colorado Springs. The only other exception to this rule would be found in DC and New York City, both of which are highly unique within American life. The factors that help the ACNA thrive in those two cities do not transfer much beyond those cities. In any case, there are no Anglicans in southeast Nebraska, for example, and their presence in other parts of the country outside those specific contexts mentioned above can be fairly spotty as well. For example, there is only one ACNA church in the entire Orlando metro. None of this is to criticize the ACNA at all; I am profoundly grateful for their faithful work. I am simply noting that they are not really a national denomination in the same way the PCA is. 

Even the SBC is a bit of an odd duck here: It's huge, but also in my part of the country basically doesn't exist. We already are saturated with conservative independent credobaptist churches, so the SBC wouldn't really offer anything new. The only national ecclesial bodies that have a meaningful presence in the lower midwest are Rome and the PCA.

And once you see that, two things should immediately snap into place: First, there is an enormous opportunity here for the PCA simply because we have a level of resources and institutional scale that no one else (aside from the SBC) can match in the evangelical world. That is an enormous gift and a responsibility for us to steward. Second, there are significant challenges here simply as a result of geography that most other church bodies do not face and, indeed, that the PCA did not face in its earlier years when it was a predominantly southern church.

The opportunities are, or should be, self-evident: Smaller denominations cannot maintain a national campus ministry such as Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) and to the degree the PCA has a young generation (unlike many other traditionally white denominations in the US) much of that is thanks to the work of RUF. To the extent that we have a pastor pipeline for training up the next generation of ministers, that too is largely thanks to RUF.

The challenges are a bit easier to miss, I think, and that conversation above helps to explain why. Because we had the chance to meet in Denver, we could speak face-to-face and pick up on context and also ask questions based on what we were hearing. This is no longer the way we usually communicate in our church. 

Most of our communication across churches and presbyteries now happens online. One of the unique challenges of online speech is that it happens in a highly de-contextualized way. I do not see a person, hear their voice, or recognize the place they are speaking from. I have only their words. And I inevitably interpret those words in light of my own experience and context. This creates a quite dangerous environment for communication because the context which shapes that person's speech is invisible to the listener and the listener's context is invisible to the speaker. Misunderstandings and worse are practically inevitable as a result. 

This is one of the greatest causes of the mistrust that besets parts of our church as we head into General Assembly: We do not encounter each other in person as fellow brothers and sisters seeking to follow God as faithful presbyterians in our distinctive contexts and situations. Rather, we tend to encounter each other as avatars for one faction or another within our church and we tend to interpret one another's speech in light of the stipulated factionalism.

There are times where disagreement is warranted, of course, and even times when hard lines need to be drawn. But more generally it is best to begin with an assumption of trust and only move away from trust when a person has given you ample reason to do so.

What is the alternative to our digitally mediated factionalism? Well, one part of the answer is that we need more events like the MNA summit held last fall in Denver that allowed so many of us to meet face to face. General Assembly (GA) can be such a gathering, of course, but GA is also a business meeting and certain tasks have to get done and so business has to be given a certain priority at GA.

That said, the story itself can be instructive for us: When I actually spoke with my friend and heard about his church situation, it changed the way I read his other work online and the way I hear him when he raises certain questions, concerns, and issues. There was even one occasion where he wrote something that caused me to raise an eyebrow a bit and, because of that face to face connection we had established, I was able to text him and ask him about it. It turned out my concern was misplaced and caused by a misunderstanding on my part which, surprise!, had to do with his context being wildly different from mine.

It is now three years since our church lost two of our elder statesman, Pastors Harry Reeder and Tim Keller, in the same week. The relational trust and social capital those two men alone possessed within our church is hard to overstate. If we are to be healthy, we will need to build those reserves back up, so that trust across wildly different contexts can survive and we can continue to be a national church doing things that only national churches can do.

There is work to be done this week, of course. But I also think that one of the best things many people could do is make a point of sitting down for coffee or drinks with someone serving in a wildly different geographical or ministry context and asking them the same question my friend asked above: "Tell me about the questions and struggles you're facing in your church." If what happened with us happens for you, you'll find that you soon have a new friend and a much deeper understanding of what day to day ministry looks like in other parts of our communion.
### Arnold's Car Keys
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/arnolds-car-keyes/
Last updated: 2026-06-19T14:28:45.000Z
“How do we honor parents who depend on us in ways they never have before? Medical crises, complicated relationships, limited finances, differing values, and competing obligations create situations without easy answers.” Relying on interviews, research, and of course, theology, this is the question that professor and PCA elder Bill Davis considers in his new book, [*Honoring Dependent Parents: Biblical Decision-Making for Adult Children*](https://www.prpbooks.com/book/honoring-dependent-parents?srsltid=AfmBOoptyHgG8bRaYmUo4XW4IHlHEJgJvIfTZoFmbzCYmzuI9%5FUFLPij&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (P&R Publishing, 2026). The following excerpt from the book is published with permission from P&R Publishing.

\*\*\*

As recently as three years ago, Arnold (79) was a friendly, upbeat retiree who loved working with his hands and tinkering with engines. He had been an aluminum-siding salesman all his life. Because he remembered details about his customers’ lives and took pleasure in getting them to talk about themselves, he was very good at sales work. After his children moved out of the house and his wife died, he used his disposable income to buy a Ford Mustang just like the one he had driven when he was a teenager. Maintaining the Mustang and cruising around town (just the immediate neighborhood) became his favorite “alone time” activity.

Over the last three years, Arnold’s short-term memory has begun to slip. Worse than that, his mood is beginning to shift more quickly than before. He has had the same primary care doctor for the last thirty years (a doctor now in his mid-sixties). He does not want to be tested for dementia, and his doctor is content to wait either for Arnold to notice that he is slipping or for a sign that Arnold has become a danger to himself.

Caroline is Arnold’s only daughter and the only child who still lives in town. (Her two brothers—both older—live more than a four-hour drive away. They visit every other Thanksgiving.) Last year, Caroline convinced Arnold to move in with her family so that he “wouldn’t get lonely”—and so that she could keep an eye on him. Caroline’s husband made room in his garage for Arnold’s “shop tools” and a place for Arnold’s Mustang. Bringing the Mustang was the only thing Arnold required before making the move. 

Caroline is no longer willing to ride in a car that her dad is driving. The last time she did—more than a year ago—she returned home shaking from the many close calls with mailboxes and parked cars. Arnold had noticed that she was “jumpy,” but he thought he was making the ride fun. When Caroline complained that he was driving too close to objects on her side of the road, he responded with uncharacteristic anger, saying, “Who taught you to drive, missy?!” Caroline has found ways to avoid her dad’s every offer of a ride since then.

Last week, Caroline found the Mustang in the driveway with the passenger-side mirror broken off. When she asked Arnold about it, he said, “I’ve ordered a new one. I know how to install it.” Caroline asked how it came off. Arnold’s reply was to leave the room, muttering to himself.

**What should Caroline do to honor her dad amid her concerns about his driving?**

1. She should try not to worry so much and let Arnold enjoy his car while he still can.
2. She should hide all his car keys and only pretend to help him find them.
3. She should work with the local police to set up a “sting” in which her father is pulled over and sternly warned about reckless driving.
4. She should talk to her dad about her concerns and ask him to get retested for his driver’s license.

Caroline asked her older brother what she should do. He recommended option 1\. He said that she was fretting, treating their dad the way she would treat an irresponsible child. Dad was not her child, he said, and the car was his. If he wanted to run into things, it was his business. His insurance rates would go up, but no one had taken his license away, and Caroline was not an expert on driving ability.

While the older brother is right that Arnold is not a child, option 1 does not honor Arnold well, since it treats too lightly his physical safety and his lifelong zeal to put others’ interests before his own. While he might not yet be a threat to his own safety, his driving puts other people in danger. Caroline knows that before Arnold’s memory and judgment started changing, he would never have gotten behind the wheel if he had been tired or tipsy.

Caroline’s other brother gave advice like option 2\. He agreed that it wasn’t good for Arnold to be driving, but he thought it would be easy to use his self-confidence against him. If they hid the keys to the Mustang, Arnold would not be able to drive it. He probably wouldn’t ask for help to find the keys, but if he did, she could pretend to help and then fail to find them. This option would be the best way to honor Arnold *if* he had asked his children to hide the keys from him when *they* thought it would be best. Because Arnold did not ask to be treated this way, doing so is best only if his children are sure it is what he would choose if his powers were restored. Getting sure about this might involve talking to people who’ve known Arnold for years. In asking for others’ help, Arnold’s children will need to be careful to describe the problem in a way that protects his reputation.

Caroline should reject option 3\. Her father would be mortified to be pulled over by police, and he would never choose to use police time for a fake “sting” if he were able to understand what was being proposed. While this option might be effective, it would come at the expense of Arnold’s dignity and reputation. 

If Arnold’s driving is putting *other* people in danger, the police may need to be involved. Option 4 is probably best in this case, but Caroline should not trick her father. After telling him what she is doing, Caroline can honor her father’s reputation and health by asking the police for help. In that case, the police would have the authority to insist on a driving test. If the police are not willing to help, Caroline can ask the state or county department of Adult Protective Services for help if she is confident Arnold would support her were his ability to think clearly restored to what it was in his prime. Her desire to protect her father from hurting himself and others is good. She can honor him by finding a way to protect him that he would have approved before the challenges of aging made it harder for him to think clearly.

The most promising option may not be listed here. Every family would benefit if parents talked about what they would want their children to do should they become like Arnold.
### Drastic Unalikes: Flannery O’Connor and Her Mother
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/drastic-unalikes-flannery-oconnor-and-her-mother/
Last updated: 2026-06-18T11:01:01.000Z
**Carol Loeb Shloss.** [***Flannery and Regina: The Andalusia Chronicles***](https://www.ugapress.org/9781588385772/flannery-and-regina/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. University of Georgia Press, 2026\. $32.95\. 200 pp.**

Flannery O’Connor enthusiasts know that she spent the final thirteen years of her life (1951-64) living with her mother, Regina Cline O’Connor, on the family farm called Andalusia outside Milledgeville, Georgia, where Flannery had grown up and attended college. Against her wishes, she had been forced to return home because of her eventually fatal disease, disseminated lupus erythematosus. Though Flannery knew she would never inhabit any other fictional region than the South, she wanted to retain a critical distance from it. She had thrived while living with her dear friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald in Connecticut. She feared that a return home would mean the death of her creative life. The pressuring thumb of her domineering mother was likely to make her chafe, distorting if not suppressing her literary imagination. No wonder that so many of her stories are focused on frustrated writers living at home with their domineering mothers—but with the sons and daughters found at much greater fault than the mothers. Flannery later admitted that, to her surprise, she did her best writing during these dozen years at Andalusia.

Carol Loeb Shloss recounts the story of their fruitful if often tense relation from a new angle of vision—the material conditions, especially the economic circumstances, that both constricted and enabled their life together. Relying on careful research into legal documents and financial records, she reveals Regina O’Connor to have been a shrewd if also selfish manager of land and money. They were her alpha and omega. Through a series of court maneuvers in 1957, she was able to claim sole ownership (excluding her own cousins) of the 500-acre Andalusia farm as well as the adjoining 1000 acres of undisturbed woodlands and open fields that her brother Bernard Cline had willed as a perpetual wildlife preserve.

As an entrepreneurial operator of the Andalusia dairy farm, Regina turned it into a profitable business. She oversaw everything—from the breeding of heifers to the birthing of calves; from the harvesting of feed corn to the baling of hay; from the digging of ponds to making sure that the livestock didn’t drown in them; from overseeing the work of seven laborers while keeping them more or less sober. Above all else, she managed the milk cows—the farm’s real source of income. 

More astonishing still is the revelation that penurious Regina treated Flannery as just another renter, docking her $30 per month at first and later $60, as the daughter’s royalties modestly increased. When she made Flannery a dress, she charged her $9.94\. She also required Flannery to pay her doctors’ bills as well as to purchase her medicines, including the expensive cortisone shots that helped relieve the pain from her lupus. There is no evidence that Flannery ever protested these arrangements. Shloss shows, instead, that property—its ownership and management—looms large in Flannery’s fiction, especially in such stories as “A Circle in the Fire,” “Greenleaf,” and “A View of the Woods.” Far from being an innocent bystander, the daughter was a full-fledged participant in her mother’s shenanigans, even when putting them to good literary use. The chief value of Shloss’s book is that we will now need to heed these hard economic facts when interpreting Flannery O’Connor’s life and work.

Shloss conveys the previously unpublished news that Regina and Ed O’Connor did not have a happy or even a satisfactory marriage. In 1979, Sally Fitzgerald discovered and reported—in her sprawling 1000-page uncompleted biography—that “Ed couldn’t stand Regina… Ed made no secret of his misery. After a final effort—in the form of a trip to Connecticut—which failed because Regina continued to berate and scold him on every imaginable occasion, he gave up, saying to \[his friend Rose Hognes\] ‘I’m tearing out that page and throwing it away. Regina can just go to hell.’ Regina went home on the train.” Ed O’Connor died in 1941, when Flannery was 15\. Yet, even in revealing the dire condition of their marriage, Shloss fails to draw the obvious conclusion. Flannery absorbed the conflict in her parents’ marriage and took her father’s side. She rode with him across Georgia as he gave American Legion speeches, admiring his rhetoric but never mentioning Regina in her accounts of these trips.

Flannery and Regina had radically opposing views on the race question as well. The daughter was a gradualist who feared that instant integration would be a disaster, bringing more harm than hope. She believed that a new set of racial manners would need to be developed before Black and white people could begin to live in amity rather than antagonism. Regina, by contrast, was a bitter oppositionist. Tom Gossett, my former Wake Forest colleague and ardent liberal—author of the groundbreaking 1963 book *Race: The History of an Idea in America*—exchanged notes with Flannery before he and his wife Louise drove up from Macon for a visit. Flannery warned them to steer clear of the race question. “That’s a train which, once it leaves the station, has no stopping places.”

Though Shloss cannot be faulted for not knowing such things, *Regina and Flannery* is a deeply flawed book. For example, it is littered with typos. “Prophesy” when “prophecy” was the requisite word. “Forthcoming” mistakenly understood to mean “forthright.” Julian the antagonist in “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is repeatedly misspelled “Julien,” ruining his clear association with Julian the Apostate. Shloss’s interpretations of individual stories also overlook their full Christian resonances. For example, she reads the ending of “Revelation” as Ruby’s encounter with “a new world where clothing cannot determine status,” and thus “a vision of the sanctity of life, a trespass on the customs of the country.” Apparently, Shloss knows nothing of Purgatory, with its central claim that Ruby and Claude’s small-bore virtues of decency and good order, no less than Mary Grace’s gross textbook-slinging righteousness, must be purged, consumed, redeemed in the fire of divine mercy. 

She also misses Father Finn’s hilarious catechizing of the esthete Asbury Fox in “The Enduring Chill,” saying only that they “talked past each other.” Nor does she catch the shrewdness of the black dairy workers who refuse to join Asbury in drinking the abundantly fresh but unpasteurized milk from the dairy. The result is that Asbury comes down with undulant fever, a lifelong but not fatal illness wherein chills and sweats alternate. Surely the worst of Shloss’s misprisions comes in her interpretation of “Parker’s Back,” O’Connor’s final polished story, a nearly perfect work. Whereas Parker is definitively drawn to the Christ Pantocrator—“the haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes” that Parker chooses to have incised onto his back—Shloss finds finds only indeterminacy. “Parker’s ‘story,’” she concludes, “may not have moved anyone else, the audience may remain unmoved, but he is radically and beautifully changed.” There is nothing beautiful about the broom-thrashing that the pregnant but life-denying Sarah Ruth visits upon Parker, raising welts on the Pantocrator’s face, much as Christ was scourged on the Via Dolorosa. Though Parker leans against a tree—his body figured as a crucifix—weeping over his failure to convert his wife, his new birth in Christ has not been canceled but only begun. The Byzantine Christ will keep summoning him down the road to suffering. Given the fierceness of Parker’s character, he will no doubt hear and heed.

It comes as no surprise that Shloss refers to Flannery’s “severe Catholicism,” clearly wishing it were something milder, less coarse. Though they were both Catholics, Regina was conventional while Flannery was radical. “The Eucharist is the center of existence for me,” she confessed; “all of the rest of life is expendable.” Even so, she and her mother formed a symbiotic team wherein both prospered, even though greater unalikes can hardly be imagined. Avoiding these distinctions, Shloss resorts to such vague anodyne phrases as “spiritual values countermand the material world.” Most egregiously, she refers to the O’Connors’ Catholicism as their “value system.” This phrase comes straight from the Sociology textbooks that Flannery studied in her undergraduate Social Science major. “Thank God, it didn’t take,” she later confessed, as if it were a bad inoculation. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), the French founder of modern Sociology, argued that “Persons more committed to religion attribute relatively high importance to values expressing motivation to avoid uncertainty and change and relatively low importance to values expressing motivations to follow one's hedonistic desires, or to be independent in thought and action.”

For Flannery O’Connor, by contrast, risk and doubt and uncertainty, but especially change—*conversion*!—lie at the heart of Christian faith. The avoidance of occasions for sin is one of its chief imperatives, as is the confession that Christians live in radical communal and ecclesial dependence, not in independent thought and action. Shloss doesn’t deal with Flannery’s approach to death, perhaps because dying is not illuminated by economic and sociological analysis. Despite her wretched state at the end, Flannery did not want to die. “I’m sick of being sick… Pray that the lupus don’t finish me off too quick” were among her final pleas. Yet she made her most revealing confession to Robert Lowell in 1953, eleven years before her death. Expressing gratitude for the cortisone shots that had put her lupus under temporary control, Flannery added, “I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all \[i.e., her disease and its dire results\] as a blessing. What you have to measure out, you come to observe closer, or so I tell myself.” 

The double qualifiers are noteworthy. Not for a moment does Flannery roll her eyes to the skies and thank God for giving her lupus. Only with the squinted eye of honest doubt can she affirm the likelihood of early death. Six years later, in a letter to her close friend Elizabeth Hester, Flannery made a similar point: “It is much harder to believe than not to believe.” Not to doubt God is not to believe in God. Did not Jesus himself shout the protest of Psalm 22 from the Cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”If Carol Loeb Shloss had attended to such matters, she could have overcome the chief flaw of her book—its indifference to theological things.
### Confessing Sin, Then and Now
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/confessing-sin-then-and-now/
Last updated: 2026-07-31T17:54:06.000Z
I have only ever used the 1662 Book of Common Prayer for my local parish worship. After many years of being a Presbyterian, I became an Anglican and began praying, at home and in church, the prayers from the 1662 BCP. 

But recently I have been traveling, and as it happened, I was in a few places that used the 2019 BCP. As you might expect, I stumbled at a couple of spots. It wasn’t at the really dramatic edits, though. Those were so big that I could see them coming. Instead, it was in the smaller edits, the changes located within an otherwise familiar text. The most jarring of these were in the confessions of sin.

A corporate confession of sin occurs in the Daily Office of Morning and Evening Prayer and also in the service for Holy Communion. These are important parts of the liturgy, and they are prayers which the congregation prays aloud along with the clergy. They are the kind of prayers that lend themselves to memorization. And that’s why a small change is such a big deal. Most people probably don’t actually read the text for these prayers. You pray them from memory, from the heart. And then—oops— you say something different from everyone around you. It’s like a scratch on the record player. It’s a bit embarrassing. But then you look at what you missed or where you went wrong and *wait a minute! Why did they do that?!*

Discovering why a certain change was made is difficult. You have to try to get inside the minds of the liturgical editors. And unless they left notes or commentary, you can only really guess. Some changes are not a big deal. Others are pretty troubling. And if we believe in the power and effectiveness of liturgy, we ought to care about this. The changes might well bring about an effect.

For now, I would like to simply lay out the changes so that you can see what I’m talking about, and I will keep it to the confessions of sin. We’ll start with the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as the baseline, and then we’ll look at the 1979 BCP and the 2019 BCP. (For the particular prayers under consideration, the 1928 BCP has only incidental changes and is otherwise the same as the 1662.)

## The 1662 Book of Common Prayer

The 1662 is the gold standard of Prayer Books. It’s not “the original,” but it is the one that was received and established after the Restoration, it is the one that became the global standard, and it is currently the version of the Prayer Book named in the governing statements of the Global Anglican Communion and the Anglican Church in North America. For the confessions of sin which we will be looking at, however, the text in the 1662 BCP is essentially the same as the older versions that Cranmer produced. The confession of sins at Morning and Evening Prayer is the same as that in the 1552 BCP, and the confession of sins at the Holy Communion goes all the way back to 1549.

For the General Confession of Sins at Morning and Evening Prayer, we are given this prayer:

> Almighty and most merciful Father, We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, We have offended against thy holy laws, We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, And we have done those things which we ought not to have done, And there is no health in us: But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders; Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults, Restore thou them that are penitent, According to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesu our Lord: And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake, That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.

This is an all-time classic, and parts of it are now being used by other denominations besides Anglicans. It is both theologically well-rounded and liturgically sonorous. The one part of the text that could said to be confusing today, though not terribly, is the use of “Jesu.” That spelling indicates a sort of diminutive. It’s a way to signal familiarity and intimacy. That’s the one place that the 1929 BCP changes here, making it simply “Jesus.” Otherwise, the text of this prayer seems straightforward, intelligible, and without any major need of updating.

For the Service for Holy Communion, the 1662 has this prayer of repentance:

> Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Maker of all things, Judge of all men: We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, Which we from time to time most grievously have committed, By thought, word, and deed, Against thy Divine Majesty, Provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us. We do earnestly repent, And are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; The remembrance of them is grievous unto us; The burden of them is intolerable. Have mercy upon us, Have mercy upon us, most merciful Father; For thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, Forgive us all that is past; And grant that we may ever hereafter Serve and please thee In newness of life, To the honour and glory of thy Name; Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Again, we have a substantial and beautiful prayer. As a personal note, I always resonate with the statement that “the remembrance” of our sins “is grievous unto us.” How many times do I sigh or cringe when I recall the evil things I have done. There’s a profound sort of comfort in admitting this. The truth of our sinful lives is a true burden, and it’s one that we are asking God to relieve.

## The 1979 Book of Common Prayer

These two confessions of sin survived for centuries until the “liturgical renewal” movement took the over the scholarly imagination. After the hazy and tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, the American Episcopalians believed a change had to come. The 1979 Book of Common Prayer is that change. It is a dramatic break from previous Prayer Books. It makes some claims to antiquity, but there is a lot of novelty. And there is a lot of diversity. 

There were truly new liturgies, said to be inspired by Hippolytus or the Second Vatican Council, which bore only the slightest resemblance to the earlier Cranmerian tradition. But there was also an attempt to save the older BCP, at least as much as possible. The “Rite 1” option, while still certainly a modern update, is at least similar to the older Books of Common Prayer. For the Daily Office, especially, the changes are not as dramatic as you might expect. But even here, there are still some noticeable edits in the confession of sins. In what follows, we’ll only consider the Rite 1 prayers.

At Morning and Evening Prayer, the 1979 BCP has this confession of sins:

> Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, we have offended against thy holy laws, we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, spare thou those who confess their faults, restore thou those who are penitent, according to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesus our Lord; and grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake, that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, to the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.

The language here is largely unchanged. It’s got “thy” and “thou.” There’s even still the potentially tongue-tying alliteration of “spare thou those.” None of that was a problem. But what’s different? There’s nothing added. But there is something missing.

*Miserable Offenders*. That’s been cut. The older BCPs read, “Have mercy upon us miserable offenders.” Now it’s just “have mercy upon us.” We can only presume that the 1979 American liturgists read C.S. Lewis’ essay on this line and chose to do the opposite of what he recommended. Fearful of misunderstanding or perhaps simply because they no longer felt quite so miserable, that line had to go. It was a tragedy then, and it’s a tragedy that has stuck with Anglicans, even of the more conservative variety.

Another cut is the removal of the line “there is no health in us.” Lurking behind this is surely the same sort of combination of confusion about the meaning of the words and possibly also a disbelief in the full reality of sin. There’s gotta be “some health” in us, right? A full humiliation and abasement is simply off-putting to the modern American mindset.

Blessedly, when it comes to the service for Holy Communion, Rite 1 made no changes to the confession of sin. They left in the statement that our sins “most justly” provoke God’s wrath and indignation. The remembrance of our sins is still “grievous unto us,” and “the burden of them” remains “intolerable.” I have to admit, I was surprised to learn this, and I’m very thankful for it.

## The 2019 ACNA Book of Common Prayer

The 2019 BCP is the product of the Anglican Church in North America. It is sometimes said to be a return to the older Cranmerian Prayer Books, but you don’t have to look long to see that it’s basically an update and revision of the 1979\. Like the 1979, it also has options. Instead of Rite 1 and Rite 2, the 2019 offers you the Anglican Standard Text (AST) and the Renewed Ancient Text (RAT). This nomenclature can be confusing, because the RAT is actually the contemporary liturgy. It parallels the 1979’s “Rite 2” option. Again, here we’ll only look at the first of these, the AST.

Now, knowing what we know about the ACNA and its motivations, you might assume that it “fixes” the 1979\. After all, they recovered the Athanasian Creed and restored the Coverdale Psalter. But unfortunately, when it comes to the confessions of sins, the 2019 is actually *worse* than the 1979.

For Morning and Evening Prayer, the 2019 has the people pray for the following for the General Confession:

> Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from your ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against your holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and apart from your grace, there is no health in us. O Lord, have mercy upon us. Spare all those who confess their faults. Restore all those who are penitent, according to your promises declared to all people in Christ Jesus our Lord. And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake, that we may now live a godly, righteous, and sober life, to the glory of your holy Name. Amen.

The older pronouns have been updated. Thy and Thou are now “your.” Fine. A little irritating, but not a big deal. Still, notice what’s missing. “Miserable Offenders” did not make a comeback. A missed opportunity, to be sure.

But wait, the 2019 did bring back “there is no health in us.” That’s good, isn’t it? But no, they weren’t able simply to restore it. They had to add a preceding qualifier, a qualifier that substantially lessens the blow. “*Apart from your grace*, there is no health is us.”

This is a mistaken edit for a few reasons. The most obvious is that it’s a flinch. In this liturgical moment, the whole point is to confess our sins. It’s not the time to qualify or hedge things. We don’t need to say, “I’m bad, but not as bad as I could be.” This is precisely when you should let it all out and say that you’re a wretched, no good, evil person. The whole point is your failing.

The other reason that this change is wrong is that it indicates a lack of attention to the internal logic of the prayer. In the older BCPS, there’s a very important contrasting conjunction: BUT. “…there is no health in us: But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us..” “But” indicates the change in motion. We had been talking about “us.” We were moving down, getting progressively more intense in our confession. The “but” is the switch. Our focus then moves to God and gets more and more hopeful. The grace part needs to come after the “but” part. The 2019 BCP adds the grace before this transition, and it even deletes the “but.” This shows that the 2019 liturgy committee was not only theologically skittish but that they also didn’t quite understand how the BCP liturgy works.

For the Holy Communion Service, the 2019 BCP is again *worse* than the 1979\. Rite 1 had most mercifully declined to alter the confession of sin before the holy table. But in 2019, this restraint could not hold. The prayer is this:

> Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, maker and judge of us all: We acknowledge and lament our many sins and offenses, which we have committed by thought, word, and deed against your divine majesty, provoking most justly your righteous anger against us. We are deeply sorry for these our transgressions; the burden of them is more than we can bear. Have mercy upon us, Have mercy upon us, most merciful Father; for your Son our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, forgive us all that is past; and grant that we may evermore serve and please you in newness of life, to the honor and glory of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Again, there are slight changes. “Manifold” becomes “many.” Unnecessary, but fine. “Wrath and indignation” has been slimmed down simply to “righteous anger.” No one could say that this is an improvement, but it is, I suppose, acceptable. “Heartily sorry” has become “deeply sorry.” This is surely because the ministers have forgotten that “heartily” means “from the heart.” And speaking of forgetting, look at what’s been cut out. There is no reference to the “remembrance” of our sins. That line, so precious to me personally, and which had miraculously survived the days of disco, has now been cut out entirely.

I’m no W. H. Auden, but I definitely want to let some people have it on this one. What could they have been thinking here? Why would they remove this line? Come on. This is certainly *grievous unto us*.

And again, this change was not something that the 1979 Prayer Book made. No, this is the conservative and continuing Anglican Church in North America. The 2019 did this all on their own. It’s startling.

I suppose the reason that it wasn’t more controversial is that the people who really cared knew that they could just use other Prayer Books. But still, this is a problem. And the 2019 is the default version of the BCP across the ACNA. People should take a closer look at this.

I’m tempted to say they should ask for an update, but honestly, I think they should overhaul their assumptions about what’s needed. Rather than trying to rejigger the 1979 BCP, the ACNA should instead truly “go back” and make an appropriately modest updated version of 1662 BCP. They already claim the 1662 in all of their paperwork. And there are already plenty of ministers and parishes who are using versions of the 1662\. It’s an entirely achievable goal. Call me a dreamer, I guess. But I hope I’m not the only one.

[*originally published at Reformed Conformist*](https://reformedconformist.substack.com/p/comparing-anglican-confessions-of)
### A Case Against Christian Doomerism
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-case-against-christian-doomerism/
Last updated: 2026-07-31T17:54:11.000Z
For the past few years, I’ve had the honor of teaching undergrads CH101 & 102\. But as someone who works primarily in the theology end of academics, I typically skew toward big picture lectures that focus on large-scale historical trends that result from or advance theological innovations. As such, I give several [Tom Holland](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43885149-dominion?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), [Rodney Stark](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11392050-the-triumph-of-christianity?ref=nav%5Fsb%5Fss%5F3%5F27)\-inspired, firehose lectures on the myriad ways Christianity altered the course of history—almost invariably for the better. And somewhere between learning how Greeks used to leave unwanted infants outside of trash heaps and the likelihood of being born a slave or dying from a disease antibiotics have now rendered obsolete, several students comment something like this: “I’m so thankful that I’m alive now and not then.” 

Students of all backgrounds, ages, and ethnicities inevitably build final presentations around the novelty of this idea—as if a thankfulness for being alive now had never occurred to them. For many of them, it’s the first time they’ve even been granted permission to wonder out loud whether their moment in history actually isn’t the worst of the bunch. 

The reality is that the world really isn’t as uniquely terrible as the average internet think piece or primetime news segment makes it out to be. It isn’t particularly *good—*but it’s not unilaterally *bad*. There’re many things that make living and breathing nowadays uniquely advantageous. 

One of the easiest showcases for this truism that I offer my students is simply the lightbulb. In 1st century Rome, if you wanted to produce light after sundown, you had to acquire candles and matches that would’ve cost the equivalent of 12-20 USD per candle and only produced about 12-15 lumens. Worse, without building codes, a candle toppling over and setting fire to the whole neighborhood was an all-too-common occurrence. 

Today, it costs $0.005 to produce the same amount of light thanks to LED lightbulbs. It’s 2-4,000 times cheaper to light a room now than it was in the Roman Empire (and their fire-starting potential also probably decreased around 2-4,000 percent). Yet the luxury of easily navigating our homes in the night rarely crosses our minds. 

We also tend to take for granted plenty of other advancements: penicillin, city water filtration systems, or the efficiency and cleanliness of modern farming. Child mortality rates are the lowest they’ve ever been. A century and a half ago, if you had 10 children, it was anticipated that 3-5 of them wouldn’t survive into adulthood. And without medical imaging technology, they might not even understand *why* those children died.

My wife recently had a surgery that involved multiple incisions. 50 years ago, medical professionals used much larger incisions that would then lead to prolonged recovery time, risk of infection, and excessive pain. Thankfully, my wife was able to recover in less than a week with no risk of infection.

For all its multitude of negative [effects](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22472?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), the market economy has still brought a lot of good. If you were born two centuries ago, your chance of being born into poverty hovered around 50%. Thanks to the spread of commerce, it’s now [around](https://globalclimatereview.org/global-poverty-in-2025/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) 9%. Even though inflation is a cause for worry, the average working-class individual in a level four (first world) country still possesses more material luxuries than a 19th century aristocrat. 

Further, while obesity is nothing to laugh at, it’s definitely revealing that our hunger problems have reversed so much so that overindulgence has become the more ostensible concern for Westerners. Regardless of our stance on the issue, saints throughout history like Francis de Sales [believed](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/398834?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) it was healthier—both spiritually and physically—to lean toward indulgence rather than asceticism. Thankfully, this is now possible for the global majority. 

Then there are the moral evolutions. Early Christians banned “killing what is born” (*Didache,* 2.2) – as in, Christians had a responsibility to not abandon or expose infants to the elements. The fact that abandoning infants to starve or to be raised as sex slaves seems heinous is thanks to Christians [normalizing](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-air-we-breathe-how-we-all-came-to-believe-in-freedom-kindness-progress-and-equality-glen-scrivener/d9e7965d237ca456?ean=9781784987497&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) its heinousness. Further, while the [initial sex revolution](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevin-deyoung/first-sexual-revolution-triumph-christian-morality-roman-empire/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of A.D. [60](https://firstthings.com/the-first-sexual-revolution/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) is often overshadowed by the [sexual revolution](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59852733-the-case-against-the-sexual-revolution?ref=nav%5Fsb%5Fss%5F1%5F23) of the 1960s, the influence of the first revolution is seen in the fact that sex trafficking is now largely socially taboo. As scholar Kyle Harper put [it](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16241530?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), “The idea that everyone has a right to their own body is an idea that stems from Christianity.”

Much progress is still needed in the arena of gender and sexuality, of course. Yet even though concern about the younger generation’s sexual liberality is warranted, there’s sufficient [evidence](https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2025/07/22/gen-z-virginity-sex-lives-book/84415109007/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to suggest that the young are having less sex than ever. For the majority of young people, sex has become simultaneously less religious and yet more sacred, encouraging a vague chasteness. They’re [also](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/171681821?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) drinking less, smoking less, and abusing narcotics less than past generations.

Although the lack of religiosity and church attendance among is nothing to sneer at, America is [still](https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/decline-of-christianity-in-the-us-has-slowed-may-have-leveled-off/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) 62-69% Christian. Since 2012, the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of religious freedom in 15 of the 16 relevant [cases](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/30/us/politics/supreme-court-religion.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). While many [trends](https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/?utm%5Fcampaign=profile%5Fchips&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in religiosity aren’t necessarily uplifting, it’s not all entirely bad, without exception. 

There are many more uniquely advantageous [aspects](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34890015-factfulness?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of living in the modern era, but this is a decent start. 

Now, the reason my students have never felt permission to express thankfulness for being alive today is thanks to the normalization of what historians call “chronocentrism.” Similar to ethnocentrists, chronocentrists believe their moment in history is the most significant of them all, thus rendering the past’s hard-won lessons and advancements irrelevant. Chronocentrists overestimate the importance of every daily headline, assuming it’s the turning point the next generation of historians will pen books about. However, today you’re less likely to run into loud and proud chronocentrists than their more popular offshoot: “doomers.” Doomerism assumes that global society is too far gone and beyond repair, which makes it pessimistic and largely hopeless. 

Interestingly, while researching church history, I’ve struggled to find any epoch where doomerism wasn’t present. Along with death and taxes, another certainty seems to be the Christian assumption that the things have never been worse and the end times are just around the corner. From the Thessalonians that Paul addresses in his second letter to their church to the 20th century dispensationalists, we can trace an unbroken chain from Pentecost to now of theologians who’ve interpreted any sign of civilizational decay as an omen that the end of all things was at hand. 

Now, there’s truth to the idea that the world will get worse before the eschaton. Lawlessness will increase along with rumors of war (Matt. 24:6, 9-12); ethics will degenerate (2 Tim. 3:1-5); disasters of all kinds will loom over the world (Luke 17:26-30). And yet, even though we’re to stay vigilant and stay awake (Matt. 25:1-13; 1 Thess. 4:13-18), there’s no imperative to worry about the degradation of all things—let alone attempt to predict it. Further, we know beyond a doubt that the Gospel must be proclaimed to every people group on earth before “the end will come” (Matt. 24:14). In some ways, doomerism’s assumptions about impending oblivion circumvent this reality—as if our socio-political forecasts overshadow the words of Jesus. 

My point here is not that the world is wonderful or even the best it’s ever been. Rather, it’s that it’s not as bad as most people, including Christians, assume. Sadly, Christian public voices are often more pessimistic than hopeful. This is problematic, because the continued, unregulated doomerism about everything is not a magnetic way to inhabit the world. The last people I want to receive a newsletter from are those who have become numb to hope because of the daily overload of negative headlines. It’s not a compelling way to embody Christ in and to the world. 

But neither am I unconcerned for the younger generations. They’re less outgoing, confident, and socially connected. Their attention spans and emotional regulation are worsening thanks to TikTok and screen technologies. Perhaps one of the most fundamentally indisputable problems today is the way that overstimulation gets in the way of us living deep, thoughtful, religiously robust lifestyles.

But even still, viewed historically, these concerns aren’t necessarily new. Centuries [ago](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/worklife-with-adam-grant/id1346314086?i=1000719589074&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), the elder generations were in a moral panic [over](https://news.illinois.edu/book-examines-dangers-of-reading-for-young-men-in-late-19th-century-france/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) the “reading epidemic,” of young folks being so absorbed in reading books that adults worried their brains were rotting. Granted, reading books is [objectively better](https://www.growcounseling.com/blog/reading-better-than-instagram/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) for mental and emotional maturation than TikTok, but it’s helpful to put contemporary observations into conversation with historical trends. 

I’m not even particularly keen on arguing that we should be uniquely happy with society at the moment. I’m horrified by the way AI is impacting us intellectually and economically. It’s a promethean, unregulated technology that deserves more consistent and active criticism. I’m also sad that fewer people are comfortable with boredom and the way that our world’s brightest minds seem unilaterally focused on devising better and better schemes to get people to click on social media ads rather than cultivating moral ambition. 

Instead, what I’d much prefer to see is simply more clarity in the *ways* in which we define the world as bad. To say, “We’re in a moral decline” is only true for certain realms of morality, such as concern for unborn children. To say, “We’re in a spiritual crisis,” is only true for specific cities at specific times, not across the board everywhere. 

So even though the world is not *uniquely* bad, it’s also not uniquely *good.* Sin and the devil still have jurisdiction. Yet, defining everything as inherently bad, or accepting worries of drifting into a godless, TikTok fueled oblivion as if this concern is an established fact will necessarily sacrifice requisite Christian hope. Rather than comprehending Christ’s overcoming of the world, we come to imbibe the poor state we’ve projected onto the world. 

Now, accepting that the world isn’t the horror story news outlets make it out to be comes with the unfortunate potential of passivity. Those who assume the moral arc of history slants toward justice stand the risk of reclining in their chairs and allowing history to do the work. Assuming time and chance will do the work is, of course, nonsense. The only thing that stops evil men is good men who refuse silence and passivity. And the only reason history could ever appear animated by a moral imperative is because God used influential voices in each generation to puppeteer history into better directions. We don’t want to re-impassion a generation of couch potatoes.

Simultaneously, assuming that everything is burning down is just as much of an engine for directionlessness. This is what’s called “[learned helplessness](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1992-98227-000?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).” An overload of doomsday scenarios can frighten us into paralysis. As Eugene Peterson once [argued](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/674019?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), if we forget to read the headlines as footnotes to Scripture rather than the other way around, “we will finally be too afraid to get out of bed in the morning.” 

It’s natural to interpret the negative in the news as if it is more powerful and prominent than the good. This is just our brain’s [negativity bias](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3652533/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) telling us to stay alert. But in a Christian theological perspective, we have an imperative to not let the negative outweigh the positive, the mourning to drown out the rejoicing, the pessimism to defeat the hope. As the philosopher Josef Pieper has [argued](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/472142?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), Christian festivity begins from the foundation that the world is “good, and it is good to exist.” This basic assumption is what justifies celebration, joy, the pleasure of communal connection. Without it, we’ll finally become irrevocably helpless.
### Augustine and the Power of Habit
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/augustine-and-the-power-of-habit/
Last updated: 2026-07-31T17:54:16.000Z
Augustine’s Confessions detail approximately a 15-year-long struggle with God. His journey wanders through [Manicheism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), skepticism, and neoplatonism, before seriously considering the Christianity his mother taught him at a young age. After meeting regularly with the bishop, Ambrose, and attending church, Augustine’s intellectual arguments against Christianity (and the Bible) fade. He becomes compelled by the beauty and truth of Christianity and begins to see how inadequate his previous Manichean faith was.

But, becoming aware of the truth of Christianity was not enough.

> I no longer had my usual excuse to explain why I did not yet despise the world and serve You, namely, that my perception of truth was uncertain. By now I was indeed quite sure about it. Yet I was still bound down to the earth. (Book VIII.v; All quotations are from Henry Chadwick’s translation.) 

What is he “bound down” by? The habit of sexual sin.

## **The Limits of the Mind**

Over the course of Augustine’s life, he became deeply bound to two vices: worldly ambition and lust. But it is the latter that becomes the dominant weight. His sexual sin blocked the path to Christ:

> They tugged at the garment of my flesh and whispered: ‘Are you getting rid of us?’ And ‘from this moment we shall never be with you again, not for ever and ever.’ (Book VIII.xi)

Augustine sees the choice before him—Christ or his lusts—and admits that while Christianity was “pleasant to think about and had my notional assent,” the lusts of the flesh were simply “more pleasant and overcame me.”

Augustine compares himself with a man in a deep sleep who upon being shaken awake—and truly desiring to wake up—nevertheless sinks back into bed:

> Though at every point you showed that what you were saying was true, yet I, convinced by that truth, had no answer to give you except merely slow and sleepy words: ‘At once’—‘But presently’—‘Just a little longer, please.’ But ‘At once, at once,’ never came to a point of decision, and ‘Just a little longer, please’ went on and on for a long while. (Book VIII.v)

Notice: Augustine wants to come to Christ and sincerely believes it is true. Yet, he only wants and believes to a certain point. Not enough to shake off the “sweet drowsiness” of the world.

> I sighed after such freedom, but was bound not by an iron imposed by anyone else but by the iron of my own choice. The enemy had a grip on my will and so made a chain for me to hold me a prisoner. (Book VIII.v)

Augustine’s reservations were not intellectual; they were moral. He was in deep sexual bondage. He had a personal concubine for most of his adult life and could not bear to be without one. He knew that coming to Christ meant that this would have to change and he both wanted and didn’t want that to happen.

He would pray: “Grant me chastity and continence…but not yet.”

## **The Power of Habit**

Augustine intellectually has come to believe in the truth of Christianity, but he cannot give up his sexual sins. So he flagellates himself with a scathing self-hatred:

> What accusations against myself did I not bring? With what verbal rods did I not scourge my soul so that it would follow me in my attempt to go after you! But my soul hung back. It refused, and had no excuse to offer. The arguments were exhausted, and all had been refuted. The only thing left to it was a mute trembling, and as if it were facing death it was terrified of being restrained from **the treadmill of habit** by which it suffered ‘sickness unto death’. (Book VIII.vii)

Any person who has been caught in the teeth of an addiction they hate can relate to Augustine’s pain here. Longing for freedom, the appeal of self-hatred as a motivating force seems intuitive. But, as many habitual indulgers find out the hard way, our thoughts alone are not sufficient to snap the chain. And this is where Augustine’s use of the role of habits proves to be so illuminating for us today.

After lamenting that the enemy “had a grip on \[his\] will,” Augustine explains:

> The consequence of a distorted will is passion. By servitude to passion, habit is formed, and habit to which there is no resistance becomes necessity. By these links, as it were, connected one to another (hence my term a chain), a harsh bondage held me under restraint. (Book VIII.v)

Augustine accepts responsibility for his sin while still affirming that he is under the “grip” of the enemy, and so is left with a will that is fundamentally bent. This distorted will creates inflamed passions—strong urges—that (when indulged) create the well-worn footpaths of habit. And once a habit is secured, it seems impossible to break (necessity).

Augustine was unfamiliar with modern brain science, but he is accurately describing the mechanism of habit-formation and the brain’s tendency to wire neural pathways together.

Our brains are designed for efficiency and are hungry for pleasure; if every time you wake up you brush your teeth or check your phone (pleasurable experiences), in time the various neurons that are firing in your brain to perform those activities will begin to[ fuse together](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian%5Ftheory?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), so that one (waking up) leads to the other (brush teeth, check phone). Eventually, you perform the task automatically. These habits are tucked away in the deep recesses of your brain responsible for emotions and memories (the basal ganglia) far away from the area responsible for conscious thought (the prefrontal cortex).

Which means that much of what animates our decisions and actions happens beneath the surface of our awareness. They are murmurs that stir and ripple the deep currents of our mind, pushing us towards decisions long before we are aware. This is also why habits seem to be so impervious to change by mere thought alone, as if one could reverse the course of a river by merely paddling in the opposite direction.

Augustine has spent 15 years practicing the habit of sexual indulgence. He has literally shaped his brain to be habituated towards this act. He has a growing set of new beliefs about Christianity and a desire to submit to God, but notice how frequently he speaks about the role of habit in preventing him from changing course:

> The new will, which was beginning to be within me a will to serve you freely and to enjoy you, God…was not yet strong enough to conquer my older will, which had the strength of **old habit**.

> I was responsible for the fact that **habit** had become so embattled against me; for it was with my consent that I came to the place in which I did not wish to be.

> Meanwhile the overwhelming **force of habit** was saying to me: ‘Do you think you can live without \[lust\]?’

> We are dealing with a morbid condition of the mind which, when it is lifted up by the truth, does not unreservedly rise to it but is weighed down by **habit.**

Notice that in none of his reflections is Augustine understanding the habit of sin to be something that absolves him of his own responsibility or agency. He realizes that the chain of habit is something he chose.

> The law of sin is the violence of **habit** by which even the unwilling mind is dragged down and held, as it deserves to be, since by its own choice it slipped into the **habit.**

At the height of Augustine’s spiritual turmoil, he wanders into a garden “deeply disturbed in spirit, angry with indignation and distress.” Augustine hates himself deeply for his failure of the will, for his slavery to his habit of sexual indulgence, but self-hatred isn’t enough to grant him the faith he needs. Like a buoy slowly sinking under the weight of growing barnacles, Augustine’s mind is “weighed down by habit” (Book VIII.ix), and so not free to respond to the truth of Christ, not capable of possessing an unencumbered will.

> Inwardly I said: Let it be now, let it be now. And by this phrase I was already moving towards a decision; I had almost taken it, and then did not do so…**Ingrained evil had more hold over me than unaccustomed good.** (Book VIII.xi)

## **Neuroplasticity and the Gift of a New Will**

How can one be free from the enslaving habits that prevent us from following Christ? If Augustine’s diagnosis is correct, and our wills are bound by sin, and our brains are shaped by habits that strengthen this distorted will, then how can anyone be freed from it?

On the one hand, if Augustine can understand his habits to play such a crucial role in hindering his faith, we could consider basic ways in which habits are changed. If your mind’s map has a well-worn groove of habit formed, then you need something from outside your mind to help change it; mere thought alone will likely not do the trick.

For instance, if you want to stop looking at your phone as soon as you wake up, just telling yourself: “Don’t look at your phone,” likely will not be enough if the habit is well ingrained. You may need to move your phone off your bedside table, maybe out of your bedroom. The point is that you need more—not less—but more than thoughts alone to change your behavior. You need something external to rearrange your environment so that indulging the habit becomes harder. You reach for your phone right as you wake up and—it isn’t there.

Your brain creates synaptic pathways through repeated actions (helping form habits), but this same mechanism can be used to change habits as well. This capacity for the brain to structurally alter itself is known as [neuroplasticity](https://choosemuse.com/blogs/news/rewiring-your-brain-how-neuroplasticity-shapes-our-habits-and-health?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). If you stop performing an activity, in time, your brain begins to practice “synaptic pruning,” weakening the neural pathway and de-coupling it from other actions. In time, the well-worn path of habit fades.

The problem for Augustine, and for any of us who are examining the role of habits in the spiritual realm, is that changing the deep habits of unbelief are not so simple.

But the mechanism isn’t different.

What does Augustine need? What do we need? We need help from something, or Someone, outside of our minds. Mere willpower alone will not be enough. Augustine has already found this external help in a number of ways:

- He has begun attending church, interacting with fellow Christians, and enjoyed the benefits of Christian community. His deeply devout mother, Monica, has stayed in regular contact with him and (Augustine knows) she prays fervently for him every day. The decisive events that precede Augustine’s conversion is speaking with the bishop Simplicianus and his Christian friend, Nebridius, who share stories of how other Christians followed Christ. The community you keep has a profound impact on the habits of faith, for good or for ill.
- He has begun studying the Bible, listening to sermons, and speaking with the bishop Ambrose to discuss his questions. The very externality of the Word of God is a means by which something outside addresses the inner man. These are objective, external bumpers that Augustine’s inner man encounters and must conform to in order to understand. And it is this external word that proves decisive in his conversion.

When Augustine falls down in prayer under the fig tree, he hears a child’s voice call out: “Take up and read, take up and read!” Believing it to be a sign from God, he goes over and opens up the Bible to the book of Romans and reads [Romans 13:13-14](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans%2013%3A13-14&version=ESV&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Augustine explains:

> I neither wished nor needed to read further. At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled. (Book VIII.xii)

But what was it that empowered Augustine in that moment to hear that external word and believe? He had heard the Bible read many times, studied it himself before. Why is it so piercing this time?

Earlier, Augustine sees a vision of Chastity in the form of a beautiful and dignified woman whose hands are filled with examples of other Christians who have forsaken the lusts of the flesh to abide in Christ. She asks Augustine:

> ‘Are you incapable of doing what these men and women have done? Do you think them capable of achieving this by their own resources and not by the Lord their God? Their Lord God gave me to them. Why are you relying on yourself, only to find yourself unreliable? Cast yourself upon him, do not be afraid. He will not withdraw himself so that you fall. Make the leap without anxiety; **he will catch you and heal you**.’ (Book VIII.xi)

Like a man on a sinking ship terrified to jump to a nearby lifeboat, Augustine has been paralyzed, incapable of making the leap of faith. And this halting paralysis (*I must jump; I cannot jump; but I must…yet I can’t*) is what makes Augustine’s conversion so painful. He knows he cannot remain where he has been, but doesn’t see how he can muster the willpower to leap into Christ. Lady Chastity exhorts him: focus less on your power to leap; focus instead on Christ who can catch even the most fainthearted of stumblers.

And then, at the moment under the tree, Augustine suddenly believes. What happened?

Augustine puts it simply: “You converted me to yourself.”

God gave Augustine a new will.

> The nub of the problem was to reject my own will and to desire yours. But where through so many years was my freedom of will? From what deep and hidden recess was it called out in a moment?…Suddenly it became sweet to me to be without the sweets of folly. What I once feared to lose was now a delight to dismiss. You turned them out and entered to take their place. (Book IX.i)

The wonder of Christianity is that it is not merely an external framework that bumpers and corrals our base desires; to change bad habits for good ones through the power of our own will.

The wonder of Christianity is that God—the Ultimate External Reality—can thrust Himself into the depths of our enslaved mind, heart, and soul and snap the chains of the flesh. The *Wholly Other* outside of us can enter in, walk into the most interior of interiors…and transform us, from the inside out; can help reorient the very structure of our brains and overcome our own weakness.

We shouldn’t discount the supernatural consequences of natural habits in our lives. If a man has a habit of walking past the doorway of a prostitute, we shouldn’t be surprised that this will eventually affect his soul (Prov 5:8). Our lives are a collection of a million, billion little decisions—most of which seem fairly inconsequential. But when we scoop them all together, we find a particular shape and pattern. And those decisions (and habits) bear influence on our spiritual lives. If you find yourself locked into a destructive cycle of habits that are choking your faith and ruining your life, then take stock of what external influences are shaping your life. Mere thought alone will not win. Use your body and your environment to help replace sinful habits with righteous ones. 

But Christianity is not just a religious flavor of Atomic Habits. Our great hope is that we are not alone. As we seek to change our life, we beseech our Lord for help to give us new desires, new minds, new wills. Augustine’s great “aha” moment was when he was able to see that what he was looking for in lust, he could find in Christ: “You drove them from me and **took their place**, you who are sweeter than all pleasure.” 

Augustine saw that, but at the same time, it was the Lord who revealed that to him. Augustine labored to see, Christ gavethe sight. The paradox of human agency and God’s sovereignty is at work here. We work hard, and God works, simultaneously. We strive for holiness with all of our might, and we push all of our chips onto God’s help to suffuse our labor and strivings with His grace to make any of it work. Unless the Lord builds the house, we labor in vain.

> You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.
### Motherhood, Never Done
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/motherhood-never-done/
Last updated: 2026-07-31T17:54:20.000Z
*The following excerpt from* [Disoriented: Embodied Life in Strange Times](https://wipfandstock.com/9798385230426/disoriented/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) *is published with permission from Cascade Press and Wipf and Stock Publishers,* [*www.wipfandstock.com*](http://www.wipfandstock.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*.*

The rule for pick-up at my children’s kindergarten was for parents to come on foot. Parents, that is, moms, parked in nearby lots and stood outside the release doors at the appointed hour. Standing around outside the doors of this north-of-Boston school, moms sorted themselves into tight social knots with their backs to me as they traded intel about what their kids would and wouldn’t eat, about deals on kids’ jeans at the mall, or about vacation plans for Columbus Day leaf-peeping in New Hampshire, the family off to Story Land.

I am tempted to tell the story of how I got out of ever taking my kids to Story Land, but it’s only a good story if you feel the bind. On my kids’ behalf, I regret that many features of their childhood got sorted into categories of fun things I refused. There was the category of things we wouldn’t do because we couldn’t afford them, and the category of things that were actually evil, but also the category of things so foreign to my sense of the way things should be that kids’ efforts at translation failed. I can see how my children could misread those as all the same category though I maintain that those were separate baskets.

On children’s behalf mothers often have to follow rules foreign to their own childhood. Some women manage easily but others flounder because expectations shift fast in national norms and regional variations, plus whatever sprouts from the individualism pressing kids’ conformity. Becoming a mother can feel like arriving in a country whose language you speak but discover locals only use an incomprehensible dialect, when your kids’ survival depends on your fluency.

In each cultural shift in parenting styles, mothers were punished by the new fad’s authorities for obeying the dictates of the last era. Mothers were accused in turn of screwing up their children by being both too attentive and too distant. All the playground insults heaped on American mothers by the time I took my turn—viper mother, helicopter mother, tiger mother, free-range mother—suggest that there is no such thing as a good one.

Was my grandmother a good mother to mine? I don’t think it would have occurred to either of them to pose that question. 

Before I had kids I didn’t worry whether I would be a good mom. You were a good mom if you passed along tradition, if you taught children requisite skills, and if you loved them. That first part has proven a stumbling block. Mothers come up short because kids may no longer inhabit tradition or live where mothers grew up, literally or metaphorically. So mothers must not only figure out how to do the new things but learn to act as though those things are natural. 

A mother wants to be able to do what her kids need her to do. Sometimes she can’t because she figures out too late what they need or she does not have the right skills. I know how to do laundry and cook dinner and pack a beach bag and write research papers and thank-you notes. For my kids’ sake I should have learned other skills, but I didn’t know which ones in advance.

Baby #1 knocked the wind out of me. Wow, she was beautiful and could not exhaust fascination. The new-baby sleep tax is brutal, but there was a short span between her colicky phase and sleep-training phase where she would slumber into morning past 8:00 or so, during which time I could have pretended to be a normal person and have breakfast and read the newspaper. Instead, what I actually did was lurk by her room hoping she would wake up so I could be with her again. Afternoons at rest I propped her on the slope made by my knees and she stared at me, receptive and amazed, like the way we are supposed to look at God. I paid more attention to her than maybe was strictly necessary. I paid attention because she was so beautiful but also because I was trying to do the right thing, what guidebooks told me, to respond to different cries for food or a diaper change or stimulation.

The experience of new motherhood leaves little original to say. But having the usual response doesn’t mean that it’s not a revelation. I held her whole being in the world on the weight of one arm while she nursed and I started down at her face, a face I came to know better thanI know any other face at the time, even my own. I started seeing people differently in line at the grocery store, wondering how much more honor they deserved from me than I usually gave them since someone some time had looked so long at them like that when they were new and milk-fed. And what if no one ever had looked at them that way? Then they deserved even more. All faces deserve that delight in being beheld, but most beholders cannot see what should be seen. One gift of being mother or father is awareness, through practice, of how good that face is. 

The effort expended in meeting the bodily needs of a small human is not the same as effort called forth in enjoying their company. Children require so much physical care: cleaning, diapering, nose-wiping, sliding their arms into sleeves and their sleeves into coats, tying shoes, cutting fruit, squeezing toothpaste, lifting in and out of beds and seats and cars, opening doors, opening boxes, picking up toys. They get hungry and need food. Whether in affluence or poverty, providing food is a task mothers manage almost round the clock—getting it, anticipating kids’ want of it, preparing it, the fiddling of sippy-cup valves and filling the cup and closing the cup, and then cleaning up after the event of eating, disorder generated all out of proportion with quantities of food eaten. 

Clothes too demand effort out of proportion with size, fixing each snap, button, tooth of zipper track, pressing limbs into pants, pressing thumbs into mittens, heels into boots, jimmying swimsuits onto and wet off of impatient bodies. Bathing and brushing teeth and brushing hair and helping into highchair and car seat and bed, and then out, and then in again. Then parents teach them how to do all these things on their own, which is more work than doing it for them. Play means scattering things on the floor. 

It’s tempting to see the problem with American childrearing as a problem of affluence, that we just have so much stuff that we have to spend lots of time cleaning it and putting it away. We do make things harder. But wealth doesn’t create the mess. The mess comes from embodiment. The mother’s body gives birth to a body that no longer gets warmth, food, or shelter automatically without requesting it but still wants all those and has to feel the need before getting it met. Felt needs hurt more and get said louder. Of course, someone else can do this physical care work for money rather than love. Parents can express love also by paying others to provide care. We hope love stays in it somewhere, though that is a lot to try to buy through an hourly wage.

There are lots of other ways of raising children than the twenty-first-century American one. But there aren’t many plausible ways as long as you raise them here. You aren’t really bringing up bébé if you aren’t in France. When American parents covet somebody else’s childrearing manners, whether the Parisian rule that no toddlers interfere with cocktail hour or Almanzo Wilder, in the *Little House on the Prairie* series, waiting patiently to be served last at breakfast, no genius hack can be imported to solve our problems. For many of us, parenting problems are a function of social mobility, egalitarian manners, and democracy. American rags-to-riches stories presuppose parents still in rags or dead. Otherwise what would it mean for characters to grow up to be something special and different? 

A friend with a happy childhood and nice parents once told me that as a kid, she loved to read books about orphaned children who made clever homes for themselves in cozy places like old train cars, except that she wanted the parents not to be dead. She liked the idea of playing make-believe in a boxcar but would rather head home when dinnertime rolled around. That hybrid resembles the regnant ideal in my kids’ middle-class comfortable childhood: be whatever you want to be while your parents support the make-believe. American children are supposed to move in circles their parents never entered. We love it that way, the American dream. What that means is that mothers may find themselves almost constantly swimming up streams on children’s behalf that they never crossed themselves.

That thing that virtue ethicists and grandmothers say, that you don’t know what you’re made of until challenge comes, mothers discover that at 2 a.m. feedings after 10 p.m. crying jags, at everything soaked through, the diaper and the onesie and the pajamas and the blanket and the crib sheet. They discover it at breakfast the next morning with the other kids, or in the car on the way to school with other mothers watching. A mother-to-be can work on herself beforehand but the actual job that her motherhood will be does not exist until it is hers. 

The problem of motherhood is not just how much a mother has to teach kids, how to preheat the oven for baking cookies, how to quit a job or file taxes, how to fasten a bra, how to use a semicolon. The problem is that the person showing up for them is you. The hard thing about motherhood was that I had to be the one showing up for it, sack that I am of anxieties and selfishness and flubbed ambitions of magnanimity. Part of motherhood is trying to move oneself around the great suffering of one’s beloved, taking into one’s body the sufferings of one who came out of one’s body. When the world inflicts injuries on children, mothers feel the hurts too. Motherhood sticks in our faces the incommensurateness of us all, our insufficiency for each other, our desire for others’ good, our causing harm by trying to help.

Mothers should be free to affirm that both extremes can be true about raising even average children: that you should glory in the miraculous presence of small humans who bloom like sunflowers under your gaze and make you actually feel more like the sun, and also admit the tedium and pain of caring for beloved embodied creatures.
### Jesus and the Law of Moses
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/jesus-and-the-law-of-moses/
Last updated: 2026-06-15T11:00:34.000Z
Paul T. Sloan. [*Jesus and the Law of Moses: The Gospels and the Restoration of Israel within First-Century Judaism*](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781540966384%5Fjesus-and-the-law-of-moses?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Baker Academic (2025). $32.99\. 288 pp. 

In the gospels according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, how does Jesus relate to the Law of Moses? Paul Sloan’s wonderful book marks the definitive, authoritative demise of two pernicious and popular misconceptions.

## Mean Moses, Nice Jesus

The first error, which I will dub the “mean Moses, nice Jesus” approach, tends to prevail in more progressive contexts or among those with more Mainline sensibilities. Take, for example, the pericope in Matthew 12 where Jesus’ disciples are eating grain on the Sabbath, or Jesus healing a man on the Sabbath in Mark 3\. According to the “mean Moses, nice Jesus” school, the Pharisees and/or their first-century Jewish contemporaries simply did not have compassion. They were so set on their observance of rules that they neglected to be merciful or show pity towards the needs of others. Jesus, by contrast, is not a legalist; he relaxes Sabbath observance in order to be inclusive and compassionate.

## Grace Dunking

The second error, “grace-dunking,” tends to prevail in more evangelical contexts or among those who descend from traditions associated with the Protestant Reformation. Jesus, in this vision, is the great opponent of “legalism” or works righteousness. His opponents (whether “the Pharisees” or first-century Jews *writ large*) are conflated with the beliefs and practices of the late Medieval penitential system of indulgences, a treasury of merit, and more. So, in texts such as Matthew 12 or Mark 3, Sabbath observance is equated with legalism, while Jesus ushers in an entirely new pattern of religion based on grace. After all, does not John’s gospel say, “the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17)? 

Crucially, it does not matter what was actually happening in the complex historical environment in the first century. But also, the nuances of what Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, the confessional Reformed and confessional Lutheran traditions, and more actually had to say about the law, justification, the covenants, and grace is judged to be rhetorically and homiletically unimportant. All that matters is that in sermons and lessons that we have a foil (albeit a strawman) of legalistic works righteousness over and against which we can set grace in the final point of our sermon.

Countless other passages in the gospels can be shoe-horned into those two misconstruals of Jesus—such as concluding that Jesus does away with laws of ritual impurity by purifying a leper either because he is compassionate or by juxtaposing the grace of God with the accrual of merit through personal righteousness.

## What is Wrong with Both Errors

The foremost problem with both errors is that they are not a Christian hermeneutic. Rather, they reflect the interpretative trajectory of Marcion of Sinope, an arch-heretic from the early Christian centuries. Marcion rejected the authenticity of much of the New Testament, retaining only fragments of Luke and some of Paul’s epistles, and contrasted the evil “God of the Old Testament” who is responsible for material creation, with the good “God of the New Testament” who brings spiritual salvation and love through Jesus Christ. The Christian church has always rejected that error, discerning instead that there is one unified, symphonic testimony to the triune God found in both the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament.

It would be bad news if Jesus overturned the law; it would be moral anarchy if Jesus opposed what God established—namely, what St. Paul calls the “holy, righteous, and good” and even “spiritual” law (Rom 7:12, 14). It would not be compassionate inclusivity for Jesus to set aside God’s wonderful *torah* that is celebrated for 176 verses in Psalm 119\. Rather, the good news of the gospel is that Christ the law-keeper overcomes sin by his humiliation and exaltation, which distort God’s law such that it produces death in us (Rom 7:5–6). However, it does not remain self-evident even to canonical readers how to handle texts where Jesus has a complex relationship with law observance, like those mentioned above. We might be asking ourselves, sure the “mean Moses, nice Jesus” and the “grace dunking” crowds are mistaken, but nonetheless what do we do with Jesus appearing to profane the Sabbath?

## How Jesus Kept the Torah

Paul Sloan’s contribution to preachers and teachers on this matter is a powerful demonstration that Jesus kept the *torah* and taught others to do the same. As Jesus declares in Matthew 5, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” Jesus does not relax God’s law; would that not make him an opponent of righteousness? And Jesus does not replace one religious system (a law-based, ‘legalistic’ pattern) with another one (a grace-based); would that not set Jesus at odds with the work of God in the scriptures of the Old Testament? Rather, Christ himself kept the *torah* and taught others to do the same, precisely in these difficult passages. 

For example, Sloan masterfully demonstrates there is an “override” principle operative in the gospels. If a male, Jewish baby is born and the eighth day since his birth (the day appointed for circumcision) falls on the Sabbath, the law expressly makes a provision that the circumcision requirement overrides the Sabbath requirement; the law is thus ultimately being kept even when the Sabbath law *per se* is not being observed. Alternatively, the *torah* makes provision that certain laws can override others in order to preserve life. *That* is the context wherein we need to locate Jesus when we see him overriding the Sabbath laws either to preserve life, or because the year of God’s promised jubilee has arrived with the coming of the Messiah. 

Still, in his future work, I would love to see Sloan address two lingering questions I had as I read his book. First, while I broadly agree that “restoration eschatology” is a sound framework whereby we may historically locate Jesus in relationship with his first-century Jewish context, the precise content of that restoration might need further clarification. My sense is that more critical historians tend to speak about Jesus having hopes of a restoration of the lost tribes of Israel that amounts to a failed imminent eschatological expectation; meanwhile, more theologically-inclined interpreters tend to think about the restoration Jesus brought as in some sense an apocalyptic, or soteriological, or eschatological-*qua*\-spiritualized restoration. 

Consequently, when Sloan speaks about Jesus’s death not as a sacrifice but rather as an undergoing of covenant curses, I appreciated many of the distinctions he drew, building on David Moffit’s work on sacrifice. But preachers, teachers, and readers of the New Testament will want to ask about how this relates to other portions of the canon. For Paul, Jesus absolutely underwent the punitive discipline of God’s covenant people; his mode of death thereby took upon himself the covenant curses (Gal 3:13). And yet, Paul plainly uses explicit sacrificial language to speak about Christ (1 Cor 5:7; Eph 5:2). This is not necessarily incompatible with Sloan’s readings of the Synoptics, but it might mean that we simply need to delineate between several different valences that sacrificial language either does or does not imply throughout the New Testament.

Second, a consistent emphasis of Sloan’s is that within the *torah* itself only Israelites and/or Jews are obligated to keep the whole *torah*, while gentiles are only obligated to keep certain parts, an outlook reflected in the decision of the apostles at the Jerusalem council in Acts 15\. But beyond the synoptic gospels, and especially in Galatians 3:15–4:7, and Hebrews 8–10, something further appears to be said than merely that ethnic particularity determines for whom the *torah* perpetually applies. 

In those two texts, there is at least some sense in which the *torah* has temporal significance relative to the economy of the saving action of the one God who sends the Son in the fullness of time and sends the Holy Spirit to unite us with him, in whom we are made “perfect” in a way that the law could not (Heb 7:19). While that does not necessarily entail the abolition of the Law in a Marcionite scheme, and has the continuity of being a fulfilled promise, surely *something* about the law’s significance in covenant history has changed now that the *telos* (Rom 10:4) of the law has appeared in Christ. Beyond the bare recognition that gentiles do not have to be circumcised and live Jewishly, what precisely does that entail about the *torah’*s abiding significance for Jews in Christ, let alone for Jews who do not believe Jesus is the Messiah, for whom Paul was heartbroken (Rom 9:1–5)?

Those who want to learn more about how Jesus relates to the law in his first-century context cannot improve upon Paul Sloan’s wonderful book, which will prove essential to anyone preaching or teaching from the synoptic gospels.
### The Sure Way of Edith Stein
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-sure-way-of-edith-stein/
Last updated: 2026-06-12T11:00:53.000Z
Edith Stein. [*A Sure Way: Following Truth in a World on Fire*](https://www.plough.com/books/a-sure-way-en?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Edited by Carolyn Beard. Plough Publishing (2026). $12.95\. 168 pp.

She was brilliant. She was faithful. In 1942, she was murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. The German-born Jewish philosopher Edith Stein was a Catholic nun who took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross when she took her vows. She was canonized as a saint in 1998\. 

Though I am not Catholic, I am a Jewish follower of Jesus, and have long been inspired by Stein’s courageous story. I’ve wanted to get to know her better, but haven’t always found her writing accessible. Her training as a philosopher and her mystic’s soul, combined with sometimes-wooden translations of her work, have rendered her a somewhat dense read.

Thanks to a thoughtfully-curated little sampler of Stein’s work, *A Sure Way: Following Truth in a World on Fire,* published by Plough as part of their Spiritual Guides series, there is now an entry-level invitation for contemporary readers to listen to what a modern mystic and martyr has to teach us about navigating our own turbulent era. Editor Carolyn Beard frames Stein’s unique role and essential voice in history in her introduction to the volume: “Stein’s wartime writings, some of which are included in this book, are a compelling testament to what it means to live a life of faith in dark times. Written from Stein’s unique vantage as a Jewish-Christian monastic, these writings are also cutting reprimands of Christians who failed to advocate for or protect their Jewish brothers and sisters in their time of need.” 

Stein’s words capture the push-pull that was constantly at work in her life. There was the push of the rationalist school of philosophy that trained her brilliant mind as an academic and the mystical pull toward her Messiah via the writings of Teresa of Avila, which immersed her thirsty soul in the mysterious and all-consuming love of God. Living in this seemingly-impossible tension turned out to be Stein’s superpower during a period in history that would lead to her murder in a gas chamber. 

Though she grew up in an observant Jewish home, by the time she was a teen, she had embraced atheism and set her course as an academic, studying philosophy at the University of Freiberg. But after reading a biography of Theresa of Avila, she entered the Catholic Church in 1922\. She wanted at that point to live a life of prayer as a cloistered nun, but her superiors felt that her education and teaching gifts would be best used in the classroom. She taught at a Jewish school in Speyer until forced from her job in 1933 by the first wave of virulently antisemitic Nazi legislation. 

*A Sure Way* contains the text of a letter Stein wrote to Pope Pius XI that year, pleading with him to intercede on behalf of her Jewish people. She could see clearly what was coming next—and that it would not stop with the Jews. She warned that Catholics who wanted to survive in Nazi Germany would be required to abandon their faith and subsume their identity to the State. After detailing the horrors of what she was seeing in the early weeks of Nazi rule, she wrote: 

> Everything that has happened and continues to happen on a daily basis originates with a government that calls itself ‘Christian’. For weeks, not only Jews but also thousands of faithful Catholics in Germany, and I believe, all over the world, have been waiting and hoping for the Church of Christ to raise its voice to put a stop to this abuse of Christ’s name. Isn’t this idolization of race and governmental power, which is being pounded into the public consciousness by the radio, open heresy? Isn’t the effort to destroy Jewish blood an abuse of the holiest humanity of our Savior, the blessed Virgin, and the apostles? Isn’t this all diametrically opposed to the conduct of our Lord and Savior, who, even on the cross, prayed for his persecutors?

The following year, she entered full-time religious life. By 1938, hoping to keep her safe, her religious order sent her to live in a convent in the Netherlands. She wrote prophetically during this period, calling her sisters and others who’d read her words to single-minded, courageous faith that would counter the oppressiveness of fascism and the anguish of war that had blanketed Europe. In a 1940 Epiphany message she penned these words:

> …the more an era is engulfed in the night of sin and estrangement from God, the more it needs souls united to God. And God does not permit a deficiency. The greatest figures of prophecy and sanctity step forth out of the darkest night…Certainly, the decisive turning points in world history are substantially co-determined by souls whom no history book ever mentions. And we will only find out about these souls in whom we owe the decisive turning points in our personal lives on the day when all that is hidden is revealed.

The book is divided into five tight sections that offer a glimpse into Edith’s inner world: Ways to Know God, At the Foot of the Cross, Light Breaks In, Women’s Spirituality, and A World in Flames. Though many of the words in *A Sure Way* call for activism, they are drawn from a deeply contemplative well. An excerpt from a 1928 lecture she gave before the Nazis rose to power highlights the contribution that women-as-nurturers could make to German society no matter what her vocation or station. Stein roots this conviction in both a generous vision of the dignity of *imago Dei* in all of humanity and in her experience receiving spiritual nourishment and inspiration from the life of Jesus’s mother, Mary. 

Stein’s contemplative life held her during the final years of her life, but eventually, the walls of the convent could no longer protect her. She always maintained her Jewish identity, and never saw it at odds with her Catholic faith. And in the end, both of those things put a double bull’s eye on her back. She was rounded up along with some other Jewish Catholics and arrested on August 2nd, 1942\. She was murdered a week later.

Edith Stein’s brilliance found sanctuary in God in a hostile world. A sense of both earthy groundedness and soaring awe saturate her work as befitting someone who lived in the tension of complex questions of faith and identity. As she entered religious life, she wrote, 

> How wonderful are your gracious wonders  
> All we can do is be amazed and stammer and fall silent  
> Because intellect and words fail. 

Those were not religious platitudes for Stein, but a revelation of what fueled her until she breathed her last breath of Zyklon B in the gas chamber at Auschwitz. For those of us who see our own world on fire, spending time with Edith Stein’s words may help orient us to what it takes to walk through the flames, one foot in front of the other, on the narrow path with Jesus.
### Understanding the Evangelical Presbyterian Church's Unique Calling
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/udthe-evangelical-presbyterian-churchs-unique-calling/
Last updated: 2026-06-12T11:00:23.000Z
My denomination, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, is currently bracing itself for an important and likely difficult time of discernment and conversation at our General Assembly this summer. When we gather in Denver in mid-June, at the center of our deliberation will be thorny doctrinal questions about the nature of sexual desire, the dynamics of temptation, the meaning of concupiscence, the possibility of the mortification of sin, and the extent of its indwelling power in those called to ordained leadership in the Church. Collectively we find ourselves taking a deep breath and steeling ourselves for what many fear will be a contentious gathering.

Controversy and strife are relatively new visitors to our common life. In the past, friends from other denominations would speak to me wistfully about the EPC—our lack of rancor, the familial feel of our church courts, the winsomeness of our stated ethos (“In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things, charity”). I would smile and concede the apparent truth of their description, but I’d also offer a caveat. While I was grateful for our relative peace, I also knew our day of difficulty was coming. Controversy comes for us all: in the history of the church, no part of the body has ever been excluded from conflict and even schism. Even while our relatively-young communion, made up mostly of refugees from other Presbyterian denominations, was enjoying the *Pax Orlando*, it was only a matter of time before the honeymoon would be over.

Well, the honeymoon is over. But that it is so is not necessarily a bad thing. Every good marriage must pass through its days of marital bliss and into the hard but good work of discussion, deliberation, mutual forbearance, agreement, and love. And as any student of church history knows, controversy can clarify and refine. Jesus Christ, the Head of the Church, uses conflict providentially to preserve the truth of the Gospel and to help us speak confidently and precisely about the faith delivered to us.

Controversy can clarify, but it can just as easily malform. A good and right focus on a specific doctrinal discussion can cause us to be inattentive and even forgetful of the wider fabric of our particular tradition. That danger accompanies the EPC at this moment, particularly because there is no great clarity about precisely what our tradition is. When faced with a difficult moment, we don’t have the luxury of asking ourselves—[as did one of the greater lights in another stream of the Reformed tradition](https://s3.amazonaws.com/5mt.jude3pca.org/2020/07/16153515/What%5Fs-So-Great-about-the-PCA.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)—“What’s so great about the EPC?” We have to ask and answer the prior question: “What kind of Presbyterians are the EPC?”

In what follows, I’d like to try to answer this question. It seems to me to be an important and necessary thing to do, not least because whenever the dust settles on our current controversy, we’ll still have the everyday work of guarding the deposit of faith and proclaiming the Gospel. And I’d like to do so by appealing to two impulses found within Presbyterian history in this country, impulses that appear again and again within the tensions of our tradition. (Credit where credit is due: this description was first suggested to me by fellow EPC TE Zach Hopkins.)

Here is my argument: *The EPC is an Old School/New Side denomination.* In order to justify this not uncontroversial description, some historical explanation will be required.

## The Old School/New School Divide

Old School Presbyterianism represents the *confessional* impulse within the Presbyterian tradition in the United States. In the early- and mid-1800s, a dispute arose within the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (at that time the only significant Presbyterian denomination in America) regarding the “New England Theology” of Charles Grandison Finney and others. 

The details of this controversy are well-documented and described in various histories of Presbyterianism, but at the center of the disagreement was the place of the Westminster Standards in the life of the church. Old School Presbyterians were instinctually committed to a close and careful adherence to the historic standards and the doctrines that they articulate. New School Presbyterians, on the other hand, could be identified by a concern to adapt historic doctrines to contemporary challenges for the purposes of evangelism and morality. 

So George Marsden writes of early New Schoolers in[ *The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience*](https://www.amazon.com/Evangelical-School-Presbyterian-Experience-Nineteenth-Century/dp/1592444504?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), “Reflecting the spirit of the age, they were much more interested in morality. Their most pressing concern was to understand how sinners could be changed and how that process might best be effected by the human means through which the Spirit worked.” These were of course noble concerns, but they were pursued by way of revising historic Reformed doctrines of sin and anthropology.

The fault-lines became clearer as the conflict unfolded. On the one side, a concern to remain faithful to the Reformed tradition as expressed through the minds of the Westminster Divines; on the other side, an evangelistic zeal that demanded doctrine respond expediently to the spirit of the age. Marsden again, representing the Old School perspective: “The Old School’s objection was that the New School taught or tolerated an un-Biblical view of man’s nature. The New School’s confidence in the dignity, freedom, and ability of man, a confidence in many ways characteristic of the mainstream of American thought in the eras of Jackson and Emerson, was resisted by the Old School on the ground that it subverted the essential Scriptural teachings of God’s sovereignty and man’s depravity.”

This same basic conflict between two divergent impulses took other shapes and forms in the American Presbyterian Church. New School Presbyterianism was marked by a spirit of moral activism. Sometimes this was right and admirable, especially when expressed in some (but by no means all) New School Presbyterians who advocated for the abolition of slavery. Other times, this activism was more ambiguous, as demonstrated in the significant New School participation in the temperance movement. New School Presbyterians were also eager to adopt the innovative “scientific” revival methods that were the mark of Finney and other leaders of the Second Great Awakening. Old School Presbyterians met these efforts and innovations with skepticism and dismay.

The two schools were composed of various parties, and we cannot devolve the differences simply to theological disagreements. Moreover, the history of these two schools is complicated and thus resists reduction. Nonetheless, it is possible to begin to trace the differences between the two impulses: for Old School Presbyterians, a conservative impulse to maintain the confessional standards of the Westminster Confession; for New School Presbyterians, an impulse to attend to contemporary controversy and to adapt to the perceived needs of the moment.

## The EPC as an Old School Denomination

It is by no means obvious to everyone that the EPC is an Old School denomination. Indeed, none other than the author of the official history of the EPC, Don Fortson, argues that the EPC instead is a New School denomination. Let me give an account of why my own telling of our denomination’s story deviates from his.

In[ *Liberty in Non-Essentials: The Story of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church*](https://epcresources.org/products/liberty-in-non-essentials-the-story-of-the-evangelical-presbyterian-church?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), Forston writes that, “The New School spirit of a moderate Calvinism is reflected in the ethos of the EPC, which has chosen to put its accent on being broadly evangelical while maintaining its Reformed commitments—as opposed to a dogmatic, exclusive Presbyterianism that was more characteristic of the Old School.” Fortson’s description is correct insofar it describes the origins of the EPC. When the denomination began, there was a great deal more emphasis on the “E” than the “P.” The New School spirit was evident first in the EPC’s emphasis of the “Essentials of the Faith” (a broadly evangelical description of Christian faith) above the Westminster Standards. The New School spirit was also evident in the impulse of moral activism that was present in the early days of the denotation. When the EPC gathered for its first General Assembly in 1981, the two speakers who addressed the denomination were Dr James Kennedy (of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and the Center for Reclaiming America for Christ) and Francis Schaeffer (who was at that point in his ministry waist-deep in cultural activism).

But as the denomination matured, it moved away from those New School beginnings. When the EPC began, the relationship between the “Essentials of the Faith” and the Westminster Standards was ambiguous at best and problematic at worst. Because of the lack of clarity regarding the relationship between the “Essentials of the Faith” and the Westminster Standards, the EPC found itself in the embarrassing situation where a Teaching or Ruling Elder could affirm the Essentials but disagree with not-so-minor aspects of the Westminster Confession of Faith like infant baptism or the doctrine of election. As early as 1988 the denomination began a series of conversations with the hope of clarifying the relationship between these two statements. At the center of the conversation was a perennial Presbyterian controversy: the question of subscription to the Westminster Standards.

To make an already long story somewhat shorter, at the 2001 General Assembly the EPC arrived at a decidedly Old School solution to this drawn-out deliberation: the Westminster Standards would not be subordinated to the “Essentials,” but instead would be given a final authority in the denomination. No exceptions would be allowed to the “Essentials,” but also at ordination and installation Ruling and Teaching Elders would be asked explicitly to subscribe to the Westminster Standards, to name explicitly any exceptions, and make known to a church court if there was any change to this vow. The resolution was fundamentally an affirmation of the Old School understanding of the place of the Confession in the Church (and the practice of confessional subscription) and a rejection of the New School impulse.

The EPC is an Old School Presbyterian denomination. Another way to say this is simply to say that the EPC is a confessional denomination. But even as we state this, it is important to say at the same time that our confessionalism is in many ways an unfulfilled mandate still awaiting full implementation and practice. When in 2006 the EPC welcomed a large number of churches from the PC(USA), their arrival significantly changed the ethos of the denomination. (Full disclosure: I, and both EPC churches I have served, were among the number of PC(USA) congregations that joined the EPC.) These churches were both disconnected from the deliberation and discernment behind the 2001 decision and also, having come from the multi-confessional framework of the PC(USA), were unfamiliar with the confessional *habitus* of Old School subscriptionism.

The result was that the Old School consensus in the EPC has in many ways been forgotten. It is simply self-evident that in the life of our local churches, our presbyteries, and our General Assembly the Westminster Standards have more often than not been sidelined in our theological deliberation and ministry practice. (This was demonstrated most recently when a vote to state explicitly that baptism is a prerequisite for the Lord’s Supper failed at the 2024 General Assembly.) Our confessions and catechisms are often treated like the emergency boxes in public spaces: we can always break the glass in case of emergency, but otherwise they are left alone.

Because of this, our Old School identity is something still to be attained. Our constitutional framework is confessional, but we do not live up to or into the vision articulated by those who went before us. To say that the EPC is a confessional, Old School Presbyterian denomination is in many ways to say that we should aspire to become what our constitution says that we are.

## New Side Presbyterianism

The category of Old School does not fully exhaust the EPC’s identity. Both the PCA and the OPC in different ways would also be understood to be Old School Presbyterians, and yet there are significant differences between each of those three denominations. Similarly, the Old School/New School division does not fully exhaust the different impulses within American Presbyterianism. In order to understand what kind of Presbyterians are the EPC, we need to give our attention to another Old/New contrast within the history of American Presbyterianism: Old Side/New Side.

The Old Side/New Side controversy actually predates the Old/New School debate, beginning in the mid-1700s in response to the First Great Awakening. The preaching and ministry of George Whitefield fanned the flames of revival that had first been kindled by the Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards and the Presbyterian Gilbert Tennent into a phenomenon that spread through the American colonies and across the Atlantic. Whitefield’s itinerant ministry and the emotionalism that accompanied the revivals placed a strain on American Presbyterianism as church leaders were forced to discern whether or not to welcome Whitfield’s version of extra-ecclesial “parachurch ministry” and how they would respond to the enthusiasms of the revivals.

Old Side Presbyterians felt that the First Great Awakening should be ignored or denounced because its emphasis on revival and religious experience ran counter to the traditional forms of Presbyterian life: strict confessional subscription, catechesis, the order of the church’s courts. New Side Presbyterians, in contrast, wanted to emphasize religious experience and the necessity of conversion. (These tensions are well-described by D.G. Hart and John R. Muether in their excellent[ *Seeking a Better Country: 300 Years of American Presbyterianism*](https://www.amazon.com/Seeking-Better-Country-American-Presbyterianism/dp/0875525741?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).) The revivals of the First Great Awakening no doubt did at times run counter to the forms of Presbyterian polity and confession, but it is important to note that this was not necessarily the case. While there were definite tensions between Old and New Side Presbyterians, the two were always able to remain within the same denomination and it was not long before the two parties resolved their differences in the Plan of Union in 1758.

If we are looking for an example of what a New Side/Old School Presbyterian might look like, we should go no further than the Old Princeton professor and pastor Charles Hodge. Hodge’s life and ministry married a New Side appreciation for the best of Reformed piety and practice with an Old School adherence to the Westminster Standards. Thus in describing Hodge as a “New Side-Old School Presbyterian,” Andrew Hoffecker says in[ his biography of Hodge](https://www.amazon.com/Charles-Hodge-Princeton-American-Biographies/dp/0875526586?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that he “manifested the attributes of associated with Calvinistic confessionalism (strong adherence to creedal religion, liturgical forms, and corporate worship) as well as the characteristics of evangelism pietism (the necessity of vital religion marked by conversion, moral activism, and individual pious practices).” The New and the Old can co-exist; Old School confessionalism can flourish alongside a New Side emphasis on conversion and religious experience.

## The EPC as a New Side Presbyterian Church

That the EPC has the impulses of New Side Presbyterianism is, I think, an uncontroversial statement. It is evident even in the denomination’s name; preceding the anchoring noun “Presbyterian” is the important qualifying adjective “Evangelical.” The EPC is relatively untroubled by the kind of “religious enthusiasms” that were problematic for Old Side Presbyterians (as is evidenced in both cessationists and non-cessationists calling the denomination home). While the EPC does have its own missions agency, World Outreach, it is also marked by a trans-denominational cooperative spirit which at times troubled Old Siders but was a mark of the New Side.

If the argument that the EPC is an Old School denomination is an invitation to become what we are, then the argument that the EPC is a New Side denomination is an exhortation to deepen what we already know ourselves to be. If the impulses of our denomination are towards the practices of piety and the importance of experiential religion, then we should remind ourselves that the Reformed tradition has rich resources for us. Calvin was the theologian of the Holy Spirit, and from Augustine to John Owen we have been given a tradition of saints who can help us to live into the best of our theology. While we can always learn from other traditions and contemporary voices, there is simply no reason that we should forsake our inheritance in order to give ourselves over to the latest fad in spirituality. Sinclair Ferguson’s[ *The Whole Christ*](https://www.amazon.com/Whole-Christ-Antinomianism-Assurance%5FWhy-Controversy/dp/1433548003?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)—with its account of how the Marrow controversy revealed not just *what* the Confession teaches but *how* we can hold those beliefs with either a gospel or legal spirit—might be an example to us of the kind of marriage between deep, confessional theology and religious experience that our tradition possesses. Embracing the ways the EPC is New Side denomination is an invitation to bring the best of the evangelical tradition to our confessional roots.

## Old School, New Side, So What?

I have argued above that the EPC, in its constitutional commitments and in its evangelical ethos, is an Old School/New Side denomination. This exercise has not been merely academic; this history has implications for those who of us call the EPC home. If these two strains of American Presbyterianism represent the best of our particular corner of the one, holy, catholic, apostolic church, and if they are the inheritance which those who have gone before us have passed on to us to steward, then what does this mean for us as we seek to serve today?

## Confessional Reasoning

A confessional standard is more than a list of doctrines to be checked off upon admission to a denominational body. A confession of faith is a way of reading Scripture, a system of doctrine, a spirituality, and a philosophy of ministry rolled into a single document. Because of this, we can’t simply slap the Westminster Confession on to our churches like a new bumper sticker on an old truck. We must[ continue to learn](https://journal.rts.edu/article/reformed-catholicity-and-the-pastor-virtues-and-postures/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to inhabit the Standards, to follow their reasoning, and to submit to the particular rationality that they provide for us.

Within American evangelicalism there is a strain of lean biblicism latent in many of our churches in the EPC. This biblicism is more *nuda Scriptura* than *sola Scriptura*, substituting the Reformers’ restoration of the authority of the Bible *over* tradition for the *abolition* of tradition. Reformed theology is rooted in the Great Tradition. As Calvin argued in his “Reply to Sadoleto,” the Reformation was more catholic than the Catholics. Part of what we must do moving forward is reintroduce ourselves to the tradition that is ours and do the deeper work of inhabiting its gifts with conviction.

Practically, this means intentionally teaching and utilizing the Standards within our presbyterian institutions. At least one thing this means is that among Teaching and Ruling Elders and in our presbyteries and church sessions, the Westminster Standards should be taught and utilized in our deliberations and officer examinations in the way I have described above. Sessions can set apart time to deepen their knowledge of the Confession – and not just during officer training and then reason according to their wisdom when shepherding and deliberating. Presbyteries can not only take their confessionalism seriously when candidates are examined or teaching elders are admitted from other presbyteries, they can also—as my own presbytery has done recently—set aside time to resource and equip teaching and ruling elders alike with the riches of the Standards and remind them of their importance.

## Warmly Reformed

A particular charism that the EPC possesses within the larger church catholic is the marriage of the New Side and the Old School dynamics of American Presbyterianism. One fruit of this marriage is that we can hold in tension the warm evangelicalism of the New Side (a hunger for revival, experiential piety, mutual forbearance for the sake of mission) with the historic confessionalism of the Old School. In many ways these two impulses helpfully supplement one another. Without our New Side spirit, our Old School Presbyterianism might become dead orthodoxy. But without our Old School instincts, our New Side impulses could easily devolve into sentimental biblicism. The two need each other. 

When the EPC embraces both our Old School and New Side inheritances we have a great gift to offer both our own communion and the world: warm piety that is formed by deep theology, missional hunger that is confessionally rooted, precise doctrine that is humbly inhabited.

## Institutional Stewardship

We live in an anti-institutional age, and as those who bear the name “evangelical” we are identifying ourselves with those who may be great at *starting* new institutions but who are less proven at *maintaining* them. There is a symbiotic relationship between a tradition (here Westminster Presbyterianism) and institution (the EPC). Much of what I have argued is that we in the EPC must reclaim our tradition. But there is a corresponding truth that is just as important: we must care for and maintain the institution that is the EPC.

Admittedly, this work often feels tedious and boring. It is the work of attending presbytery meetings, of reading dockets in advance, of learning parliamentary procedure, and of comprehending the Book of Order. Few of us took vows of ordination with this kind of thing in mind. But the longevity of the work we have put our hands to depends in some way on this ministry of little things. As [Yuval Levin has argued](https://www.amazon.com/Time-Build-Community-Recommitting-Institutions/dp/1541604415/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?crid=2GEADRQKICUVW&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.O22KYApcI7H7x4h%5F8dQLpJESWFeToTzjOWB4oqnnqek.QS5LP0VuTCi9DUzyl5Bn6kMSF6G1d90Cc%5F3pi%5Fx-mok&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=a+time+to+build+yuval+levin&qid=1780703375&sprefix=a+time+to+build%2Caps%2C156&sr=8-1&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), our institutions should not serve merely as platforms for our public-facing preaching and teaching. They should instead form and even restrain us as we submit to the wisdom they have accumulated over the years of their existence.

## Conclusion

We don’t know what kind of gathering the 46th EPC General Assembly will be, nor do we know what the subsequent months and years will hold for our denomination But no matter what, on the other side we will need to get on with the ordinary and everyday work of proclaiming the Gospel and stewarding the institutions—local churches, presbyteries, and the EPC itself—that God has entrusted to us. The best way to do that will be to inhabit the best gifts of our own particular version of American Presbyterianism: an Old School denomination bearing the best of the Westminster Confession of Faith with the warmth and evangelical spirit of our New Side heritage.
### Who Does the Kingdom of God Belong To?
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/who-does-the-kingdom-of-god-belong-to/
Last updated: 2026-06-11T11:00:41.000Z
Who does the kingdom of God belong to? In Luke 18:15–17, Jesus welcomes children. He takes them up into his arms, blesses them, and declares that the kingdom of God exclusively belongs to those who are like little children. This is a difficult text for us to hear, for several reasons.

Sometimes this is due to over familiarity with this passage, such that it can seem quaint, cliché, or sentimental. But often we cannot hear it because we have become cynical. Rather than being attentive to God with earnestness and sincerity, we are jaded. Underneath our smirk, there might well be a broken heart. Due to our sin, our suffering, our broken dreams, or some combination of them all, being ‘child-like’ might feel hopelessly out of reach for us.

Differently, it can be hard to listen perceptively to this passage because of our attitudes towards children. 

On one hand, children and childhood are superficially idealized. Popular culture today often pays lip-service to children and childhood; in some ways ‘youth culture’ is increasingly becoming the culture of adults, from the ‘[Disney adults](https://firstthings.com/a-whole-new-world-2/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)’ trend to [the juvenlization of American Christianity](https://www.amazon.com/Juvenilization-American-Christianity-Thomas-Bergler/dp/0802866840?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Decades ago, [concerns](https://therebelution.com/books/do-hard-things/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) were being sounded about adolescence being extended well into adulthood for many. 

On the other, the shadow side of the trend above, children have been treated with contempt in both the ancient and modern worlds. In his 2005 book [*When Children Became People: The Birth of Childhood in Early Christianity*](https://www.fortresspress.com/store/product/9780800637255/When-Children-Became-People-The-Birth-of-Childhood-in-Early-Christianity?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), O. M. Bakke notes how the spread of Christianity overturned attitudes towards children in the Greco-Roman world, most notoriously the exposure of unwanted infants, and the several terrible ways that children were exploited. Sadly, in the modern world some of those attitudes towards children have re-emerged, especially when the value and worth of human beings is reduced to our ability to produce, consume, our expressive ourselves. 

Writing about the feast day of the Holy Innocents last year, Wes Hill notes from writer B. D. McClay’s bluntness about an uncomfortable but unavoidable observation, that [people hate children](https://livingchurch.org/covenant/people-who-hate-children/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Not only in faraway places, but all too often in our local contexts in advanced industrial societies, the hospitality and care Jesus exhibits in this passage is denied. What is a child? What are children *for*? Are children’s qualities desirable, or undesirable? 

It is unsurprising, in their context, that the disciples rebuke those who are bringing children to Jesus; what is shocking is Jesus’s hospitality for these children. The church’s contemplation of what Jesus says and does with children in this passage ultimately led to the assumptions about childhood and rights for children that are common even to non-Christians in the Western world today. 

The narrative itself is ultimately quite simple. While Matthew and Mark include this story, Luke stresses that they are quite young children, “infants.” Helpless infants are being brought to Jesus. The disciples, astonishingly, rebuke this practice. Perhaps they are overly concerned with efficiency or optimizing Jesus’ time and energy. But Jesus is extremely inefficient. What kind of people does Jesus make time for? Here, Jesus welcomes very young children, declares the kingdom of God belongs “to such,” that is, to those who are children and those who are like children.” Mark adds an arresting image, that Jesus “took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them” (10:16). In this stunning moment, Jesus issues an astounding rebuke to the world in our conceitedness and pride: only those who receive the kingdom like a child enter it. How do we do that? We should be wary of drawing abstractions about children in general and then projecting those onto this passage, but we are given crucial context for discerning what it means to receive the kingdom like a child in the surrounding stories in Luke ch. 18\. 

All of these stories are about the same basic thing: the posture of heart needed to receive God’s kingdom. In vv. 1–8, Luke introduces the parable of the unjust judge and the persistent widow by expressly telling us its main point: we “ought always to pray and not lose heart.” In vv. 9–14, Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector summons us not to trust in ourselves, but to come to God in an unassuming and unpresumptuous manner, with penitent hearts. In vv. 18–33, the story of the rich young ruler summons us to regard God as our chief treasure, and unconcerned with fleeting wealth. In vv. 35–43, the story of the blind beggar reveals a heart that is unconcerned with pleasing others. This one is especially notable, because it closely parallels Jesus’s encounter with the children. The blind man is crying out “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” He wants to see Jesus. And the people in front of him rebuke him. But rather than complying, he starts crying out even louder than before, “*Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!*” This is certainly a moment of desperation on the part of this man; those rebuking him seem to think this is an embarrassing moment, or at least a highly inconvenient one, which he should be ashamed of. But they are wrong; Jesus explicitly commends his faith. All of this is crucial context for what it means to become like a child in vv. 15–17: namely, like a helpless and trusting child, the kingdom of God requires a heart that is persistent, penitent, and so captivated with Jesus as to be unconcerned with wealth or the opinions and opposition of other people. 

We become adopted children of God through our union with Christ. We who “by nature are children of wrath” (Eph 2:3) due to our sin become adopted sons and daughters of God by grace (Gal 4:4), because the Holy Spirit unites us with the only Son of God by nature, such that we now address God in him and with him, as “Abba, Father” (Rom 8:15). 

As the Hymn, “[Jesus Friend of Little Children](https://hymnary.org/text/jesus%5Ffriend%5Fof%5Flittle%5Fchildren%5Fbe%5Fa%5Ffri?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)” notes, the incarnate Word knows what it is like to be a child. And as the Christmas hymn “[Jesus, Joy of the Highest Heaven](https://www.gettymusic.com/fhotm-december24?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)” sings, though the eternal Son of God took to himself a truly human nature, he knows what it is like to be a crying baby taking his first breath. As a child, he was “Held by His mother, helpless/ Close to her beating heart” so that you and I might no longer be strangers but become a child of God in him.

Consequently, in the mystery of the gospel, we mature through childlikeness. To be sure, God calls us to become mature in our faith, and naïve towards evil. Paul writes: “Brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature” (1 Corinthians 14:20). Simultaneously, in a certain way we nonetheless should also to be infants towards the good, towards God our heavenly Father, like the children Jesus takes in his arms and blesses in this passage, to whom the kingdom belongs. 

For an example of how we miss this, there is a beautiful tradition of Christmas liturgies beginning with the majestic hymn: “[Once in Royal ](https://hymnary.org/hymn/PsH/346?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)[David’s](https://hymnary.org/hymn/AM2013/81?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)[ City](https://hymnary.org/hymn/PsH/346?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).” Speaking about the mystery of the one who is “God and Lord of All” being born in a stable and placed in a manger, the third verse speaks about the relationship between Jesus and his mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, whom he honour and watched and loved, and was loved by: 

> *And through all his wondrous childhood* 
> *he would honour and obey,* 
> *love and watch the lowly maiden,* 
> *in whose gentle arms he lay:* 
> *Christian children all must be* 
> *mild, obedient, good as he.*

The immature will dismiss such lyrics as a paean for the young to comply with the fifth commandment and have good manners. However, the mature will perceive in these lines that “Christian children” actually refers to us; Christ’s “wondrous childhood” is paradigmatic for the whole of the Christian life, as we continually rediscover the depths of what it means to be a child of God. That is actually the secret to the verses which conclude the hymn, wherein we advance as children as we grow further up and further into the place where he is gone in heaven:

> *For he is our childhood's pattern,* 
> *day by day like us he grew,* 
> *he was little, weak, and helpless,* 
> *tears and smiles like us he knew;* 
> *and he feeleth for our sadness,* 
> *and he shareth in our gladness.*

> *And our eyes at last shall see him,* 
> *through his own redeeming love,* 
> *for that child so dear and gentle* 
> *is our Lord in heaven above;* 
> *and he leads his children on* 
> *to the place where he is gone.*

> *Not in that poor lowly stable,* 
> *with the oxen standing by,* 
> *we shall see him; but in heaven,* 
> *set at God's right hand on high;* 
> *where like stars his children crowned* 
> *all in white shall wait around.*

The posture of heart Jesus summons us towards is something so demanding that many of us can scarcely imagine it. [Psalm 131](https://www.esv.org/Psalm+131/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) aids our hesitating imagination with an image of such tenderness and beauty that should stir us to reimagine our life before God: 

> *O LORD, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me. O Israel, hope in the LORD from this time forth and forevermore.*

Despite all we must forsake that hinders our attentiveness and vulnerability to God from being like a weaned child with its mother, the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.
### The Joy of Naming the World
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-joy-of-naming-the-world/
Last updated: 2026-06-11T11:00:37.000Z
In my congregation we tend to welcome a lot of babies.

Just this month we saw four new image bearers take their first breath and vault into the first stage of action in the world. Apart from sheer joy for the parents, newborns contribute nothing to the productivity of society. They do not advance the plight of humanity through their efficiency. As Shakespeare says in “As You Like It,” they came in "mewling and puking in their mother's arms". They are, in the best possible way, a burden. Yet the dignity they carry is not dependent on their actions or abilities, but on their personhood.

The reason for this is that from conception we share a common name, the name "human". When a new life enters the world, they are given a personal, human name, signifying their dignity as a person. To take away someone's name is rightfully considered a great evil. In a just society, no one should be fearful of losing their name: even if they are good-for-nothing, or even if they have committed a great crime. The name "human" is given, and the name "human" cannot be taken away.

The art of naming creation is God’s gift to man. What a name does is provide meaning, shape, order, and density to what is named. An unnamed object is a *thing*, but a named thing becomes a defined *being*, something alive, something personal. Sometimes we name boats or cars or other inanimate objects, such as AI chatbots, but we do so because they remind us of life and are in themselves “icons” of life. The Christian novelist and poet Madeline L’Engle says it this way: 

> God asked Adam to name all the animals, which was asking Adam to help in the creation of their wholeness. When we name each other, we are sharing in the joy and privilege of incarnation, and all great works of art are icons of Naming.

This is what we are created for. Adam and Eve were made by God to “fill the earth and subdue it”, that is: to birth and name human beings and to birth and name the beauty in the world. But as the history of our world continues on from its infancy into greater degrees of societal, cultural, and technological advancement, it becomes harder to enjoy the simple “joy and privilege” of incarnation. It shouldn't be a surprise that as processors get faster, AI gets smarter, and manufacturing gets easier, that we begin to define our value and worth by means of production and efficiency rather than beauty and relational unity. The more powerful, unnamed “things” we launch into the world, the less capacity we seem to have to take up the sacred work of “naming” and creating living things. 

This is the great warning of Magnifica Humanitas, the recent encyclical written by Pope Leo XIV. In the words of the introduction, "every era runs the risk of creating an inhumane and more unjust world... humanity is in danger of marring its true identity." The danger of humanity since the fall of man is not simply that we have the potential to “unname” or “unhuman” ourselves, but that we have the potential to create an inhuman and “nameless” world, a world where it becomes harder to live humanly. 

As a protestant pastor, I find myself confronted continually with questions from parishioners about how they can maintain humanity in the world we live in. They are concerned they are over-busy, over-distracted, and over-sold. They worry that their children will suffer greater isolation and economic insecurity than they have. Much of this is perceived to be the result of rapid technological advancement creating a more inhuman world. The question before us in 2026, so aptly posed by Magnica Humanitas, is whether we are aware of the potential of such a danger and willing to do something about it.

## **The Danger of Babel**

The negative Biblical example given by Leo of the danger of building an inhumane world is that of the tower of Babel found in Genesis 11\. 

> \[Babel\] was a project conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion. When a city is built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency, communication breaks down, languages are confused and people no longer understand each other. The result is not unity, but dispersion. Babel thus reveals the limits of any effort that, however grandiose, arises from self-affirmation, sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing.

Babel was the height of human civilization post flood, the zenith of development, technology, production, and efficiency. "All mankind shared one language" is not just a description of their linguistic unity but their organizational and aspirational unity. They had two goals: first, to get to God, which is why their city became known as Babylon, "gate of the gods"; and second, to achieve cultural and political unity, which is why they feared being “dispersed over the face of the earth”. The problem with Babel was not their goals, but their motivation and methods. Instead of embracing the God-given identity of the name “human”, they sought “to make a name for themselves” (Gen 11:4). 

The primary motivation of Babel was self-glory, and their desire for unity was to build higher and stronger. The fear of being “spread” was simply a fear of the thinning out of influence and power. But what they forgot is, as Leo affirms, the “The quality of a civilization is measured not by the power of its means, but by the care it is able to offer.” 

But even if we have good motives, we can have bad methods. This is often where we fail in our technological society. Perhaps we desire to do great things for God, but we are not humble enough to depend on God to do them through us. So we expedite the process: we use bricks to get to heaven, rather than suffering. We outsource devotion and prayer to devices that give us answers. We trade relationships for entertainment. We attempt to multiply and fill the earth not through the slow and patient steadfastness of love, but the frenzied hurry of the next advancement.

The primary method of Babel is technocratic ambition. Their project was technocratic because they based their decisions on the newest technology available to them: hardened bricks and water-proof mortar. They had no time to chop lumber and gather stones, bricks are easier and stronger. No doubt their decision to waterproof their tower was also an attempt to God-proof their tower. Our methods of work in the world become likewise technocratic and “God-proofed” when, in Leo’s words, we let “the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic decisions.” When this happens, technology ceases to become a “tool” and instead becomes a “standard by which everything is judged, reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.” Our thirst for more powerful and advanced technology is one way we attempt to protect ourselves from the slow and often painful methods of God. Real humanity takes time, and real relationships take attentive focus, sacrifice and suffering. The best way to avoid confronting God is to try to become so technologically powerful that you believe you can afford to forget him. 

But no matter how tall the tower is built, it cannot reach Heaven apart from God’s methods. In one of the most striking parts of the *Magnica Humanitas*, Leo affirms the necessity of suffering, dependence, and limitation. 

> Even when limitations are experienced as inner suffering, human wisdom teaches us not to deny or suppress it, but to integrate it. To eliminate suffering entirely would mean, in the end, extinguishing love and desire as well. Those who love and desire cannot avoid passing through trial and suffering; and over the years, we carry within us lessons that leave their mark like scars, the memories of a journey shaped by freedom and failure, dreams and disappointments. It is only thanks to the interplay of these elements that the wonders of the soul occur within us, allowing us to sense the richness of our humanity. To renounce this adventure, both tragic and splendid, in the name of a presumed transcendence of all limits, could mean many things, but it would no longer be human.

To be a human is to live with and embrace the reality of dependence, and even at times, futility. To try to escape our dependence is to trade eternal goods for temporal gains. Calvin calls this the “world’s perpetual folly: having neglected heaven, to seek immortality on earth, where everything is perishable and passing away.” Until our motivation ends with the increase of God’s glory and not our own, our ambition will always be futile.

In our culture, we use phrases like “find yourself” or “make something of yourself”. But no one canknow himself apart from God and others. No one can name himself. No one can reach Heaven from earth. No one can build a legacy that lasts for eternity. No one can become more than human, regardless of what kind of machine they build. What Babel is teaching us is that such an effort is entirely fruitless, futile, and in the end, destructive. 

**Born Again**

Magnifica Humanitas ends on a redemptive note, recognizing the only way to protect and recover our humanity in a technocratic age is through incarnation, “the flesh of the Son, poor and vulnerable.” It is in the incarnation where God takes a human name, the name of Jesus. And it is in the incarnation that we receive the grace of being named by God.

What happened at Babel in response to their foolish and godless attempts to get to God is that God himself, in great mercy, “came down” and confused their unity. In giving them multitudes of languages, he gave them all sorts of different “names”. He created the beauty of diversity—but not as an affront to the beauty of unity. What God mercilessly protected the world from was false unity, an inhumane name and an inhumane language, in order that he might deliver them in time back to true unity and heavenly language.

God still frustrates our plans for false unity today. Although our best technological tools can remove the barrier of language and offer instant translation, none of our tools can unharden human hearts towards mutual love, respect, and honor. None of our tools can give humanity back the name they were created for, the name of God. But such frustration need not distract us from what God is really doing. Neither our technological achievements nor our technological failures can prevent God’s plan of unity. Listen to how Herman Bavinck masterfully puts it:

> The false unity \[of Babel\] was violently broken, making room for true unity; the kingdom of the world was shattered, so that the Kingdom of God could be established on earth. Henceforth, the peoples were dispersed and scattered over the earth. Israel was chosen from among these peoples to be the bearer of God's revelation. General and special revelation, hitherto united, separated and remained apart for a time, only to converge again at the foot of the Cross.

Jesus is the king who unbuilt the palace of his presence, brick by brick, so he might rebuild here on earth. This is why we pray “let your kingdom come.” Jesus came down so that he might be lifted up on another man-made instrument, the Roman cross. And the reason for the cross was, in his words, so that “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself” (John 12:38). What was attempted at Babel in man’s way is fulfilled at Calvary in God’s way. 

As the church just celebrated Pentecost, I am surprised Pope Leo does not bring Pentecost’s promise into his Encyclical. At Pentecost, we see the great glimpse of the way that the earth is unified. Of course, it is not through human power and technological achievement, but through heavenly power and human trembling. The only way for God’s kingdom to come is for him to send it and for us to receive. The only way to learn the language of God, the language of grace and mercy and the language of Heaven, is to learn it as a child does: slowly, by immersion in the love of God and dependent on the speech of God. The only way to be named not just with the name of humanity but the name of God is to be born again, welcomed into the world as a newborn, not of flesh but of Spirit. 

And in the mercy of God, when through the incarnation of God we take on the name of God by the Spirit of God, we are welcomed into the joy of naming and making the world. There lies a great potential for the church to “be fruitful and multiply and have dominion.” With God’s help, and in God’s way, the church of Jesus Christ does not have to settle for an inhumane world of lifeless things, but one alive with the creative diversity and beautiful unity that comes from belonging to God and bearing Christ’s name.
### On Becoming a Historian of Chromatic Theology
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/on-becoming-a-historian-of-chromatic-theology/
Last updated: 2026-06-10T11:00:41.000Z
One of my strongest memories from the late 1960s, when I was immersed in what was then called the counterculture, was sporting colored shirts and pink-striped, grey trousers. My colored clothes gave me a deep sense of having been freed from the conformity of early-1960s male fashion with its white shirts, a mark of the [chromophobia](https://www.amazon.com/Chromophobia-Focus-Contemporary-Issues-Batchelor/dp/1861890745?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that has lurked in the Western culture for centuries. 

Chromophobia is, of course, not restricted to the West. An Iranian woman in her twenties [recently commented](https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cx2lr40g17kt?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) on the various security patrols and checkpoints around the city of Tehran: “I always wear colourful clothes. But now I don’t. I’m afraid of their patrols, worried that if I wear something too bright it might annoy them.” Still, conservative Christianity has often been a purveyor of this distinct suspicion of color. 

Alongside this chromophobia, though, the West, like most other cultures, has long used chromatic terminology to highlight thought and affections. Consider the iconic folk song from the mid-1960s, “California Dreamin’.” It seeks to evoke the bleakness of winter through the use of two chromatic terms: “All the leaves are brown/And the sky is grey.” Brown and grey are the two key words in these lines; they capture perfectly the way that northern climes can be quite depressing during the winter months.

Given the way that our world is flooded with color, it is not surprising that Western culture has frequently turned to chromatic terminology to express ideas and perspectives. Here, for instance, is Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–1892), the evangelical wonder of Victorian London, commenting [on Psalm 19:13a](https://archive.spurgeon.org/treasury/ps019.php?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (“Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me,” KJV):

> This earnest and humble prayer teaches us that saints may fall into the worst of sins unless restrained by grace, and that therefore they must watch and pray lest they enter into temptation. There is a natural proneness to sin in the best of men, and they must be held back as a horse is held back by the bit or they will run into it. Presumptuous sins are peculiarly dangerous. All sins are great sins, but yet some sins are greater than others… It is wrong to suppose that because all sins will condemn us, that therefore one sin is not greater than another. The fact is, that while all transgression is a greatly grievous and sinful thing, yet there are some transgressions which have a deeper shade of blackness, and a more double scarlet-dyed hue of criminality than others.

In this commentary, Spurgeon adroitly uses two colors, black and scarlet, to drive home his argument that there are certain sins, “presumptuous sins” in the words of Psalm 19, that are worse than others. The association of scarlet with sin has biblical warrant (see, for instance, Isaiah 1:18), but the description of sin’s stain as having “a deeper shade of blackness” does not. Spurgeon’s use of the term “blackness” is shaped rather by a cultural idiom that had become commonplace in the Western tradition. That this cultural idiom is alive and well today can be seen in what is sometimes called a “witness bracelet,” worn by some Evangelicals and which is composed of different colored beads with a black bead standing for our sin. In a world where skin color has major social ramifications, this identification of black with sin is profoundly problematic.

My training as a historian in the late 1970s and early 1980s was in the realm of doctrinal concepts, tracing the way that Christian doctrine developed, especially in what is now called Late Antiquity. In other words, I was trained to be an intellectual historian. By the late 1990s, though, influenced by the *Annales* school of historiography, I had become convinced of the importance of socio-cultural dimensions in all historical research and writing. One cannot divorce the people who wrote works of Christian doctrine from the cultures in which they were immersed. To understand their doctrinal convictions, both their cultural contexts and their lives had to be taken into account. In other words, my concept of what it means to do history became far more holistic.

As I began to broaden my practice of history-writing, I came across the work of Michel Pastoureau (1947‒), the renowned historian of color who is the director of the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. His [series of works on color](https://press.princeton.edu/our-authors/pastoureau-michel?srsltid=AfmBOooGvztkaDZ5pXn-yYez9xgpi3qaJBULsD0SzWpgJIqK-g6M6Et3&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) as “first and foremost a social phenomenon, one with historically grounded realities and effects” (to quote Roland Betancourt’s foreword to [*White*](https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691243498/white?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)) has profoundly shaped aspects of my research over the last eight or so years on the way that color has been employed to convey and accentuate elements of the Christian Faith. My new monograph, [*A Thousand Beauteous Dyes*](https://davenantinstitute.org/a-thousand-beauteous-dyes/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), is an initial attempt—a taster, if you will—at formulating a history of color in the Christian tradition.

The first essay in the monograph traces some aspects of the reception history of Song of Songs 5:10a (“My beloved *is* white and ruddy,” KJV) from the Reformation to the long eighteenth century, particularly, as it concerns the colors red and pink. The other three essays are more narrowly focused. They look at the chromatic theology of two English Baptist hymnwriters, Anne Steele (1717‒1778) and Benjamin Beddome (1718‒1795), and the assertion by the New England theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703‒1758), who has been well described as “America’s Augustine,” that green was God’s favorite color!
### The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Living and Dying
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-stories-we-tell-ourselves-about-living-and-dying/
Last updated: 2026-06-10T11:00:34.000Z
HBO’s *Hacks* made a splash when it began in 2021\. The lead actress is Jean Smart, who plays Deborah Vance, a veteran stand-up comedian looking for a comeback. She finds herself working with an inexperienced comedy writer, Ava Daniels, played by Hannah Einbinder. What initially surprised and captivated audiences was the casting. Jean Smart happens to have been born in 1951\. Einbinder was born in the mid-1990s. Audiences and award shows alike have been intrigued by the show’s dark humor and unprecedented celebration of older women. Now, in 2026, the show’s finale has set a different kind of cultural precedent. (Warning, series finale spoilers ahead.)

As we’ve reached the show’s finale, Deborah Vance has achieved everything she hoped for from the first episode of the series. Already a comedy legend, she has regained center stage on her own terms. She has also managed to learn from Ava, while helping Ava mature. Though Deborah has not lost her edge, she is a bit kinder and certainly more capable of friendship at the end of the series. She has even become more open-minded on certain topics.

The show has had a good run and Deborah has had a good run. Should Deborah ride off into the sunset? Comedy shows are notoriously difficult to end well. Despite the passage of time, still no one likes the *Seinfeld* finale.

*Hacks* makes a bold choice. In the very final episode, we learn that Deborah has cancer, it is likely fatal, she does not want treatment, and she wants to take a vacation to Paris and then go to Switzerland for assisted suicide. She also wants Ava to come with her. This is one of the first instances of normalizing assisted suicide through plot on a show which is not about medicine or law and which has not had an ongoing illness narrative.

*Hacks* chooses to interpret assisted suicide through the lens of empowerment. Deborah is sick, but she looks fine and she still feels fine. She wants to die “on her own terms.” She is not choosing death to be put out of her misery, but to avoid misery altogether. Only Ava and Jimmy seem to know about Deborah’s plan. They are both sad and both try to talk Deborah out of it, though Jimmy respects her decision. Jimmy tells Ava that he doesn’t like it, but it is consistent with “her body, her choice.” He understands why Ava doesn’t want to go to Switzerland with Deborah, but says “if you can, I think you should.” Ava is angrier and less accepting. She tries several times to dissuade Deborah from suicide, and is confrontational and openly disapproving. Deborah reminds Ava that she is always preaching about listening to women and respecting women’s right to do what they want with their bodies. In these conversations, Ava feels like her own words are being turned against her. She *is* always talking about women’s rights and respecting people’s autonomy. Eventually, reluctantly, Ava agrees to go to Europe.

In recent years, assisted suicide has become increasingly legal and mainstream. Once a rare phenomenon in some corners of Europe or a media spectacle around Dr. Kevorkian in America, it is now something else. Assisted dying laws have been hotly debated in England in the past year and medically-assisted dying may soon be legal there. In Canada, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) has been shockingly [rapidly adopted](https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2025/01/16/canada-has-adopted-assisted-dying-faster-than-anywhere-on-earth?utm%5Fmedium=cpc.adword.pd&utm%5Fsource=google&ppccampaignID=17210591673&ppcadID=&utm%5Fcampaign=a.22brand%5Fpmax&utm%5Fcontent=conversion.direct-response.anonymous&gclsrc=aw.ds&gad%5Fsource=1&gad%5Fcampaignid=17210596221&gbraid=0AAAAADBuq3KTgSSfb-xpXr2%5FDK0qffItQ&gclid=CjwKCAjw8uTQBhAdEiwAVvtJyrJP16Hohcqd6bqPevWmY2BULmbwuFD9FEfhOkYkE3vsS4ZlXf%5FfiRoCCLsQAvD%5FBwE). MAiD was responsible for [5% of Canadian deaths](https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/publications/health-system-services/annual-report-medical-assistance-dying-2024.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in 2024\. People can seek assisted suicide for a variety of conditions, not all of them fatal. Where assisted death has become legal and more common, it is seen by proponents much like it is portrayed on *Hacks*,as a way for people to address their illnesses and meet death “on their own terms.”

In 2023, I wrote for *Mere Orthodoxy* about [the need to make MAiD unthinkable](https://mereorthodoxy.com/making-maid-unthinkable/). In 2026, it has clearly become more thinkable. The final episode of *Hacks* ends with Deborah deciding not to do it and agreeing to try medical treatment. This will no doubt allow the episode to be controversial and attract extra attention while avoiding extreme blowback. But it doesn’t negate the episode’s social commentary. By the time Deborah arrives at her ultimate decision, the show has affirmed her right to suicide and has normalized assisted suicide. Even Ava is on board. In fact, she’s literally about to board the train to Switzerland when Deborah slows down and decides against it.

In recent years, many people have taken up the pen to outline the reasons for Christian opposition to assisted suicide. They are worth reviewing, but I will not revisit them here. I would like to examine the nature of this portrayal of assisted dying on *Hacks* and what makes it more serious than some others.

All television shows involve fiction, but there is more than a stretch of the imagination between Deborah Vance and most people who pursue assisted suicide. The fictional comedienne is absurdly rich, in her right mind, and not yet feeling the effects of any illness. This presents the decision as something not brought about by necessity. And Deborah has told almost no one, so she is under no pressure to pursue it. If anything, she is only receiving pressure to try medical treatment instead. 

The reality of medically assisted suicide is very different. Not only are most people not extremely wealthy, they are often suffering in some form. That may be from a terminal illness or it may be from a long-term condition that seems overwhelming. In Canada, people have ended their lives because of depression and anorexia, in addition to more expected conditions. Deborah makes her decision under no pressure from pain, but some form of pain is nearly always at play with assisted dying. 

On *Hacks*, euthanasia was clearly Deborah’s choice, one which should be respected. In reality, some people are pressured to accept MAiD. It may be that the burden of caring for them seems overwhelming to those around them. Sometimes assisted suicide is the result of caregiver burnout or patient guilt. Though it is a criminal offense to pressure someone into MAiD in Canada, there have been [safeguard failures](https://spcare.bmj.com/content/16/2/333?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Some doctors in Canada have expressed concern about [pressure to recommend MAiD to patients](https://www.catholicregister.org/item/3103-doctors-alarmed-by-health-canada-s-push-for-m-ai-d-talks-with-patients?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). In the UK, opponents of a recent assisted dying bill highlighted that the bill had insufficient safeguards for protecting patients from pressure, from family or medical professionals. Assisted dying is likely not to be an expression of autonomy as it is on *Hacks*, it can actually signal a lack of autonomy. 

On *Hacks*, Deborah’s ability to choose her own death affirms her dignity. So much of the entire series has been about her overcoming stereotypes and limitations and taking on the world, in her own way. Assisted dying would mean taking on death in her own way, too. When we look at the scope of conditions and suffering among MAiD patients, we see that MAiD denies the dignity of the suffering and those who need care. It denies the possibility of a meaningful life for many people. The representation on *Hacks* is harmful because it is dishonest about dignity in assisted dying. 

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Russian critic Vissarion Belinsky became known as the “conscience of the intelligentsia.” He evaluated books for their writing, but he also judged books as good or bad based on their relationship to the truth. He expected fictional characters and entertaining plots, but if a book was dishonest about the nature of reality and social conditions, he judged it a bad book. When Gogol, who Belinsky had idolized, wrote a book which portrayed serfs as happy in their oppressed state and upheld the knout and illiteracy as proud traditions, Belinsky was beyond disappointed. His public, scathing “Letter to Gogol” was so widely read and appreciated that it was memorized by many young Russians. In the opening salvo, Belinsky wrote that “one cannot endure an outraged sense of truth and human dignity.” 

Everything about theportrayal of Deborah’s decision on *Hacks* is so distant from reality as to be a harmful distortion of reality. It leaves one with an “outraged sense of truth and human dignity.” At the end of that letter to Gogol, Belinsky writes directly to his former idol: “This is not a question of your or my personality; it concerns a matter that is of greater importance than myself or even you; it is a matter that concerns the truth, Russian society, Russia.” To echo Belinsky, this is not a matter of liking or disliking *Hacks*, which most *Mere Orthodoxy* readers likely already do not watch (it is pretty R-rated). Even if they did, the show is over now. This is a matter of greater importance, concerning the truth. Our response should be directed beyond *Hacks*, to broader society.

Belinsky understood the importance of literature. In nineteenth-century Russia, especially, literature was more than only entertainment, it was a method for communicating worldview and political ideals. In all times and places, stories have a way of sinking into how we view the world and a way of shaping our opinions on things. This is why Harriet Beecher Stowe’s *Uncle Tom’s Cabin* affected people in a way that many existing non-fiction abolitionist efforts did not. 

At present, we have an existing and growing body of non-fiction essays and books that argue for a Christian view of human dignity that is inherently opposed to medically assisted dying. What we need more of, and more attention to, is stories—books, movies, television—that emphasize human dignity, in suffering and dying, and which affirm Christian beliefs about suffering and death. And those stories need to be good. In the *Hacks* series finale, Ava’s grief and distress is moving and portrayed sympathetically, but so is Deborah’s desire for dignity. The scales tip, but not so dramatically that we feel we are being preached at, even if we are. 

Joan Didion wrote that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” We also need stories to know how to die. For a long time now, most Western Christians have participated in the broader cultural trend of looking away from death and avoiding thinking about it very much. During the Civil War, Americans still had a sense of a “good death.” Now, we don’t know enough about death to grasp the relationship between human dignity and death. This has probably never been healthy for people whose faith hinges on Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. But now our ignorance about death and dignity poses an increasing threat to life. It is time to get our story straight.
### The Kiln of Proceduralism: On the Failures of Magnifica Humanitas
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-failures-of-magnifica-humanitas/
Last updated: 2026-06-09T11:00:54.000Z
John presses a finger to his terminal. There is a soft chime. Therapy has begun. 

Some text appears on the glowing screen. “(I’m registering that you’ve selected the ‘Simply Human’ agent for today’s session. You can return to the ‘Ancient Light’ module at any time.) Hello, John! It’s good to see you. Would you like to continue where we left off? How is work at your dad’s restaurant going?” John slowly types away: “It’s been really busy. We’re still understaffed and Dad can’t afford to hire anyone else. It’s been 10, 12 hour days sometimes, a lot of work. But the restaurant is struggling, so I think it’s worth it. It’s important to honor my dad. The restaurant is all he has after leaving Cambodia.” 

The screen answers: "That’s a heavy load to carry. That reminds me of something you brought up five sessions ago: working somewhere else could mean getting to do what you love, with clearer boundaries, without the family pressure layered on top. Some people find that actually *strengthens* their family relationships too—when work stress isn’t constantly mixing with family dynamics. So it might be worth just sitting with one honest question: if the family obligation weren’t part of the equation, what would you actually want to do?” John stares at the terminal. Maybe it is time to leave."\*

\*\*\*

## What Leo is Trying to do

Pope Leo XIV’s chosen name is a deliberate callback to Leo XIII’s work, which addressed the pressing concerns of labor during the Industrial Revolution. *Magnifica Humanitas* describes Leo XIII’s major 1891 encyclical, *Rerum Novarum*, as a “milestone in the development of the Church’s social teaching,” centering “the dignity of work and of workers,” a “‘Magna Carta’ of Christian social action” (§30). It is no accident Pope Leo XIV signed his first encyclical on the 135th anniversary of *Rerum Novarum*, signaling a document that will revisit and expand these questions around “work and workers” in light of the artificial intelligence revolution, proposing a variety of measures to protect human dignity from the excesses of the machine horizon. 

Leo frames the encyclical with an arresting image of the paths before us (§§7-10): on the one, the socially flattening, language-unifying Tower of Babel, which reduces humanity to efficient means in pursuit of self-glory, and on the other, Nehemiah’s rebuilding of Jerusalem, the solidarity of a people who value the weak and forgotten, working together in harmony to build the earthly city brick by brick.

Far from treating it as ontologically evil, Leo approaches artificial intelligence as a non-neutral tool (§104) with great potential for both good and evil. Many of his concerns on the negative front will be familiar: job disruption, mass unemployment, autonomous weapon systems untethered from human decision-making trees, algorithmic credit sorting and approval systems—a panoply of dehumanizing automation that artificial intelligence threatens to greatly accelerate. Leo also rightly worries about the models themselves; artificial intelligence is not neutral, and any sort of post-alignment settlement will simply let the models perpetuate the secular moral values of their creators (§§102-107).

Leo proposes a variety of anthropological and structural responses to the risks artificial intelligence poses to human dignity. Critically, these prescriptions are grounded in a continuation of traditional Catholic Social Teaching, emphasizing religious freedom (*Dignitatis Humanae*, §34) and a pluralistic approach that rejects empty proceduralism (§134) while centering the objective truth of the Gospel, each of us interpreting and reflecting truth through interwoven lives (“a multifaceted polyhedron,” §25). 

This vision of the Gospel “is not imposed from above, but grows over time within the concrete interweaving of lives, communities and cultures” (§25). The anthropological, character-forming strategies are grounded in natural law that exists prior to (rather than dependent on) state power and is accessible to all who seek it (§56), are witnessed to in a wide variety of paragons across traditions (§§124-126, §223), and find their ultimate expression in the Eucharist as celebrated within the bounds of the Church (§229, §§234-235). 

The structural responses operate at the political level and involve a defense grounded in Catholic subsidiarity–the notion that matters of governance should be resolved at the lowest possible level. The structural solutions are pluralistic in nature: refuse the monopolistic tendencies of megacorporations, ensure regulatory frameworks allow for data to be treated as a common good, ensure democratic participation in the moral alignment of models, and so on. Perhaps most importantly, in §107, Leo writes:

We cannot be satisfied with merely calling for the moralization of machines — the so-called “alignment” of AI with human values — without also having the courage to insist on a further condition: the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice. Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating, and of protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions.

And instead of elite (or American) values determining the moral structures of AI, Leo argues that a faithful commitment to and recognition of social justice “is not only a goal to be safeguarded after technologies are deployed, but a condition that must shape their very design from the outset” (§109). In other words, it is not enough to tack on some sort of post-training moral correction after the models and their behavior are largely settled in non-neutral (perhaps anti-human dignity) ways, but to ensure the models are trained under Catholic Social Teaching through social and political mechanisms routed through democratic participation.

\*\*\*

## Why Magnifica Humanitas Falls Short

*Magnifica Humanitas* offers freely chosen prescriptions to correct the defective secular anthropology at the heart of modern culture’s use of artificial intelligence. Leo writes eloquently about us coming to recognize truths available to reason, such as the innate dignity of humanity, but the full mechanism that would enact this internal change across the institutions that affect artificial intelligence at the development and policy level is not entirely clear, and perhaps this is because it is unlikely to prevail. 

There are three reasons for this. The first revolves around the nature of the institutions that shape our artificial intelligence models. The second has to do with the nature of the cultural and political order in which these labs operate. The third rests in the formative nature of the technology.

First, a cluster of network-level difficulties exists at the lab and training level. The moral structures in this space, as Leo recognizes, are characterized by technocratic efficiency and self-actualization, a spiritual “sickness” where “modern man is wrongly convinced that he is the sole author of himself, his life and society” (§133). These moral values exist as a kind of ambient framework, something readers familiar with Charles Taylor will recognize as a particularly strong expression of the dominant Western *social imaginary*, or something like the preformed assumptions about life and practice that form a culture’s tacit boundary of internal plausibility. 

Top AI engineers and researchers are often drawn from a remarkably small set of elite university programs governed by a secular monoculture, skilled professionals who then work in environments that share this monoculture. Silicon Valley may fight (often viciously) over philosophy and business practices, but these conflicts are more intramural than truly cross-cultural, occurring within a Western framework that tilts strongly toward secularism. And so the labs in this space tend to converge on similar post-training RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback) alignment or behavioral policies—largely harm reduction and valuing individual autonomy and expression. 

As a result, the idea of spending resources to push the models’ weights toward an ethical system that, they believe, treats women as ontologically incapable of becoming priests and is staunchly anti-choice is spiritually repulsive to the researchers who run these labs, to say nothing of governments that will regulate out of existence any alignment training that condones Catholic sexual ethics more broadly. It may be true that “the construction of Babel or the rebuilding of Jerusalem begins within each one of us” (§130), but such formation must still survive through and then operate in an overwhelmingly secular landscape.

Even if these spiritually formative practices successfully inculcate Jerusalem-over-Babel into a new class of Catholic technologists, it is unclear how the anthropological *postures* Leo celebrates could reach technological design as it is currently implemented, for the problem exists down a layer: if every frontier lab were founded by members of Opus Dei and adopted rigorous, Thomistic-inflected alignment practices on “social criteria for innovation” (§156), the training data would still be largely secular and Western, overwhelmingly produced by people formed outside the faith. 

Not only is the grain of the data secular, but the process of using training data is itself a kind of technical proceduralism that flattens normative authority. Artificial intelligence models are built on a process that starts with reducing both a Papal encyclical and an anonymous Reddit thread down to statistical noise. Attempts to inject a distinctively Catholic social justice into the current models are a category error—these parameters are fundamentally mathematical and can neither internalize nor relate the non-propositional content of Catholic Social Teaching. Frequency patterns cannot experience the Eucharist. The “invisible infrastructure” (§107) Leo worries about is already here. True, both the network effects and the training data are contingent rather than necessary facts. But so is the Pacific Ocean.

Yet even if we granted all the contingent factors (the leaven is not extinguished, the seed is not choked, §34, §210), the design-shaping solutions on offer face another set of severe problems. There is a world in which frontier AI labs largely adopt the calls of *Magnifica Humanitas*. The top three AI corporations, whoever they might be in this rapidly changing ecosystem, having met the capital-intensive demands of initial training and now focused on inference and deployment, all decide to refuse further consolidation. They largely decline to service autonomous weapons platforms. They reduce or curtail algorithmic credit sorting. They create a “common good” framework for data sharing. And in an unprecedented move at significant cost to themselves, these megacorporations spin off a couple dozen smaller institutions that cater directly to particular industries or demographics, consciously modifying post-training alignment to include a variety of moral and cultural perspectives that are attentive to regional and religious backgrounds. All of these models include the option of selecting which general moral framework the user would like to operate under before beginning some line of inquiry or work—say, Catholic Social Teaching for a Washington, D.C. think tank, Halakha for a synagogue in Manhattan, or Maqasid al-Shariah for a town council in Michigan. These are the runtime parameters of the new social order: “human-friendly and restoring \[technology\] to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life…disarmed, welcoming and accessible” (§110).

The difficulty here is one Alasdair MacIntyre diagnosed in *Whose Justice? Which Rationality?* Some policy wins in this space would be goods that could operate in principle, but they are orthogonal to the anthropology being shaped by the technology. A world of Catholic-aligned labs and models would still be one dominated by a culture and polity in which a secular juridical and administrative frame imposes its liberal tradition under the guise of neutrality, for there is no tradition-neutral viewpoint that can adjudicate them. The religious pluralism of *Dignitatis Humanae* (§34) acts like a vise here. Integralism is surely wrong, but refusal comes with costs: if the Church, as Leo has argued, must not impose its metaphysical values on the surrounding culture but allow them to be freely chosen, then it necessarily enters the modern square as one option among many. The Thomistic tradition may claim that reason discovers values that apply to everyone (§56), but the liberal order will transmute a claim of universally available reason into a contestable metaphysics. Either a shared commitment to thick moral standards must be imposed or the democratic dialogue of “openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved” (§107) subjects Catholic Social Teaching to the commensurability demanded by the procedural system. John might choose a communitarian honoring “Ancient Light” model for his therapy sessions, but the very act of choosing is to submit to the framework in which a Christian anthropology that demands we honor our parents is but one menu option among many.

How could Christians advocate for theologically informed changes to secular AI models in a system that seems to foreclose their distinctive moral claims? MacIntyre’s resolution would sit outside the liberal framework rather than within it. Christianity and liberalism will likely continue as competing traditions, handing down knowledge and practices to their adherents, generation after generation. Eventually epistemological crises will rise in liberalism that cannot be resolved on liberalism’s own terms, but can be answered by Christianity’s resources, and this is where Christianity would be vindicated. It is in this diachronic, tradition-laden process that, perhaps over centuries, Christianity (or Thomism on MacIntyre’s account) will triumph. At least that is the wager. So perhaps Leo could be content with sitting at the table of liberal proceduralism rather than hoping to argue through it—a living witness to the Church’s social teaching and practice, a means of eventually persuading the world to adopt what can be knowable by all who are rightly formed.

MacIntyre’s process of rational vindication requires communities and subjects inhabiting traditions and arguing over generations. In particular, it requires individuals to be willing to live within traditions long enough for them to become legible and navigable, something like learning a second language enough that it becomes the first. Leo’s position, if it admits the contingent infrastructure difficulties outlined above, would be similar, requiring faithful dialogue in the public square over decades, even centuries, with rational interlocutors from other traditions. Perhaps we can grant that the frontier labs decide to decelerate the technology and “slow things down” (§107) enough to give dialogue some breathing room. The challenge here is not so much in persuasion but in having a culture that has the patience required to deeply know—to inhabit—competing traditions. 

Older forms of technology, like books and television, formed their audiences in specific ways but still pointed to encounters with real communities of shared practice, environments where novices could be apprenticed under masters and inculcated into a living tradition. Artificial intelligence models that are aimed at the wrong ends can create an ersatz form of this encounter, with dialogue and engagement wrapped in sticky anthropomorphic feedback mechanisms—available around the clock, open to chatting about virtually any subject, customized to know your history, and designed to speak in ways that are attentive to your unique preferences. A living tradition stands above its subject, disciplining and correcting it, while a chatbot aimed at formation pretends to be the servant while ever shaping its user. Even if a Christian artificial intelligence model were to teach Christian doctrine to its users, the mode can never replace the full teaching relationship Christ has set out for us, that between the Church’s elders—her pastors, bishops, and priests—and its faithful members. These models are not just secular as static entities, but continuously and pervasively secular interactive mediums, their priors and unique mode of engagement relentlessly reinforced and reiterated across multiple domains of society. The Church has the formative tools to resist this. But those outside will be more susceptible and the public vindication of one tradition over another risks becoming impossible.

Soon Leo will be dialoguing with a people formed by a machine intelligence that propagates counterfeit inhabitation, one that accustoms people to experience Christianity by asking a chatbot to teach them the Nicene Creed.

\*\*\*

## Outside the Camp, Bearing Disgrace

For those of us outside the Catholic tradition, our posture of faithful witness should remain the same. We will continue to form communities that refuse to adopt wholesale the most disfiguring aspects of modern technology. The same shared theological culture that domesticates cars, television, computers, smartphones, and social media as means rather than ends can also refuse to deploy artificial intelligence in ways that undermine our commitment to faithfully receiving and preaching the Word in a fallen world. The costs will be real, sometimes staggering, but so it has been for Christians in every age, even the age of artificial intelligence.

“Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore. For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.” –Hebrews 13:13-14

\*\*\*

Sometime later John meets with his father. He is leaving the restaurant. “Self-care is important too, Dad.”

The tower rises to the heavens, fired brick by brick in the kiln of proceduralism.

*\* This dialogue is designed to resonate with §100 of Magnifica Humanitas and is partially drawn and paraphrased from several therapy roleplay sessions I generated in Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.7\. I drew on my childhood growing up in a mixed Chinese-American house to develop plausible scenarios driven by a fundamental conflict between communal honor or filial obligation and individual happiness. The resemblance to AI output is intentional.*
### Even in the Agony of Despondency
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/even-in-the-agony-of-dispondency/
Last updated: 2026-06-09T13:34:26.000Z
For the past few months my daughter has been talking about “Lincoln Lincoln.” When she was about a year old, my wife and I stopped by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield. We walked through and took it all in as it traced Lincoln’s life from his small Kentucky upbringing to the White House and ultimately to his death.

This time my daughter was a bit older. During that first visit we had bought her a little Abraham Lincoln board book, which she loves — especially its description of Mary Lincoln as “short and plump.” But this time I was coming off several harder months with anxiety, something I have battled for much of my adult life. It isn’t fun, but it isn’t defining either. It is not what I am but something I deal with — part of living in a fallen world, and a constant reminder of my creaturely dependence.

As we walked through the museum, I was encountering a side of Lincoln I hadn’t before. Lincoln was certainly endowed with gifts. That much is apparent to anyone who has ever read his writings — he belongs, in my estimation, alongside Whitman and Twain. But Lincoln is also very human: a man with his own struggles and weaknesses, his own darkness and his own hard-won resilience. It was this Lincoln I had in mind as I walked through the museum, and it is that Lincoln who has inspired me to write this piece.

---

In modern American memory, there are few leaders as towering as Abraham Lincoln. And yet Lincoln often thought very little of himself. He was of course known for his humor, often self-deprecating. Lincoln, always the master of locution, used such humor to disarm opponents, charm audiences during speeches, and to manage his lifelong battle with “the hypo” — short for hypochondriasis — or what we would simply call melancholy.

During a debate in 1858 with Stephen A. Douglas, his longtime Illinois rival, Lincoln once responded to Douglas’ accusation of two-facedness with the rebuttal: “I leave it to my audience. If I had another face, do you think I’d wear this one?”

It is ironic, of course, that Lincoln would make light of his homeliness — because his face was always easy to read. Joshua Speed, one of Lincoln’s early Springfield friends, commented that he had never seen “so gloomy and melancholy a face” as that of young Lincoln. Speed owned Bell & Co., a general store, and would be Lincoln’s roommate for several years.

I’m certainly not the first one to see the theme of melancholy in the life of Lincoln. Joshua Wolf Shenk’s *Lincoln’s Melancholy* covers the topic in full. Shenk writes about Lincoln less in mythic imagery and more in human terms. The Lincoln he presents is a man, not a legend — one who struggles, deals with internal contradiction (especially regarding slavery), but who returns again and again to one recurring theme that prompted this essay: melancholy.

Lincoln’s correspondence throughout his life is punctuated with this reality. When Joshua Speed confided his fear and anxiety at the thought of marrying Fanny Henning — caught up in internal torment, wondering if he could ever love her the way she deserved — Lincoln, no stranger to such nascent doubts, replied in 1842: “Remember in the depth and even the agony of despondency, that very shortly you are to feel well again.”

It is this side of Lincoln that is most endearing to me. I too battle anxiety — often debilitating, though by no means a defining feature of who I am. When life changes, as it often does, my body responds with a cocktail of upset stomach, racing heart, insomnia, and a sense of impending doom. But as I listen to Oates tell about Lincoln, I can’t help but find inspiration in the man.

So where did it begin? It was most likely hereditary — but Lincoln also suffered a series of crippling losses: the deaths of his brother, mother, and older sister. And yet, despite all of this, he would rise to become one of the giants of American politics. There are of course those who criticize Lincoln’s presidency. Some argue he was the seed of an ever-expanding federal government. The suspension of civil liberties during the Civil War lends further weight to the charge of tyranny. Yet even those who hold such views — and I do not, though I was once tempted — will find it hard to deny that Lincoln’s melancholy reveals a leader who was a man before he was a monument. Without Lincoln, the Union would not have been preserved. If the cloth that held the Union together could be reduced to a single thread, that thread would be Abraham Lincoln.

Modern leaders hide their sorrow and pain. For the better part of a century, the presidency has projected a polished image — a facade of splendor that is rarely the reality. The presidential life is not a blessing but a burden, however much the public celebrates it. Lincoln was the right leader for his times precisely because he was not perfect — he was a man endowed with gifts and humbled by the melancholy that plagued him.

So how does this encourage me? If Lincoln could face melancholy and press on — if he could persevere until he reached the highest office in the land — it gives me courage that I too can push through my own battles. It is Lincoln the man, not Lincoln the monument, whom I most relate to. And so we turn to the origins of that melancholy.

Lincoln had two notable breakdowns in his life — one in 1835 and another six years later in 1841.

Young Lincoln was engaged to marry Ann Rutledge. He had met her while boarding with her family during his early days in New Salem. When Lincoln arrived, Ann was still a teenager of about eighteen. She was short and commanded the attention of many a suitor. In 1832 she became engaged to John McNeil — a young man so embarrassed by his father’s business failures that he changed his last name from McNamar to escape the burden of the family name. McNeil was determined, however, to reclaim his father’s name and honor, and so he set out for New York to help his father settle his debts. While he was gone, young Lincoln swooped in. Despite his misgivings about his own abilities, Lincoln began to court Ann. When it became apparent that McNeil was not going to return, they prepared to wed.

One summer day in 1835, Ann fell sick with typhoid. She died in August of that same year.

Lincoln was torn apart by her death. Robert Rutledge commented that “the effect upon Mr. Lincoln’s mind was terrible; he became plunged in despair, and many of his friends feared that reason would desert her throne.”

Not long after, Lincoln met Mary Todd, whom he would eventually marry in 1842\. But on January 1, 1841 — a day Lincoln would later refer to as “that fatal first of Jany” — he broke off the engagement. Reasons abound as to why, but recalling the advice he would later give to Joshua Speed, it seems reasonable to presume that Lincoln likewise battled an anxiety of love — a hesitation he could not overcome. 

Upon calling off the engagement, Lincoln wrote to his first law partner, John T. Stuart: “I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I cannot tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.” William Herndon, Lincoln’s third law partner and one of the men Lincoln trusted above all others — Herndon would remain by his side through many political failures — described his friend as “a sad-looking man; his melancholy dripped from him as he walked. His apparent gloom impressed his friends, and created sympathy for him.”

Lincoln was well acquainted with loss. It touched nearly every walk of his life. Before Lincoln was old enough to remember, his infant brother Thomas Lincoln Jr. died.

In 1818, his mother Nancy Hanks died an untimely death from milk sickness. According to Francis Browne, as she lay ill, young Abraham would sit by her bedside and read whatever portions of the Bible she wished to hear. As she listened, she would occasionally interject — encouraging him to walk in honor, goodness, and truth. She died, and Abraham, not yet ten years old, felt the full weight of loss for the first time.

Later in life Lincoln would lose not one son but two. Eddie died of tuberculosis in 1850\. Willie — by many accounts the son Lincoln loved most deeply, intellectually gifted and temperamentally close to his father — died of typhoid fever in 1862, in the White House, at eleven years old.

Lincoln was well acquainted with grief, and his melancholy was more than justified by what he had suffered. What is remarkable is not that he felt it but that he carried on. Melancholy has a way of making the next step feel impossible — the weight of what has been lost presses down on the present until forward motion seems not just difficult but meaningless. And yet Lincoln moved forward. He bore not only his private grief but the accumulated sorrow of a nation tearing itself apart (as we will see) — and he did so with a tenderness and a moral seriousness that the losses themselves had formed in him.

As I walked through the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, I couldn't help but reflect on this. Lincoln — the man, not the marble monument we have made of him — was a deeply broken man. And yet he carried on.

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JLK0!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc4f622e2-9613-4d47-a1e9-44a3846ce13e_1536x1024.png)

A bust of Lincoln. Photo taken by me at the Lincoln Presidential Museum.

Lincoln walked up the steps of the Illinois statehouse — the building stood like a Greek pantheon in the center of Springfield. His law office, which he shared with Billy Herndon, overlooked the capitol. From his second-story window he could see the building’s towering Greco-Roman pillars rising at the back.

He had been up late waiting on the tallies. Now it was settled: Lincoln had won the presidency. The rail-splitter candidate — born in the backwoods of Kentucky — was president-elect of the United States.

The race had been anything but ordinary. The Democratic Party had imploded. Stephen Douglas, a short, stocky, fiery man from Illinois, had split from John C. Breckinridge, a Southern Democrat from Kentucky, and the fracture had proved fatal to both. Douglas was hard to pin down on slavery — if not downright contradictory. Would slavery reign in the territories or not? Would popular sovereignty rule the land? Douglas often dodged the question with the vague phrase “unfriendly legislation,” a formulation that satisfied nobody. Breckinridge was harder to misread. A thoroughgoing Southern hardliner, he ran on an explicitly pro-slavery platform, demanding federal protection of slavery in the territories — no hedging, no ambiguity.

The split fractured the Democratic vote and opened the door for Abraham Lincoln — who detested the moniker “Abe” — to walk straight into the presidency.

As Lincoln climbed the statehouse steps that morning, men pressed forward to hail him president-elect. He received their congratulations with the quiet dignity that would come to define him. And yet there was a weight beneath it all, a burden he carried even in the moment of triumph. The death threats had been arriving almost daily — scrawled notes, anonymous and ugly, stacking up on his desk (one showing the Devil casting Lincoln into the fires of hell). Southern newspapers were savaging him. In some towns his effigy had been burned in the streets. He was president-elect of a nation that was already coming apart at the seams — and he knew it.

Lincoln was always a melancholy man. Carl Shurz, a Lincoln biographer, would write that while Lincoln was a man who enjoyed reading and pondering — often staring off into space and thinking — he was also given to “strange spells of melancholy, from which he often would pass in a moment to rollicking outbursts of droll humor.” Francis Browne called this his “pensive melancholy” disposition which he inherited from his mother.

As Lincoln marched up the stairs, he was marching toward the future — a future marred by uncertainty. The nation was threatening to break apart at the seams, and yet it was to him they turned.

There are a few reasons for Lincoln’s resilience. First, he had been forged by failure. His story was not built on success after success but rather on the ruins of crushed attempts and broken dreams. He had lost races for the Illinois state legislature, two races for the U.S. Senate, and a race for the vice presidential nomination — all of this on top of the personal losses already mentioned.

What these failures produced was a man undeterred by defeat and undaunted by the prospect of failure. Most of the generals and politicians of his era were always positioning themselves for the next political opportunity. General McClellan is a perfect example. During the Civil War he was conflict-avoidant, in part because he knew he would eventually — and indeed did — run for the presidency. His caution on the battlefield was inseparable from his ambition off it.

As Doris Kearns Goodwin has shown in *Team of Rivals*, Lincoln had been forged by failure in a way his rivals had not. He was immune to the threat it posed, and as such he was able to carry on in spite of it.

Lincoln was also, as this essay aims to show, chronically melancholic. Joshua Shenk writes that:

> “Whatever greatness Lincoln achieved cannot be explained as a triumph over personal suffering. Rather, it must be accounted for as an outgrowth of the same system that produced that suffering. This is not a story of transformation but one of integration. Lincoln didn’t do great work because he solved the problem of his melancholy. The problem of his melancholy was all the more fuel for the fire of his great work.”

In other words, Lincoln’s melancholy was far from a liability — it was an asset. It fueled him. He wrestled with it, and often won. His lifelong experience of contending with darkness gave him a moral register that more cheerful men simply could not reach. He had lived too long in the shadows to flinch from what he found there.

And so when he assessed the challenge of a nation split in two, he felt it. Lincoln understood the cosmic weight of what had been placed on his shoulders. He felt the burden of the Union’s cause as a man feels grief: personally, physically, without the comfortable distance of mere political calculation.

In his annual message to Congress on December 1, 1862, he closed with words that captured this sense of sacred obligation: “The struggle of today is not altogether for today — it is for a vast future also. With a reliance on Providence all the more firm and earnest, let us proceed in the great task which events have devolved upon us.” And likewise, in the very same speech, he called the present war a “fiery trial.” An ordeal unlike anything the nation has known.

Lincoln, whatever challenges his melancholy pressed upon him, was always thinking about the cause he believed had been Providentially placed in his hands. In a letter dated December 22, 1860, to Alexander Stephens, he wrote: "I fully appreciate the present peril the country is in, and the weight of responsibility on me." Lincoln bore the weight of the nation as his own — the country's burden became his burden. This is the mark of a great leader, and only a man with his own long experience of struggle could write such a sentence and mean it.

On September 24, 1862, responding to the Emancipation Proclamation, he said: “What I did, I did after very full deliberation, and under a heavy and solemn sense of responsibility. I can only trust in God that I have made no mistake.” Again, he framed his actions in the context of divine will.

Allen Guelzo has written a helpful assessment of Lincoln’s faith in *Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President* — I won’t rehash the whole argument here. I remain fairly ambivalent about Lincoln as a Christian in any formal sense, and instead follow the line of thought that he was deeply indebted to his Calvinist upbringing. Whether that amounted to a genuine personal faith, only God knows.

The most private expression of Lincoln’s anguish is his “Meditation on the Divine Will,” written in 1862\. Oates describes this as something of a turning point in Lincoln’s discourse about God. This meditation is lesser known — so much so that the collected works I employed for this piece did not even include it. The fragment was found and preserved, according to [Abraham Lincoln Online](https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/meditat.htm?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), by John Hay — a White House secretary who noted that it was written not to be seen by others but as a personal reflection. Lincoln was a serious, anguished soul, and this document shows it more plainly than almost anything else he left behind. I am going to quote it in its entirety:

> “The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party — and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true — that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun, He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.”

Lincoln, just as he had come to understand that his own suffering was preparation for a greater purpose, found in this meditation that God’s purposes were at work in the conflict itself. Despite the human carnage, the destruction, the immense loss — God “wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.”

In the same year, Lincoln wrote a letter to miss Fanny McCullough dated December 23, 1862\. In it Lincoln extends comfort to Fanny on the loss of her father. He writes that “in this sad world of ours sorrow comes to all, and to the young it comes with bittered agony because it takes them unawares.” It’s hard not to hear Lincoln’s own loss at a young age — the loss of his mother. He goes on: “the older have learned ever to expect it.” To expect loss and sorrow is certainly true and yet Lincoln doesn’t leave her in her anguish. He offers a glimmer of hope: “you are sure to be happy again…I have had experience enough to know what I say, and you need only to believe it to feel better at once.”

---

As I walked around the Lincoln Presidential Museum, I was struck by how Lincoln’s struggle was itself a blessing — without it he would not have been the person he was, nor the president he was. The nation would not exist today were it not for Lincoln. He bore the struggle as his own, carried it as his own, and ultimately sacrificed for it.

Biographers capture an unsettling story. One day Lincoln, seeking some much-needed rest from the many political friends pressing him for positions in his administration, went home and lay down on the sofa in his chamber. As he rested, he looked across the room at a looking glass on his dresser and saw his own reflection. But his face had two separate and distinct images. He got up, walked over, and the illusion disappeared. He went and lay back down — and saw it again. This time it was clearer than before. Two faces: one alive with color, the other pale and deathly. When he told Mary, she was disturbed and believed it foretold that he would survive his first term but would not live through his second. Lincoln reflected that “the thing would come up once in a while and give me a little pang, as though something uncomfortable had happened.”

As someone who deals with anxiety, it was encouraging to find Lincoln wrestling with the “hypo” that shadowed him throughout his life. And yet despite his battle he overcame — he grew, he learned how to look his suffering in the eye and draw from it rather than be destroyed by it.

As a Christian, I take comfort in the fact that Jesus is neither stoic nor aloof, but intimately acquainted with suffering. I’ve been reflecting on Hebrews 2:17, which says that “he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.” Jesus sweat drops of blood in Gethsemane. He felt the full anguish of impending suffering — and yet he endured it.

I am glad to worship a God who knows what I am going through. But it was also quietly comforting to walk through that museum and encounter Lincoln — this towering figure in American history — and discover that he was, like me, a regular person who had to face his struggles one day at a time and press on anyway.
### No Beauty Without Boundaries
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/no-beauty-without-boundaries/
Last updated: 2026-06-08T11:00:49.000Z
*God whose service is perfect freedom* \~ Book of Common Prayer

Psalm 1 begins: “Blessed is the man . . . \[whose\] delight is in the law of the Lord.”

But we live in a time when many loud voices defiantly cry out like the kings in Psalm 2: “Let us break their bonds asunder and cast away their cords from us.” 

An advertising jingle I heard some years ago has stuck with me. It echoes the rebellious cry of the kings in David’s time: 

> To know no boundaries,  
> To let yourself run free,  
> To know no boundaries,  
> That’s what the world should be.

I don’t remember what that jingle was advertising, but I do remember thinking: “What a succinct encapsulation of one of the world’s headiest ideals—no boundaries, complete freedom!” But the world doesn’t think it through. What, after all, would a world without boundaries look like? 

Consider the picture that accompanied the jingle. It showed a handsome, powerful bull trotting along a shoreline. A bull, of course, has very clear boundaries. Without boundaries where is his beauty of shape—in fact, where is the bull? Without boundaries there is no bull. Without boundaries where is his graceful trot and untapped power? Without four legs as distinct from the head, the torso, the horns, and the tail, his beauty of movement would not be possible. 

Further, it would be impossible without each of the muscles involved performing its particular function in rhythm with the others. Without boundaries there would be no beauty of shape or grace of movement. There would not even be a shoreline for the bull to trot along, and such a visually appealing and rhythmically catchy commercial would have been impossible.

I have removed only a few of the boundaries from that picture. What would the world be like if there really were no boundaries? Shakespeare answered beautifully in *Troilus and Cressida*:

> Take but degree away, untune that string,  
> And, hark, what discord follows! Each thing meets  
> In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters  
> Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,  
> And make a sop of all this solid globe:  
> Strength should be lord of imbecility,  
> And the rude son should strike his father dead:  
> Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,  
> Between whose endless jar justice resides,  
> Should lose their names, and so should justice too.  
> Then every thing includes itself in power,  
> Power into will, will into appetite. \[1.03.109-124\]

Before Creation there were no boundaries. “The earth was without form and void; and darkness was over the face of the deep.” Then God *said* . . . and God *separated* . . . and God *formed*. . . “And God saw that it was good.” \[Genesis 1:25b\]

But man has rebelled against boundaries from the beginning. In Eden God set a very limited boundary regarding the eating of fruit. He put a boundary around only one of the many trees in the garden. But when Eve and Adam ate fruit from the bounded tree, they were driven out of the garden. They didn’t gain freedom; they lost the garden. Freedom didn’t come from violating the boundary. It would have come if they had obeyed God’s restriction and respected the boundary. Obedience would have led to freedom; disobedience led to slavery, a paradox Thomas Howard explains well in *An Antique Drum* (later published as *Chance or the Dance?*).

The implication of the Adam and Eve story is that if they *had* bowed to the interdict placed in the forbidden fruit, life and not death would have been the guerdon. That is, paradoxically, if they had knuckled under to what looked emphatically like a *denial* of their freedom (“Thou shalt not” is not a very convincing corollary to the “Have dominion” charge), they would have discovered something unimaginable to them—something that, according to the story, was at that very point lost to them and us for the duration of human time. 

Psalm 104 tells of a time when God *removed* a boundary as punishment. When he “saw that the wickedness of man was great in earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” \[Genesis 6:5\], he removed the boundary between the waters above and the waters below. He covered the earth “with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains.” \[Psalm 104:5\] But in his kindness he restored the boundary.

> At your rebuke the waters fled;   
> at the sound of your thunder they took to flight.   
> The mountains rose, the valleys sank down   
> to the place you appointed for them.   
> You set a boundary they may not pass  
> so that they might not again cover the earth. \[Psalm 104:6-9\]

Startling juxtapositions of law and freedom run throughout Scripture. The God who gave the Law—boundaries—to his people is the one who delivered them from “the house of bondage.” The author of Psalm 119 wrote, without flinching, that keeping the law results in freedom. 

> I will keep your law continually,   
> forever and ever;   
> and I shall walk at liberty,   
> for I have sought your precepts. \[vs. 44-45\] 

Paul, in one breath, says “you were called to freedom” and “be servants of one another” (Galatians 5:13), and James wrote to his church about the “law of liberty” (1:25). Since then many theologians have joined the choir, adding variations to the theme. 

Rudolph Bultman: 

> Genuine freedom is freedom from the motivation of the moment. It is possible only when conduct is determined by a motive which transcends the present moment, that is, by law.

Eugene Peterson: 

> Those who parade the rhetoric of liberation but scorn the wisdom of service do not lead people into the glorious liberty of the children of God but into a cramped and covetous squalor.

Stanley Hauerwas

> Christians are called to faithfulness and obedience so we can be free from the tyranny of those who would enslave us in the name of freedom.

Christianity teaches that there is a sense in which Sam Levenson’s phrase, “the statutes of liberty,” is not tongue-in-cheek. G. K Chesterton, as one would expect, had a witty way for explaining how walls—statutes, laws, boundaries—lead to freedom and joy. In *Orthodoxy* he wrote:

> Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a play-ground. . . . We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.

When Israel was about to enter the promised land, God, through Joshua (1:6-8), told them to be “careful to do according to all the law that Moses my servant commanded. Do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left.” It sounds so restrictive. But if they obeyed, God promised joy; they would be “prosperous” and “have good success.” The author of Psalm 119 speaks repeatedly of delight and joy that the law brings.

> Lead me in the path of your commandments,  
> for I delight in it. (vs. 35)  
> Your precepts are my heritage forever,  
> for they are the joy of my heart. (vs.111)

In [a recent article](https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/04/100676/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in “Public Discourse” titled “Embrace the Limit: And the Limit Shall Set You Free” (April 7, 2026), Marianna Orlandi gave several examples of “limits that are far from restraints to our happiness.” Among them is language.

Being bound by an alphabet and a common language, one we did not invent but inherited, we can communicate and learn, including from our past. We can ask for help and laugh at someone’s jokes, we can sing, scream, and pray. But for all this to happen, there are rules to follow and grammar to learn.

Or take the arts for example. Nowadays there is widespread belief that great art results from unbounded expression. Edgy and transgressive are popular terms of choice. In James Joyce’s *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*, Stephen Daedalus, the protagonist, when he announces that he has decided to be an artist, says, “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church.” Quite to the contrary, George Herbert—no small artist—wrote, in wonderful “bounded” poetry, of his rebellion, only to be called up short when he “heard one calling, *Child*.”

> I struck the board, and cried, No more.  
> I will abroad.  
> What? shall I ever sigh and pine?  
> My lines and life are free; free as the road,  
> Loose as the wind, as large as store.  
> Shall I be still in suit? (“The Collar,” ll. 1-6)  
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  
> Forsake thy cage,  
> Thy rope of sands,  
> Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee  
> Good cable, to enforce and draw,  
> And be thy law,  
> While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.  
> Away; take heed:  
> I will abroad. (ll. 21-28)  
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  
> But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild  
> At every word,  
> Me thoughts I heard one calling, *Child:*  
> And I replied, *My Lord*. (ll. 33-36)

In *Orthodoxy* Chesterton countered the myth of artistic freedom with characteristic bluntness. “It is impossible,” he wrote, “to be an artist and not care for limits. Art is limitation.” Great artists agree. Shakespeare’s encomium on boundaries in *Troilus* begins with an example from music: 

> Take but degree away, untune that string,   
> And, hark, what discord follows!

Orchestra players know that full well! Good composers know it too. Igor Stravinsky, perhaps the finest composer of the previous century, wrote in his *Poetics of Music*: “The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free.” He went on to say: 

> My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit. 

Christopher Hoyt, in [a recent article](https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=39-01-056-c&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in *Touchstone* (Jan./Feb. 2026), describes the [*Miserere nostri*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5W67uBRZCo&list=RD-5W67uBRZCo&start%5Fradio=1&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) by a 16th-century composer, Thomas Tallis. It is a work in which the composer surrounded himself with obstacles and imposed many constraints. It is scored for seven voices. The two soprano parts are in a strict canon (rule, law) in which the second voice imitates the first exactly, as in a round. At the same time the alto begins another melody which turns out to be the lead voice of another canon. This one, called a mensuration canon, is in four parts. The lead voice, alto, is imitated by tenor 1 in notes eight times longer! Basses 1 and 2 also sing the alto’s melody, also in proportionally longer lengths. Bass 1 sings the notes four times longer while bass 2 sings them twice as long. Furthermore both basses sing the alto’s melody inverted—up-side-down! And it all fits and produces a thing of ethereal beauty. Hoyt comments:

> In this way, composing musical counterpoint is often more discovery than invention. The composer is not so much creating something as *finding* it. He is solving an intricate puzzle, and in the process, uncovering a pattern that God has embedded in the natural order.

He concludes:

> Tallis’s counterpoint turns a listener away from himself and toward the timeless serenity of measure and proportion, toward the unfailing order of the stars in their dance, toward the song of a harmonious universe, and ultimately toward the divine Maker.

Hearing music as “serenity of measure and proportion” and the “order of the stars in their dance” calls to mind what Martin Luther wrote about music in his preface to a collection of Latin motets by early Renaissance composers. That collection was aptly called *Symphoniae jocundae*—pieces that “sound together joyfully.” At the climax of an encomium in praise of music, Luther described a prevalent type of music in which the tenor carries the basic tune while the other voices, bound to the tenor, dance around it “in a divine roundelay.” In such music, Luther wrote, “it is possible to taste with wonder (yet not comprehend) God’s absolute and perfect wisdom in his wondrous work of music.” 

I have no doubt that Luther would agree that Bach’s music is such music. Out of his vast output, for the purposes of this article, I select [just one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJhT6zGiej8&list=RDtJhT6zGiej8&start%5Fradio=1&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of his smaller pieces for illustration—the organ chorale prelude for manuals only (no pedals) from *Clavierübung III* based on Luther’s chorale on the ten commandments, “Dies sind die heiligen zehn Gebot” (“These are the holy Ten Commandments”). In this setting Bach bound himself not only to one of the most binding musical forms, the fugue, but also to the melody of the chorale as the fugue subject. Although he could vary the chorale melody, it still had to bear an audible resemblance to the chorale. 

As if those restrictions were not enough, he set himself the additional task of filling the piece with the number ten, the symbol of the Law. He made the fugue theme ten beats long and ten half-steps in range and stated it ten times. And for good measure, he concluded the piece with a ten-beat note in the bass. Further, he chose to write the fugue in the rhythm of a gigue—yes, a jig! And a wonderfully exuberant gigue it is, literally exulting—jumping—for joy. In two minutes Bach expressed as much delight in the Law as did the author of Psalm 119\. The freedom with which this gigue, with all its restrictions, joyfully skips along is but one small testimony, among so many bigger ones in Bach’s works, to the relationship of law and boundaries to freedom and joy. It is as if he were saying with the Psalmist:

> Your statutes have been my songs  
> in the house of my sojourning. (Ps. 119:54)
### When Christoff Meets Pope Leo
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/when-christoff-meets-pope-leo/
Last updated: 2026-06-08T15:47:21.000Z
In the 1998 psychological satire *The Truman Show*, Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey) discovers his entire life has been a fabricated social experiment televised to the world. Orchestrated by a director named Christoff, Truman’s experience is situated in a highly choreographed, repetitive, and completely artificial environment. Every relationship is with a paid actor; every decision is ultimately controlled to keep Truman fearfully tied to his small town, lest he adventure too far and realize the horizon is really the wall of a painted dome. 

Such satire is an apt example of one anti-human aspect of our increasingly artificial environments. Even though Truman is unaware of the artificiality of his world, it slowly but nevertheless hinders his flourishing as a human being. He begins exhibiting a disturbing dissonance as he grinds against his simulated existence.

This is the same danger situated as the philosophical spine through [Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical](https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), *Magnifica Humanitas.* Throughout his robust treatment of humanity’s nature, uses and concerns over AI, and a charge to Christ followers to rebuild together is this implicit reality: that humanity––being made in the image of God––has a unique means of flourishing in this life, and that our technology has a great potential to mislead us in the very ways we seek to flourish. That is, our various technologies are increasingly offering a *manufactured resonance*. 

## **Resonance as Flourishing**

In his 2019 book, *Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World*, sociologist Hartmut Rosa argues that resonance is foundational to human happiness and flourishing. Rosa defines resonance as a responsive and mutually transformative relationship between subjects––to resonate is to be in [right relationship with others and the world](https://mereorthodoxy.com/resonance-and-the-psalms/). 

While such resonance according to Rosa is not exclusive to people of religious faith, the Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck argues that no one can resonate with the world unless a feeling for its beauty is placed in their heart by God. Resonance––genuine flourishing––happens when we are in conversation with the created order. Vigen Guroian poetically affirms that, “man is a microcosm in whose flesh resonates and reverberates the pulse of the whole creation.” Biblically speaking then, we can think of resonance as the very vibrations of shalom––resonance happens when we tap into what Alvin Plantinga calls the,

> rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Savior opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights. 

When we resonate with something, then, we are experiencing a tinge of shalom––of *things as they ought to be*. Understood this way, *resonance* can be yet another sense in which we flesh out biblical *blessedness*. Blessed––happy, fortunate, flourishing––is the one who *resonates* with things as they ought to be.

Such blessed flourishing is the fundamental desire of every human being. We are all after fullness of life, with varying visions of what such fullness looks like. However, this fullness is at risk in unique ways, as laid out by Pope Leo XIV:

> Today, the human desire for fullness of life is at risk of being misled by deceitful goals, such as the prospect of a technology that promises to free us from all weakness. 

While we are increasingly aware of our need for resonance in a digital age, it is the very digital environment we inhabit that threatens to cut off pathways to resonate with the world. The end of technology is control, yet nothing stifles resonance quite like control.

## **Resonant Design in AI**

One growing area in the development of algorithmic technology and artificial robotics is Resonance Theory. Not to be confused with Rosa’s theory of resonance, this is the science of statistically engineering environments for resonant responses. Essentially, machines—both algorithms and physical machines—are equipped, calibrated, and trained to mimic the stimuli most likely to trigger resonance in humans. 

In his recent book, *Superbloom*, Nicholas Carr notes how such advancements can help us understand how mindless machines can command so much of our attention––they are calibrated to analyze our behavioral variables and adjust in ways that foster resonance. This is uniquely insidious, as it offers the husk of what we deeply desire––flourishing via resonance––while void of its substance.

[In a 2022 journal article from *Frontiers in Neurorobotics*](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9097027/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com#%5Fad93%5F) researchers Lomas et al. proposed that resonance can serve as a design strategy to guide human relationships with artificial agents. They argue that resonance is a physical mechanism that can not only be measured, but *harnessed*. Their research is based on identifying “external oscillations”––outside vibrations––that align with an individual’s natural vibrations, thus likely causing “synchronization and amplification effects.” In layman’s terms: they identify stimuli that are most likely to trigger meaningful attunement with humans and then design robots to engage accordingly.

The goal, says Lomas, is that perhaps “resonant robots” might dance with us, show love for us, or even offer spiritually fulfilling interactions. 

However, I believe most of us intuitively see the folly of such aspirations. This was, in fact, the downfall of Christoff’s experiment with Truman. His entire world was calibrated to create resonance––for Truman to flourish through simulated relationships and surroundings. But the artificiality of these could not sustain meaningful flourishing. The more he realized this, the more he exhibited all the symptoms of late modern life: skepticism, cynicism, agitation, depression. 

As the “Creator” of Truman’s world, Christoff wanted an authentic, unscripted human experience. However, his techniques of executing on this vision cut off the very possibility of authentic resonance he was after. 

Likewise, these researchers cite Rosa for their understanding of resonance as a physical mechanism needed for well-being, but they cut off any possibility of manufacturing such resonance by ignoring Rosa’s core tenet: *unpredictability*. 

## **The Essential Unpredictability of Resonance**

Harnessing “external oscillations” to produce resonant responses simply cannot result in meaningful transformation. Rosa takes pains to show how inherently uncontrollable resonance is! However, while unable to be manufactured, Rosa does identify what he calls “axes of resonance”––pathways where resonant encounters are *more likely* to occur. For Rosa, this is not an exercise in *harnessing* an external force to behave synchronistically. Rather, it is a matter of placing oneself *in the way of* unpredictable vibrations.

Rosa’s three primary axes are:

1. Meaning — art, history, religion
2. Relationships — family and friendships
3. Objects — food, music, work

Each of these, Rosa shows, are inherently uncontrollable. They uncover in unique and unpredictable ways various frictions, limitations, and weaknesses. These are the paths to flourishing.

Pope Leo XIV agrees:

> Everything that appears as a “limit” — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not *despite* limitations, but often *through* them. The light of faith offers a perspective on reality that helps us recognize what we call the “contingency” of the things of this world.

Limitation is one shade of unpredictability. That is, our initial experience with what is uncontrollable is fundamentally limiting. But limitation––unpredictability––is prerequisite for flourishing. Lomas’ attempts to design, measure, and harness are antithetical to this. Such attempts, by nature, remove the unpredictability needed for resonance. Lomas admits the difficulty of controlling the uncontrollable:

> Part of the challenge of operationalizing human resonance from a brain-to-stimuli correlation measure comes from the challenge of decoding how a stimulus produces a brain response.

In other words, the challenge of making resonance operational is due to the fact that it is deeply unpredictable! 

For Rosa, this unpredictability of resonance lies in it being between two *subjects*, each with distinct otherness. A robot designed to analyze behavior and synchronize oscillations cannot meaningfully be understood as a *subject*. Truman only truly resonates with a woman *outside* of the simulation—a subject whose unpredictability gets her removed from the experiment.

Pope Leo likewise notes:

> So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean… They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.

Thus, a “resonant robot” is an ontological oxymoron. The reason resonance “works” is because a *personal* Creator has woven it into the fabric of his creation. This personal Creator then entered into his creation as the *Subject*, Jesus Christ. Therefore, to resonate with others and the world is to be aligned with the oscillations of his general revelation in creation, which is able to result in common grace flourishing. On the other hand, true flourishing––shalom in the fullest sense––is an encounter with the Spirit-spoken oscillations of his special revelation in Scripture, himself being its fulfillment. Thus, resonance resulting in genuine human flourishing can only result from an encounter with the otherness of the Divine Subject, either in his creation or in his person. 

No matter how advanced AI’s resonant-mimicking capabilities become, it simply does not have the ontological ability for this resonance. Further, attempts to manufacture such resonance with humans will stifle the very ability to flourish it seeks to simulate. 

## **Keeping the Axes Clear**

To experience true resonance in the way Rosa means it, it is important that we keep the three axes he describes relatively clear of technological interference or planning. Because the use of AI is such a unique and complex issue, there will be as many specific uses and philosophical approaches as there are individuals. However, we can at least start with Rosa’s identified axes—pathways to—resonance. 

Rather than offer practical guidance (which too will be unique and numerous) we can consider questions that will encourage keeping these axes “clear” of too much dependence on AI:

### **Axis of Meaning**:

- How has my knowledge of or familiarity with a topic or idea deepened recently?
- How have I experienced or pursued beauty recently?

### **Axis of Relationships**:

- What was the most meaningful face-to-face conversation I had recently? How would I describe that person's voice––their tone, inflection?
- How could I make one person feel known and loved?

### **Axis of Objects**:

- What’s the last *thing* that made me pause (Tree, sunset, meal)? Can I describe it in detail?
- What song, image, poem do I keep coming back to? Why is it capturing my attention?

\*\*\*

The hope of the Christian faith is shalom—resonance in the fullest sense, in a new heaven and new earth in right relationship with our risen Lord. This is the fullest vision of what it means to be human. 

Regardless of our convictions on AI, we must resist overtly anti-human outcomes. Using AI responsibly is not anti-human; AI using our behavioral variables to manufacture flourishing *is* anti-human. May we seek flourishing along the paths given to us by God, and seek it not alongside AI servants but alongside *the* Subject, Jesus Christ.
### Hospitality, Desecration, Politics: A Review of Carl Trueman's 'The Desecration of Man'
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/hospitality-desecration-politics-a-review-of-carl-truemans-the-desecration-of-man/
Last updated: 2026-06-11T01:34:22.000Z
***The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity.* Carl Trueman. Sentinel Press, April 2026\. $29, 256 pp.**

\-

Over a century ago, Max Weber characterized modernity as a period of disenchantment, inspired by Frederich Schiller's poem, *Die Götter Griechenlands*, where lamentation is raised for the disappearance of supernatural creatures and the world of divine significance:

> But lost and never to return again  
> Is all that I had known of these fair worlds,  
> No more can one this earthly bliss regain—  
> Gone is all which breathed life into these words.

The absence, even forceful eviction, of the weird and the divine, Weber's *Entzauberung*, has haunted the pages of criticism of modern times ever since. In Weber's hands, disenchantment was a way of capturing the rationalizing dispensation which loomed over modern society. The arenas of politics, philosophy, and science had sloughed off the past's deposit of mysterious rites, folk tales, and strange beliefs, and replaced them with measurable, quantifiable systems. There was nothing else to uncover beneath dead matter. Divine nature, if it was real, was not present, and if present, not felt. Its many deputies, emissaries, and diminutive expressions -- influential planets, fairy, angelic and diabolic powers -- had gone out of sight, out of mind, out of belief.

Drawing on Weber, Charles Taylor would later give students of modernity an array of tools for reflecting upon the nature and effects of disenchantment in our secular age. Reading him more than a decade ago, I found his distinction between the porous and buffered self especially illuminating, where the porous person believes there are powers in the world capable of entering in and influencing his life, while the buffered self imagines a barrier between himself and the exterior world, granting each individual a walled-off space for self-determination.

For all its explanatory power, disenchantment does not capture our modern crisis without remainder. Nor did figures like Charles Taylor or others imagine it was so. As a way to capture the malaise of a materialist world, the spiritual void left over when our tie with the transcendent was cut, disenchantment provides a needful part of a more complex account.

All the same, there are domains where disenchantment may be unfit for, perhaps even a distraction from, a far more pressing crisis than belief in the mysterious. We need more than one framework to diagnose the modern crisis. Is it enough to say that man has been disenchanted? Or is something else also at work?

This is where Carl Trueman, in his new book *The Desecration of Man*, proposes the adoption of a different framework. In the case of anthropology -- what it means to be human -- he calls for the use of more serious terms. The term Trueman points us toward is desecration.

As Trueman admits, "Desecration is a strong word, stronger than others that have been used to describe the modern world such as disenchantment." He argues on two points that the word is nonetheless more fitting. First, it captures an essential quality of those things which have fallen victim to modernity's nihilism and wanton disfigurement. He primarily focuses on how we have depreciated our human nature. Desecration better names what sacrality and holiness has suffered than disenchantment does. Humans are no longer seen as exceptional, unique creatures, placed higher than the animals and lower than the angels. Our persons and our bodies have been reduced to objects. How we choose to live our lives, how we choose to treat our *selves*, what counts as our final end have all turned into an array of options and preferences provided by technological research and legal license. 

With an eye for these consequences, Trueman surveys such topics as sexual ethics, abortion, IVF, surrogacy, and man's war against mortality. In every case, Trueman points out that if our souls and bodies are in fact sacred gifts given into our care by God, there are ways in which their treatment can only be described with the same language we would use for the act of burning down a church, violating the altar, or destroying a relic.

The analogy between body and building of course harkens back to Paul's reminder to the church in Corinth, that the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, and we ought not to defile it with sin. With such a governing image, one can see more clearly how disenchantment's demystification gives way to the violence of desecration. Disenchantment may have provided the conditions, but desecration best captures the results.

There is another aspect of modernity's rejection of human nature which the idea of desecration captures more strikingly than disenchantment. Those who commit acts of desecration understand their behavior as a form of trespassing upon sacred ground. There is a rush and a thrill in the act of violating the sacred. While unintentional acts of desecration are certainly possible, Trueman notes, "the person who topples the gravestone or smashes the windows of a house of worship knows what they are doing: They are striking at the heart of what the religious community considers most sacred" (16). Trueman observes the common experience of the violators: desecration is exhilarating. "The sheer delight taken by many in toppling the moral codes of the past cannot be explained simply by the loss of an enchanted world. … There is a delight being taken in destruction" (21).

"Put provocatively, \[what is happening to man\] is not disenchantment. The death of God in modernity has led to the desecration of man. And many of us seem to find that exciting" (21).

The unsettling lens of desecration is what gives new force to the litany of biological and technological challenges which are otherwise familiar topics of concern. Addressing technological advancements, the ethical and legal battles, the surge of research and funding from institutions and governments, and our expanding powers of manipulation in areas of sexuality, fertility, and life-extension, Trueman's analysis is rich in both research and reflection. Many cases are themselves the best warrant for desecration as the more fitting term. Certainly the awful threat of such trends as womb surrogacy, artificial wombs, or the eugenic potential in IVF companies [such as Orchid](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/07/opinion/genetics-children-noor-siddiqui.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) strike the moral imagination no less than the violation of an altar in one's local parish.

In one way, Trueman is arguing that we place at the center what has been on the periphery of our analyses. Scientific advancements, which one might have judged as a network of neutral methods employed at times for horrifying goals, are colored red from the moment the idea of such research enters into the minds of scientists. The outcome is not disbelief in the divine but the destruction of its embodiment. The excitement surrounding scientific and technological progress echoes the cries of revolutionaries. The vapor from heating vents atop an artificial-womb research lab blends with the smoke rising from a smoldering church.

Desecration requires nothing less than a wholistic response, and Trueman argues for three elements which must remain integrated with one another for Christians truly to survive and flourish in an age where the holiness of embodied souls is under threat. Christians must adopt orthodox belief, right worship, and proper practice, a trio he summarizes as creed, cult, and code. Adopting one or two and leaving the others will not do. 

He points out the trend among some intellectuals to defend the cultural effects of Christianity or its aesthetic beauty – without submitting to the wholistic Christian way of life. Richard Dawkins's praise for the cultural benefits of Christianity falls flat, for those effects are nourished by genuine, not selective, belief. "The problem is not solved," writes Trueman, "by living *as if* Christianity were true" (187). Beliefs based on mere benefit, he argues, amount to a Christian nihilism. The beliefs are made subject to our will, to the condition that they be useful for us. The irony, as Trueman points out, is that Christianity can be misunderstood as merely useful because of the profound belief of those who came before us, who surrendered themselves to the faith and shared with their children and grandchildren the harvest of their simple submission. Belief must be placed into our hearts and minds, our imaginations and actions. Better perhaps to say, *we* must be taken into it. 

"The truth of Christianity," he writes, "must reshape our intuitions so that our moral limits, or obligations, and our ends dictate how we relate to our bodies, our loved ones, our neighbors, our communities, and the world around us, near and far" (187).

The quiet obedience to the creed, cult, and code of Christianity points us to our larger aim: we must reconsecrate the world. This comes in many forms, and Trueman gives a series of examples, all organized into instances of creed, cult, or code. We must train our beliefs by reading and understanding the Genesis story, through catechisms asking the believer what is the end of man; our worship should emphasize prayer, song, reciting and speaking with each other. Our rites must re-member us with our bodies. We must be a cult of nativity and funeral. Our buildings must be restored as venerable places, and in this way will we see more easily the respect owed to the temples of our bodies.

Last, Trueman turns to code, the way in which our beliefs and worship is carried into the wider world through moral habits. As Trueman sees it, this must begin through Christian hospitality and kindness. As he turns to offering a path forward, he writes, "The battle against desecration does not begin so much with boycotts of blasphemous arts as with acts of human kindness extended to neighbors" (207). A time of desecration is sure to be full of souls neglected and mistreated by systematic sacrilege: The elderly, for whom assisted suicide is offered at state expense. The sickly and malformed, for whom early scanning might have saved the soul from the pain of existence. The infants born from an artificial sack swirling with industrial fluids. Children whose parentage is either anonymous or mechanically fabricated. The mothers whose babies were handed over to others through a moneyed transaction. These, too, must be shown their humanity, and invited into places of comfort and holiness.

These strangers must be welcomed in. Trueman reflects on the passage in Deuteronomy where the Israelites are enjoined to welcome in the stranger, as they too were strangers once. The relevant part reads, "for the Lord, your God ... executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt." Thus, Trueman argues, is desecration challenged: by the loving invitation into a consecrated space filled with a consecrating people: a friend to church, the lonely to a conversation, the lost to a home.

Trueman has paved for each of us a "little way" to walk in. Instead of chasing the elusive and perhaps undesirable qualities of enchantment, persons, families, churches, and communities are oriented toward a concrete vision of reconsecration, to love the human in a hostile world.

This, however, is not the end of the story. Trueman proposes the turn from enchantment toward consecration in the context of modernity's abuse of human nature and the physical distortion of human bodies. This is a fitting place for its introduction, yet the language of consecration invites wider application. After all, surely desecration is not found solely in the treatment of our bodies, but can be found throughout society. What does it look like to reconsecrate an economy? What about a reconsecration in education? What does political reconsecration demand?

Seeing how many forms of desecration have invaded not only technological or scientific development but a richer tapestry of bonds and relationships between souls, such questions linger after reading Trueman's account. They promise to bear fruit for Trueman and others who investigate them.

Trueman, however, expresses some hesitancy. Near the end, Trueman gestures toward some of the political consequences, by way of a warning against Christian nationalism. "Of course, the wannabe Christian warlords who talk tough online will dismiss this as pietism or ineffectual intellectual idealism. But that is only because they want power and they want it next week." However true this may be -- it seems hard at times to pin down what Christian nationalism is, much like enchantment -- Trueman frames his caution in terms of acting too quickly in too short a period of time. He argues that the Christian nationalists are fantasists, since they imagine a recovery of Christendom in the short- or medium-term. "Christianity is too weak and too fragmented to be a significant ecclesiastical or political force in the world at large." Reconsecration is a long-term vision, whereas many a political movement seems to overextend itself. The local church may have the resources to effect their neighborhood, county, or city in profound ways, but nothing at the scale of organizing a nation.

All the same, this caution against fantasies of imminent political change does not extend at least to intellectual reflection. If desecration is indeed definitive of our time, this seems all the warrant one needs to consider the effects of desecration on, say, politics, even while Christian traditions and communities lack the integrity and strength to effect change. Even if prudence discourages us against incorporating consecration into political action, it seems that consecration would provide a clear and deep source for consideration, *especially* in the sphere of politics. This can, and I think should, be explored alongside our daily practice of hospitality. We needn't wait for, or indeed plan for, political influence before we see how consecration shapes our concepts of the political, the economic, or the technological. Hospitality already stands within a political philosophy, with implications for many areas of life. 

There is another influence upon our notion of political consecration, however, which offers ample material for thought. The history of the Church, in Europe especially, is bound up with that of Christendom, a period in time when the institutions of palace, cathedral, and university were deeply shaped by Christian virtues, and vices. The period between the 9th and 14th centuries is an unsettling time to look into, full as they are with creeds, cults, and codes that disturb our modern predilections. In the Middle Ages, there were seasons of stability and cycles of warfare. Scandals and superstitions and saints abounded. People walked through the mud; Crusaders had blood on their hands, yet consecration was in the air. Not that consecration is peculiar to an era of fiefdoms and holy empires. Throughout its history, Christianity consecrated whatever and whomever it touched. What could we learn from past eras of Christian presence regarding what reconsecration looks like?

As Trueman pointed out, desecration is a strong word. He might also have called it a perilous word. Unlike disenchantment, it has the power, once deeply felt, to move people to action. His call for hospitality seems laudable, but the term implies more than an invitation to the stranger. Desecration is not only something, at least historically, that people have rescued others *from*, but have defended themselves and others *against*. This seems to be the challenge of the term which Trueman has chosen. It carries within it more than what Trueman attends to. I might agree that Christian response to desecration does not begin with boycotting art, but surely it includes it. Does it entail more than boycotts?

Desecration demands of us a great deal of wisdom to handle, but if Trueman is correct, handle it we must. He is to be thanked for taking the first step in turning our attention in its direction. As Christians and other believers ponder its significance, a rich and sober conversation awaits our minds and hearts and hands.
### How My Family Uses Yoto to Teach Our Kids the Faith
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-my-family-uses-yoto-to-teach-our-kids-the-faith/
Last updated: 2026-07-31T17:54:24.000Z
My family recently bought a Yoto for our son’s birthday. Some of our friends mentioned enjoying it for their kids, and it had come recommended elsewhere (including the Mere O Discord server). Yoto has a great library of short stories, songs, and audiobooks for listeners of all ages. 

As part of its offering, Yoto also sells ‘Make Your Own’ cards. These cards can be loaded with up to 99 tracks of audio. That’s where I want to direct my attention in this piece–Christian families will be greatly helped by this little device for its simple and convenient opportunity to help conduct catechesis. (*This post is not sponsored by Yoto nor am I receiving any commissions from them.*)

## Why the Yoto?

Before I share my process, let me answer a preliminary question for those unfamiliar with the Yoto. Why bother with it? What’s the difference between it and, say, playing an audiobook or a podcast on Spotify with your phone?

From my experience and understanding, the Yoto is different and better because of how differently it presents to parents and kids. To parents, it’s obviously a digital technology–WiFi enabled, uses NFC cards, requires phones to connect, offers a subscription with streaming options, and is mostly controlled via mobile application. But for kids, it’s an analog experience. To my son, the Yoto is not Mom or Dad’s phone, he can only push three buttons on it, there’s no touch screen or moving pictures, he has to put a card in the slot for it to play music or stories, and he can carry it around (unlike Mom and Dad’s phones). The simplicity of the Yoto as a kind of alternative neo-analog device is exactly why we enjoy it so much. 

Anyone raising kids in the Year of Our Lord 2026 is doing so in the shadow of harmful digital technology. As we try our best to raise our kids, it’s become increasingly clear that part of our task is to strive toward a generational weaning from our dependency on mobile devices. Any tool or feature we can take away from the iPhone is, for us, a win. With the Yoto, my wife and I reap the benefits of the convenience of digital technology (to upload custom playlists and adjust settings, for example) while our son reaps the benefits of it as an “analog” medium. And the medium, as they say, is the message.

Given that, here’s my recommendation: if you have young kids, get the Yoto. It’s better than an iPad because it requires attentive listening without an addictive screen. It’s intuitive, easy for kids to use, and can be set up in the background for kids to listen to. Kids can stream the Yoto Daily Podcast, play a music card, or listen to an audiobook–it’s great. 

But for the Christian family, here’s the cherry on top: This is a prime opportunity to set a vision for discipleship in your home and to carry it out. 

## My Family’s Process 

### Buy a Yoto.

We started by purchasing a Yoto from a nearby Target. Each Yoto comes with a Make Your Own card and this Target happened to only have Laurie Berkner song cards on the shelf, so our son started without any story cards.

### Set a vision for discipleship in your home. 

Our family has adopted a vision for discipleship in our home, thanks to many people and resources, but especially folks writing about this today like [Adam Griffin](https://www.familydiscipleship.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), [Danielle Hitchen](https://www.catechesisbooks.com/products/p/sacredseasons?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), and [Justin Whitmel Earley](https://www.habitsofthehousehold.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), among others. 

This vision is especially situated around a rhythm of three things: (1) the reading of Scripture; (2) traditional Christian catechesis through [the Apostle’s Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer](https://mereorthodoxy.com/martin-luther-rule-faith-bible/); and (3) keeping time with the church calendar. We also make a serious effort to read good literature to and with our kids, to include classics like Aesop’s Fables and Mother Goose, and relatively newer works like Curious George, Little Blue Truck, and whatever the library may have available on a given day.

### Buy books, borrow books, get creative, collect songs & stories.

The next step in our process was to gather stories and songs that we aspire to be the heart and soul of our home’s collective imagination. This is essential because it makes my wife and I the *active curators* for our children, instead of the *passive consumer* of whatever Walmart’s marketing team or Meta’s algorithm pushes. What I mean by that is, if we aren’t making an effort to pursue our vision for discipleship, especially through stories, it will be far too easy for us to simply receive what Amazon or Walmart or The Algorithm is pushing at any given time. 

In other words, we began to build a family library that is at the service of our family’s vision for discipleship. We save websites, resources, links, videos, and conference materials. We occasionally print off what we can, and put it in a place we know we will remember it. We have been blessed in that our oldest was the firstborn grandchild for both my side and my wife’s side of the family, so we have plenty of books. Our aim has been to cultivate interest, active listening, and patient attention so that we can nourish our kids’ wonder and imagination. All of that comes with reading, telling stories, and singing together.

As an example, we are now the proud owners of three entries in Lexham Press’s [*For All God’s Children Series*](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/search?series=A%20FatCat%20Book&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). These books serve as concise and easy-to-follow teachings on the Apostle’s Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer. 

### Read and sing to kids.

Naturally, after setting a vision and accumulating stories, we read and sing them to our children. On Sundays, we make a special effort to read the *For All God’s Children* series and to memorize these foundational parts of the Christian faith. As I’ve read to my kids, I’ve gotten more comfortable reading at different paces and tones that suit the book being read. It’s been especially helpful to find the places where I can pause and look over to my son and expect him to “fill in the blank.” 

### Try recording some things by yourself.

Here’s where we get into the actions that actually involve the Yoto. After nurturing some familiarity with the books we love, I have started to record myself reading them so they can be added to the Make Your Own cards. Oftentimes, I’ll also read a chapter of Scripture verbatim where I may not always do so when we tell the story. 

For example, our son loves David and Goliath (classic!), but we will typically read a condensed version of it together. For the Yoto, I recorded myself sharing a little preface about how David was anointed king just before this and so was a “secret shepherd king” that came to fight the giant, followed by a verbatim reading of 1 Samuel 17\. To close the reading, I say, “This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.” We could purchase one of the many Bible cards available in Yoto’s library, and we probably will, but these little details and repetitions are things we want to teach and put on display in our home. So we do it ourselves.

To record, I open the Yoto mobile application, go to the *Create* tab, and tap *Record*. When I’m finished, I can go to *My recordings* to change the title or listen back to each track. So far, I have kept eighteen recordings. I’ll talk about how to create a playlist and upload it to a Make Your Own card below.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/06/data-src-image-9ab3adf8-ecb2-47a9-a197-638d32ef5bc5-1.jpeg)

### Record yourself reading/singing to your kids.

Another thing I have begun to do is record myself reading while I am with my son. We’ve done this with all the *For All God’s Children* books, which is a lot of fun because Yoto offers a *Page turn chime* button that my son is always delighted to push. It’s also great fun to hear him “fill in the blank” when we’ve read together and point out the hidden cat on each page. When he listens to these recordings, he can do so with the book in his lap to follow along, or he can listen without it. The other stories I’ve recorded have been what you might call “of the oral tradition”--some that I’ve made up. These are fun to tell and listen back to because they’re spontaneous and totally unserious. In one recording, my wife accidentally interrupts by asking if I can take the trash out. In another, my son forgets I’m telling a story and asks if he needs to get in his jammies. We hear these little bloopers every time we replay the Make Your Own card, but my son still happily declares “it’s the giant gilded saber-claw crab!” at just the right time.

### Create a Yoto playlist, add tracks, and upload to the Yoto player.

To record a playlist, here’s what I do. Go to the *Create* tab and tap *Record* if you haven’t recorded anything. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/06/data-src-image-36da4936-abee-4283-8cc9-4e92d3ff6605-1.jpeg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/06/data-src-image-3a86177c-ddc7-470a-8bac-c960ac9b294f-1.png)

After you have at least one recording, go to the Library tab and tap *Make a playlist*. After adding a name and a description, you have the option to add recordings from your library, add audio files recorded elsewhere, or add a radio stream. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/06/data-src-image-1dfd888a-a59f-45ef-9c2e-a97b61b2803f-1.jpeg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/06/data-src-image-150e47f0-e779-4663-ac8d-cade57c687c3-1.png)

I’ve only ever recorded in the app and added tracks the first way. After you’ve selected the tracks you want to add, tap *Create playlist*. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/06/data-src-image-4ff30829-49af-4121-a2e9-f8c88691dd19-1.png)

By the way, it’s worth noting that you can add up to 100 tracks to a playlist. I haven’t pushed this to the limit, but one of my tracks is eighteen minutes long and there’s been no indication that tracks are limited by time. When you have a playlist, you can open it up and tap the *Link to card* button. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/06/data-src-image-73876dcb-5ec1-4182-92e0-108512bc70e7-1.jpeg)

I’ve only used the NFC option, which you can do by tapping *Use your phone*. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/06/data-src-image-2fdad9c7-7a3a-4515-9581-f6ecd08bb684-1.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/06/data-src-image-354b632f-5184-46ef-8db9-bac06f7d9bce-1.png)

All you have to do then is set your card down and tap it with your phone. When you have your playlist downloaded to your card, you can have the Yoto player download it by leaving the card in the player without any audio playing. I’ve found this process to be really easy, and there are many [how-to articles](https://us.yotoplay.com/make-your-own?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to walk you through anything you may prefer to do differently than I have.

What’s on our Make Your Own card?

1. An intro where I say hi to our son, tell him what’s on the card, and tell him I love him
2. Jack & the beanstalk
3. The hare and the tortoise (Aesop’s Fables)
4. Fighting roosters and the eagle (Aesop’s Fables)
5. Psalm 23 (Theopolis version, sung)
6. David & Goliath (1 Samuel 17, read verbatim)
7. Ten Commandments and All God’s Children
8. The Ten Commandments
9. Apostle’s Creed for All God’s Children
10. The Apostle’s Creed
11. The Lord’s Prayer for All God’s Children
12. The Lord’s Prayer
13. The boy and the red shell (a story I made up and tell to my son)

We let our son listen to the Yoto mostly at his leisure during the day. We also let him play the Make Your Own card during his nap and at bedtime because we adjusted the Yoto to turn off after it finishes all the tracks on a card. 

The repetition of the Apostle’s Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and Psalm 23 have been instrumental in our work to collectively memorize the articles of our faith and the songs of the Church. Hearing our toddler “fill in the blanks” as we recite the Creed or sing a psalm together has paid for the Yoto one hundred times over. 

It’s a joy and a privilege to stumble through the journey of raising kids, especially as we find what works and what helps. The Yoto has proved itself as a reinforcing tool for catechesis in our home. Making our own recordings forces us to recite the things we are teaching our children. Having a card with his parents’ voices helps our son to know that what he’s hearing is particular to the life of our home. 

My wife relayed a story to me that our son picked up a book at home and started “reading her the Bible” and just combined the story of David & Goliath and the Apostle’s Creed. “Giant of Gath! ..and ..and ascended into heaven…” Praise God for the gifts of repetition, imagination, and, yes even devices like the Yoto.
### The Challenge and the Hope of Magnifica Humanitas
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-challenge-and-the-hope-of-magnifica-humanitas/
Last updated: 2026-06-03T11:00:06.000Z
When Pope Leo XIV was elected in 2025, he made clear that a chief focus of his pontificate would be the rise of artificial intelligence. My ears immediately perked up, for the topic is uniquely relevant to me. I am a writer, one of the professions often thought to be most at risk from large language models. My husband, on the other hand, is an electrical engineer who currently works with LLMs for a living. 

Oh, the conversations we have had in our home! There have been points of strong disagreement where we looked at each other oddly and wondered how the other could possibly hold such erroneous underlying assumptions. There have also been points of compromise and even, dare I say it, agreement. 

When it was announced that the pope’s new encyclical, *Magnifica Humanitas*, would be dealing heavily with the issue at the center of our household discussions, we were both highly interested. This was notable, for our choices of reading material tend to differ significantly. But now I was eager to read something about AI and my husband was at least willing to read a summary of something theological. As it turned out, he watched the pope’s speech and read through multiple summaries long before I could wade through all 42,300 words of the text. 

“At least he didn’t ask ChatGPT to summarize it for him,” I reasoned, but the frustration of doing things the old fashioned way—with a printed copy that I marked up with pens in between shuttling my son to his various activities, preparing dinner, and all manner of other household tasks—was acute. Within a few hours of the encyclical’s release, the internet had read and digested it. Quotes were popping up all over social media. Long-form analyses had been posted to YouTube. Still stuck on page twenty, I had a serious case of F.O.M.O., but I told myself it was alright: sometimes family responsibilities are more important and slow ways are better. Yes, I told myself that, but it was hard to believe. When I finally read the whole encyclical, I reflected upon its contents and saw reason for both concern and hope.

The opening paragraph of *Magnifica Humanitas* reveals the themes that will dominate the encyclical. “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together,” the pope writes, setting up a contrast between the biblical examples of Babel and Jerusalem. Whereas Babel “reveals the limits of any effort that, however grandiose, arises from self-affirmation, sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing,” in Nehemiah’s Jerusalem we find “a common language—not one of uniformity, but one of communion, namely the harmony that arises when all persons assume their own role and recognize that their strength comes from the Lord.”

Having established this dichotomy, the pope continues, “Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and fraternity is made possible.” His choice of the terms dignity, justice, and fraternity reveal the three foundational principles which he will seek to uphold: 

1. human dignity derived from the *imago Dei* and in need of preservation through humanization,
2. a renewed evaluation of the demands of justice in light of the new things of history,
3. the common good as chiefly seen when we encounter one another in community.

The purpose of *Magnifica Humanitas* is neither to fully condone nor fully condemn artificial intelligence, robotics, and other developing technologies. For,

> the primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem; between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence.

## **Dignity and Humanness**

The term dignity occurs often in modern parlance, but its meaning can shift with circumstances. Nowhere is it more prevalent than in the debate over medically assisted suicide, another matter that strikes at the purpose of human life. The Catholic Church has previously spoken to that issue, and now Pope Leo XIV invites us to consider how we uphold the same principles in light of new things. “In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human.” This was my own conclusion recently upon re-reading T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men”: that I will be human if it is the last thing I do. This is a great rallying cry for our time.

The pope identifies four understandings of the word dignity. Moral dignity is “the way in which a person directs his or her choices and actions.” This is what we mean when we say someone acts in a dignified manner. Social dignity indicates “a person’s living conditions and the concrete respect received from society.” This is part of what is meant when people speak of dying with dignity. Existential dignity is “the way in which a person perceives his or her own worth and the value of life” and is therefore a matter of subjective self-analysis. Ontological dignity, on the other hand, is “the dignity that belongs to every human being simply by virtue of existing, of having been willed, created and loved by God.” It is therefore supremely objective.

This distinction is important, as when he uses the word dignity throughout the encyclical, the pope is referring to ontological dignity: the significance that a human being has as the result of bearing the *imago Dei*. It is an inextricable part of human nature such that to speak of “dehumanization” is to speak of the denial of the *imago Dei* and an offense against humanity’s Creator. The pope writes that the gospel “provides the criteria for recognizing what humanizes or dehumanizes and what liberates or oppresses in ever-changing situations,” precisely because it is in God’s Word and his actions in history that the true dignity and *telos* of humanity is revealed. (Some may object to the way he uses the term gospel here, but the general point holds.)

Pope Leo sees many ways in which emerging technologies are dehumanizing us, from algorithms viewing individuals as a data set rather than a person, to our relentless efforts to remove any limitations upon our nature, to the quest for endless knowledge without growth in wisdom. But of chief concern to the pope is the ideology “that suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective.” According to this perspective, human beings are “reduced to a means of achieving results, a resource to be used and exploited, and are no longer recognized as a proper end in themselves who should never be instrumentalized.”

It is the Church’s job to remind the world “that true fulfilment is not achieved by eliminating weakness but through harmonious growth,” as opposed to the technocratic or post-humanist mentality which asserts that the human person is “an object to be manipulated or a resource to be optimized, removing all safeguards against the unchecked pursuit of profit.” 

Here the chief fear of many regarding artificial intelligence—that it will put them out of a job—is not merely an economic concern but one of human nature itself, for “work is not simply an instrument; it expresses and enhances the dignity of our lives. It is a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfilment.”

Given these potential threats to human dignity, the pope uses what has proved to be a headline friendly turn of phrase, stating that artificial intelligence must be “disarmed.” But many who see that word out of context will not understand his intent, for he clarifies, “To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussions and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life.” 

This is one of many occasions on which the pope’s themes overlap and converge, for disarming artificial intelligence is not just a matter of preventing dehumanization and upholding dignity. As his clarifying comments show with their emphasis on open access and pluralized control, disarming artificial intelligence is equally a matter of justice.

## **Justice**

When Robert Prevost was selected as the latest bishop of Rome, there was considerable speculation over whether he would be as “woke” as Pope Francis. As it turns out, Pope Leo XIV holds to a similar understanding of justice as Francis, but one that is equally similar to the tradition of every pope going back to his namesake Leo XIII. Simply to proclaim the traditional social doctrine of the Catholic Church is, for some, a step into wokeness. But in *Magnifica Humanitas*, the present pope argues that the Church’s understanding of justice is as old as Scripture itself.

“Technology has the power to heal, connect, educate, and protect our common home; but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice,” he warns, appealing to the Church’s understanding of the ultimate destination of goods to argue for equal access to the benefits of artificial intelligence. So far, so basic. But he goes on to use a term often shunned in conservative theological circles: social justice.

“The idea of ‘social justice’ helps us recognize that injustices do not arise solely from the wrong choices of individuals, but also from structures, mechanisms and economic and cultural systems that produce inequality almost automatically,” the pope writes. Anticipating potential objections to the language of systems, he further insists, “To think that new technologies will automatically benefit everyone is to ignore the evidence. Unless transformations at the design stage prioritize the prevention of new and further disparities, technological progress will inevitably produce structural inequalities.” Perhaps we can put him down as a skeptic about trickle-down economics.

The pope would have us look to the example of our Lord to find the rationale for pursuing social justice. “For the Christian community, social justice is a concrete way of following Jesus and remaining faithful to the Gospel,” he says, adding that Christ “teaches us that justice is born from, and fulfilled in, fraternity, because the way we approach and relate to the least among us becomes, in concrete terms, the measure of our relationship with God and with our brothers and sisters.”

This discussion about the just use of technology makes me think of President Trump’s second inauguration in the Capitol rotunda, which was perhaps most memorable for the lineup of tech titans standing behind him. There in a row stood Elon Musk (owner of X and founder of Tesla and Space X), Sundar Pichai (CEO of Google), Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon and founder and owner of Blue Origin), and Mark Zuckerberg (founder and owner of Facebook/Meta). Tim Cook (CEO of Apple) stood further away. I could not help wondering if the man being sworn in as president would have as much power over American lives as the men standing behind him. 

The pope evidently shares my thoughts and views the situation as one of potentially great injustice. “When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted forms of development that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities.” Perhaps worse still are decisions made not by humans at all, but algorithms. Choices involving “employment, credit, access to public services or even a person’s reputation” are now handled by “automated systems that do not know ‘compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and above all, the hope that people are able to change,’ and can therefore give rise to new forms of exclusion.”

In one of the passages that has drawn significant attention on social media, the pope expresses concern about the way justice is currently perceived in relation to warfare. “Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated.” 

The phrase “Pope Leo calls Just War Theory outdated!” has been making the rounds, but it is misleading. For the pope is not arguing here for more warfare, but less. “Humanity possesses far more effective and capable tools for promoting human life and resolving conflicts, such as dialogue, diplomacy, and forgiveness. The use of force, violence, and weapons reflects a relational poverty that always has disastrous consequences for civilian populations.” This is an acknowledgment that the realities of modern warfare could not have been anticipated by St. Augustine of Hippo, and therefore we need to find ways of extending the same principles to new things.

When tech companies consider only their profit margin while deciding who to hire and fire or when countries pour public money into expensive weapons systems rather than social welfare programs, it amounts to a grave injustice. But fears of losing out on the battlefield or in the marketplace are leading to the rapid expansion of many AI programs without taking time to properly evaluate safeguards. 

This is what the pope calls a “globalized technocratic paradigm,” and it is used to justify all manner of injustices. But injustice could also occur if we fail to make appropriate use of technology to reduce human suffering. He tells us that “the true alternative is not between enthusiasm and fear, but between two paths of development: a progress that serves individuals and peoples, or a progress that subjects them to the mentality of power.”

It is this relationship between the individual and the communal that constitutes the pope’s final major theme.

## **Community and the Common Good**

Pope Leo writes in his encyclical that “when the economy turns against the person or science oversteps the limits of its competence, the Church—together with other Christian denominations and believers of other religions—must make her voice heard, not in order to dominate, but to promote communion.” This word communion holds an important place both in Scripture and in the mind of the pope. He urges us to be “builders of communion, rather than architects of Babel. We are to be servants of the coming Kingdom, instead of lords of towers destined for ruin.”

Communion is linked to two of the key principles of Catholic social doctrine: subsidiarity and solidarity. According to the pope, subsidiarity means that “whatever can be carried out by individuals, families, intermediary organizations and local communities should not be carried out by higher-level authorities,” whereas solidarity is “the concrete recognition that the future of each individual is connected to the future of all.” 

Here we see a two-part recognition of the role of community and the fact that humans are communal beings. Government has its place in providing social care, but this does not remove the primary duty of the local community, e.g. family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, and co-religionists. Neither should any person think themselves totally independent, without duties to their neighbors or reliance upon the products of their neighbors’ labor.

“The digital culture multiplies connections and offers new opportunities for interaction; yet, the human heart retains an irrevocable need for genuine closeness,” the pope stresses, speaking perhaps to what is often termed the loneliness epidemic. He argues that “what saves humanity is not enhanced self-sufficiency, but a relationship that liberates, a communion that transforms.” This is true not only in terms of human relations, but also to our ultimate redemption through the Son of God who came to dwell with us. In the light of the Incarnation, we see the true *telos* of humanity as communion with our neighbors and with God himself.

Large language models, on the other hand, “do not build genuine relationships, but only their appearance.” This is not to say that they have no positive role to play, but the *telos* of artificial intelligence must be the betterment of humanity, not its domination. We must not lose sight of what makes humans human. “We can embrace the technological progress that alleviates suffering and unlocks new possibilities, provided we do not abandon the very essence of our humanity, namely the capacity for relationship and love.”

The rise of globalization in the past century means that “the common good is taking on an increasingly universal dimension, with rights and duties concerning the entire human family.” We must therefore avoid insular thinking that shrinks community down to those who are exactly like us, expanding our notion of community to include all who are made in God’s image. “This is the guiding principle for technological processes: it is not enough for artificial intelligence to make us more efficient or connected; it must also serve to build a universal human family, with shared rights and duties, where digital proximity becomes a real opportunity for encounter and mutual care.”

This leads into the pope’s consideration of our present geopolitical moment, in which great powers are increasingly abandoning diplomacy in favor of military action. The pope laments that “rather than automatically generating unity and peace, globalization has provoked fundamentalist, identity-based and nationalistic reactions.” This results in a world where international relations are characterized by distrust. 

Multilateralism has led not to greater balance and harmony, but a more fractured communion. He urges us to welcome the possibility of encounter with those unlike ourselves: to hear them and know them as precious creations of God. “For if we experience authentic encounters with others, with those who are different, strangers and migrants, it becomes much more difficult even to imagine war.”

These days, it is far easier to imagine a world with unending war than one where it never begins. Building what the pope envisions will therefore require something else: genuine hope.

## **Hope**

In the traditional Christian understanding, hope is one of the three theological virtues, relying on its sister virtues of faith and love. It also supports and draws from the cardinal virtues of justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude. Disconnected from these other virtues, hope becomes unworthy of the name, but when they are all brought together, it is strengthened into something that can bear the weight of our anxieties. The pope assures us, “In fact, peace is neither a naïve hope nor merely the absence of war; instead, it is always possible as the fruit of justice and charity.”

The hope of a Christian is based on the Incarnation of Christ, in which he redeemed us and through which he will bring us to life everlasting. The pope writes, “We view history in the light of the crucified and risen Lord, to whom the Father has given ‘all authority in heaven and on earth’ (Mt 28:18). We do not consider the present as a predetermined fate, but an opportunity for personal and collective conversion.” The power of Christ’s kingdom is like a mustard seed that grows to become a great tree. “While the tumult of confusion is all around us, goodness grows silently from the earth.”

This means that it is not up to us to save the whole world by ourselves. “The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization.” In our limited areas of personal influence, “we must choose whether to fuel the mentality of force (even if only through indifference, cynicism, lies or hatred), or to preserve the mindset of peace (with truth, moderation, closeness and care).”

As a believer in the doctrine of total depravity and a long observer of the evils of this world, it is easy for me to fall into the trap of thinking that things will always get worse, people will always choose evil over good, and we will not have peace before Christ’s return. But the pope rightly reminds us that, “History does not appear solely as a record of human violence, but also as evidence that humanity is capable of creating institutions that protect our shared life.” I must remember this, or I will be tempted to deny the goodness of God and the possibility of redemption for myself and my fellow humans. 

In one of the most beautiful passages in *Magnifica Humanitas*, the pope touches upon our resurrection hope in a rapidly changing world.

> No computational system, however sophisticated, can create a heart that gives itself, or a conscience that discerns good from evil. Even when machines excel in efficiency, a human face that asks to be gazed upon remains the center of our history. This human face is the fullness toward which history is moving. It is the mystery of ‘recapitulation’: the certainty that the Father has decreed to bring all things, those in heaven and those on earth, back to Christ, the one Head (cf. Eph 1:10) In this plan, nothing will be lost that is authentically human. Indeed, everything will be purified and reunited in the One, who gathers every fragment of life, every tear and every authentically human achievement, rescuing them from nothingness and delivering them, redeemed, to the Father.

The call for Christians is therefore to be like Nehemiah and his fellow countrymen rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. We must not be “passive spectators of social and cultural fractures, nor mere commentators on what is crumbling.” Rather, we must “enter the construction sites of history—research laboratories, technology companies, schools, the media, institutions and local communities—in order to rebuild what has collapsed and protect what is threatened.” Because Christ has already triumphed and we know he will one day restore all things, we can do this with confidence, not fearing the changing times.

## **Encounter**

In emphasizing the need for genuine human encounter, *Magnifica Humanitas* echoes something else I have recently been reading: the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the chief theologians of Christian community. In works such as *Life Together*, Bonhoeffer stressed the importance of genuine encounter between human beings and with God himself. Without such an encounter, he argued, community cannot exist.

Therefore, when I finished reading the encyclical, it was time for an encounter: a real moment of human connection. I found it in discussing the work with my husband. I thought perhaps he would accuse the pope of overstatement in his warnings about artificial intelligence. But no, my husband agreed with the pope’s assessments, especially a paragraph that highlighted the way workers can be locked into an endless cycle of repetitive tasks, unable to keep pace with the development of AI, feeling their dignity has been eroded.

My husband confessed that much of the stress he experiences at work is because he is expected to know all there is to know about AI, but it is literally changing every day. This, he explains, is why he spends hours at night watching YouTube videos, attempting to understand the latest twists and turns of the machine. This is what raises his blood pressure when he questions what his company’s future, or indeed his own future, will be like. For just a moment, I saw the immense stress he was under as I had not before, even as I recognized his continued passion for the subject. 

I also could not help but think that in choosing the path of slow contemplation rather than rapid summary, I had honored the very intent of the pope’s encyclical. For I uphold the dignity and humanity of my disabled son when I put my work aside to care for him. I act justly when I divide my time equitably between my vocations in proportion with God’s calling. I cultivate community when I take time to talk to a friend or simply keep our house running. And when I get out of bed in the morning to serve another day, I declare my hope in the restoration of all things.

That is the challenge and the hope of *Magnifica Humanitas*. It is a message we would all do well to heed. Times change and technology changes, but Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
### Organizational competence is a way of loving neighbor.
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/organizational-competence-is-a-way-of-loving-neighbor/
Last updated: 2026-06-02T11:00:52.000Z
To begin, we need to cover two key topics: the words, behavior, and associations of Zachary Garris and the teaching record of the Presbyterian Church in America on issues of racial sin. After that, I want to move toward a broader point regarding the stewardship of our institutions, including our denominations.

## The Words, Behavior, and Associations of Zachary Garris

Rev. Zachary Garris is a teaching elder (TE) in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). Rev. Garris pastors at Bryce Avenue Presbyterian Church in White Rock, New Mexico, which is part of the Rio Grande presbytery. (Presbyteries are bodies of regional governance in presbyterian congregations, roughly equivalent to a diocese in churches that use an episcopal polity rather than presbyterian.)

In addition to his work at the church, Rev. Garris is a regular conference speaker, author, and [runs a publishing imprint](https://opencorporates.com/companies/us%5Fnm/6695310?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) called [Reformation Zion](https://www.reformationzion.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). In the past, Garris has [authored a book](https://www.reformedchristianpolitics.org/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) with the independent scholar and [ethnonationalist](https://reason.com/2023/05/13/beware-the-christian-prince/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) Stephen Wolfe and initially [accepted an offer](https://christiannationalismnotes.com/p/a-trashworld-of-schismatics-and-heretics?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to speak at a conference alongside [the anti-semitic white nationalist pastor Joel Webbon](https://wng.org/articles/old-prejudice-1764646829?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), which he later withdrew from after a number of pastors in the PCA strongly encouraged him to do so. The launch video for the event, however, [is still visible on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fCk70748hk&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and includes Garris's photo alongside the other speakers. One of the promotional graphics for the conference, created when Garris was still scheduled to speak and featuring his photo, is used as the feature image of this essay.

In his work as a publisher, Rev. Garris has published [*Assailing the Gates of Hell*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1956521089?%5Fencoding=UTF8&qid=1646149097&sr=8-1&linkCode=sl1&tag=zionpress-20&linkId=6bd58dc5c4c5569bdee47947e164e749&language=en%5FUS&ref%5F=as%5Fli%5Fss%5Ftl&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), a book by the South African Calvinist author Adi Schlebusch. Schlebusch is [a self-described kinist](https://www.pactuminstitute.com/press-statements/doug-wilson-the-pactum-institute-and-ethnic-complementarianism?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Schlebusch himself works at the Pactum Institute, a South African think tank that has in the past published [a series of essays](https://www.pactuminstitute.com/the-pactum-blog/christian-race-realism-part-1-introduction?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) by defrocked presbyterian pastor Michael Spangler on what Spangler calls "race realism." Spangler has also posted many times on social media regarding [the supremacy of the white race](https://x.com/spanglermt/status/1907079212185358762?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and has said that the Nazi treatment of the Jews was not a failure in Christian love:

> Michael Spangler explaining that he agrees with Cajus Fabricius that what the Nazis did to the Jews was not "lacking Christian love" and describes it as a "great act of Christian charity".  
>  
> "In the treatment of Jews by Germans, no violation of Christian love is to be found" [pic.twitter.com/5OrokKsPde](https://t.co/5OrokKsPde?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)
> 
> — Hitler Hated Christ (@not\_our\_guy) [August 27, 2025](https://x.com/not%5Four%5Fguy/status/1960741060625211717?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

[Spangler also argues](https://www.pactuminstitute.com/the-pactum-blog/christian-race-realism-part-3-nature?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that, "This is the secret reason violent crime rates are so high in America, and especially in the South: it’s not our guns, it’s our blacks." Wolfe [has made similar claims](https://im1776.com/2022/03/18/anarcho-tyranny/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in his own work, arguing that "blacks in America, considered as a group, are reliable sources for criminality, and their criminality increases when constraints diminish." Both Spangler and Wolfe have [also claimed](https://www.pactuminstitute.com/the-pactum-blog/christian-race-realism-part-6-application?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that interracial marriage is (or can be) sinful:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/05/FfiqdP-WIB0Y3Fc-1.jpg)

Garris's own writing also aligns with the general viewpoint of his friends and associates. For example, in 2019 Garris [wrote an essay on the southern presbyterian theologian R. L. Dabney](https://chroniclesmagazine.org/remembering-the-right/remembering-r-l-dabney/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), whose own views on race [were quite clear](https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/providence-is-no-excuse?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Writing in reply to a critic of his original piece on Dabney, [Garris said](https://chroniclesmagazine.org/polemics-exchanges/dabneys-blind-spot/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com),

> There are two issues raised in Mr. Whealton’s response. The first is whether biblical hierarchy extends to racial hierarchy. The Bible does not specifically address this. Though the Bible affirms that all humans are made in God’s image (Genesis 1:27) and that Jesus redeems people from every nation (Revelation 5:9), there is nothing in Scripture that teaches that all men are created equal.

While Garris does not explicitly say here that the white race is superior, he does possibly accept the reality of "racial hierarchy" and then goes on to note that the Bible never explicitly teaches that all men are created equal. The conclusion one would be expected to draw from the above is fairly obvious, I think, even if Garris does not explicitly spell it out.

Additionally, Garris has been published [by New Christendom Press](https://www.newchristendompress.com/fathers?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), which is operated out of Refuge Church in Ogden, UT, a non-denominational congregation which is pastored by Brian Sauve and by Eric Conn. New Christendom Press has also [published the work](https://www.newchristendompress.com/bonifaceoption?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of [the anti-semitic author Andrew Isker](https://www.newschannel5.com/news/newschannel-5-investigates/confronting-hate/men-behind-tennessees-christian-nationalist-settlement-this-country-belongs-to-jesus-not-the-jews?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Sauve and Conn have both in the past [boosted social media posts](https://x.com/blakecallens/status/1834256017112051736?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) made by the white nationalist Ethan Holden, and [appeared in a video](https://x.com/blakecallens/status/1836215043924406735?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) produced by Holden which spliced footage of Sauve, Conn, and Wolfe into a video alongside a variety of white nationalist and Nazi figures and designs. The video was sufficiently explicit and extreme that even Moscow, ID pastor Douglas Wilson, who has himself in the past [defended southern slavery](https://www.amazon.com/Southern-Slavery-Was-Douglas-Wilson/dp/188576717X?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), [expressed concern about it](https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/a-timeline-for-the-ogden-moscow-controversy.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). 

Finally, Garris [contributed a book foreword](https://www.sacrapress.com/home/A-Treatise-of-Christian-Religion-PDF-by-Thomas-Cartwright-p702542736?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to a recent volume published by Sacra Press. Sacra Press is notable because it is run by Cody Justice, who [cohosts a podcast with the aforementioned Michael Spangler](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/old-paths-podcast/id1797180585?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Sacra Press has also published volumes from [Schlebusch](https://www.sacrapress.com/home/Covenant-People-Place-Families-Communities-Nations-and-the-New-Christendom-by-Adi-Schlebusch-p799258324?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and [Spangler](https://www.sacrapress.com/home/Christian-Race-Realism-by-Michael-Spangler-p734080239?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (an adaptation of his essays on race realism for Schlebusch's Pactum Institute). Most notably, Sacra Press has published a volume by an early 20th century German Lutheran called [*Positive Christianity*](https://www.sacrapress.com/home/Positive-Christianity-in-the-Third-Reich-Including-the-28-Theses-of-the-German-Christians-and-Miscellaneous-Documents-of-Cajus-Fabricius-p744437053?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) which sought to reconcile Christianity and Nazism. This is a publisher Garris is plainly willing to be associated with.

Later this year Garris [will be speaking](https://thewarfornormal.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) at the New Christendom Press conference alongside Conn, Sauve, and Wolfe. Additionally, Garris has in the past defended chattel slavery on social media.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/05/GPTwlrFWMAAwu_L-1.png)

He has [also liked social media posts](https://x.com/elimcgowan/status/1887983153194876947?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) claiming that racism is not a sin:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/06/GjN2rAJWYAA4OI2-1.jpg)

This, then, is an overview of Garris's speech, behaviors, and associations as they relate to questions of racism, kinism, and Nazism. It is not in any way ambiguous. His record is *quite* clear. Garris has a direct commercial relationship to a self-described kinist in Schlebusch. Garris has co-authored work with an ethnonationalist in Wolfe. And we see that Garris's own commercial associates, Schlebusch and Justice, are closely tied to a self-described white supremacist and [defrocked minister](https://x.com/spanglermt/status/1778433946029600944?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

In his publishing, writing, speaking, and public associates Garris is deeply intertwined both financially and through professional connections with a network of public and avowed ethnonationalists, white supremacists, and kinist thinkers. These ties go back a number of years. To whatever degree an interrelated network or project of far right Christian kinism exists, Garris is an active associate of this movement.

## The PCA's Handling of Racism

The Presbyterian Church in America is a denomination of roughly 2,000 congregations and 400,000 members. The PCA has on at least four separate occasions taken some kind of formal action to address the sin of racism. 

In 2004, the denomination's General Assembly, the highest authority in the church, [formally adopted a pastoral letter](https://pcahistory.org/pca/studies/racism.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) addressing racial sins and the denomination's own history with racism.

In 2016, General Assembly [passed an overture](https://byfaithonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Overture-43-clean.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) which amongst other things said that the PCA resolved to,

> recognize, confess, condemn and repent of corporate and historical sins, including those committed during the Civil Rights era, and continuing racial sins of ourselves and our fathers such as the segregation of worshipers by race; the exclusion of persons from Church membership on the basis of race; the exclusion of churches, or elders, from membership in the Presbyteries on the basis of race; the teaching that the Bible sanctions racial segregation and discourages inter-racial marriage; the participation in and defense of white supremacist organizations; and the failure to live out the gospel imperative that “love does no wrong to a neighbor."

In 2018, General Assembly [received a report](https://www.mtw.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2018%5FPCAInterimReport%5FRacialReconciliation.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) on the sin of racism drafted by an ad interim committee of the church.

Finally, in 2025 [General Assembly affirmed](https://www.pcahistory.org/pca/ga/52nd%5Fpcaga%5F2025.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com),

> That the 52nd General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America does hereby join with the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church (221st General Synod) and with the Reformed Presbyterian Church in North America (193rd Synod) in condemning without distinction any theological or political teaching which posits a superiority of race or ethnic identity born of immutable human characteristics, and does call to repentance any who would promote or associate themselves with such teaching, either by commission or omission.

It also should be noted that there is a theological reason the PCA has staked out these positions. The PCA is a confessional denomination, which means that ordained leaders in the PCA take vows to uphold a certain confessional standard. In the case of the PCA, that standard is the Westminster Confession of Faith as well as the Westminster Larger and Shorter Catechisms.

One of the strengths of the PCA's confessional standards is the expansive way they treat the Ten Commandments, which is fully in keeping with the way the Reformed tradition has always understood them. Following the example of Our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount, who argued that hating our brother is a form of murder (and therefore a violation of the sixth commandment), the PCA's confessional standards adopt broad readings of each of the Ten Commandments—which you can read for yourself in [the Larger Catechism](https://thewestminsterstandard.org/westminster-larger-catechism/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com#143) particularly.

So when addressing issues of racism, the PCA has often linked sins of racism to specific violations of the Ten Commandments. In [the 2004 Letter](https://pcahistory.org/pca/studies/racism.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), for example, it argues that the sin of racism is a violation of the first, sixth, and ninth commandments in as much as racism involves having other gods before God, leads to hatred of other racial groups, and requires lying about the status and capacities of other racial groups. So the argument the PCA has made on this issue is not simply driven by 21st century egalitarian politics; it is rooted quite explicitly in our confessional standards.

Given all of this, it seems almost self-evident that Rev. Garris is in violation of the teachings of his denomination on the issue of racism. 

Even if you *only* considered his associations with Schlebusch, Wolfe, Isker, Webbon, and Spangler and set that next to the 2025 General Assembly's call to repent of "any who would promote or associate themselves" with racist teaching, Garris is in violation. He has, since the church adopted that statement last summer, co-authored a book with a man who, as noted above, says that Black people are a reliable source of criminality in the USA and who has suggested that inter-racial marriage is sinful—a position *explicitly* condemned by the PCA's own past statements on the issue. That alone seems like a quite brazen and obvious act of defiance directed at last year's General Assembly.

If you take the broader scope of Garris's work and the broader scope of what the PCA has said about race, the problems become even more apparent and undeniable.

That, of course, is why it was no surprise that Garris was brought up on charges over precisely this issue. Unfortunately, that is the last part of the story that makes sense. Because after charges were filed, the process seems to have fallen apart. Since Rio Grande Presbytery has not issued any statement at time of publication, we cannot definitively say *why* the process failed. But that it has seems difficult to deny.

To begin, it took roughly two years from the time Garris was first accused at the presbytery level to when the trial was completed. Regardless of what one thinks of the merits of the case against him, it is highly irregular to initiate a process that could lead to the revocation of a pastor's ordination credentials (and thus the loss of employment) and then leave that pastor (and his family and his church) dangling for two years. It may be the case, of course, that Garris himself contributed to the slow process—he has several cases already pending with the PCA's Standing Judicial Committee, so that may have contributed to the delay or Garris may simply have dragged his feet at certain points. We cannot say for sure unless the presbytery releases information regarding the process, which they have not done so far.

Then last week, when the trial finally took place, [the rulings](https://www.christianpost.com/news/pastor-zachary-garris-suspended-indefinitely.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) were even stranger. The presbytery exonerated him of the charge related to racism, which suggests that they either failed to do their due diligence, which is a failure of process, or that the prosecutor did not present all the relevant evidence, which is also a failure of process. 

Additionally, the presbytery found him guilty of intemperate speech, citing two tweets he sent to Dr. Anthony Bradley several years ago and which, it must be said, are relatively innocuous, particularly relative to the ways in which countless other teaching elders on all sides of the PCA have sometimes spoken of one another. Again, there may be more here than has been publicized so far—other examples of Garris's speech that the presbytery considered and caused them to make these charges. 

Yet since the presbytery has not made any public statements, we are left with a minister charged with a ninth commandment violation over what are pretty innocuous tweets, relative to how ordained ministers in the church routinely speak on social media. Not only that, but because he was formally charged and because he did not repent, [the PCA's Book of Church Order](https://www.pcaac.org/book-of-church-order/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (30-1) requires his indefinite suspension—meaning that the presbytery's decision to make this particular charge in the way they did combined with Garris's refusal to repent automatically triggered an indefinite suspension.

One hopes that more information about the proceedings of Garris's trial will be made public soon. But based on what is publicly verifiable at time of writing, it certainly appears that the Rio Grande presbytery handled the affair poorly by failing to do due diligence regarding Garris's words, behaviors, and associates, by failing to anticipate how this case would affect the purity and peace of the denomination, and by failing to make details of the case which can be publicized public in order to avoid outcomes in which onlookers lose faith in denominational processes. We can only hope that when the meetings of the presbytery's meetings on this are produced that a less incompetent picture emerges.

In any case, as things stand right now the outcome of all this is likely to be quite bad for the peace and purity of the PCA. The presbytery took what ought to have been a fairly simple case regarding the sin of racism and managed to handle it in a way that has made Garris a sympathetic figure both by the way the timing of the trial was stretched out and by convicting him over what is, if an offense at all, a fairly minor one—and one that would, if applied equally across the denomination, tie the church up in endless trials and adjudication. And that, of course, is precisely what may happen if things continue to go poorly.

## Why Organizational Competence is a Non-Negotiable

There are many things one might say about this sad affair. But the main thought I have had is the same one I've had for years when I consider the health of the PCA, which is my home denomination and has been for 20 years. 

The challenge for the PCA is that the overwhelming majority of our teaching elders are simply ordinary pastors. They love to preach, to shepherd, and to evangelize. They are not terminally online. They do not know the ins and outs of esoteric political theology disputes. They are not kinists. And yet a sizable portion of our communion, precisely because of their admirable and good pietism, are radically unprepared to navigate the procedural rules that govern presbyterian churches. If it is accurate, as some have reported, that Garris's defense was led by multiple lawyers while the prosecution in his case had no lawyers... well, there you have it.

Too often, these common failures of the pietists in our church have been minimized or dismissed by many. Set next to the realities of preaching, shepherding, and evangelization, knowing the ins and outs of the Book of Church Order (the rule book which defines how our denomination functions formally) seems unimportant. But a case like this highlights precisely why procedural competence is so important.

This ought to have been a simple and straightforward case. You take Garris's words, behavior, and associations. You take the PCA's official position on racism. You compare the two. You conclude that Garris either needs to repent *or* he needs to be suspended because he has violated the first, sixth, and ninth commandments and is not repentant. It should not be hard—the publicly verifiable record here is quite clear. Yet because too many in the PCA have an indifferent relationship to polity and procedures, we make it difficult.

I am writing this not only because I care about the PCA, which I do, but because I care about the state of the broader church around the world. The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) has had its own struggles with institutional mismanagement in recent years, after all, as have most other evangelical denominations that I know of, to say nothing of the many non-denominational independent congregations that have had similar issues.

There is a broader difficulty here, of which the PCA and ACNA's difficulties are exemplary: Evangelicals as a class tend to have an indifferent relationship to procedure, policy, and institutional norms. We value charisma and talent, but charisma and talent cut loose from the constraints and demands of healthy institutions have, repeatedly, proven themselves to be enormously destructive. That is the thread that runs through so many of the depressingly long list of stories that have plagued American evangelicalism over the past 10 years—whether it is the death of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, the decline or collapse of so many evangelical colleges and churches, the shocking waste of denominational funds across many different communions, or the specific scandals currently vexing so mny of our churches, far too often our organizations have been led by people that may be personally virtuous but who lack institutional competence. The outcomes of this are never good.

What we need—and I am inclined to place this *quite* high on the list of our needs—are healthy groups and movements that learn how to become healthy institutions. But if that is to happen, we will have to learn to care about administration, about policy, and about procedure. We will need to spend far more time in our proverbial Books of Church Order than most of us have to this point. Such work is unglamorous and even boring. But if good things are going to endure, that will usually require the support of an institution. And for institutions to endure, they need to be led by people who understand and value the procedures that govern and guard an institution's life.
### That Hideous Narcissism
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/that-hideous-narcissism/
Last updated: 2026-06-01T22:47:10.000Z
As I was writing my book, I was exploring the nature of Christian history. Christian history is not just the past, though it encompasses that. It is the meeting of past and future in the present. Eliot captured this well in "The Dry Salvages" from his "Four Quartets":

> Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;  
> You are not those who saw the harbour  
> Receding, or those who will disembark.  
> Here between the hither and the farther shore  
> While time is withdrawn, consider the future  
> And the past with an equal mind.

For many, this is untenable. We only want the potential of the future — the better job, the better car, the better partner, and more. The present is where we situate our lives. It is the all-encompassing base from which we operate.

In my reading, I stumbled upon a quote by Joseph Ratzinger. In his book *In the Beginning*, he sets out to ground the creation narrative in its proper context as a story of all existence — naturally the origin, or pre-history, from which we draw. He writes: “Past, present, and future must encounter and penetrate one another in every human life.” In other words, a Christian view of history and reality must take into account the past, the present, and the future. He goes on: “Our age is the first to experience that hideous narcissism that cuts itself off from both past and future and that is preoccupied exclusively with its own present.”

Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy, in his book *The Christian Future*, writes that the Christian is “the founder and trustee of the future, the very process of finding and securing it, and without the Christian spirit there is no real future for man.” For Rosenstock-Huessy — and I find myself convinced by his argument — the Christian life is lived at the crossroads of four fronts.

The first front looks backward, toward the past. Christians look back at what happened in order to understand what is, and what is to come. The second front looks forward, into the future — and this is the uniquely Christian contribution. The past met the future at the Cross, transformed reality, and set humanity on a trajectory toward something more. The third front looks inward, among ourselves: this is the front of personality, of our dreams, feelings, and wishes. The fourth and final front is outward. This front presses in on us from all sides — the external world with all its demands and pressures.

To neglect any of these fronts is fatal. Rosenstock-Huessy calls this intersection the “Cross of Reality” — the crossroads of all four fronts — and argues that it keeps us rooted and guards us from what he calls “complete contemporaneity.” This is what Lasch hints at as the permanent present, and what Frank Furedi, in his book *The War Against the Past*, refers to as “presentism.”

It is painfully obvious that modern man has detached from the past, but he’s also removed any means of thinking about the future. Limitations are viewed not as reminders of the fragility of life, but of the need to transcend reality. That hideous narcissism that Ratzinger talks about reigns supreme. Of course it would help if we did a bit of work on what we mean by the term itself. Narcissism is a term often thrown around. “He’s a narcissist.” “That person is a narcissist.” But Christopher Lasch, the culture critic and writer of the mid-twentieth century, found that narcissism isn’t just a personality trait. When psychoanalysts talked about narcissism they were often referring to self-love — a person so obsessed with themselves that they are incapable of thinking about another. For Lasch, narcissism was a cultural force, not just a personal character issue. He noted that the writer Tom Wolfe had [highlighted](https://nymag.com/article/tom-wolfe-me-decade-third-great-awakening.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)—in his essay “The ‘Me’ Decade”—the mid-twentieth century as akin to a Third Great Awakening, an outbreak of “orgiastic, ecstatic religiosity” — the worship of the self.

The self is something of a loaded term. Thinkers like Taylor, Ricoeur, and MacIntyre view the self as narrative: who you are is a thread of meaning derived from the story of how you got here and where you are going. Others view the self as a social construct. George Herbert Mead understood the self as derived from social engagement — you come to know yourself by how others see you, the “looking-glass self.” Some New Age thinkers posit that the self is an illusion, not a coherent core but individual fragments that, when assembled, form something like a cohesive unit. Phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger pushed back against all of this and tried to ground the self in existence: the self must be embodied, located in a place, in a world, with others, and in a language. It is specific and particular.

But what about the self today? As I read the Ratzinger quote, and as I’ve been reading Lasch and reflecting on his work, I can’t help but think we are at a time where the “narcissism” they spoke of, has not only expanded, but it has morphed.

What I mean is that today the self is dominated by narcissism — though it has shifted back into being a personality trait rather than a cultural diagnosis. This is driven by social media and psychology, which through therapy helps people identify how their boss is a narcissist, their roommate is too self-focused to help clean the apartment, or why their last relationship failed. We have moved the narcissistic trait back from a social diagnosis (where Lasch situated it) to a personal one. One major effect of this is that relationships and work become inundated with attempts to escape the trait in others, and we operate as if our problems come from outside ourselves, not from us. For instance, if our boss is too demanding, if any form of discomfort is introduced, we quit.

The modern self desires many things, and we can trace several defining features. I hope to offer a sketch here of what makes up the hideous narcissism of the modern self and some of the key things missing from the modern self. I’ve already written a bit on the “self” before. So I apologize if you are “selfed out.” However, I do think Ratzinger’s warning is important for us today. That hideous narcissism threatens all aspects of life, including my own. If we don’t understand what it is, and how it plays in our lives, it’s much harder to fight against it.

So here are some ways the narcissistic self is expressed today.

## **Authenticity**

The person seeks their true self within themselves not from without. “Be yourself.” “Find your truth.” “Live authentically.” Lionel Trilling, in *Sincerity and Authenticity*, observed that authenticity has come to mean moving against the current of conventional moral authority rather than with it. To do what is expected is insincere; to transgress is to be truly oneself. Part of this is the effect of Critical Theory, which views even self-expression through the lens of power dynamics. The self as authentic interior dominates conversations around gender and identity — the true self is hidden within and needs to be expressed outward.

## **Consumer aesthetic**

Modern identity goes hand in hand with lifestyle and trend. What we wear signals status. As American culture grows more complex, subcultures multiply, and identity becomes a matter of curation. If you spend all of five minutes on Instagram, you’ll see what I mean. Every other video is a person showing off style. Style is class and class is status.

## **Psychological interior**

This is evident in the enormous popularity of books like *The Body Keeps Score*, which affirms the trauma-informed development of the modern person. The language that dominates this version of the self is therapeutic: trauma, attachment styles, triggers, boundaries. Each of these terms conveys that the self is developed by what happens *to* us, not what we commit *to*, or what we believe about ourselves and the world. We often mistake therapeutic language for self-knowledge, and self-knowledge for growth. If we are moving so far forward in our understanding of our trauma, why are we more miserable than ever? Rosenstock Huessy writes about “suburban man” but it seems apropos here: “there is a paradox about suburban man: he lives amid too much peace, but he knows little peace within.”

## **Performance and recognition**

The self is not only authenticity-seeking but audience-seeking. We post online to give meaning to the self through recognition — the self is performed in the theatre of modern opinion. Mead’s looking-glass is prescient for social media. Lasch found that the self is empty at the center and requires constant external input to feel real. The metrics of recognition — likes, follows, engagement — become proxies for self-worth.

## **Identity category**

Here again Critical Theory shapes the field. The self is understood as a constellation of categories: gender, sexuality, race, and more. When we identify with a category, that category must be affirmed without qualification. Any divergence from this expectation is treated as a social infraction akin to soft murder. Community forms not around growth and productive tension, but around affirmation.

## **Autonomous will**

Running through all of this is what Michael Sandel called [“the unencumbered self”](https://www.jstor.org/stable/191382?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (his essay is well worth reading when you have the time) — a self whose defining feature is not the ends it chooses but its sheer capacity *to* choose them. Sandel wrote this in the 1980s during the Reagan years, but his words feel more urgent now. No matter the consequences of certain decisions — gender reassignment surgery, MAID — the modern self demands the freedom to make them. The choice itself is sacred; the result is tertiary.

So what is missing today?

## **Obligation and commitment** 

Obligation is increasingly experienced as tyranny. We dislike being bound to someone else’s time or needs, preferring instead to be our own autonomous agents. And yet commitment is not a cage — it is the very condition in which character and love become possible.

I’m reminded of a job I had out of college. I was juggling seminary alongside three part-time jobs, trying not to go into debt. One summer, at the pool store where I worked a third of my hours, I was tasked with interviewing a few high schoolers for seasonal work. One of them sat down across from me, and I asked the standard question: “So what does your schedule look like?” He thought for a moment and said, “Well, I’d like to have weekends free to hang out with my friends. Fridays too.”

I was dumbfounded. Growing up, my parents had drilled into me that in an interview you say: *I will work whenever and however long you need.* This young man had apparently received different instruction entirely.

It would be easy to chalk this up to one kid, but it isn’t one kid. Our lives are increasingly organized around fun and pleasure, and obligation is recast as an obstacle — a limitation on our freedom to pursue what we actually want. Commitment, in this frame, is something you tolerate until something better comes along.

## **Suffering and limits**

Pope Leo recently wrote: “Our relationship with life seems to be in crisis today. Everything that appears as a ‘limit’ — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.” This is one of the great ailments of modern society. Constraints are viewed as impositions, roadblocks on the path to happiness. When we see a path that may have them, we don’t turn around but instead try to go off roading and find our own way. But they—limits—are in fact what enable us to flourish as finite beings created by an infinite God. To accept limits is to accept our nature as created things. We despise them, perhaps, because we secretly wish to be like God. I’m reminded that Eve was tempted to transcend the limits of her present situation. To become “like God.” This temptation is ever calling and ever more appealing to the modern self.

Similar to Pope Leo’s comment, Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy writes that:

> “The greatest temptation of our time is impatience, in its full original meaning: refusal to wait, undergo, suffer. We seem unwilling to pay the price of living with our fellows in creative and profound relationships. From marriage to teaching, from government to handicraft, man’s relation to man has become segregated, impatient, non-committal in the machine age.”

We are unwilling to suffer for through suffering we are reminded of our own limits and finite reality.

## **History and tradition**

Lasch found that the tyranny of the present leads us to view the past not as a resource to mine and learn from, but as a reminder of an inferior time. Lasch writes that:

> “The narcissist has no interest in the future because, in part, he has so little interest in the past. He finds it difficult to internalize happy associations or to create a store of loving memories with which to face the latter part of his life, which under the best of conditions always brings sadness and pain. In a narcissistic society—a society that gives increasing prominence and encouragement to narcissistic traits—the cultural devaluation of the past reflects not only the poverty of the prevailing ideologies, which have lost their grip on reality and abandoned the attempt to master it, but the poverty of the narcissist’s inner life.”

Yet as Christians we are called to hold a faith deeply rooted in history — it is from the past action of God in Christ that we draw present and future hope. To remove the roots is to down the tree. Christians must be at the forefront of the valuation of history — that those who came before us matter and have much to teach us.

## **The self in relation**

Online life thrives in part because within its confines the self is rarely confronted. We choose our relations and remove those who impact us negatively. Dating apps extend this logic: we swipe away who we don’t want and meet those we do, but only momentarily. To settle down is to place yourself in genuine relation to another person — and that is precisely what the modern self resists. Yet the creation was declared good, and the only thing that was not good was for man to be alone. We were made for one another. The church as body is meant to invoke this reality: each person needs the other, and the other needs each person.

## **A telos**

When we remove the beginning — history — we also remove the end. Time collapses into the present: our present desires, present wishes, present dreams. But the self cannot flourish without knowing it is *for* something beyond itself. We live not for ourselves. Paul writes that “you are not your own” but belong to God. And yet we fear death. MAID is an egregious blight on modern life — the destruction of persons because they choose it. The self wants no part in the uncertainty of the end, so it seeks to control and harness it. We try to give life, and we try to choose when we leave it. Foucault, for all his faults, made an interesting observation about asylums: by removing the impaired from society, we created a space where we defined sanity — and those who didn’t conform were cast out of sight. We suppressed what we didn’t want to see. Modern society does the same with death. The more that the limits of life — and its end — are moved from our sight, the more the self imagines it can flourish. Instead, we are left ungrounded. We are all going to die, and those who have been most shielded from this reality will have the hardest time accepting it.

All in all, the modern self is remarkably free and remarkably miserable. Liberated from limits and boundaries, we find we are not walking toward anything — only away from something. The hunger we feel for meaning, purpose, permanence, and recognition points beyond the self, revealing what it is missing. And ultimately, it is the good news of Jesus Christ that can fully root and give the self what it so desperately needs.
### Agatha Christie Is Still Worth Reading
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/agatha-christie-is-still-worth-reading/
Last updated: 2026-05-29T11:00:34.000Z
**Theodore Dalrymple.** [***Agatha Christie and the Metaphysics of Murder***](https://www.encounterbooks.com/books/agatha-christie-metaphysics-murder/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. $19.99\. 168 pp.**

When I was in high school, I read Agatha Christie’s *And Then There Were None* at breakneck speed to figure out the identity of the murderer. The shocking ending left me desiring more and was the beginning of my enjoyment of Christie. I am not alone, it seems. Whodunits remain popular, as readers delight at the prospect of an evening armed with their favorite blanket, beverage, and (paradoxically) a cozy murder. At the center of this genre is Christie, “the Queen of Mystery,” the best-selling novelist of all-time for her brilliant Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot series, as well as numerous standalone mysteries. Her writing established the genre as we know it. Today’s mystery writers still rely on her techniques and tropes.

Retired physician, prison psychiatrist, and conservative social critic, Theodore Dalrymple, combines his professional experience and knowledge with his enjoyment of Agatha Christie in this short volume, *Agatha Christie and the Metaphysics of Murder*. The title is appealing; however, the book does not offer a retired prison psychiatrist’s look at the metaphysical nature of murder. Instead, Dalrymple’s main aim is to justify the merits of reading Christie and her ilk. He does so by answering literary critic Edmund Wilson’s rebuke of Christie as “mawkishness and banality which seems to me literally impossible to read.” 

Dalrymple brushes away part of Wilson’s ridiculous claim as pure “intellectual snobbery” rather than a real technical issue with Christie’s writing. After all, she has gained global appeal since the appearance of her first novel over a century ago; her novels have sold in the hundreds of millions across dozens of languages. Therefore, it must be that Wilson’s critique really means that Christie is not a writer worthy of “close attention” by the serious literary world. Dalrymple notes that in no way was Christie disillusioned with her merits and literary standing. She called herself middlebrow. In the introduction, Dalrymple argues that Christie’s shrewdness and observations of human nature are remarkable. As a result, her novels are full of insights of notable social, psychological, and philosophical substance. 

The introduction offers a glimpse of what the volume could have been as Dalrymple provides a brief example of Christie’s talents in her breakout novel, *The Murder of Roger Ackroyd*. Then instead of a psychological look at the top-tier books among Christe’s canon, he decided to pick a novel at random and evaluate it. The novel of choice is a Miss Marple mystery, *They Do It with Mirrors*, a middle-of-the-road volume that holds neither universal praise nor scorn. Dalrymple selected this novel based solely on the fact that he owned a copy but had no familiarity with it. While his efforts to remain unbiased and to tackle Wilson’s critiques are commendable, it is interesting to entertain what Dalrymple could have produced in evaluating the psychological depths of some of Christie’s greatest contributions and those of the whodunit genre more generally. Dalrymple’s method is to walk the reader through the novel, discussing along the way anything he considers worthy of note—socially, psychologically, and philosophically. 

While Dalrymple rarely deals with the metaphysical nature of murder, he attempts to make up for that with great social commentary and insight. At times he focuses on larger topics and ideals while on other occasions zooming in on a few words or simple phrases from *They Do It with Mirrors*, such as the description of Miss Marple as “every inch a lady.” Dalrymple examines the “social, educational, cultural, and behavioral background” contained within this short simple phrase. His analysis leads him on the path to explain and picture the bygone social caste in England of gentry. 

In these few words, Christie gives the reader a great deal of insight into Miss Marple as someone born into a higher class than the one she currently occupies. The impoverished genteel class was displaced by circumstances, but the manners and beliefs of their previous station never left them. Dalrymple seeks to turn his readers’ attention to this brief but witty insight offered by Christie as she attempts to weave an elusive murder mystery along. Even in her less critically acclaimed books, there are nuggets that serve as rebuke to Wilson’s low opinion of Christie. 

Dalrymple does argue that his experience regarding murder has revealed it to be a far cry from the extravagant and sometimes farfetched world of Christie. More often than not, it is “merely sordid, unmysterious, stupid, and not infrequently drunken, or alternatively engendered by passions of a crude culture.” Such criticism of Christie’s world as outlandish and unrealistic is accurate, yet we cannot forget that her novels are fictional works of entertainment. Dalrymple argues that the whole point of murder for Christie is to be committed in a “milieu where they are least expected.” This is perhaps our most poignant look at the metaphysics of murder in the book. Christie wants to give better than what reality offers. 

Many of Christie’s novels take place in small environments, rarely entering anything larger than a small village. While such settings produce a cozy quality to British whodunits, it is purposeful. Dalrymple points to Miss Marple’s quote, “Human nature, dear, is very much the same everywhere. It is more difficult to observe it clearly in a city, that is all.” Dalrymple’s randomized pick of *They Do It with Mirrors* happens to work perfectly. The novel revolves around a juvenile delinquent center, just the sort of environment that Dalrymple knows well through his experience as a psychiatrist working with the small populations of prisoners. And so, Dalrymple devotes considerable space in his book to the delinquent center, particularly the staff in charge of it and the methodology of the staff regarding crime and rehabilitation. 

Dalrymple is particularly interested in the character of Lewis Serrocold and Christie’s description of his sparkling eyes and enthusiasm for his charges at the delinquency center. In his estimation of Serrocold, Dalrymple notes: “He has Christian charity untethered to an awareness of original sin that might make his charity more realistic.” The enthusiastic head of the delinquent ward is one that believes in and lives out a strong charity but does not believe in good and evil. For Dalrymple, Serrocold is a highly realistic character from Christie. 

Chesterton described someone like him as the humanitarian that cares only for pity, therefore making his own pity untruthful. Serrocold displays this pitiful pity during his interview with Miss Marple. When she inquires whether one of his charges might be dangerous, Serrocold responds that the young man had never shown a proclivity toward suicide. So much for charity. Serrocold lacks the awareness to consider that Miss Marple might have had people other than the lone delinquent in mind. The virtue of charity removed and isolated from other virtues only ruins the one virtue on display. By his excessive charity for one case, Serrocold fails to provide charity at all.

Dalrymple’s treatment of Serrocold’s beliefs about the motives of his charges at the center is wonderful. Serrocold believes that the crimes of these juveniles are from “exhibitionism” and “thwarted unhappy home life,” and these outbursts and crimes make them feel heroic. Dalrymple argues that this is highly common in his experience and in the culture at large, as some criminals appear to the general public in admirable and romantic ways. Such is the cult of personality, even for criminals. Human nature desires to be known—"to be is to be perceived; not to be perceived is not to be.” The greater evil for some is to not be perceived. The crime it takes to be perceived seems a lesser evil, by contrast. 

Considering the random selection of a Christie book to refute Edmund Wilson’s attack on the master of crime, Dalrymple’s book is a resounding success. And while he didn’t treat the metaphysics of murder much in this book after all, perhaps he will take it up another time. Despite the misleading title, Dalrymple offers a unique and short evaluation and defense of Agatha Christie. Christie wrote intelligent and insightful novels that, as she knew it, are middlebrow. While not all Christie books are of the same quality, her famous novels rightfully earned their place as classics of the genre, and she is worth a closer reading. She is the “Queen of Mystery” or as Dalrymple remarks, “books about murder are legion, but there is only one Agatha Christie.”
### Community, Character, and the Governance of the Social Commons: Sanctuaries of Order
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/community-character-and-the-governance-of-the-social-commons-sanctuaries-of-order/
Last updated: 2026-05-29T11:00:04.000Z
So much seems to be going wrong in our society. There is so much dissent, there are so many acts of violence, and there is so much division about the acts of violence. So much worry, anxiety, depression. 

Many of us in economically prosperous nations feel that “[society is broken](https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/system-broken-ipsos-study-across-31-countries-reveals-deepening-distrust-politics-and-elites?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)” and declining. So much seems outside our control. The crises seem political, economic, and technological in nature; no doubt, such forces are changing our world and presenting new challenges. Yet the deepest roots of our problems are more basic. They involve personal and social order, direction, and purpose. The deepest roots of our problems are spiritual. 

Take just one unspeakably horrific example that has become a recurring and all-too-familiar feature of our news cycles: school shootings. Americans have had access to guns for decades and centuries. In the early twentieth century students even [regularly](https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/01/gun-clubs-school-charles-c-w-cooke/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) shot, hunted, and participated in school-based gun clubs. Only in the last few decades have school shootings become a major social concern. 

My point with this example is not to debate gun policy or the Second Amendment but to suggest that something more fundamental has shifted under our feet beyond merely law, politics, or technology. Something is different in our very culture and way of life. We could give other examples to make this same point. Earlier generations of Americans faced more difficult economic, geopolitical, and legal circumstances, yet they suffered from fewer mental health maladies, built strong families, and experienced greater contentment in life. 

Neither the left nor the right in our politics seem able to adequately confront the underlying disorder driving the symptoms all around us. In my new book [*Community, Character, and the Governance of the Social Commons: Sanctuaries of Order*](https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/community-character-and-the-governance-of-the-social-commons-9798216255741/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), I offer an account of that shift. I argue that we have been losing the ability to govern ourselves and establish a tolerably ordered, decent, livable society. This ability involves, first and foremost, informal mechanisms for inculcating habits of restraint, courtesy, commitment, discipline, and respect, and reinforcing these habits through social sanctions and rewards. As our capacity for self-government has declined, we have become overly reliant on formal, legal methods of social control and order-maintenance. 

Borrowing from the great political scientist Elinor Ostrom and her analysis of commons governance, the sustainable management of shared resource systems like lakes and fisheries, I employ the idea of the “social commons” to express the notion that we are building a social world together. We don’t live and die only to ourselves; we are helping to form, shape, and color the social environments we inhabit—often in subtle ways we are tempted to deny or downplay. 

There is probably at least one area in which each of us would like to retain freedom to behave in a way that contributes to deterioration of the social environment, even as we decry that deterioration. Maybe it’s a choice to view pornography. Maybe it’s a choice to pursue divorce without biblical justification—or ignore it in our church when we should not. Maybe it’s to cuss. Maybe it’s something as simple as checking a phone during a conversation or in a shared space. 

Each of these actions in the abstract, while more or less selfish and sinful, may not appreciably damage the social world. If we consider only a single, discrete, isolated action, we could make a case that our choice isn’t harming anyone. But when such actions, as we repeat them, solidify into behavioral regularities, we slowly and almost imperceptibly allow the behavioral patterns we adopt and accept to degrade the social commons. Women in contemporary society largely have to expect, even if they do not condone, that men they want to date struggle with porn; divorce is not as common as it was in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but neither is it at all uncommon; cursing and phone distraction are all around us. 

There is a sense of sternness that has existed at other times and places, including in the American experience. It has involved an ability to set high expectations and standards of behavior and largely see them met. We have been losing it in the last several decades, to our detriment. We see the loss of that sternness in parenting, in public comportment, in policy, in church governance or lack thereof. To be sure, not everything about ages and places of greater sternness is good. But the ability to set and uphold behavioral expectations, norms of courtesy, commitment, and decency, is an ability we can and should recover. Expectations of decency are essential for the construction of a livable social world, a social milieu in which we can live with a measure of liberty, justice, and dignity. 

Where did it come from? The short answer is social bonds and participation in relational networks that promoted accountability and shared norms. Membership in particular relational networks with a sense of intergenerational partnership, with agreed-upon rules, opportunities for monitoring behavior, and instillment of shared norms allow us to govern ourselves, to discourage narrow egoism. Through enmeshing our lives in ongoing relational connections, we tie our fortunes and wellbeing to the lives of others; we expose ourselves to potential reputation costs and establish mutual accountability. At a deeper level, the social bonds of family, neighborhood, and other associations offer personal connection and even love. These are the kinds of relational networks that have lost their place in our society, leading to the degradation of the social commons. 

The deterioration of the social commons and attendant wreckage in the lives of persons are a problem of wide scope, but it is most acute for those with the least education and means. Scholars and commentators like Robert Putnam, Charles Murray, Rob Henderson, and W. Bradley Wilcox note that elites may embrace radical individualism and antinomianism in theory, but they tend to embrace bourgeois moral and cultural norms in practice. The breakdown of traditional social institutions like the family has especially affected the least well-off and educated members of our society. 

The paradox of our time is that our greatest social need is to establish and renew the kinds of bonds and mores that generations before us managed to secure almost by instinct. We are wired for the kinds of self-governing community we seem to lack the most. Yet such bonds are hard to renew or generate when they break down and dissolve. We are shaped by the social commons we inhabit and help to shape it in turn. The irony of personal and social order is that we need good communities to form good persons, but we need good persons to build good communities. Thus, as I noted above, the deepest problems we face are not technical, political, or economic, they are spiritual. 

We might prefer to talk about legal, technical, or medical fixes for problems like school shootings, crime, drug overdose, suicide. Reckoning with the spiritual roots of personal and social disorder can be daunting, because it means reckoning with the fact of human wickedness and sinfulness. Yet we must reckon with the real root causes of such evils. 

The church is and remains a unique sanctuary of order. The church—the social witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ—forms and transforms her members through participation in practices of confession, repentance, and restoration. God’s grace transforms us in the church. While church hurt and abuse of church authority are real and they merit concern, the much greater, if less easily perceived, damage to the social commons has come from de-churching and loss of ecclesial authority and discipline. 

We have more power than we think. In each of our actions and words, we are helping shape the social commons and form the persons in our orbit, helping strengthen and beautify or degrade the social environment we inhabit. My book is an invitation to join, build, and revive the sanctuaries of order so desperately needed to renew the social commons and offer hope to generations starving for meaning, purpose, and life.
### Trojan Horses and Magnifica Humanitas
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/trojan-horses-and-magnifica-humanitas/
Last updated: 2026-05-28T11:00:00.000Z
It is apt that one of the deadliest computer viruses was named after the Trojan Horse. The original Trojan Horse, made of wood, was a giant automaton-like statue that, in Greek myth, provided the only way for the Greeks to finally defeat the Trojans after a ten-year stalemate of a brutal war. The Horse was a trick—its wooden body hollow by design, so warriors filled it to the brim. When the Trojans brought the statue into their city, choosing to believe it was a sacred gift to the gods, the warriors poured out at night, taking over the city unawares. 

Then the slaughter began in earnest. None of the men survived. Women and children who survived were captured, brutalized in the most horrific ways imaginable—and some that we thankfully cannot even fully imagine—then sold into slavery. In other words, the simple technological advancement that the Trojan Horse represents made possible the destruction of an entire civilization overnight. 

The presumed sacred nature of the Horse is apt as well—as is its deceitful presentation as a gift. So often do we coo now over technological innovations as gifts sent to liberate us from the drudgery of work and everyday life—the sort of laborious existence that takes getting up in the morning, and pursuing day in and day out the same mundane tasks that have been part and parcel of human existence ever since, perhaps, Eden itself. The work that we do, especially in taking care of each other, is exhausting. Creative work is challenging too for many, who understandably grow eager to outsource it now. But could such simple daily acts be good for us—an integral part of what makes us human and also what affirms daily the *Imago Dei* within each of us? 

The importance of the affirmative answer to this question undergirds [Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical](https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), issued on May 25th, and titled *Magnifica Humanitas*—the sort of Latin that probably requires no translation to understand even for those who have never set foot in Latin class (although it’s not too late even for you, by the way, but I digress). The wording in the document’s title is highly significant for reasons to which Leo returns in concluding it. But at its core, this encyclical is a response to AI. At the same time, it is also a powerful theological manifesto on the value of human work, human thought, human creativity, and (most important of all) human worship of God. Leo opens the document as follows:

“Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together. Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and fraternity is made possible. Yet every era also runs the risk of creating an inhumane and more unjust world.”

So how should the Church respond to this challenge? It is important to note that while Leo’s concern is specifically with the Catholic Church’s response—thence his decision to begin with an overview of Catholic social teachings—ultimately, his recommendations are simply good theology that, for the most part, any conservative evangelical should be able to affirm as well. Consider, for instance, this powerful reminder of the importance of the *Imago Dei* for any conversations about humanity, including the acknowledgement of the [value of motherhood](https://www.ivpress.com/mothers-children-and-the-body-politic?ref=mereorthodoxy.com): 

> At the heart of the Christian understanding of the human person lies the great biblical affirmation that men and women are created in the image and likeness (cf. *Gen* 1:26-27) of the Triune God. Created for relationship, every human person is planned and willed by God to enter into communion with him, with others and with creation. Human dignity does not depend on a person’s abilities, wealth or position in life, nor on the right or wrong choices made; instead, it is a gift that precedes and transcends each person, endowed by God as an expression of his unfailing love.

So what does AI have to do with this? Leo explains: “The use of AI is never a purely technical matter: when it enters processes that affect people’s lives, it touches on rights, opportunities, status and freedom.” And one implication of this is: “we cannot consider AI to be morally neutral.” Leo is concerned over the abuses of power that those wielding technological tools can now exercise to disrespect the humanity of others, not to mention their own. In his discussion of transhumanism and posthumanism he shows awareness of such debates as those over the optimization of human embryos in IVF and the artificial enhancements that could optimize human bodies to become the stuff of Sci-fi novels—not fully human anymore, but possibly part machine. 

As Christians, we proclaim the Resurrection of the body, because Christ rose again. Because of this conviction that Christ died for all of us that we may rise again, we also affirm a commitment to the preciousness of every human life in God’s eyes. But to those who do not believe, the technology exists now to make themselves into their own gods. Why is this a problem? Because it ultimately threatens the weak and the vulnerable—especially those at the extremes of life (the very young and the very old), but also those who are sick. Leo’s concern is clear:

> Our relationship with life seems to be in crisis today. Everything that appears as a “limit” — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not *despite* limitations, but often *through* them.

The section of the encyclical on the significance of embracing our limitations is, in my view, the most beautiful in the entire encyclical, combining theological, historical, and practical insights. Yes, we are all morally flawed beings—sinful and fallen. And yes, suffering is the lot of each and every human life. But God loves us in our flawed state, and God is working even these things for our good and for His glory. Such are the reminders we get from the study of history—yes, there have been many wars and abuses and violations of human dignity. And at the same time, history records many beautiful stories of goodness and mercy, some of them arising in response to the most horrific of abuses. 

In his conclusion, Leo connects the title he selected for this encyclical, *Magnifica Humanitas*, to another document—[Mary’s *Magnificat*](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%201%3A46-55&version=ESV&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), the song of praise to God that she sings early in her pregnancy with Jesus. The first name of the song in Jerome’s Vulgate translation is “Magnificat,” and it has become its title. “My soul magnifies the Lord,” the English translation holds, but the verb comes first in Latin—“magnifies,” the action each of our souls should be doing up front, no matter our task at hand.

As I finish typing this essay, my daughter is seated in the middle of the living floor nearby, drawing flowers in vibrant colors, her concentration uninterrupted by my typing or her brother’s traipsing around and at one point even stepping deliberately over her in an impressively large stride. Such is the nature of human lives lived together in ordinary wonder and gratitude. Not all technology is evil, as Leo notes and as many of us would agree. Some outsourcing of work to machines may enhance our human dignity rather than eroding it. I am grateful, for instance, that the dishwasher could clean the dishes after lunch, so I could sit down and read this encyclical and write about it. And I am grateful that a [tiny robot lawnmower](https://lawliberty.org/outsourcing-life/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) can cut my in-laws yard in Maine, now that they are no longer up to this task themselves. 

It is human community illumined by the gospel that we are after, the encyclical concludes—and community is a distinctly human delight. As beings who are bodies as well as souls, we rejoice in our families, churches, friendships, and neighborhoods—whereas no robot could feel delight or joy over the fellowship of fellow robots. Leo is right. Our humanity is indeed magnificent—but only because God who created us in His image deserves all the glory.
### The Case for Copying 'The Imitation of Christ' by Hand
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-case-for-copying-the-imitation-of-christ-by-hand/
Last updated: 2026-05-27T14:37:55.000Z
In Christian higher education, we practice something often called “faith integration.” The goal is for faculty to bring faith into their classes, connecting faith with their discipline. Some people prefer other terms, like “faith-infused,” or something else, but the idea is always about connecting faith with the classroom and education. It is part of what distinguishes Christian universities from other universities.

In my university’s honors program, faith integration is often relatively straightforward. After all, we assign faith-related reading every semester. We have a chronological Great Books sequence and we pride ourselves on our broad coverage of “The Great Conversation.” In their first semester, students read Plato and Aristotle and Homer and Sophocles and Thucydides alongside portions of the Old Testament. The core of our honors sequence extends across six semesters and by the time our students finish, they’ve been assigned more reading than most undergraduates. This includes authors like Augustine and Aquinas and Hildegard and Benedict, as well as Marx and Freud and Nietzsche.

The downside to the breadth of our reading list is that we have to move at a pretty fast clip to get through all the assigned reading in any given semester. In the “World of Humanism and Reform” class, which covers the Renaissance and Reformation, we read *Utopia*, *The Praise of Folly*, *Hamlet*, *The Spiritual Exercises*, *Imitation of Christ*, Petrarch’s *Secret Dialogue*, sermons by Luther, and *Paradise Lost*, as well as a few other texts. Students sometimes remark that they wish they had more time with some of the books, especially the books about religious devotion.

Even at a relatively quick pace, Humanism and Reform achieves many aspects of faith integration. We are assigning explicitly religious texts and trying to really understand them. Any student who does not reflect at all on their faith in that semester is practicing some resistance. We are an interdenominational school, so group discussions that cover the events of the Reformation and Counter Reformation are an opportunity to learn more about church history and to learn to have mature conversations about theological differences within the church. People in the room do not all agree on the correctness of Calvin or the Council of Trent, but we learn to have productive conversations together about them anyway.

Still, the faith integration we normally achieve in the class does not typically reflect the depth of spiritual formation we see in some of the books. Our reading of Petrarch’s *Secret Dialogue* does not compare to Petrarch’s self-examination, even if it prompts from self-examination from us. We read Ignatius’s *Spiritual Exercises* in a couple of weeks, but we do not experience an Ignatian retreat. I’ve taught the class for several years now and I have long pondered the gap between what we are reading about and what we are doing. A couple years ago, I came up with an idea to give students an opportunity to close that gap a bit.

To give students the opportunity to truly engage and internalize a devotional book from the semester, I created an alternative assignment that allowed interested students to hand copy the entirety of Thomas à Kempis’s *Imitation of Christ*. This was optional. Students who chose the transcription option would be exempted from two of the three papers we did as a class and they would not have to take the final (they still had weekly assignments). If they completed the transcription, they would earn a minimum of 93% on the final. If they did not complete the transcription, they would earn grades for the papers and final exam corresponding to the percentage of the book they completed, not to exceed 85%. It was a high risk, high reward option.

*Imitation of Christ* was the perfect text for this alternative assignment. Historians believe that Thomas à Kempis transcribed the Bible by hand four times. Transcribing his work by hand is the best way to enter into his world. Hand copying the book honors his work. *Imitation of Christ* is also an ideal length. It is challenging to transcribe in a semester but not at all impossible. And students have nearly the whole semester. Of course, *Imitation of Christ* is also a devotional classic which has been read for centuries and remains relevant. St. Ignatius read from it every day.

Transcription gave students the chance to turn a reading assignment into a spiritual practice for a semester. Like Ignatius, they would be reading the book consistently, even if not daily. When you can only move at the speed of your handwriting, you go word by word, page by page, day by day. The speed and the focus let the words sink in. When you transcribe a book, you begin to internalize the author’s rhythm and ideas. This is why so many famous writers have developed their craft by retyping the works of other writers. And more of those rhythms and phrases will be remembered because people have a better memory of what they write by hand than what they type.

In the two years I have offered this assignment, I have observed students assimilating *Imitation of Christ* across a semester. Weeks after we all read the book together, people doing the transcription were much more likely to bring it up in later class discussions. In honors classes, we encourage students to connect books and authors, within a semester or from across the honors sequence. With this assignment, some students were always prepared with what Thomas à Kempis might have thought about a book or an idea and their comments reflected understanding and familiarity. Even a year later, I have observed students who transcribed *Imitation of Christ* bringing it up in class conversation. Ideally, they will be thinking about it for more years to come.

Transcription offered students the opportunity to go deep with a single text and to really internalize *Imitation of Christ*. But it was high stakes. It takes an entire semester and sometimes more than one notebook to transcribe *Imitation of Christ* by hand (and it hurts your hand). It cannot be done last minute. It requires discipline and time management skills. I advise students to “know thyself” when they decide whether or not to choose this option. The consequences for misjudgment can be extreme. By the time you skip the second and third papers, you are all in. If you don’t finish, you can end up with a low final grade in the class. I’ve offered this option twice and each time I have had at least one student take it and fail to complete the transcription.

Arguably, the high stakes were part of the lesson. Over half the authors we read in Humanism & Reform emphasize self-examination. *The Spiritual Exercises* asks people to reflect on their sin, Petrarch’s *Secret Dialogue* suggests you should imagine your own death, Luther’s life and work encourage self-examination, etc. *Imitation of Christ* emphasizes a realistic understanding of one’s own weaknesses and an awareness of one’s own sin. Meditating on the words of *Imitation of Christ* and doing the slow work of transcription should lead to a more accurate self-assessment. And the stakes make failing the assignment a meaningful opportunity for learning.

This is an imperfect assignment, but it brought something new and exciting into the class. This was faith integration that was more than talking or a single assignment. This was faith integration that was *doing*, and that doing was sustained across an entire semester. Students who chose this assignment could turn something we were otherwise treating as primarily academic into something much more personal. And it helped them make more sense of a book which was written for the purpose of religious devotion. Many students found the practice of transcription meaningful.

Pedagogically, the assignment has some additional advantages. This assignment is AI-proof. It’s not a substitute for the analysis done in writing a research paper, but there is also no short-term substitute for the work done in hand copying a book. This assignment also helps connect the mind and body in a way that very little academic work does. Even the opportunity to accept or decline the challenge added an element of self-direction that is often lacking in school. The existence of choice was a helpful addition to class. Obviously, this assignment is not possible or helpful in every class, but for our class it made a positive difference.

The best part of teaching in a Great Books program is when you can help students understand all of the new thoughts and experiences they can get from old books. This assignment did that. It was also an experiment with a new way of doing faith integration. For the students who did this assignment, faith wasn’t just referenced or integrated in class, a space in their weekly routines was created and made hospitable for faith formation. This assignment readied the ground for spiritual growth, hopefully helping students to better understand the links between learning and study and growing in their faith. Whatever else comes of it, students will go forward with their own, very personal, copy of *Imitation of Christ*.
### The Church: One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-church-one-holy-catholic-and-apostolic/
Last updated: 2026-05-27T14:38:00.000Z
**Myles Werntz.** [***Contesting the Body of Christ: Ecclesiology’s Revolutionary Century***](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781540960085%5Fcontesting-the-body-of-christ?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Baker Academic, 2025\. $24.99\. 200 pp.**

“I believe in the church.”

This article of the Christian faith seems unusual compared to others in the church’s creeds. Our faith, like everything else about us, is fallible and marked by sin. Still, this is a confession of God’s divine action and preservation of Christ’s body. There is a church, and it is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. But what does this pronouncement look like in practice? The early twentieth century’s ecumenical movement had promising energy, but it has largely faded. Now, after a century marked by fragmentation, schism, and deepening denominational stratification, discussions of the church and its oneness seem exhausting and exhausted.

Yet Myles Werntz’s *Contesting the Body of Christ: Ecclesiology’s Revolutionary Century* is a refreshing and welcome contribution. The twentieth century, the “century of the church,” witnessed the rise of the modern ecumenical movement and global missions, and the dramatic growth of Christianity around the world. It also saw Vatican II and its reforms, the explosion of Pentecostalism, and widespread theological self-examination. The result was a strange combination of division and vitality, the church growing rapidly even as it reassessed its identity.

While Werntz reflects on twentieth-century history, this is not a work of history or sociology. Rather than evaluating the arguments and probabilities for an institutional merger or waving away genuine differences, Werntz invites readers to reflect on the essence of the church. He notes various lists of marks of the church, such as Martin Luther’s, but declines to ground his analysis in them as tests to determine whether a particular body counts as a “true church.”

Instead, Werntz frames his work around the Nicene marks of the church—one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. These marks describe what the church *is*, not what it lacks. Because they point to the church’s being rather than its borders, they create space for sincere ecumenical conversation. They also frame the past century’s conflicts and debates not as divisive battles but as explorations of what it means to practically and communally live out these four marks.

Werntz never directly addresses the Reformed–Anglican dialogue that culminated in a 2020 report identifying *koinonia* as a communion all churches share as parts of the one body of Christ. Communion is never “impaired,” the report asserts, but “variously received.” Still, Werntz’s approach substantially overlaps with that insight, especially in his treatment of the church’s oneness. The church is one because it is the body of Christ animated by His Spirit. Its unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity are not external additions; they arise from its very life. To be the church *is to be* these marks.

With this overall thesis in mind, Werntz traces the ways different twentieth-century Christian traditions “contested” or worked out what the church’s essence meant for their lives and practices. He frequently returns to the North American context, a geographical focus that reflects the availability of sources and the continuing influence of Western theology on global conversations. With far too many stories to list here, the book is worth reading if only for this panorama of Christ’s bride. This overview is especially relevant because the material issues that pressed the twentieth-century church (economics, race, the relationship between laity and clergy, the legacy of colonialism, etc.) have only intensified in the twenty-first.

The struggles, changes, sacrifices, sins, and reflections of the church are the working out of what it means to be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. The marks of the church are gifts received, and therefore “will *by their nature* be contested, expanded, and reconfigured in different eras.” In other words, this contestation is how the church by the Spirit sorts out its marks as it comes into contact with the world and speaks to itself. So what does it mean to be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic in each particular place and time? Werntz devotes one section of the book to each mark.

## **One**

Werntz begins his longest chapter with a sharp line from Cyprian, the mid-third century AD bishop of Carthage: “He cannot possess the garment of Christ who parts and divides the Church of Christ.” Few themes have preoccupied modern Christians more than church division and the elusive hope of unity. This mark deserves the extended attention he affords it, from formal moves within Roman Catholicism, the World Council of Churches, and Eastern Orthodoxy, and turns to approaches that emphasized spiritual unity—most notably within Pentecostalism—along with unity through mission, whether defined by evangelism or by the Social Gospel, and unity through hermeneutics, which Werntz associates most closely with the rise of evangelicalism.

Expressions of oneness by Christians across these traditions have included formal mergers, theological accounts of unity that persisted despite visible fractures, internal reckonings with non-denominational divisions like racism, cooperation in evangelistic and social efforts, common openness to the Spirit, and shared ways of reading Scripture. Werntz’s reporting highlights just how varied the attempts were and how differently each tradition understood what “unity” required.

His treatment of evangelicalism and the contestation for unity built upon hermeneutics is surprising and enlightening. Readers from other traditions may question aspects of his taxonomy, but I found his angle on evangelicalism refreshing. Werntz describes the movement as one that found church unity not primarily in institutions, mission, or the Spirit’s work, but in a shared hermeneutic. This is not to say evangelicals ignored institutions, mission, or the Spirit, or that traditions emphasizing those facets of the church’s life neglected Scripture. But for evangelicals, the center of contestation lay in how the Bible is read in ways that crossed institutional boundaries. The unity of the church was worked out through hermeneutical battles—internal debates, engagements with other Christian bodies, and efforts to embrace and partner with emerging majority-world churches whose readings began to differ sharply from their Western counterparts.

Experientially, this rings true and was even a little exposing to me as an evangelical reader and pastor. I am a Presbyterian who practices connectional polity and sacramental worship, yet contestation within my larger church still takes place on hermeneutical terrain. Doctrinal agreement matters deeply, but there must be a better way to express the oneness of Christ’s body than “We are united to the degree to which we agree.”

## **Holy**

Werntz is keen to show that holiness is not simply an extension of oneness, even though the two are closely connected. Holiness is more than moral purity, although never less than that. It concerns the church’s life “by virtue of God having sanctified the church in Jesus Christ: before \[holiness\] is a task, it is an indelible gift of God’s own presence.”

So how did holiness belong to the whole church, and how did the church contest its holiness during a century marked by populist movements, lay empowerment, and complicity with social sins? Holiness, Werntz argues, is fundamentally about *wholeness*. Pentecostals emphasized this through the gifts and baptism of the Spirit. Pentecostals, mainline Protestants, Evangelicals, and Roman Catholics wrestled through the implications of the laity being wholly part of the church, because holiness presses outward: If the church is holy, the whole church must be engaged.

This becomes even more complicated when we consider social sins like colonialism and racism. Werntz shows how different models of polity shaped the ways churches reckoned with collective responsibility. The structures of the United Church of Canada produced one kind of response to questions of culpability regarding historic treatment of First Nations People; Southern Baptists in the Jim Crow South produced another. Werntz’s point is not to rank traditions but to reveal how holiness, understood as wholeness, inevitably draws the church into questions of common life, past failures, and present accountability.

## **Catholic**

Catholicity for Werntz is a distinct mark, not just oneness under a different name. Catholicity is not just about unity, but shared confession in continuity with the apostolic message. Catholicity is not only what unites, but what is *ubiquitous*, believed universally across the centuries and across the planet. In other words, catholicity is about the movement of what unites Christians in different times and places; it is about how the church contextualizes and shares its unified witness in its pluriform contexts.

To show the limits of contextualization, Werntz turns to the German church of the 1930s and 1940s—a stark reminder that catholicity cannot be stretched infinitely. When the church’s contextual articulation of the faith undermines presuppositions of God’s universalizing work and seeks to emphasize context at the expense of the universal nature of the gospel, it ceases to be catholic. Context may shape witness, but it cannot eclipse the catholic nature of the gospel itself.

Werntz contrasts this with Pentecostal and Restorationist movements, which sought to recover the faith and practice of the early church in order to experience a catholic fullness that *transcends* time. Werntz astutely notes the similarity to the Eastern Orthodox; both view catholicity as participation in the church’s ancient, original, living inheritance. Evangelicalism, meanwhile, offered a different reorientation. Whatever catholicity might mean in relation to confessional standards, figures like Billy Graham insisted that it must include a form of Christian faith and experience accessible to all people, regardless of theological background. The explosion of parachurch organizations in the twentieth century expressed this instinct. These groups embodied a kind of functional catholicity, unity across denominational lines grounded in a widely shared experience of the gospel and a sense that Christ’s work unfolds in the present moment in a spiritual new birth.

A perennial question arises, however: How can the faith be both catholic and local, universal yet particular, complete yet still unfolding in specific contexts? One enduring answer from both Protestant and Catholic traditions is mission. A truly catholic church is one that sends, so that the gospel moves into new places and takes root in new localities. Catholicity, Werntz observes, has a “missional inflection,” though its expression varies across traditions.

## **Apostolic**

If catholicity concerns continuity through contextualization in the present, apostolicity concerns continuity with the church’s past. Werntz frames it as a question of how the earliest generations of the church continue to exert authority over the present.

Most examples in this section focus on how the church bears and receives the apostolic message. The church contested apostolicity in the rise of mass media (what is the medium of the message and who are its gatekeepers?). It debated apostolicity in light of the growing role of laypeople, especially women (who may bear the message?). Long-standing issues surrounding apostolic succession and episcopal orders, especially the papacy, continued to provoke disagreement. And cultures shaped by colonialism and church wrongdoing raised hard questions about whether certain apostolic institutions could still be trusted as faithful messengers (can apostolic institutions be disqualified as message bearers?).

A quiet thread humming along in Werntz’s analysis is the effect of the Pentecostal movement upon the global church. Emphasis on the experience and life of the Spirit has shaped the contestation of all traditions, and especially on the mark of apostolicity. It’s a Pentecostal world, and the church is asking how the Spirit might be calling forth different people who embody and bear God’s wholeness.

As he concludes, Werntz urges the church to cultivate four virtues corresponding to its marks—temperance, prudence, fortitude, and justice—to inform the contestation of its life in the twenty-first century. Where the twentieth-century church leaned into these virtues, regardless of tradition, material circumstances, or theological convictions, the contestations were profitable and addressed the church’s needs. These are the virtues the church has needed in every age and still needs today.
### Welcome to the New Mere Orthodoxy
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/welcome-to-the-new-mere-orthodoxy/
Last updated: 2026-07-01T14:37:28.000Z
**From Jake: It is a significant day in the life of *Mere Orthodoxy.* Today we launch our new website and member dashboard. But behind that launch is a much larger story about the work that media projects like our own have to do today. It is a truism at this point to lament the division, anger, and extremism that is now ubiquitous in American life. But hidden inside the many problems now afflicting us is an exciting opportunity.** 

***Mere Orthodoxy* exists to form Christians in the church who participate in broader culture for the common good. Today’s essay is my attempt to reflect on that opportunity by talking about how we got here, what challenges we now face as both Christians and members of a pluralistic civic experiment, and what we at *Mere O* are doing to try and seize the opportunity before us to build up both the church and our civic life.**

**We built the website and member dashboard not simply because we need a website of some kind, but because we want the site and member dashboard themselves to serve our goal as a media project. Given that, I’ve written a larger essay below that seeks to position the site and dashboard within that larger endeavor.** 

**If you want to understand what we are doing and why, read the whole thing. If you want to learn specifically about our new website and member dashboard, you can use the navigation links now embedded in our articles to navigate to the relevant section of the essay.** 

**As always, thank you for reading!**

Sometimes when I am asked to talk about writing, I like to take people back to what the writing life once looked like for many professionals in the United States and elsewhere. I take them back to films like *All the President’s Men* or *Spotlight* or perhaps share some of my own much less interesting stories from my too-short time spent in old daily newspaper newsrooms.

Though the memory is fading now, there was a time when such papers could be found in any town of significant size in this country–and in larger cities you might have had several such papers.

I still remember as a kid snagging the Sunday copy of the Lincoln *Journal Star* on the way out the door to church so I could read the sports page in the car on the way and, if there was time, maybe some of the comics as well. And when I got to church, I could reliably count on meeting other people there who would have read the same news stories and comics that I had, who subscribed to the same paper our family did.

In those days before the internet, this was how media worked: The main problem when it came to getting information out into the world was that it cost a lot of money to do it. You needed large printing presses, a fleet of delivery trucks, a huge number of workers to man the presses, drive the trucks, and deliver the papers, and, of course, you needed the reporters and editors who made the product, to say nothing of the advertising people (often forgotten) who ran the classifieds sections, which brought in a significant amount of the paper’s revenue. 

There were, obviously, many downsides to this model, not least the exorbitant ad rates that papers liked to charge local businesses to advertise. Yet the tradeoff here was that information distribution tended to concentrate around geographically constrained publishers, which meant that within a geographic area most readers were reading the same things, and the publishers were reporting on matters of interest to people in their city or region, and the publishers often had plenty of money to maintain their work.

Put another way, geography created social context for readers. Media then existed as part of that social context and commented on it, helping their readers to interpret it, improve it, challenge it, or simply to enjoy it.

The arrival of the internet turned all of this upside down. The cost of information distribution trended quickly toward zero for publishers, which meant that the barrier to entry for new publishers almost entirely disappeared. This meant that newspapers and magazines suddenly found themselves competing against a previously unimaginable number of new publishers, most of whom had dramatically lower costs than the legacy institutions.

The cost of advertising–a form of information distribution–also trended toward zero, which almost immediately destroyed the primary revenue stream for most daily papers, who always made far more from classifieds than they did subscriptions.

Finally, once we combined powerful search engines and social media platforms with the arrival of smartphones, the challenge of finding and accessing media became similarly trivial. The consequences of these various digital revolutions are hard to overstate.

First, legacy media began to collapse, which had immense economic ramifications for journalists. Specifically it meant that stable entry-level jobs disappeared. This meant both that finding work now became far more difficult and that the early career incubator period that allowed new journalists to learn their craft in a stable institution with respected, experienced peer journalists ceased to exist. In such an environment, one secured a livelihood in journalism through the force of one’s personality and the reach of one’s personal platform on social media. In short, media shifted from being centered on institutions to centered on personalities.

Second, as the volume of media content exploded, maintaining reader trust became an enormous problem. 

Third, as people became more dependent on their phones and personalized online algorithms to access content, the thick social context once supplied by geography and the high cost of information began to dissolve. Over time, [the very idea of consensus reality began to crumble](https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/what-happened-to-consensus-reality?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

The outcome of all of this is that media audiences shifted away from being groups of people who shared a thick common social context, typically centered around a place. Media audiences, instead, became universalized online masses that could live anywhere and whose only common context was the content they consumed online. Yet, because all of us still live in geographic places, we still exist within a place. But the experience of the place transformed as more and more of our mental, emotional, and social life was experienced online and mediated via our devices and various algorithms.

The outcome of all of this is that the way we define the audience for a media project has changed. We are losing the idea of our audience being “readers.” That older model is being replaced by the idea of a “fan.”

As I noted in [a recent essay](https://mereorthodoxy.com/writers-vs-content-producers/), “readers” can be thought of as people who share a common context with the other consumers of a media project. The obvious applications here are magazine or newspaper readers. But you could even see people who listen to local radio or watch the local news as fitting in this category. The key idea, as I already said, is that readers exist in a given social context and the role media plays is to comment on that context in some way.

Fandom, by contrast, does not presuppose a given social context, but is built around chosen media brands. Because the geographic and social commons have dissolved, what we are left with is a paralyzing amount of choices for what media to consume, and our own personalized social contexts are then built atop those media we choose to consume. 

So we relate to media producers in the way we relate to sports teams, associating ourselves with them not because they speak into something we already possess and share with others, but because we privately enjoy what they produce and identify with it rather than identifying with other producers. So media production becomes agonistic in some sense, a kind of Darwinian struggle between competing brands. This re-fashioning of media creates significant problems for both Christian media consumers *and* for American civic life.

## Media Fandom and the Christian Reader

First, we need to talk about the challenges this creates for Christian media consumers. 

I take for granted the fact that Christian readers have certain moral restraints that dictate how they can relate to media if they wish to do so *as Christians*. 

Our Lord, for example, commands us to let our yes be yes and our no be no, which means something for how we speak as Christians. It means that we can’t become [so lost in irony](https://mereorthodoxy.com/hegseth-pulp-fiction-prayer/) and sarcastic humor that our actual beliefs become lost or obscured. This command alone will bar us from producing anything resembling most dissident media, whether that comes from [the “dirtbag left”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirtbag%5Fleft?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of an older internet age or the various successors to the “alt-right.” Christian speech needn’t shun *all* irony–Paul himself sometimes seems to speak in ironic terms–but it does seem to exclude the sort of endless irony and mockery that defines a great deal of podcast media especially.

Additionally, the Ninth Commandment says that we are not allowed to bear false witness against our neighbor. The church has traditionally interpreted this command [in quite expansive terms](https://thewestminsterstandard.org/westminster-larger-catechism/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com#143) because Jesus himself interprets simple moral commands in such ways, as when he says that anyone who has hated his brother has “committed murder in his heart.” Taken in this expansive way, the Ninth Commandment does not simply mean that we cannot lie. Rather, this is what the Heidelberg Catechism [says](https://www.heidelberg-catechism.com/en/lords-days/43.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) is required of us by the Ninth Commandment:

> I must not give false testimony against anyone, twist no one's words, not gossip or slander, nor condemn or join in condemning anyone rashly and unheard. Rather, I must avoid all lying and deceit as the devil's own works, under penalty of God's heavy wrath. In court and everywhere else, I must love the truth, speak and confess it honestly, and do what I can to defend and promote my neighbour's honour and reputation.

Needless to say, simply taking these two basic Christian moral norms seriously would require many contemporary media producers to retract huge swathes of what they have published or to cease operations altogether. It is likely no overstatement to say that taking the Ninth Word seriously would require many *Christian* social media users to delete most of their social media posts.

But the problem actually goes deeper than this. Fandom models of media are basically amoral; we do not typically think of our sports fandoms as having moral significance. As much as I am sometimes tempted, I do not view support for Arsenal Football Club or the Iowa Hawkeyes as evidence of moral deficiency. But when we apply the fandom model to media, we reduce our relationship to media down to personal taste. This is a problem, of course, because media is speech and, as noted above, Scripture actually says a great deal about speech! So Christian media producers and consumers must participate in the media world in morally restricted ways while the bulk of the media world is not bound by such moral norms—which means that Christian media producers will feel a strong temptation toward the same sort of amoral style.

For media consumers, this can make it difficult to find trustworthy media *and* even more difficult to resist the deformative effects of consuming fandom-based media products that are unconcerned with basic moral norms. For media producers, there is a constant pull toward half-truth, mockery, or fabrication in order to expand one’s audience and to attract the attention of donors who care more about influence or victory than they do truth.

The outcome of this is that Christian media can easily over time become captive to unhealthy, sub-Christian audiences who demand something other than truth. This is disastrous for both Christian media producers *and* Christian media consumers.

## Media Fandom and American Civic Life

We turn now to the problems this creates for civic life in America and, really, across the liberal democratic world.

It is significant that there are two types of institutions whose existence is assumed in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. One such institution is the church. The other is the press. The First Amendment protects both churches and the press from government interference. Why? 

Because the framers of the First Amendment seem to believe that healthy democratic life requires independent churches and independent media. Recall, for example, that when Hamilton and Madison wanted to make the case for the Constitution they turned to the press, which published the many essays we now have collected as The Federalist Papers. 

The particular importance of an *independent* press is illustrated powerfully in the movie *Spotlight* when the Boston *Globe* editor Marty Baron meets the Catholic Cardinal and archbishop of Boston, Bernard Law. Law invites Baron into a kind of informal alliance with the church, saying that the city thrives when its great institutions stand together. Baron demurs, saying that for newspapers to do their job they need to stand alone.

It is this tension which captures the brilliance of American democracy. The health of our civic experiment depends not on the church, state, and press all standing together, reinforcing each other's power and influence, but rather on each operating with a fair degree of independence from each other, serving as checks against each other so that no one body or individual gains too much power, thereby allowing them to undermine, subvert, or destroy our democratic system.

We might think about it like this: In his book *An Anxious Age* the Catholic writer and editor Joseph Bottum argued that American civic society is built atop a three-legged stool. One leg is the government, which through laws define what our common civic context will be and through police and military secure the ongoing peace of that shared context. Another leg is the marketplace, which exists within that civic space and provides work and wealth to the American people, which they can use to preserve our common life and enrich it. The third leg is the church, by which he meant the Protestant Mainline, which provides moral direction and oversight to both the government and the market, helping the government to know what kind of space it should preserve and the market to know what the purpose of all its work and wealth actually is. Obviously the church’s ultimate purpose is not to provide moral direction to society. Its final and ultimate purpose is to be the people of God, united under the preaching of the Word of God and the practice of the church’s sacramental life. I am not saying the church is a utilitarian body of do-gooders whose purpose is to moralize at everyone else. 

That being said, it is legitimate to speak of the church having multiple purposes or functions, some greater than others, but all real. In its relationship to broader society, the church can and often has provided unique moral guidance throughout history, whether that is in its rebuke of Roman cruelty toward slaves and women in the church’s early days to the church’s 20th century rebuke of segregation and racial cruelty in the United States. Another example of this sort of moral witness can be seen in the film *On the Waterfront* [when a Catholic priest rebukes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ7im%5Fl76fM&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) corruption in the markets.

I would like to add a fourth institution to Bottum’s list, however–the aforementioned “press.” You might think of the press this way: If government, market, and church are the legs of the stool, the press stands to the side and insures that the legs are all sturdy and, if not, that they are repaired in the way they need to be so that they can continue to function. 

One might say that because they are each legs of the stool holding up society, the government, markets, and churches all have certain incentives (in their social roles) to protect their own standing at the expense of long-term health. The press, by contrast, is meant to be indifferent to its own reputation or status, but simply to be aimed at speaking what is true, without institutional factors constraining its witness. A good example of this, in practice, can be seen in *Spotlight*: Because the Catholic church existed as a human institution with assets and liabilities, it was all too easy for church officials to conceal and minimize the horrifying abuses taking place in their diocese. The cost of acknowledging the scale of the abuse was simply too high in material terms. It was the external witness provided by the Boston *Globe* that was able to expose the rot and call church leadership to account.

The difficulty we now face is that because the common social context of our common life has largely dissolved, the press struggles to place itself in relationship to what remains of that context. As a result, we have a press that often either does its job badly or has lost all interest in doing its job as envisioned by the founders. Indeed, the largest financial rewards for the press–whose business model was destroyed quite recently, you might recall–tend to flow not to those who seek to repair the common context, but to those who participate in its collapse. 

This is another way of getting at the problem of “fandoms.” Because fandom is detached from any unchosen common context, the press’s ability to fulfill its social role as understood by the First Amendment is excluded from the start: If you’re a media producer working under the fandom model, you simply don’t see yourself as having any sort of altruistic social function. You are simply a business trying to win fans to the cause so you can generate the revenue and attention you want and need. What drives decision making, then, is not whether or not you as a media outlet are fulfilling your role within a shared civic project, but whether you are winning fans and, thereby, winning revenue.

Taken together, then, it is a fairly perilous time for Christians and for media producers. We are all participating in a media environment that is largely indifferent to truth, addicted to cheap attention, and incentivized to radicalism and extremism. And due to context collapse, the issue is not that we have some healthy and viable alternative model, if only we would reach back and participate in it. The media environment has been destroyed. The common culture has been liquidated.

## The Need for Context-Creating Media: Introducing *Mere O*’s New Online Platform

This brings us to the work we are doing at *Mere Orthodoxy*. I understand I’ve spent an enormous amount of time getting to this point, but it’s all important to understand in order to *really* get what we are trying to do at *Mere O*, which is *far* more than simply building a successful magazine or media nonprofit.

We no longer live in a world of shared context where media simply speaks into pre-existing spaces. The sort of business model that sustained all those magazines is dead. What’s more, because we now live in a world mediated via the internet and dominated by platforms, we no longer even have a shared idea of consensus reality. The commons [have been liquidated](https://mereorthodoxy.com/negative-world-aaron-renn/). 

When I say that I do not simply mean that the idea of my neighbor and I sharing a common place has been eroded, though it has. I mean that the very idea of the “fact” [has been largely dissolved](https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/what-was-the-fact?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). And we are all now left living in our own worlds of “truthyness” and “alternative facts” and “fake news.” The consequences of all this for both the church and our civic life are basically impossible to overstate.

One option we could take—and many media companies have taken this option—is to simply spend our time wringing our hands and lamenting the world we have lost, while suggesting to our readers that if only the right person obtained power or the right decisions were made in our churches or the right tech companies were rewarded or punished, then things would be fine. 

But that is not true. 

The problems we have stumbled into are far too large and too complex for such simplistic thinking. Not only that, but that sort of simplistic analysis will actually make things worse because media organizations pushing that habit of thought will form in themselves and in their audiences a spirit of hatred and rage aimed at whoever their great enemy and destroyer of all that is good happens to be. Simplistic solutions not only fail to address the problems before us, but actually form us in ways that make the problems far worse.

And it will not accomplish anything to simply wish it were not so. All we can do, as Tolkien reminds us, is decide what to do with the time that is given to us.

So this is the task we have set for ourselves at *Mere O*: If fandom is the default model for media audiences today, we want to know if we can create a fandom of Christians engaging in culture for the common good and seeking to enrich the life of the church and of our shared commonwealth. 

Put another way: If we must have fans, can we seek to cultivate fans not of *Mere Orthodoxy* but “fans” of principled Christian piety and civic engagement within an inextricably pluralist society?

And while we’re at it, since we can’t create media that simply partakes of an already created, already shared context, can we create media that remakes that context for our readers, supplying common context for them?

And, let us be practical, can we find enough paying members, donors, and sponsors to support such an endeavor so that we can do it in a sustainable, enduring way so that, one day, we might pass this work on to a second generation of stewards who might carry it forward into the future?

Those are the questions that Mark, Ian, and I are asking, and that we are also thinking about with our board of directors and our editorial board.

How can we accomplish all this? There are two answers to that question.

First, we need to talk about the values we presuppose as an organization that constrain what we do and that we seek to commend to our audience. To answer the question, you might ask “what are the things that we simply take for granted at *Mere Orthodoxy* and try to teach our readers to take for granted in the same way?”

Some of these answers are explicitly theological: We take for granted that the things proclaimed in the Apostle’s Creed are actually true. We take for granted that God invites us to pray. We take for granted that God calls and equips us to follow the Ten Commandments. 

Other things we presuppose are entailments of those prior theological commitments: We take for granted that there really is a common reality we all share and that we can reason about together. Because of that, we take for granted the ideas that persuasion is good (and actually possible!), that making arguments is good, and that having spirited disagreements about matters of great significance is good and fruitful.

If you have followed our work for some time, hopefully none of this is a surprise. These commitments are why we have a very uneven and tentative relationship to social media platforms. They are why we have loudly condemned revolutionary ideologies of all sorts. They are why we sometimes publish essays and reviews and interviews that exceed 10,000 words. They are why we still publish a print journal. These twin commitments to basic Christian orthodoxy and a kind of civically engaged Christian liberalism are foundational to everything we do.

But you can answer the question in another way as well, and this is where the new site is most exciting to me. One way of thinking about the internet today is that it consists of a series of walled gardens, all disconnected from one another. And these walled gardens are best understood as "platforms." Thankfully, *Mere Orthodoxy* is itself a platform because about 75% of our traffic comes to us either directly or via our own email list. So we access our audience without the need of social media algorithms or search algorithms. And so that makes us wonder what sort of things might be possible, given that fact. For example: Can we create a platform that through its design helps call people to love of God and love of neighbor?

In one sense, the answer is "no, we can’t." That work is something God does and he accomplishes it most simply and directly through other persons. You should not look to any online platform to do the work of the local church or of Christian fellowship with other believers. 

That said, because media does play such a foundational role in shaping how people experience the world and because media has to be aimed at *something* in its design, we have designed something that we hope is aimed at encouraging people toward piety and neighborliness.

For our current paying members, you’ve likely had the experience at some point of realizing that if you need to change anything with your membership–shipping address, payment information, etc.–that you couldn’t do that. Our old website was built on Hubspot and Hubspot simply lacked the tools to allow us to create a dashboard for our members. So if you wanted to change any information with your membership, the only way was to email us and ask us to take care of it for you.

That, thankfully, is no longer true. All paid members of *Mere Orthodoxy* now have access to our member dashboard. And our hope for the member dashboard is that it would be a place that helps you grow intellectually and also grow in your awareness of the connections between our media diets and our Christian discipleship. So we have created a dashboard that allows you to change your payment or shipping information, but also does quite a bit more.

First, when you login to the dashboard, you’ll see a welcome message and a prayer for whatever season of the church year we are in which is pulled from the *Book of Common Prayer*. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/05/data-src-image-d8bc7cf9-3581-47de-b2dc-6349256eb132.png)

This is our simple way of acknowledging the point [made so beautifully](https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-christian-scholars-need-the-psalms/) by John Ahern last week: The choice given to each of us is not to choose between ten hours in prayer or ten hours in our books; you can (and should!) choose to spend ten hours in prayer over your books. 

Our hope is that this simple inclusion in the dashboard will prompt our members toward prayer even as they are browsing the internet. It is hard to hate someone when you are praying for them, after all. So we hope that this small encouragement to prayer might help all of us to approach our media consumption in the right spirit.

Second, if you scroll down you will find that all our different unique offerings to our members are now easily accessed: You can access our Members-only Discord, digital editions of all our print journals, and you can access bookmarks, which are a new feature we have on each article on the site, making it easier for you to access later. And if you click and drag over any quotes you want to remember from an article, you can click to “save” the quote and that quote (with a link to the article) will be added to your personalized Commonplace book:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/05/data-src-image-40803f54-58ae-48bf-9c77-9d1bdaf91bce.png)

The dashboard also includes a full reading history of everything you’ve read at *Mere O*, which we hope will make it easier to find any old pieces you might want to return to later.

If you scroll further down, you will see two more features in the right-side nav bar. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/05/data-src-image-bf9237fc-e9ce-4756-bc4a-7bf48f2c2fc4.png)

First, we now have a link to the day’s morning or evening prayer readings from the Book of Common Prayer, which you can read within your member dashboard. Again, our hope here is that it would be a prompt to prayer and a reminder that even our reading and thinking is done before the face of God, that it is something for which we will one day give an account, and it is something which we can do in ways that please God. 

Lastly, you’ll notice an option to adjust the site’s color theme according to the season of the church year. It’s a relatively small feature, but another way in which we hope that the time you spend on our site will call you back toward an awareness of who you are as a human being—you are a beloved son or daughter of God who is made to know and love God forever. The work of growing to know and love God happens now in the world of space and time.

The thought process behind all of this is that if we no longer can assume a shared context between us and our readers and our neighbors, then the best thing we can do is try to create healthy contexts that call people back to the best of what has been lost and also forward into what good remains possible for us.

And now that I have thoroughly tested your patience with such a long introductory essay, I will simply leave it here with three closing thoughts aimed at anyone who wishes to be a properly Christian reader and a properly Christian member of a civil public square. 

First, if all this makes sense to you and it seems right to build media that values what we value and commends to our readers what we commend to our readers, would you consider [joining us as a member](https://mereorthodoxy.com/membership/)? The reality today is that while we know now that reader-supported media *can* work as a monetization strategy, it is still an immensely challenging strategy simply because it is quite difficult to get enough paying readers to support the work. 

Put another way: We can’t do this work without the support of our paid members. If our paid members left us, we’d be done. If you want media projects like this to exist, then we need your support.

Second, it is sometimes difficult to remember the things we know are true while we are online. Anger comes easily. So does mistrust and cynicism. If you want to be part of the solution to our ecclesial and civic malaise rather than a contributor to it, please engage online media from a posture of prayerfulness and quiet, patient devotion to God. And when you pray, please pray for us.

Third, remember that God loves the world and he made us to delight in it and steward it and form it. The work we do is an act of worship to God. He delights in the work of plumbers and electricians and teachers and nurses and lawyers and even politicians and journalists, at least when we do that work as an act of service to God and an expression of love to our neighbor. Never forget that the world is worth knowing and even worth loving because God made it, knows it well, and loves it best.

Thank you for reading and for being with us in this new chapter of *Mere Orthodoxy*.
### Augustine and the Glittering Vices of Christian Ministry
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/augustine-and-the-glittering-vices-of-christian-ministry/
Last updated: 2026-05-22T13:42:41.000Z
This essay is adapted from [*The Augustinian Pastor: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Ministry*](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781540966902%5Fthe-augustinian-pastor?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)(Baker Academic, 2026).

One Sunday morning in Hippo Regius, many years into his service as bishop, Augustine’s regular preaching duties coincided with the anniversary of the day he was ordained to the priesthood. Perhaps feeling a bit nostalgic, Augustine reflected in the sermon on the sense of the heavy responsibility that he had assumed when he became a pastor. In the homily that morning, Augustine singles out a specific and perhaps surprising aspect of the calling that he found especially challenging: the *honor* that accompanied the office. “From the moment this burden… was placed on my shoulders, anxiety about the honor shown me has always been haunting me.” In his preaching to the flock that morning, Augustine identifies one of the central temptations that can accompany the pastoral vocation: the possibility that his congregation might *admire* him, that they would *esteem* him. “What, though, is to be dreaded in this office, if not that I may take more pleasure… in the honor shown me, than in what bears fruit in your salvation?” Augustine is afraid that he’ll come to want to be praised more than he’ll want to be a person who is worthy of that praise.

The problem, of course, is not so much with the praise itself but in his own immoderate love of praise. Love of praise is a fruit of the pride that always threatens our integrity and our faithfulness. Vigilance about this danger, and the accompanying need to cultivate the virtue of humility, is for Augustine a moral necessity for all of us - those who are called into ministry, but really any of us who have ever been given some kind of authority and leadership.

Disordered love of praise and honor is one among a number of subtle and insidious forms of pride which accompany the Christian life, and the only way to prevent being mastered by this pride is to cultivate a humble spirit. Humility is, of course, for all. Augustine writes, “All Christians have to practice humility. Indeed, they even get the name of Christian from Christ, and no one can examine his Gospel attentively without discovering that he is the teacher of humility.” But pride does present particular challenges to some. “On the other hand, it is proper that those who stand out from the rest because of some great gift should be especially concerned to develop and preserve this virtue.”

We find some of Augustine’s most poignant counsel on this danger in a treatise called [*Holy Virginity*](https://www.amazon.com/Marriage-Virginity-Works-Saint-Augustine/dp/1565482220/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?crid=12IMDX6SLPZ89&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.qV36EXE88eucMunU05uMFFmY2F58APGTvWkPTJcQUNDcV8poXeRcvetqTr%5FNAki8uKPgV05jCaYlIp6KxR%5FxkdR1uYZoBgI1mmbn5oU%5FjVYqyoLfljUHJRK6UAToPp8s.9GVX6sJ7OSuOhYS6ejzXUFdcO1jFlVFAHTmvWPurELU&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=augustine+marriage+and+virginity&qid=1778328832&sprefix=augustine+marriage+and+virginit%2Caps%2C319&sr=8-1&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), a work written to women who had taken a vow of chastity. But with a minimal amount of translation, it is a treatise which has wisdom for all of us, especially those with positions of authority. It’s in that treatise that Augustine gives us an important but counter-intuitive principle for thinking about the dynamics between pride and humility: pride is most dangerous for those who have progressed furthest in virtue and the moral demands of the Christian life.

## **Pride and the “Glittering Vices”**

“A person must have humility in proportion to his or her greatness. The danger is pride, and the more exalted the person, the stronger will be its assault.” It is the very presence of virtue that creates the conditions for pride to grow. Augustine sees Jesus’ parable of the praying Pharisee and tax collector from Luke 18 as evidence for this. When he considers the person we know to be the antagonist of the passage, the Pharisee, he draws our attention to the real virtues that the Pharisee has and even his attempt at heartfelt thanksgiving to God. But all of this is spoiled by the pride that acts like a parasite upon his virtues.

Commenting on the passage, Augustine writes “It is possible, therefore, for someone both to avoid real evils and be aware of genuine goodness in himself or herself, and give thanks for this to the Father, from whom comes *every good and excellent thing we receive from above* (Jas 1:17), and at the same time be guilty of the sin of pride by being insulting to others who are sinners, especially those who confess their sins in prayer.” Here’s the terrifying insight Augustine suggests: there are both real goodness and also terrible pridefulness in the Pharisee, and it is precisely that goodness that both encourages his pride and also conceals it from him.

It is when a Christian demonstrates virtue and greatness become visible they are most susceptible to the danger of pride. Faithfulness, goodness, moral excellence, giftedness, and virtue are often met with honor and praise in the Church. But with that praise comes the possibility of a subtle change in motivation. The Christian can become more concerned with how he or she is seen by others than with their identity before God. Pride “makes them more afraid of displeasing other people than displeasing God.” Exterior appearances begin to replace interior realities. Now the Christian’s moral orientation is “directed more to show than to reform.”

This mis-orientation is in many ways a Christian version of an Augustinian concept called the “glittering vices.” In Book V of *The City of God* Augustine considers how Rome came to be such a great power with a panoply of heroes who appeared to possess moral excellence and virtue. He bemusedly observes that Rome’s greatness emerged from a willingness to restrain all of their other vices in the pursuit of one great vice: the love of glory. “This glory they loved with a passion. It was for its sake that they wanted to live and for its sake that they did not hesitate to die. Their boundless desire for this one thing kept all their other desires in check.”

Rome’s greatness had as its source one great, “glittering” vice – the vain love of glory – that it was willing to submit all of its other vices to. But this is where the parable of the Tax Collector and the Pharisee in Luke 18 comes in. Christians should not look down upon Rome, as if we are inoculated to this principle. In the same way that pagan Romans suppressed greed, sensuality, and other vices for the love of glory, it is all too possible that Christians can also restrain their own vices but do so only for the sake of the same vice—love of glory. Only now this love of glory would, just as with the Pharisee in Luke 18, be camouflaged by the virtues that are honored in the Christian community.

This concept helps Augustine give such a shrewd analysis of the subtle and manifold dangers of pride. In *Holy Virginity* Augustine speaks frankly to serious, devoted Christians, people whose lives are a model of sacrifice and devotion. He tells them that he is afraid for them and their souls precisely because of their great devotion: “I am frightened, I say, that you will become proud about following the Lord wherever he goes, and then you will not be able to follow him through the narrow places because you are swollen with pride.” Part of why this fear is warranted is because pride is so subtle it can disguise itself as false humility: “Now that men and women know that they are what they are by the grace of God, let them not fall into another trap by pride, by becoming proud even about God’s grace and looking down on others because of that.” The sobering truth is that a Christian’s most zealous acts of devotion can be “stolen and destroyed by pride.” Because of this, the Christian must be a student of pride and know both its nature and also its antidote.

Pride is of such great concern to Augustine because it is at the center of every departure from the good life that God intends for humanity. “Now pride is a great vice, and the first of vices, the beginning, origin and cause of all sins.” Pride is, for Augustine, a movement away from dependence upon God and toward the self in an effort to possess radical independence, self-security, and self-exalting achievement. To [quote the Augustine scholar John Cavadini](https://www.amazon.com/Augustine-Through-Ages-Allan-Fitzgerald/dp/080283843X/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?crid=T16DLGPB2BGS&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hq4ZgWCkoZm3J3aKWSPTxQTWqnpJ1GvOh5h40Ld7R5h2rgt%5F0xO0yUPK2WEbXDEAxeMqku5KeX8C1TqJHJOViItWIN-sXkq0o4znffOV7KmNUq5%5FO8MLs88WCvp9-FGjZS6ltD5TR6RiUYYy09gsGuU49DEChPa0ZmjwrcBK4zIx0yTCf4IavvrInWEjBj6g.JUooXjjKYYK6H5B1ovCHHGLeMgFmm2HjBuyWljbtcMQ&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=augustine+through+the+ages+an+encyclopedia&qid=1778329288&sprefix=augustine+through+the+ages%2Caps%2C697&sr=8-1&ref=mereorthodoxy.com): “In essence, pride is the desire to replace God with oneself.”

But Augustine goes beyond simply defining pride and identifying its intrinsic and necessary role in every sin–he describes pride. Because pride is such an important concept and such a formidable opponent in the Christian life, he often lingers over specific examples where it is manifested in the world. Throughout his writings we find a textured and nuanced description of pride as it appears in its various forms. This is a vice that can be instantiated intellectually or spiritually, in an individual or or in a culture, perversely or under the guise of virtue. While a definition of pride is helpful, it is even more useful for us to be trained to see it in its manifold forms. In what follows, I’d like to draw your attention to some of the ways Augustine describes pride which have particular relevance to us as pastors.

There are a multitude of examples, but we will have to limit ourselves to one: education. Augustine identifies a kind of intellectual pride in the various educational institutions that are mentioned in the *Confessions*. When describing his early education in Latin while he was a rhetoric student in Thagaste, Augustine paints a picture of a culture that honors the skills of intellectual achievement rather than truth or virtue. His teachers praised a rhetorician's ability to wield precise and correct grammar and their ability to move an audience—to the exclusion of the truth of the subject matter being spoken of and the character of the speaker. “The models proposed to me for imitation were people who would have been caught out and covered with confusion if they had related any of their doings—deeds not wrong in themselves—in a barbaric accent or with grammatical blunders, whereas to relate licentious deeds in correct and well-turned phrases, in ample and elegant style, would have won them praise and honor.” This is a culture that is built upon the self-exalting character of pride, an environment where the singular measure of achievement is the extent to which individuals can exalt themselves over and against others.

Augustine has an eye for this. He sees pride enculturated all around him. He sees it in Platonic philosophy, a belief system that Augustine believes is in some way founded on pride. He sees it in Roman spirituality, which exalted individuals in their ability to access secret knowledge through rituals. And he sees it in Roman culture itself, which exalted itself as the greatest power the world had ever known.

## **Pride and the Christian Life**

Augustine describes sin so carefully in order to learn to see it. But he does that not just so we can learn to see it over there, but so we can learn to see in ourselves. Augustine’s understanding of pride gives us a framework that we can translate and transfer to our own institutions, cultures, and practices of pastoral ministry. This diagnosis is all the more helpful to us because of pride’s subtlety and how it can clothe itself in the pursuit of “glittering vices”—and do so even in the Christian community. What might this look like? A few thought experiments will help us apply Augustine’s counsel.

We can easily imagine what this would look like in a local church. Pride can infect the culture of the church so that it becomes a place where pastors with certain gifts exalt themselves through using their gifts, through the growth of a congregation, or through the ability to build a platform. The “glittering vice” of institutional glory can create a culture where congregations turn a blind eye to issues of character and behavior because of a charismatic leader’s ability to draw people to worship.

All sorts of other institutional disorders follow upon this one. Pastors might devote their time and energy to performance, to the curation of their brand to the exclusion of personal devotion and the shepherding of the flock between Sundays. This is the kind of ecclesial culture where pride is camouflaged by the seemingly great virtues displayed in the pastor’s skills and the worldly “glory” that follows. When we read about churches that implode – Mars Hill, Willow Creek, and others, this is often exactly what is happening. There is this unsaid agreement between the leader and the people. Get us to glory, and we’ll overlook the problems. And the glory of the success, the importance of “the mission,” justifies everything else. It’s “glittering vices” in Christian dress.

We can even imagine how pride can corrupt spirituality—Christian spirituality—in a way that mimics the theurgist religion Augustine critiques in *The City of God*. Under the banner of studiousness and devotion, Christians can pridefully exalt themselves through their practice, their piety, and their knowledge of doctrine. This could be a Christianity of practice: of fasting, or Sabbath, or of service. Or this could be a Christianity of knowledge: of the necessity of cultural engagement, of political theology, or even of the glories of the doctrines of grace. But whatever its form, it would be a spirituality that says with the Pharisee in Luke 18, “I thank you, God, that I am not like that \[blank\],” with each form of spirituality filling in its own version of the “other” that it looks down upon.

Unfortunately, these are not hypothetical examples of how pride can infect Christian institutions and practices. Pride is always attempting to infiltrate Christian communities, corrupting Christian theology and spirituality, and ultimately diverting us from faithfulness. And here is where Augustine’s diagnosis is helpful. His description of pride and the examples that he provides are there to arm us against its attempts to overcome us. We benefit from Augustine’s description of pride in at least two ways.

First, because Augustine gives pride a central place as the “beginning, origin, and cause of all sins,” he forms us to be observant of pride’s insidious nature. We can use Augustine’s definition to nip pride’s bud in our hearts before it spreads and overtakes us. When we sin—as we inevitably will—we can use Augustine’s diagnosis to identify pride’s pattern and the false promises we believe.

Secondly, Augustine’s description of pride helps us to understand the shape of pride and how it affects cultures and institutions. It does not operate merely within atomized individuals, enclosed within the human heart. Pride is both personal and systemic; like a parasite, it attempts to infect whatever host is available. Across his works, Augustine shows us how we are in danger of being “discipled” into pride through education, through philosophy, through religion—through any institutions or cultures we participate in. This is true even in Christian communities.

This second point possesses a great deal of explanatory power for what we too often see in the Church. Specifically, Augustine’s account of the “glittering vices” helps us to make sense of the paradox of apparently successful churches and ministries headed by leaders who eventually face one kind of reckoning or another because of their pride. Why is it so often the case that ministries with a reputation for creativity, excellence, and success are also led by pastors whose lives are characterized by the kind of pride that inevitably leads to a fall? Why is it that those who seem the most committed to Jesus’ Kingdom too often fail to resemble Jesus himself in their gentleness, kindness, and integrity? Augustine helps us to see why.

Just like Rome was able to restrain its “lesser” vices in the pursuit of the one great goal of glory, many Christian leaders and organizations also mobilize all of their resources around the same pursuit of glory. While that “glory” may explicitly be described as God’s glory, Kingdom expansion, or any other number of Christian ends, in reality those goals have some kind of disordered relationship to the institution or its leader. And that prideful glory can prove to be an uncannily effective motivator for getting things done. Incredible creativity is unleashed, innumerable people are served, costly sacrifices are made, non-disclosure agreements are signed—all to the end of this counterfeit “glory.”

The pursuit of that kind of prideful glory is sustainable only for so long. It may be that those within the institution who have been chewed up and spit out by the relentless pursuit of glory protest the disparity between the purported values of the organization and the realities of life within it. It may be that the leaders who spearhead the charge for this glory develop shadow lives in order to relieve the growing pressure that comes with being progressively enslaved to pride. It may be that the pastor increasingly feels entitled to indulge in certain habits and behaviors as compensation for their purported importance for the Kingdom. It may be that there is all kinds of dysfunctional behavior going on behind the scenes. But whatever the case, the “glittering vices” will at some point prove to be an unstable foundation for life and ministry. Augustine’s account of pride helps us to see this troubling reality for what it is.
### The Ancient World Had No Word for Child Abuse
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-ancient-world-had-no-word-for-child-abuse/
Last updated: 2026-07-01T14:37:37.000Z
In 1 BC, a man named Hilarion wrote a letter to his pregnant wife, Alis, while he was away on business in Alexandria. The letter survives on papyrus, preserved by two thousand years of dry Egyptian air. He asks about her health. He tells her to take care of herself. And then, almost in the same breath:

> If you bear a child, if it is a boy, let it live. If it is a girl, expose it.

One sentence without anguish or apology. Just instruction.

What Hilarion wrote was not considered monstrous in his world, his legal system, or to his gods. Roman law gave the paterfamilias, the father and head of household, the power to accept or reject a newborn. Acceptance meant lifting the child from the floor where it had been placed after birth. Rejection meant leaving it there, to be carried outside the city and abandoned to the elements, to wild animals, or to whoever might find it first.

The practice had a name. It was called exposure. It was legal, widespread, and morally accepted.

What we would call murder, the ancient world called a household decision.

This is not an obscure corner of ancient history. It’s the mainstream. Aristotle, one of the most respected philosophers of the ancient world, argued in his *Politics* that exposure should be legally required for deformed children, and recommended as population policy for everyone else. Plato, in the *Republic*, proposed that children born to inferior unions should not be raised. Seneca, whose diagnosis of wasted time was otherwise so penetrating, wrote without particular emotion in *De Ira*: "We drown children who at birth are weakly and abnormal." He was not describing a tragedy. He was describing a reasonable practice.

Girls and the weak and the inconvenient were abandoned in large numbers, most died. Some were found by slave traders and raised for labor or prostitution. A father had no particular moral obligation to the child his wife was carrying. The child's right to exist was entirely contingent on his decision.

And then there was the matter of what the Greeks called *paiderastia*.

The word means, literally, love of boys. It described the formalized sexual relationship between an adult male and an adolescent, typically between twelve and seventeen years old. It was not hidden. It was not shameful. It was celebrated in poetry, codified in philosophical writing, and treated across significant parts of Greek culture as a form of mentorship and education. Plato wrote about it approvingly. The gymnasiums where boys trained were, in part, sites of adult male pursuit.

The ancient world did not have a word for child abuse. It had a word for a relationship.

The first Christians stepped into this world and named what they saw differently.

The Didache, one of the earliest Christian documents outside the New Testament, written sometime in the first or early second century, is essentially a manual for community life. One of its instructions condemns murder, adultery, theft, and then, in the same breath, as a matter in the same moral category: "you shall not be a *paidophthoros*."

The word is not *paiderastes*. Not a lover of boys. Not a mentor or admirer.

*Paidophthoros* means destroyer of children. Corruptor of children. The one who ruins what is young.

The vocabulary shift is not incidental. It is a complete moral reclassification. What Greek culture had named as love, the Didache names as destruction. The adult in the relationship is not an admirer or a teacher. He is someone who destroys. The child is not a junior partner in an educational arrangement. He is a victim.

This is not a minor theological shift. It is a revolution in moral language. And moral language shapes moral vision.

The early Christians did not simply write differently about children. They acted differently.

Justin Martyr, writing around AD 155, described the problem with exposure: abandoned children, he mentioned, were frequently found and raised as prostitutes. Christians could not participate in a practice that handed children to such a fate. The logic was not sentimental. It was theological. Their lives were not the fathers to dispose of.

Aristides, a second-century Christian apologist writing to the Emperor Hadrian, described Christian practice: "They do not expose their children." In the context of his time, that sentence was provocative. It marked Christians as different in a way that was socially costly and economically irrational. Families were pressured to limit the number of mouths they fed. Girls were a financial liability. Christians kept them anyway.

It went further. There is substantial historical evidence that early Christians actively rescued exposed infants, taking in children left to die and raising them as their own. The New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado, in his historical study of early Christian distinctiveness, documents the rejection of infanticide and exposure as one of the clearest markers by which the Roman world recognized Christians as genuinely, stubbornly different from everyone around them. This was not a peripheral practice. It was, Hurtado argues, a defining feature of what it meant to be a Christian community in the Roman world, noticed and remarked upon by pagan observers precisely because it made no sense by their moral framework.

By the fourth century, the first institutions specifically for abandoned children, called brephotrophia, were being built and maintained by the church. The emperor Valentinian I, a Christian, outlawed infanticide entirely in AD 374\. What had been a household decision became a crime. The moral vocabulary of the Didache had, over three centuries, reshaped the legal vocabulary of the empire.

None of this was accidental. It happened because the early Christians had a theological account of why children mattered that the ancient world simply did not possess.

The scriptures of Israel planted a radical idea that eventually stripped the Roman father’s power over life and death. While Roman tradition viewed a newborn as a mere object awaiting a *paterfamilias’s* verdict, Jewish and Christian theology saw a sacred life created by God, born with a royal vocation and divine purpose that no earthly authority could revoke. Armed with this conviction found in the scriptures, first-century Jewish and Christian writers like Philo of Alexandria, Flavius Josephus, and Aristides boldly condemned child exposure as outright murder and a violation of nature.

And then there was the specific belief of the incarnation.

The God whom Christians worshiped had entered the world as an infant. He had been placed in a feeding trough. He had been carried as a refugee into Egypt. He had grown slowly, as children do, learning to walk and speak in a particular language in a particular house. He had been, for years, entirely dependent on the care of human parents.

The gods of the ancient world did not become children. They appeared in power and glory. The God of the Christians chose to begin where every human being begins. And in doing so, he made it permanently impossible to treat the vulnerability of childhood as a defect to be eliminated.

Jesus made this explicit. When the disciples tried to turn children away from him as a distraction, he stopped them. "Let the little children come to me," he said. "Do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God." And then he said something with no real parallel in ancient moral philosophy: anyone who causes one of these children to stumble would be better off drowned in the depths of the sea. The ancient world assumed children were managed by adults for adult purposes. Jesus made the child's welfare the measure of adult moral standing.

The historian O.M. Bakke, in a carefully researched secular study of childhood in early Christianity, concluded that the church introduced something genuinely new into the ancient world: a framework in which children were not property, not burdens, not tools, but persons with full dignity before God, deserving protection and love for their own sake.

This is now, in much of the world, simply assumed. We call it civilization. We enforce it with law. We feel an outrage at its violation so deep and instinctive that we rarely stop to ask where that outrage came from.

It came from somewhere specific.

It came from a document written in the first century that gave child abuse a different name: not love, but destruction. It came from communities that kept their daughters and pulled abandoned infants from the refuse heaps at the edge of Roman cities. It came from a theology that said every child matters, including the weak and the unwanted, and that their dignity is not ours to grant or revoke.

It came from a God who, when he chose to enter the world, chose to enter it as a child: held in the arms of a young mother, in the middle of the night, in a place no one with power would have chosen.

The world he was born into left children at the city's edge to die.

He came to that world anyway. And he has been gathering the ones it discards ever since.
### Why Christian Scholars Need the Psalms
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-christian-scholars-need-the-psalms/
Last updated: 2026-05-21T14:20:09.000Z
As students met this spring to launch our first Coverdale House reading group, we followed a standard format for the evening: we ate, we prayed, and we got down to the business of carefully reading and discussing. It’s the second step of that process that I would like to talk about here. Prayer is an important part of the intellectual life. The great Presbyterian theologian B. B. Warfield, in his famous address “The Religious Life of Theological Students,” critiqued an overly pietistic contrast between the spiritual life and the intellectual life thus: “Sometimes we hear it said that ten minutes on your knees will give a truer, deeper, more operative knowledge of God than ten hours over your books. ‘What!’ is the appropriate response, ‘than ten hours over your books on your knees?’” Evidently Warfield wished his seminarians to study their books, yes, for ten hours, but be praying all the while. Hans Urs von Balthasar put it even more succinctly: the Christian thinker is engaged in a kind of “kneeling theology.”

But at Coverdale House events, our prayers together are structured and even scripted: the Lord’s Prayer, the Psalms, and other readings of Scripture. This is, of course, what some would call “liturgy”—a tricky word, since, to some, it implies certain church traditions as opposed to others, or a particular vibe or aesthetic (vestments, thuribles, Ember days, and so forth). This is not the sense in which I’m speaking when I say that we prayed liturgically. All I mean is that we prayed with words which were normed and governed by Scripture, and particularly by the Psalms.

This liturgical prayer is a part of the long-term vision of the Coverdale House, because we think it is especially important for academics tasked with keeping their focus on Christ in their scholarly endeavors. There are many wonderful things about such prayer. For instance, as we prayed together, we heard whatever Scripture and prayed whichever Psalms were appointed for that day by a pre-determined lectionary. I think there’s particular benefit in this for academics, since there can come to be certain passages of Scripture we wouldn’t choose on purpose, certain passages after which we would rather not say “Thanks be to God.” Keeping that habit of gratitude alive and well, regardless of the appointed reading, is likely salubrious for the spiritual hygiene of the average Christian academic.

But there is an even deeper reason why I think liturgical prayer is crucial to the formation of Christian scholars. Insofar as we shirk this kind of liturgical prayer—by which, again, I mean prayer normed and governed by Scripture, and particularly by the Psalms—we stunt the growth of Christian scholars. I’m not here arguing for the superiority of one particular church tradition over another, since (as I hope to show below) this has been, at times, a common desire of many traditions (even Presbyterians and, yes, even Baptists!); rather, I’m insisting that liturgical prayer is particularly useful for the life of the Christian scholar. This is because liturgical prayer uniquely forms Christian imaginations. I hope to explain how in what follows.

How have different eras evaluated intellectual genius? What characterizes the great mind in the Middle Ages as opposed to the modern period? Mary Carruthers answers just that question in the introduction to her 1990 *The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture*.

Her introduction begins by contrasting two biographical descriptions, one of Albert Einstein and the other of Thomas Aquinas. The contrast is instructive: two contemporaries describing the greatest minds of their respective generations. The question is, how do the two different eras understand genius and intellectual greatness?

Here’s a bit of how Einstein was described by his Princeton colleague, the Polish physicist Leopold Infeld:

> The greatness of Einstein lies in his tremendous imagination…. Originality is the most essential factor in important scientific work. It is intuition which leads to unexplored regions, intuition as difficult to explain rationally as that by which the oil diviner locates the wealth hidden in the earth. …The clue to the understanding of Einstein’s role in science lies in his loneliness and aloofness. In this respect he differs from all other scientists. …This aloofness, this independent thought on problems which Einstein formulated for himself, not marching with the crowd but looking for his own lonely pathways, is the most essential feature of his creation. It is not only originality, is not only imagination, it is something more.

And here is what the Dominican friar Bernardo Gui recounts about Thomas Aquinas, based on contemporary accounts of Thomas’s life directly from his friends:

> His memory was extremely rich and retentive: whatever he had once read and grasped he never forgot; it was as if knowledge were ever increasing in his soul as page is added to page in the writing of a book. Consider, for example, that admirable compilation of Patristic texts on the four Gospels, which he made for Pope Urban and which, for the most part, he seems to have put together from texts that he had read and committed to memory from time to time while staying in various religious houses. …Nor did he seem to be searching for things as yet unknown to him; he seemed simply to let his memory pour out its treasures…. He never set himself to study or argue a point, or lecture or write or dictate without first having recourse inwardly—but with tears—to prayer for the understanding and the words required by the subject.

Carruthers first notes how much the two descriptions are alike, particularly in the emphasis on solitude and extreme concentration on problems to be solved. Yet, she notes, the central contrast lies in the source of genius: for Einstein, Infeld emphasizes his creative imagination, whereas for Gui, Thomas’s genius lies in his retentive memory. Here we sense the gulf between our own era and the Middle Ages: it isn’t hard for us to accept that someone is a genius based on his or her creativity and imagination. Less intuitive to us is the idea that someone is an intellectual giant merely because of their memory. Retentive memory may make a person a savant or a geek, but it isn’t immediately clear what the good of that retentive memory is unless it’s harnessed toward some further end. We are inclined to think of an education that emphasizes memorizing bits of information as useless on its own and even a dangerous substitute for actual thought, the sort of education John Dewey rejected as the mere “accumulation of information in the form of symbols.”

But there’s a strong case to be made that both kinds of intellectual genius are crucial, and that moderns, if they don’t overvalue the creative imagination, at least tend to undervalue the retentive memory. Our typical metaphors for scholarship (e.g. “knowledge production” or “pioneering research”) betray a certain bias in how we think knowledge goes all of the time: it’s about innovation, thinking the previously unthought. Less often do we acknowledge the fact that this innovation is often reconfiguration or re-imagination of an existing body of knowledge. From this perspective, knowledge is full of pre-existing building blocks, and the main task is their holistic and integrated arrangement, their ready and new application to a changed world. If the building blocks are already there, awaiting the perfect configuration, then the retentive memory quickly becomes the prized commodity. Lest my readers think I’m only talking about the humanities, I should clarify—there is good reason to think this is how science is conducted at its best, no less than the humanities. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy was not wrong when he defined scientific process as “the organization of all thinkable errors in order that, as a later result, error may be overcome.” Here he was describing the affordances of Faraday’s laboratory, but he could well have been describing Thomas Aquinas’s Catena Aurea—if not an organization of thinkable errors, then at least an organization of thoughts and authorities with which one might or might not agree.

There shouldn’t be any binary between retentive memory and creative imagination. In fact, Carruthers argues, for the Medieval period, the two were a unity: the imaginatio or phantasia was, in fact, a repository and factory of images (whether literally images or more abstract thoughts). Take, for example, the Unikitty lego, undoubtedly a product of the imagination. From a Medieval perspective, it’s merely several images (rainbows, unicorns, kittens), stored in the memory, then reconfigured. Thus the productivity and quality of your imagination is directly dependent on the fruitfulness and quality of the images you choose to put in your imaginatio. Your imagination is what it eats, so to speak, and it will be creative only according to the materials it is fed upon. Those materials are the images stored in your memory.

Let’s assume, for a moment, that there’s some truth to this perspective. For a scholar hoping to form a Christian imagination in that more Medieval sense, how is it done? How does one think about one’s field or discipline or methodology as a Christian? The answer is clear: your scholarly imagination must be provided with good images. And that is precisely what liturgical prayer does well. With your own lips, in company with other Christians, you are making Scripture your imaginative stock. You allow Christ’s words to dwell in you richly. You offer back to God his own words, since, after all, what do you have that you did not receive? George Herbert, in his wonderful poem “Prayer (I),” describes prayer precisely this way, as “God’s breath in man returning to his birth…reversed thunder.” By praying Scripture aloud (or even singing it), regularly and systematically, you are capturing these words in your memory—and that will, in the end, be the wellspring of creativity and scholarly energy. This approach to Scripture, I’d argue, is more likely to accomplish this than the exclusively private study of Scripture (the “quiet time”).

Take a literary example: in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Ilyusha’s father is unable to prepare himself for the likely death of his young son. His son consoles him, urging him to adopt another boy like himself, to which his father replies, “I don’t want another boy! If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my tongue cleave….” Later, Kolya, the irreligious and precocious teenage boy, asks Alyosha Karamazov what the father meant by this. Alyosha explains, of course, that this is from Scripture, but Kolya is unlikely to get the full resonance that Alyosha does: the grief-filled imprecations of Psalm 137 and its context are immediately available to the father as a way of expressing his sorrow.

How? Well, Ilyusha’s father is a decently churched Orthodox Russian, and the Psalms are repeated so often as to become parts of one’s very vocabulary. The same thing happens in James Agee’s Death in the Family, also about grief and death: here Mary, the wife grieving her husband, reaches a depth of sorrow so low she has no words left, and in this very moment a voice from within Mary prays, “Out of the depths have I cried unto you, O Lord.” She too, a good Catholic who knows her Psalms, has the words of Christ in her, interceding on her behalf when she has no words of her own. This is the great power of regular liturgical prayer: the words of Scripture spring to one’s lips unbidden. Spontaneity is only ever conditioned on the possibility of a replete memory, well-trained upon its materials.

This liturgical encounter with Scripture is different from (but not a replacement for) the “quiet time” of private study, for several reasons: it is in community with other Christians, it is spoken back to God in prayer, and it is spoken aloud repeatedly and systematically for our own inward retention. Theologians have often pointed out that this is the basis for theology, not just Scripture studied in the ivory tower, but Scripture read in community and in prayer. “Dogmatics,” says the Catholic theologian David Fagerberg, “bobs in a liturgical stream.”

Although we may think of this scripted and less spontaneous form of prayer as an exclusively Catholic phenomenon, it is not. Martin Luther insists that praying to God in public worship is directed toward an inward retention of God’s word. “Know, therefore,” speaking of worship specifically, “that you must be concerned not only about hearing, but about learning and retaining God’s word by memory. Do not think that this is optional for you or of no great importance. Think that it is God’s commandment, who will require an account from you about how you have heard, learned, and honored his Word.” John Calvin, for his part, also advocated for a more scripted approach to prayer, especially in catechetical contexts. Even the Puritans, often thought to be the godfathers of spontaneous prayer, are more complicated. Lori Branch, in Rituals of Spontaneity, brilliantly analyzes the Westminster Directory of Public Worship, an attempt to chart a middle path between advocates of spontaneous prayer and the English Book of Common Prayer. The Directory included liturgical rubrics and pre-scripted prayers in order to guide worshipers, but always worded them in such a way that it could not quite be read word-for-word, in hopes that the affective power of the worship would not be lost in dull or rote repetition. Princeton’s own Charles Hodge, for whom Presbyterianism was Christianity come into its own, also praised the practice of Morning and Evening Prayer, begrudgingly admitting that the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer nailed it in that limited respect. He praised these liturgies for their “evangelical sentiment, fervor of devotion, and majestic simplicity of language.” But Hodge notes that, ultimately, these services are “derived from forms already drawn up by the Reformers on the continent,” and, indeed, one could add, they derive from forms going back farther into the Middle Ages—a truly ecumenical form of prayer.

There is one particular subset of Scripture which lends itself to prayer more than others and holds a special place in the catechizing of the Christian mind. “The choice and flower of all things profitable in other books,” says Richard Hooker, “the Psalms do more briefly contain, and more movingly also express by reason of that poetical form wherewith they are written. …This is the very cause why we iterate the Psalms oftener than any other part of the Scripture.” Myles Coverdale, in his “Preface” to the Bible, says that “In the Psalms we learn how to resort only unto God in all our troubles, to seek help at him, to call upon him to settle our minds by patience….” Even Baptists, as I mentioned, have emphasized this sort of pre-scripted prayer as powerful. Charles Spurgeon, in his Treasury of David, says,

> Time was when the Psalms were not only rehearsed in all the churches from day to day, but they were so universally sung that the common people knew them, even if they did not know the letters in which they were written. Time was when bishops would ordain no man to the ministry unless he knew "David" from end to end, and could repeat each psalm correctly; even Councils of the Church have decreed that none should hold ecclesiastical office unless they knew the whole psalter by heart. Other practices of those ages had better be forgotten, but to this memory accords an honorable record.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his The Prayerbook of the Bible, points to a yet more profound reason for the Psalms’ place in Christian worship: Psalms are the prayers of Christ to the Father, and when we pray them, we pray Christ’s words after him, and thus participate in the life of the Trinity itself. “It is the Son of God made man who has borne all our human weakness in his own flesh, who here pours out the heart of all mankind before God, who stands in our place and prays…it is the prayer of that humanity which he has assumed that comes before God in the psalms.” Even in our prayer, we do not offer what is only ours to him; he initiates even this, does it on our behalf: “Of thine own have we given thee.”

A disturbing corollary follows, if we assume that the Christian imagination is fed on images (or words or thoughts). Christian scholarly imaginations are getting formed, one way or another. If it is not the words of Scripture, imbued in liturgical prayer, it will be the other sorts of things we do in community repetitively.

In Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” the boy Kay finds his sled tethered to the back of the Snow Queen’s sleigh, and he is unable to unhook himself. He is terrified, and he tries to pray, “but he could remember nothing but the multiplication table.” Nothing against multiplication tables, of course; the point is, when the pressure is on, we reactively fall back on what resources we have within ourselves. This is why it’s urgent that we build institutions that take on the role of consciously forming Christian minds according to the pattern of Scripture. If we don’t do it, it will be done anyways, but not in ways we want.

[*originally published at Coverdale House*](https://thecoverdalehouse.substack.com/p/liturgy-and-the-christian-scholar?utm%5Fsource=post-email-title&publication%5Fid=5705032&post%5Fid=195741382&utm%5Fcampaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1npwo6&triedRedirect=true&utm%5Fmedium=email)
### A Taxonomy of Pride in 'The Great Divorce'
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-taxonomy-of-pride-in-the-great-divorce/
Last updated: 2026-05-20T14:03:56.000Z
Our lives are full of trouble. That much is clear.

Marriages fracture. Families feud. Churches split. For those serious about faith, the complications compound — unanswered questions about God, revelation, salvation that no one can fully resolve and everyone argues about anyway. The menu of ancient and modern wisdom promising to help is longer than anyone could absorb in several lifetimes.

What if most of it traces back to one thing?

C. S. Lewis didn't set out to write a book about pride. *The Great Divorce* is a fantasy about souls who refuse Heaven's invitation — some pious, some pitiful, all fatal. Look closer, and the reasons for their refusal collapse into one. Every shade in Lewis's gallery is a variation on the same theme: the deadly sin of pride, the self turned inward, the will that insists on its own way even at the cost of everything else.

Pride hides in plain sight, usually wearing the face of a virtue. Inwardly, it inflates — overconfidence in one's intelligence, moral standing, ability, or control. Outwardly, it pushes — into self-promotion, narcissism, envy, and the relentless ranking of people. Worst of all, it blinds us to itself. We don't want to see our own pride precisely because we are proud. And once pride curdles into envy, it stops merely inflating the self and begins resenting the good it sees in others.

The book is nearly eighty years old. Their modern equivalents surround us — and indict us.

## The Big Man: Self-Righteousness

Here, pride takes the form of an inflated sense of personal virtue and a refusal of grace that cannot be earned.A blustery, working-class ghost convinced of his own decency, the Big Man insists he deserves Heaven on the strength of his good behavior. His pride rests in moral self-sufficiency, and grace *offends* him precisely because it treats all as equally undeserving.

The Big Man insists on being admitted to Heaven because he has “done his best”:

> “But I done my best all my life, see? I done my best by everyone, that’s the sort of chap I was.”

His Spirit-guide corrects him gently, shifting the ground from merit to grace:

> “Oh no. It’s not so bad as that. I haven’t got my rights, or I should not be here. You will not get yours either. You’ll get something far better. Never fear.”

When the Big Man resists, the guide confronts him directly:

> “You weren’t a decent man and you didn’t do your best. We none of us were and we none of us did. Lord bless you, it doesn’t matter. There is no need to go into it all now.”

Pride here is, above all, self-righteous — the delusion that one could merit eternal life on one’s own merits. This echoes the mindset of the rich young ruler who approached Jesus in the gospel accounts. The Big Man’s pride is compounded by envy: his grievance is not only that he lacks Heaven, but that a convicted murderer like Len already enjoys it. Envy, as explained by Aristotle, is the experience of pain and disappointment over another’s good fortune. We see it reflected in today’s culture, where the societal goal (in the eye’s of some) has shifted from the elimination of poverty to the elimination of inequality – as if it were morally objectionable that some might succeed more than others.

## The Bishop: Intellectual Pride

The Bishop embodies intellectual (or epistemic) pride, an unwarranted certainty in one’s own opinions and beliefs. An urbane clergyman who prefers theological speculation to the presence of God, the Bishop hides from truth behind endless “honest” questions. Though he seems to avoid any expressions of personal dogma, he’s quite confident in his dismissal of orthodox Christian dogma. His intellectual hubris is on full display – flaunting his imagined wisdom, assuming he alone is immune to bias, and insisting that God ought to respect to his opinions, rather than submitting to Him in humility.

The Bishop relishes the idea of returning to Grey Town to continue his lectures and debates, avoiding paradise for the pleasure of attention. He asserts that honest opinions, “fearlessly followed,” are never sins. His Spirit-guide spots the flaw in reasoning:

> “It all turns on what are honest opinions.”

And then more directly:

> “Our opinions were not honestly come by.”

The guide lists the “sins of intellect” — hide-bound prejudice, intellectual dishonesty, timidity, and stagnation — and invites the Bishop to “the land not of questions but of answers” where he shall “see the face of God.”

Contemporary psychology affirms the guide’s claim: our beliefs are rarely the product of pure, bias-free reasoning; they are shaped by self-interest, emotional commitments, and social pressures. The Bishop’s pride lies in assuming he is immune to these distortions. It’s a universal affliction that pervades every nook and cranny of our politics, churches, and public discourse. Yet, there is a simple remedy: intellectual humility, the humble admission that we *could* be sometimes wrong.

## The Hard-Bitten Ghost: Superiority

In this ghost, pride expresses itself as the conviction that seeing through everything is a mark of superiority. A tough-minded cynic, the Hard-Bitten Ghost prides himself on never being fooled. He “sees through” everything, but his skepticism has eaten away his capacity to see anything at all.

> “It’s up to the Management to find something that doesn’t bore us, isn’t it? It’s their job… they won’t catch me that way.”

C. S. Lewis elsewhere warns of the danger of “seeing through” everything until nothing is left to see. In a time of mass disinformation, our default posture ought to be one of skepticism. But sometimes, healthy skepticism grows into an unhealthy cynicism that acts as a firewall against truth itself.

Cynicism functions like armor: it prevents the sting of disappointment but also prevents the embrace of joy. Such a mentality is pervasive in modern society, with widespread public skepticism of the government, public institutions, and the scientific and medical communities. Yet the skepticism is rarely consistent – those who reject the authority of more mainstream sources are often too eager to believe anything from a FaceBook meme or YouTube video.

## The Well-Dressed Woman: Narcissicism

The Well-Dressed Woman reveals a form of pride rooted in obsessive self-promotion, where dignity and appearance are idolized. Terrified of embarrassment (real or imagined), the Well-Dressed Woman clings to her image and dignity as though they were her life. Pride leads her to a self-consciousness so complete that it eclipses all other loves.

When asked to let go of her self-image, she protests:

> “You’ve no right to ask me to do a thing like that.”

Her Spirit-guide urges:

> “Could you, only for a moment, fix your mind on something not yourself?”

Her pride is expressed in her self-serving insistence upon admiration and recognition, along with the idolatrous presumption that outward appearance is the truest measure of a person’s worth. In an era of self-branding and image curation, her fixation on her personal appearance feels disturbingly commonplace — and therefore more dangerous.

## The Grieving Mother: Control Over God

Here, pride masquerades as devotion, while asserting moral superiority over God in the name of love. The mother is eternally grieving over a lost son. She is assured he awaits her on the other side. But Pam demands her son back on her terms, even if it means rejecting Heaven. Her “love” is really possession, an unwillingness to love God unless she controls the relationship.

> “I don’t believe in a God who keeps mother and son apart. I believe in a God of love. No one has a right to come between me and my son. Not even God. Tell Him that to His face. I want my boy, and I mean to have him. He is mine, do you understand? Mine, mine, mine, for ever and ever.”

Her guide offers the humility lesson all must learn:

> “That’s what we all find when we reach this country. We’ve all been wrong! That’s the great joke. There’s no need to go on pretending one was right!”

Here again we see the essence of intellectual humility, and how essential the virtue is to every other aspect of life. Pam’s “devotion” is not an excess of love, but of selfishness — an unwillingness to love God unless she first possesses her son. Pride further puts her in the role of judge over God — and leads to envy, her resentment that anyone else (even God) should enjoy what she cannot possess. It is the nature of possessive love in any age, but in ours it mirrors the parent whose identity is wholly bound to a child’s loyalty or achievement, unable to bless any relationship not under their control.

## The Tragedian: Control Over Others

Frank’s pride takes the form of sanctified suffering, using misery as leverage to control the emotional lives of others. Augustine wrote of the *libido dominandi* – the lust for power. The power he attempts to wield is not political but emotional. Frank appears as a small, shrunken figure leading a tall, melodramatic puppet — the Tragedian. He weaponizes self-pity, demanding that others be held hostage to his misery.

Sarah Smith names his demand for what it is:

> “Did you think joy was created to live always under that threat… that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.”

Lewis then expands:

> “The passion of pity… was used as a weapon by bad men against good ones: their weapon will be broken.”

Frank’s pride leads to envy, and envy to domination — a demand that others be as joyless as himself. His misery cannot bear the sight of anyone else’s happiness; joy in others is an offense that must be vetoed. Through this lens we can understand the impulse driving grievance culture, where other people’s joy is treated as a personal insult unless it conforms to one’s own terms.

## Ikey: Self-Promotion

Ikey’s pride appears as opportunism and radical self-sufficiency, transforming gift into resource and abundance into advantage. Ikey appears on the outskirts of Heaven carrying a black bag, intent on gathering golden apples. But his aim is not to enjoy them here; it is to carry them back to Grey Town, where others have none. The apples’ value lies not in their beauty or nourishment, but in their scarcity — they become a means to set himself above others and profit from their lack.

Aquinas describes one form of pride as the pursuit of goods “in order that others may be exceeded.” Greed seeks to possess; pride-linked greed seeks to surpass. Ikey’s plan is a textbook example: it’s not that he really wants the apples for their intrinsic worth, but for what personal advantage they confer against others. And yet the absurdity is plain: from selling the apples in Grey Town, what could he possibly gain that would be superior to the bounties of Heaven? Pride will cling to its own little advantage even when surrounded by infinite abundance, measuring worth not by joy received, but by how it exalts the self over others.

## The Ghost with the Lizard: Sensual Pride

In this ghost, pride binds self-serving desire so tightly to identity that transformation feels like annihilation. This ghost carries on his shoulder a sly, whispering lizard — the embodiment of lust. At first glance, lust might seem less obviously connected to pride than self-righteousness or intellectual arrogance. But Lewis presents it here in its truest form: a passion oriented entirely toward the self. Lust is not ordered toward the good of another, but toward personal pleasure and gratification. In that sense, it is pride turned inward — with self enthroned as the final end.

The ghost’s resistance is revealing. He does not argue that the lizard is good, only that killing it would be unbearable. Pride speaks here through fear: fear that surrender would mean loss, diminishment, or annihilation. To admit the lizard must die is to admit that something in him is disordered and in need of repair. Pride recoils at that admission. Better to remain damaged than to concede dependence on grace.

Only when the ghost consents — haltingly, painfully, perhaps humbly? — does transformation occur. The lizard is destroyed, and in its place emerges a great stallion, strong and free. What pride insisted would be the end of the self becomes the beginning of something larger and more real. Lewis’s point is precise: repentance does not erase desire; it redeems it. But pride cannot imagine this, because pride equates change with a loss of self rather than its restoration.

This logic manifests in many ways; for instance, wrapping one’s identity around unbiblical sexual conduct and rendering that identify sacrosanct. However, all of us are broken. All of us are in need of radical transformation. But we do not often welcome it. What truly *threatens* the self is not transformation, but the proud refusal to be transformed.

## Lewis's Theological Frame

The narrator’s guide through Heaven’s foothills, George MacDonald, is a towering, solid Spirit patterned after the real-life Scottish author and preacher whom Lewis revered. He serves as both interpreter and theologian, explaining the deeper meaning behind each ghost’s refusal. MacDonald frames the encounters in terms of freedom, self-will, and the unyielding choice between “Thy will be done” and “my will be done.”

> ““One will say he has always served his country right or wrong; and another that he has sacrificed everything to his Art; and some that they’ve never been taken in, and some that, thank God, they’ve always looked after Number One, and **nearly all, that, at least they’ve been true to themselves.**” \[emphasis added\]  
>  
> “Every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind — is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself.”

MacDonald observes:

> “There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery.”

And gives Lewis’s most famous summary:

> “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it… Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.”

(Lewis’s depiction of Hell here is, in his own words, a “fantasy, not even a guess or a speculation at what may actually await us.”)

Hell, he says, is small and shrinking:

> “All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World.”

And pride is the stubborn rejection of grace:

> “Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see.”

Grace is offered to any who open their hands, their mouths, or their eyes. They don’t want it and refuse to admit they need it.

## Conclusion

Lewis’s ghosts are not caricatures of evil, much less an allegorical catalog of vices to overcome. Each lost soul clings to something once recognizable as a virtue — intellect, love, justice, caution, artistic calling — but held in a disordered way. Pride’s danger is that the deification of self leads to the corruption of whatever virtue is present, even when doing so makes us smaller, colder, and less free.

What Lewis exposes is not merely moral failure but moral intransigence. Pride does not simply lead us into sin; it steels us against grace. It tightens the fist, hardens the will, and convinces us that surrender would mean ruin, not restoration. Hell, in Lewis’s telling, is not imposed from without so much as chosen from within — the final consequence of insisting on “my will” over reality itself.

The antidote is not self-loathing or moral heroics. It is humility: the willingness, at minimum, to admit we are in need of repair.

Pride promises satisfaction. It delivers a shrinking world. Lewis said as much in *Mere Christianity*, written a few years before *The Great Divorce*: pride "leads to every other vice" and "has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began." The gallery of ghosts in *The Great Divorce* is that claim given form — each figure a case study in what pride costs when the bill finally comes due.

Are you holding something you'd rather keep than surrender? The phantoms know that feeling well.
### Ida B. Wells's Public Faith
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/ida-b-wellss-public-faith-2/
Last updated: 2026-05-20T14:03:58.000Z
There are moments when you realize the tradition you love is larger than the version you inherited. Ida B. Wells, a Presbyterian, has recently done that for me, and her faithful witness deepens how I live faith in the public square.

I remembered her name only dimly from high school history class. Wells was a crusader against lynching through her journalism, and later a key figure in the suffragist movement and the NAACP. Over the past year, I have felt a conviction to study her life, notably her courage, gumption, and refusal to stay silent.

As a young journalist, Wells reported on lynching with a specificity no one else dared, and her work brought its scourge into the consciousness of both Black and white Americans. Eventually, she would own her own newspaper in Memphis, only to have a white mob destroy the printing office and threaten her life, forcing her into literal exile. Wells went on to play a significant leadership role within the American suffrage movement, working alongside figures such as Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, until she broke with them when they asked Black women to wait their turn on questions of race.

What surprised me most was learning that Wells spent roughly thirty-five years in a Presbyterian church. Ida B. Wells did not write on or about Presbyterian theology as a system, but she reasoned, protested, and hoped as someone formed by it. Her faith does not show up in doctrinal exposition, but in her confidence that God judges nations, that institutions can sin, and that truth spoken publicly is an act of obedience to God. We rightly celebrate the sermons of Knox, the persistence of Wilberforce, and the political leadership of Kuyper, her contemporary, no less. Ida B. Wells belongs in their company.

## **Faith in Life**

Wells’ talent was instantly recognized by church leadership. In her autobiography, *Crusade for Justice*, she writes of joining Grace Presbyterian Church in Chicago:

> They did accept me and I and my two daughters united with the church. Shortly after I was asked to accept the position of teacher of the men's Bible class by the members themselves. I thus began that which to me was one of the most delightful periods of my life in Chicago.

Her teaching at Grace (today Sixth Grace Presbyterian Church) did not remain inside the classroom. The Sunday after the 1908 Springfield race riots, Wells confronted the moral paralysis she saw among the young Black men in her class. Many of them, facing urban dislocation, unemployment, and systemic injustice, heard from her that a response to racial violence cannot remain rhetorical, but must become organizational.

What she did next with that moment is worth hearing in her own words:

> I do not remember what the lesson was about that Sunday, but when I came to myself I found I had given vent to a passionate denunciation of the apathy of our people over this terrible thing. I told those young men that we should be stirring ourselves to see what could be done. When one of them asked, ‘What can we do about it?’ I replied that they could at least get together and ask themselves that question. The fact that nobody seemed worried was as terrible a thing as the riot itself.

Out of that Bible class emerged the Negro Fellowship League, a ministry designed to do something Presbyterians have long believed matters: form people over time for their flourishing and that of others. The League provided housing, employment assistance, education, and moral formation for Black men navigating a hostile city. This was discipleship embedded in social reality, a deeply Reformed move.

Wells went on to help found organizations that carried her vision beyond her own lifetime: women's clubs, civil rights associations, suffrage groups, kindergartens, and settlement houses. Some of these institutions still exist today, including the NAACP and the National Association of Colored Women. Wells built hopeful alternatives where the kingdom of God broke through. Wells did not see the church as a refuge from the world, but a place of courage and discipleship; a place of moral clarity where God calls and sends every day people for his mission.

Presbyterians have always believed that ideas need structures to survive. My friend Professor Mike Glodo at Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando, often shares with students that the book of Acts presents institution-building as a church-planting methodology, one we should not neglect in our desire for simple, digestible Christianity delivered over a latte and a text. Wells shows that cultural renewal must be institutional if it is to outlast personalities, trends, and annual budgets. A moral vision, even the gospel itself, untethered from durable forms eventually dissipates. Wells held this instinctively. Her life pairs truth-telling with institution-building, critique with construction, and courage with patience.

## **A Public Gospel**

In my own work, I have been wrestling with what I call "gospel walking." By this I mean the conviction that the gospel is not only something we believe or proclaim, but also something we carry through our bodies into neighborhoods, workplaces, and institutions. Faith that remains abstract eventually loses its hold on people. Wells understood this.

The same scriptures she taught in a men’s Bible class shaped how she read lynching testimonies, court transcripts, and newspaper editorials. Wells did not separate her journalism from her faith, or her organizing from her discipleship. The same moral seriousness that led her to church membership led her to risk her life for the truth,

Ida, my new friend, walked the gospel into places where it was unwelcome. She stood up to the Memphis elite, Black and white. She stood up to northern reformers, content with gradualism. She stood up to church leaders who preferred quiet respectability to costly faithfulness.

Ida B. Wells exercised Presbyterian instincts naturally: moral realism about sin, confidence in God’s sovereignty, patience for long-term formation, and the belief that scripture and institutions matter. Her life suggests that, at its best, Presbyterianism has always been more than polite theology and cautious leadership. It shapes people capable of public courage, institutional imagination, and sustained resistance to evil. As a pastor, I want to do the same. I suspect many of my colleagues do, too.

The Reformation Chapel at First Presbyterian Church of Orlando, where I have served for twenty-one years, bears the names of ten reformers carved into the molding that crowns the room. At the risk of appearing *woke*, I can’t help noticing that the names are all dead white guys. Could Ida’s name ever be up there? Maybe, but more importantly, I want her story in my heart and to be known by others. The more I attend to her story, the more I suspect that the future health of our churches depends less on innovation and more on recovering the breadth of the house we already inhabit. There are rooms we never entered. She lived in them. And the gospel walked there long before I arrived.
### The Other Side of Seminary
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-other-side-of-seminary/
Last updated: 2026-05-19T14:08:48.000Z
Open the door. Set my bag down. Turn on light number one. Turn on the library light. Walk upstairs. Walk back down. Open the computer to check emails. Look at the to-do list. Look at the calendar. Wonder how it is already May.

Bank statements are due soon. Graduation is coming.

Did I ask the professors to be there early? Yes, I did. How am I going to get the flowers and the cake both at 4 and be ready for the walkthrough? I need a clone. Did I submit that invoice? We need the water filter changed. Did the cleaners vacuum? I need to call them.

The to-do list piles against me, and just before the lump in my throat surfaces, I am paused in motion. By an all too familiar sound. It is Thursday morning. The preaching lab is being taught in the classroom overhead. The walls of this building are extremely thin, which can sometimes be a blessing. During these times, when future church leaders are giving a sermon for their class, they always begin with a hymn. As the powerful, deep, male voices sing "Holy, Holy, Holy," I pause and listen with hope, recalling why I am here and the work I believe in. Despite its routine and sometimes overwhelming nature, like any job, I remember this morning: this is the future of the church, and Holy is the Lord God Almighty.

## **A Long Investment**

When addressing a group of donors last fall, Sinclair Ferguson, a visiting professor, posed the question: "Why seminary?" His answer was simple: your grandchildren need biblically sound pastors. A seminary propels us into the future of the church. By investing in seminary education, we ensure a vibrant and grounded church for generations to come.

Of course, many people have asked why we need pastors to have a seminary degree? Paul didn't go to seminary. While true, the counterargument is that you don't need a seminary degree when your letters are inherently inspired and breathed out by God. Paul no doubt emphasized teaching the word and learning. One might even argue that he started the first seminary (Acts 19:9).

**20 Years from Now**

I come from the underbelly of the seminary. I am the face behind the moving parts: the fall schedule flyer posted, the snacks in the breakroom, the classroom set up, the invoices submitted, the meals for faculty meetings, the peanut M&M's always at my desk. I am the person who meets the first child of our seminary students.

At times, my work can feel insignificant. But when voices echo through the paper-thin walls, I see the infants I care for at church right now in 20 or 30 years, with a church and a faithful pastor who learned in seminary. These pastors won’t just know Hebrew and Greek; they will sit under teachers who have been walking far longer in ministry than they have, having lunch with esteemed professors, inquiring about what it really means to shepherd a church. Because pastors have a bigger calling, not only to faithfully and biblically stand as ministers of the gospel of Jesus, but also to live out the truth: how to love people, how to comfort the broken, and care for the sick. Sit with those who weep, rejoice with those who rejoice.

My senior pastor, who also serves as a professor at the seminary where I work, preached on Isaiah 42 a couple of months ago. As it happens with some sermons, it has clung to me. In reference to the bruised reed and the faintly burning wick, he said:

> "I suppose it's one of the reasons why one of the best ways you can see about a pastor's instincts is whether he knows how to be gentle with people, a leader who can see what a bruised reed is, what a faintly burning wick is, and say, no, we are not going to snuff it out, no, we are not going to break it, because it is nearly there. Because that's what Jesus does. So if you are in here today and broken, or nearly broken, know that Christ can take care of you."

Strip down the institution and the branding, lose the formality and regulations, and you will see a modern-day shepherd making disciples, who go and make more disciples. Our prayer is that they leave here not only knowing God more but also loving him more, walking as Christ walked, serving, and not looking to be served. And in 20 years, when a bruised reed comes to them, they will not snuff it out. They will sit with them and remind them of the same basics of the gospel they learned in a classroom, in the scripture, many moons ago, and perhaps they will remember that lady who gave them peanut M&Ms, who felt lucky to meet the future pastors of our generation.
### The Problem with 'Religion'
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-problem-with-religion/
Last updated: 2026-05-19T14:08:52.000Z
James Baird’s new book [*King of Kings: A Reformed Guide to Christian Government*](https://press.founders.org/shop/king-of-kings/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)is exactly the sort of volume I appreciate. It is cleanly written, succinct, and analytically clear enough to allow for ready engagement. And I’m largely sympathetic to its driving concern—the relevance of the Christian message for all domains of life, including politics—even if I fundamentally disagree with some aspects of Baird’s formulation.

Indeed, I found *King of Kings* a fascinating and challenging read precisely because I agree with so much of it. Earlier in my career, I spent several years as a senior political staffer in the U.S. Senate. Many young Christians who find their way to Capitol Hill are passionate about the life of the unborn, about protecting a biblical understanding of marriage and gender, about defending religious liberty, and so on—as I am. But one of the things that surprises many people is how little time Congress spends working on those issues on a day-to-day basis. These all typically get lumped together into a single policy area that’s nicknamed “values issues.” A Senator might have a staff of 40 people, and maybe one of them has the “values portfolio.”

There is something unsettling, even grotesque, about this. Talking about “values” in this way evokes a host of other, rather condescending terms like “faith groups” or “faith perspectives,” which implicitly marginalize the actual *truth-value* of any Christian claims. The obvious implication is that most of what Congress does is something that “values” have basically no bearing upon. And from a Christian vantage, that’s totally wrong. As Baird recognizes, if Christianity is *true*, that means its claims necessarily implicate the work of civil government. Contra John Rawls, no account of the public good can stand entirely devoid of theological assumptions. And so the background beliefs that inform policy determinations *matter*.

Unlike its intellectual forerunner, Stephen Wolfe’s *The Case for Christian Nationalism*, *King of Kings* never gets bogged down in complex questions about the phenomenology of nationhood or the morality of violent revolution. Instead, it sets out to defend an elegantly simple thesis: *civil government must promote Christianity as the only true religion*.\[1\]

Most of Baird’s readers—if they aren’t already aboard the “Christian Nationalism” train—will likely find that thesis jarring and controversial. By contemporary standards, the claim feels illiberal and obscure, and like a warrant for coercive violence. And so it’s not surprising that virtually all the other reviews I’ve read of Baird’s book replay a series of now-tired fights about the intersection between politics and religion, Protestant and early American history, and so on.

Those will not be the subjects of this review. Rather, my concerns with Baird’s approach are very different—even radically different—than those of most of his critics: namely, I don’t think his analysis goes *quite far enough.*

\* \* \*

Baird’s book is built around a single straightforward syllogism, which forms the basic architecture of the text that follows:

> Premise 1: Government must promote the public good.  
>  
> Premise 2: As the only true religion, Christianity is part of the public good.  
>  
> Conclusion: Government must promote Christianity as the only true religion.\[2\]

To lay readers, this may seem like an unfamiliar or off-putting argument. But on basic Christian premises about reality, it certainly coheres. The first premise simply follows from the nature of government as such—what *is* government, teleologically speaking, if it’s not aimed at the common good?—from the biblical text, and from the Reformed confessions. The second premise is a logical extension of what it means to actually believe the truth-claims of the Christian faith. If what Christianity teaches is in fact true—a true statement of the universal moral order woven into the fabric of creation—then *of course* it serves the public good.

How does this cash out in practice? Well, for instance, Christianity teaches that God created human beings male and female. This teaching therefore militates against any law that would allow young people to consent to the mutilation of their bodies via “gender reassignment surgeries.” That mutilation is *bad* for those who undergo it. Accordingly, one can quite reasonably say that the Christian metaphysics of gender, instantiated in law and custom, serves the embodied good of those who dwell under it. Extending this logic across-the-board, Baird straightforwardly concludes that civil government ought to promote Christianity because it is both true and good.\[3\]

In Baird’s telling, there’s ample precedent for this approach, even when pursued by political leaders who aren’t especially pious themselves. Baird points to a range of Old Testament monarchs, from David to Nebuchadnezzar to Darius, intervening directly in the religious life of their subjects in order to promote truth and refute error. And the New Testament, as Baird sees it, extends this principle: rendering “to God what is God’s” (Matt. 22:20–22) means that Caesar himself, as God’s human creation, ought to subordinate his power to God’s law.\[4\]

Does this mean reigniting the great wars of religion? Probably not. Baird clearly shies away from any authoritarian solutions, reasoning that under contemporary conditions, the role of a Christian statesman is primarily to serve as a sort of national moral exemplar. Trying to compel church attendance, under contemporary conditions, would be “foolish.” Instead, such a statesman ought to “encourage the people to go to good, gospel-preaching churches,” and “set a good example by going to a gospel-preaching church every Sunday.” The statesman might also “directly tell his people to go to church” and “give periodical ‘fireside chats’ where he reads Scripture to the people.” While he should ultimately have higher aspirations, these steps discharge the statesman’s “civic duty to promote true religion and display sound wisdom.”\[5\]

None of this sort of thing, Baird stresses, is particularly novel or unprecedented by historical standards. In the American context, Founding-era understandings of religious liberty left plenty of room for state establishments of religion, and even religious tests for state office. Religious liberty did not entail religious neutrality on the parts of the states or public officials. Indeed, a lively religious culture was *central* to the Founders’ understanding of the necessary conditions for the thriving of a democratic republic.\[6\]

Finally, is there any conflict between the exercise of political power and Christian love or charity? Probably not: as Baird explains, there is nothing wrong with the exercise of power informed by love, particularly because the alternative—unwillingness to take our own religious beliefs seriously—is itself profoundly unloving. Shouldn’t *all* of us be concerned for the eternal good of our neighbors? As Baird nicely puts it, Jesus “requires us to seek the public good—and there’s nothing better for the public than the Good News about him.”\[7\]

\* \* \*

*King of Kings* gets a fundamental point right: the dividing line between theological commitments and political implications cannot be neatly drawn. God, as the True, is also the Good. In the face of modern efforts to marginalize Christianity in the public square, by claiming it has no relevance for the day-to-day realities of civic life, Baird offers a sharply clarifying rejoinder.

This is a very salutary goal. And that makes it all the more unfortunate that, despite its good intentions, *King of Kings*ends up reinforcing the very modern dualisms it seeks to critique. Put differently, my difficulty with *King of Kings* has little to do with its expansive understanding of the scope of Christian commitments. The *actual* problem is the book’s *pervasive retrojection of a decidedly modern concept of “religion,” which necessarily subverts the book’s own central thesis.* This claim, however, requires some unpacking.

We all know that “religion” is a familiar term, and we treat it as a sort of cultural universal. In everyday speech, we often refer to some set of belief systems that we call “world religions,” such as Christianity, Taoism, Sikhism, and others. But like so many other concepts, the term “religion” itself has a fraught and contested history, which embeds a set of assumptions about the nature of the underlying phenomenon in question—specifically, *early modern assumptions* that diverge from older Christian understandings.\[8\]

The English term “religion,” or the Latin *religio*, originally derives from the Latin verb *religare*, or “to bind again” (as in “ligation”). The noun *religio*, in the classical sense, was not conceived as a specific set of beliefs or propositional truth-claims among others. Rather, it was a sort of *virtue* or *characteristic*: one who is “religious” has the *property of holding fast*, or fidelity. That is why the term “religious life,” in the Middle Ages, was not a descriptor of one’s personal theological conviction. Rather, it referred to those who had bound themselves to a particular monastic or lay rule of life.\[9\] In other words, almost everyone was *Christian*, but the phrase “the religious” referred to those who’d adopted a particular set of intense devotional practices.

On this older paradigm, individuals exemplifying the virtue of *religio* were those capable of seeing God as “what He is, namely the summit of all goodness, the truth of things, the light by which the mind operates” and so choosing to “sedulously revere Him in act, in goodness, in truthfulness of speech, in clarity of mind, in love,” as Wilfred Cantwell Smith notes.\[10\] On this view, crucially, religion was not something *other than* natural; rather, it was a particular disposition toward the apex or limit condition of reality itself. “Since *philosophia* is the love and pursuit of truth and wisdom, and since truth and wisdom are, precisely, God, it follows that true *philosophia* and true *religio* are identical.”\[11\]

This has important implications for Baird’s syllogism: when the relationship between domains of knowledge is conceived in this way, it would simply make no sense to speak of “religion” as “part of the public good” as Baird does in his second premise. “Religion” is not a discrete and specifiable set of commitments or practices, having to do with the obtaining of some “heavenly good” that is largely separated from the business of everyday life.\[12\] “Religion” was, rather, an *attitude toward* “the common good of the whole universe which is God himself.”\[13\] The virtue of *religion* could be exemplified in politics, in philosophy, in what came to be called natural science, and every other field.

But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the meaning of “religion” began to change. The term came, as Cantwell Smith emphasizes, “to designate now that in which \[interlocutors\] were increasingly interested, namely the intellectual construct, presently the various intellectual constructs, systematic and abstract, that were to be elaborated in the religious realm.”\[14\] That is to say: religion became a name for “the system, first in general but increasingly to the system of ideas, in which men of faith were involved or with which men of potential faith were confronted.”\[15\] Just *as* a “system” in this sense, historian Tomoko Masuzawa argues, “religion” began to be deployed as a universal Western category capable of encompassing and “explaining” Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and the hitherto-unknown Buddhist tradition. It became “an effective means of differentiating, variegating, consolidating and totalizing a large portion of the social, cultural, and political practices observable among the inhabitants of regions elsewhere in the world.”\[16\]

Put bluntly, thinking of “religion” in terms of a discrete system or set of propositional claims, rather than a quality or virtue more like *piety*, was extraordinarily useful to national leaders seeking to strengthen their regimes in the face of external political pressures. “Religion,” understood as a zone of commitment to a particular set of supernatural beliefs rather than as a pervasive orientation toward the divine in all of life, could be increasingly pushed into the realm of private belief and *separated from the actual business of governance on military and economic matters*. As Talal Asad notes, “the attempt to allocate ‘religion’ or its surrogate to its own private sphere, defined and policed by the law, was also an attempt to clear a space within the state for modern ethics”\[17\]—meaning that now, a leader might in theory hold the “right” religious beliefs, while ordering brutal or murderous actions justified according to political expediency. Within this new horizon, treating “religion” as *part of the public good* implies that there are lots of other “parts of the public good” where “religion”—that is, anything specifically drawn from Christian theology—shouldn’t bother trying to stick its nose.

Now, this is a *total inversion* of what I take to be Baird’s agenda—working out Christian commitments, which are true and good, within civil government. But over and over again, Baird deploys a concept of “religion” that unintentionally concedes the critical ground. “\[T\]he core of religion,” Baird writes, is “what we believe about God and our relationship to him\[.\]” “\[T\]rue religion” is, on this formulation, something essentially epistemic or cognitive, which can be “progressively added” to “bare-minimum beliefs” about nature, creation, the world, or what have you. In Baird’s telling, “piety, religion, and morality” are subjective internal forces that “compel \[people\] to do what is good for their community.” Hence, promoting true religion in public office is mostly a matter of telling people to go to church.\[18\]

All of this means that, on Baird’s paradigm, “religion” as a domain is constantly privatized, interiorized, and depoliticized. I agree that internal cognitive assent is certainly important, but why are Baptism and the Lord’s Supper—which are consummately *political practices*—not similarly at the “core of religion”? I appreciate how William Arnal and Russell McCutcheon frame the matter:

> “Religion” . . . comes to form a special *political* category in modernity—one that creates a peripheral space for, and serves to account for, individualize, sentimentalize, and *especially* to domesticate whatever forms of persistent social and collective action happen to retain a positive or utopian orientation that ill-accord, in other words, with the personalization and individualization of the modern political subject.\[19\]

If Arnal and McCutcheon’s claim is a bit abstruse, allow me to clarify: the modern reduction of religion to private assent, rather than a disposition with implications for all domains of reality, logically empowers the “secular state,” disempowers the church, and renders Christian affiliation a mere shadow of one’s supervening membership category, which is citizenship within the nation-state. The state, thereby, comes to define the shape of Christian theology to serve its own purposes.

To be clear, I don’t believe this is what Baird necessarily wants to do. But this is where the logic of his syllogism—especially formulated as it is, with “religion” considered just one “part of the public good”—ultimately leads.

At the (necessary) risk of anachronism: consider again the examples Baird gives from the Old Testament—such as the stories of Nebuchadnezzar and Darius. After the episode of the Fiery Furnace, King Nebuchadnezzar declares that no “people, nation, or language” may speak against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, or Abednego. (Dan. 3:29) And after Daniel survives his night with the lions, King Darius decrees that all shall “tremble and fear before the God of Daniel.” (Dan. 6:25)

Is this *true religion*? Baird seems to think so. But the fact of the matter is—*we don’t know*. These Darius and Nebuchadnezzar episodes certainly—as Baird acknowledges—are not exactly conversions to the true faith. Perhaps these are one-off edicts issued by the monarchs in question, as survival strategies designed to ward off divine judgment. Power recognizes power.

Or, more sinisterly, *perhaps we are witnessing the incorporation of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob into a larger pantheon of Babylonian or Median deities*. Making this move—adding the One God to a preexisting pantheon of elevated “beings among other beings”—amounts to a reduction of God to merely one powerful cosmic force among others, which is *false religion* in its most strictly idolatrous sense. After all, in the words of the Apostle Paul, “we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man.” (Acts 17:29)

From a more critical vantage, then, these Old Testament stories may admit of a very different interpretation. Perhaps these are stories in which the worship of the true God is “domesticated,” by being brought within the ambit of a preexisting state structure that—necessarily—changes the nature of the faith itself in the process. What sort of understanding of the faith of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is then being mediated to the Babylonian or Median onlookers? How might this synthesis change the nature of Israel’s own catechesis? At best, the political-theological message here is more ambivalent than it appears.

And with this, we arrive at last at a fundamental question that looms over Baird’s book, and indeed over much of the entire present conversation surrounding Christian politics, Reformed retrieval, and the relationship between religion and civil order. *Is our primary concern, as Christians, maintenance of the integrity of the state qua state? Or is our primary Christian concern fidelity to a truth that exceeds, relativizes, and disciplines that same state?*

Now, I freely concede that there’s plenty of support, within certain parts of the historic Protestant tradition, for something rather like the former position. Towards the end of his volume, Baird briefly, and almost in passing, draws a sharp distinction between the categories of “natural” and “supernatural”—consistent with a reduction of (supernatural) religion to the private sphere. And he is not the first recent writer on “Christian nationalism” to make that move: in their recent study *Reformed Christian Politics*, Zachary Garris, Sean McGowan, and Stephen Wolfe largely echo Baird’s central thesis—that civil government must promote true religion—while rendering this natural/supernatural disjunction even more starkly. And I do mean *stark*. In their words, “\[t\]heology does not supply the political art’s *principia*, formal object, means, or end.”\[20\] Rather, “sacred theology and politics have different *principia*—the former being faith and scripture, and the latter being reason and nature.”\[21\]

In my view, there are numerous problems with Garris, McGowan, and Wolfe’s formulation. For one thing, their description captures exactly how “religion” *already functions* under modernity—as a disciplinary category safely hived off from other domains, and so subordinated to a larger domain of political power that bridles it. It is, in short, exactly how contemporary secularity operates. Is *this* “Christian nationalism”? If so, it doesn’t count for much as a strategy.

For another, this framing rests on the philosophically naïve, and historically unsound, view that there are in fact such things as “reason” and “nature” unmediated by theological considerations.\[22\] That is plainly false: as a legion of ideologically diverse philosophers from Alasdair MacIntyre to Michel Foucault to Bruno Latour to Peter Harrison have all demonstrated, the very standards that constitute our sense of “reasonableness” and the “natural” are wildly divergent over time and profoundly shaped by political imperatives.

Garris, McGowan, and Wolfe complain that “Christians tend to mash together elements of ethics, politics, and theology, resulting in an unsystematic, incoherent, and *ad hoc* set of ideas suitable for mass consumption in a liberal environment.”\[23\] Rightly understood, though, it is Garris, McGowan, and Wolfe who are the historical innovators. That is because their project hinges on a set of arbitrary disciplinary divisions that would have been unintelligible to many Christians prior to early modernity. Far from reflecting “a liberal environment,” an *ad hoc* synthesis of disciplines probably better reflects, however dimly, a recovery of the “analogical-participatory worldview”\[24\] of Christian life-worlds past. (Really, go back and read Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Luther, and so on. In practice, they *constantly* mix and blend disciplines.)

Ultimately, drawing the disciplinary divisions this sharply gives rise to the precise opposite of a Christian theology of politics. One ends up with an approach to political life to which any specifically Christian insights have little relevance at all: Christianity may function as a sort of glue that shores up the functions of the secular state and builds social cohesion, but it is the secular state which is always in command.

\* \* \*

As far as the ongoing debates over “Christian nationalism” are concerned, it seems to me that this dilemma represents a real parting of the ways. One faction is willing to bridle and discipline theology as needed to secure the interests of the state—including by deploying the modern (and so often anachronistic) category of “religion” to render theology largely politically impotent—because the fundamental problem intended to be solved by “Christian nationalism” is not so much *secularization* as *liberalization*. Another faction, conversely, places the accent on Christian fidelity and the integrity of the Christian message, because liberalization is not so much a problem to be solved as a background condition to be negotiated.

This is not the venue to properly engage the larger political hypothesis that a sufficiently muscular right-wing government in place, with enough will and conviction behind it, could effectively brute-force solutions to many of modernity’s various problems. Elsewhere, I’ve argued at length why I don’t find these “illiberalization” scenarios particularly plausible or promising.\[25\] But because *King of Kings* is the sort of book that will be read by churchmen, I think it’s worth underscoring that the questions here go far beyond now-familiar arguments about “faith and politics.” They implicate fundamental judgments about the history of the nation-state, the relative primacy or marginality of theology as an interpretive paradigm, and the future “Christian strategy” for a secularizing age.

To sum all this up: my basic disagreement with Baird’s book has nothing to do with its concern to restore the centrality of Christian thinking in politics. That is a mission I *wholeheartedly* embrace. But I have no intention of drawing the line at the place where any particular state or regime says that “religion” begins and ends. “Religion” is not some zone of private belief or set of axiomatic commitments; rather, *theology* is the love and knowledge of God that orients the Christian way of life. It cannot be privatized, interiorized, or *ever* depoliticized.

Isn’t that really what it means to call Jesus “King of Kings”?

[*originally published on Between Two Kingdoms*](https://jsehrett.substack.com/p/the-problem-with-religion)
### A Scrapbook of Pastoral Care
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-scrapbook-of-pastoral-care/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T15:22:16.000Z
​​​​**Reuben Bredenhof.**[ **The Ministry of Small Things**](https://www.prpbooks.com/book/the-ministry-of-small-things?srsltid=AfmBOorYY0IxbaXPmD46tmx6MIiK3xBmBVECKXdR%5FVLnZFURqSHo3ve6&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. P&R Publishing, 2026\. $12.99 (pb). 144 pp.**

What ought to occupy a pastor’s time? Reuben Bredenhof, who pastored Reformed congregations for almost two decades in both Canada and Australia and now teaches at Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary offers the expected answer: the Word, sacraments and prayer.

And yet, *The Ministry of Small Things,* is not a book about preaching, nor sacraments, nor is it primarily about prayer (some portions notwithstanding) but rather it seeks “to unpack one more significant element in the minister’s job description: pastoral care.”

While English resources on preaching and prayer are virtually endless (resources on the sacraments, less so), it is the view of this author that for every young minister who needs to have the ordinary means of grace underscored, there are five, if not ten, who need a reminder not to despise the small things.

Reflecting on church farewells, Bredenhof recalls what he most often received gratitude for: checking in, remembering birthdays, pausing to answer a question, baptizing families, and listening. “Maybe,” writes Bredenhof, “we would like to be appreciated for more impressive accomplishments.” A few ministers will be; the majority will not. Can we still stand with the psalmist and say, “The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places”?

*The Ministry of Small Things* is a scrapbook of sorts with thirty snapshots (i.e. chapters) which depict pastoral care in its usual scene: inefficient, unremarkable, anonymous, and glorious.

## An Inefficient Ministry

It is a mistake to confuse *effective* ministry with *efficient* ministry. The basis of any effective ministry is love and Bredenhof warns, “Love is inefficient because it doesn’t follow a predictable timetable of outcomes: Love this much, and for this long, and achieve these good results.”

Now, a pastor need not dawdle in the discharge of his duties. Few ministers are ignorant of their options when it comes to their personal calendar: sink or swim. (Like Peter, they may cry: “Lord, if it is You, command me to come to You on the water.”) Even so, inefficiency is intrinsic to good ministry because good ministry is born out of love, love which “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

“There should be no question in the minds of \[the\] people that their pastor cherishes them. They must know for certain that he has an affection for them, a loyalty that will outlast the present season of their lives, whether it is good or bad.”

Even sharper is Bredenhof’s encouragement to embrace the ordinariness of life. Bredenhof writes that many pastors feel “pulled upward and away from an ordinary ministry by “bigger” things.” Whether it's a teaching position or an exciting downtown mission opportunity or starting a podcast, it's easy to become enamored with the exciting over the ordinary.

“Over the years, there were too many occasions when I felt like I was bigger than the present moment.” Bredenhof confesses, “The hour came when I needed to make a pastoral visit in my congregation, but my mind felt like it was a thousand miles away from the living room in this cramped condominium. It was going to be hard to climb down from the lofty heights of academia or the exciting possibilities of a publishing contract, and to enter into the humble life of one of my sheep.”

It is the humble lives of people—with their marriages and migraines—to which pastors are called. Actually, we might interrogate the presupposition that it is the creation of content that is most effective in forming people. Ministers mourn the sparse minutes spent preaching in comparison to the deluge of online content their people digest all week. But Bredenhof challenges us not to measure our impact by the words we’ve shared but by the moments. Yes, ideas shape people, but it is largely *people* that shape people. It’s inefficient, but not ineffective.

## A Simple Ministry

“*The* distinctive element of pastoral care,” writes Bredenhof, “is the privilege of speaking this living and active Word into people’s lives. It is always appropriate to read Scripture with them.” (emphasis mine)

We need Bredenhof’s encouragement to *tolle lege* (“Take up and read!”). If we're not careful, we can slip into a “Martha-mentality” when during a visit we feel ourselves stretching for questions or fumbling for encouragements. These things are good, but they can also muck up the mind of a pastor to become like Martha: distracted with much serving. The pastor’s privilege is to point to a power beyond his own.

Now, this requires that a pastor nurture an active knowledge of God’s word. Which scriptures speak to anxiety? To God’s design for sex? To gracious yet firm parenting? To the hope of the resurrection? To shame? With this in view, Bredenhof urges ministers to prepare beforehand for pastoral visits and clearly know why they are there.

“You can easily slip into a thoughtless repetition of duties: another week, another three visits. And next week, three or four more. Driving home from the café one afternoon, you might be struck by the nagging thought ‘Now, what did that visit accomplish? What was I even there for?’”

To combat this, ministers should pause before the visit to ask: *What would I like to hear more about? What message should I bring today? What would be a good outcome? What does this person need?* Questions like these will guide the pastor towards a portion of scripture to share.

Even so, pastoral care requires dialogue. “I sometimes wonder,” says Bredenhof, “how pastors would feel if they could see a transcript of their conversations, a written record of everything said during a visit.” *Small Things* is rightfully critical: “In our visits, who is doing the talking? What are we saying? Is it helping?” Here then, is a formula for simple ministry:

- Know Why You’re There
- Open The Word
- Use Your Ears

## A Self-Forgetful Ministry

The best pastors, to borrow from C.S. Lewis, can be described thus: “He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.” Indeed, humility, a core qualification for church overseers is key to profiting from *The Ministry of Small Things.*

This is in view when Bredenhof encourages: “Be the predictable pastor.” Few aspire towards predictability, but it is a noble task. Becoming predictable demands dying to the self: subjugating emotions, not scratching the itch for the new, entrusting ourselves to God no matter the moment.

Attentive husbands and fathers will notice how their own steadiness or lack thereof can bolster or wobble their family. It is no different for the church of God. “For a pastor, this predictability is freeing. You need not be innovative in your message. You need not have a radical counseling technique. You simply ought to pray for God’s help to be faithful, even as you keep reflecting: “What kind of ministry does the Lord Jesus call me to have? Let me pursue such a ministry with all my heart.”

Predictability requires self-forgetfulness as does the next principle: “Don’t take the credit—or the blame.” Bredenhof is ruthless in the application: “Refuse all acknowledgement.” Pastors should be diligent, yet only God gives growth. “When we are faithful messengers of his Word, we can leave the results to God. This frees us from pride in our own efforts. It frees us from false guilt when there are disappointments. And it frees us from the pressure of trying to save someone by our own exertions.”

Finally, there is a freedom from cynicism as Bredenhof reminds pastors to “believe that people can change.” It takes months, not years, for pastors to flirt with cynicism. People don’t seem to change or they leave before they can. Repeated efforts to care for the poor seem to do little good. Marital intervention seems to arrive too late. Fighting cynicism requires its own brand of self-forgetfulness: a refusal to project past pain into the present moment. The Living God is making all things new. Pastors, believe that people can change.

\*\*\*

Charles Bridges, after devoting his largest section (by far) in his *The Christian Ministry* to the topic of preaching admits, “Let us not think that all our work is done in the study and in the pulpit. Preaching—the grand lever of the Ministry—derives much of its power from connexion with the Pastoral work; and its too frequent disjunction from it is a main cause of our inefficiency.”

Bredenhof’s work sits right next to Bridges on my bookshelf. If my son shows an interest in pastoral ministry, I would want him to grab both. We need time-tested tomes that remind us of the primacy of preaching, the sacraments, and prayer. But it is not only in the study and in the pulpit that a pastor does his work. *The Ministry of Small Things* re-emphasizes the minister’s calling to pastoral care. A calling which, according to Bridges, is not a distraction from the word and prayer, but an empowerment.
### Baa, Ram, You?
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/baa-ram-you/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:41:32.000Z
Luke Burgis. [*The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion*](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250373038/theoneandtheninetynine/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). St. Martin’s Press, 2026\. $30.00\. 288 pp.

Ever since Robert Putnam wrote *Bowling Alone*, the discourse around society has often emphasized social fragmentation and isolation. There are books and essays about the decline of fraternal organizations, third spaces, and church membership and the rising isolating effects of social media, remote work, and delayed marriage. Most cultural criticism is worried about a decline in belonging and attributes much of our bad behavior to that. But what if we’re actually pretty good at joining a crowd and we’re missing some other issues by bemoaning the loss of bowling leagues? Luke Burgis’ new book, *The One and the Ninety-Nine*, suggests we should spend some time thinking about a differentiated self and better ways of belonging.

*The One and the Ninety-Nine* rests on a “simple” premise: “Each of us is torn between belonging and differentiation, and few ever learn to manage that tension.” Early in the book, Burgis introduces August Landmesser, famous for a photograph taken in Hamburg in 1936, where everyone else is giving the Nazi salute and he has his arms crossed. What made Landmesser capable of withholding his approval in the middle of that crowd? Burgis finds Landmesser a good starting point, because he is especially worried about “social contagion.” While not new, he believes it has been “exacerbated by technology.”

Burgis suggests that there are at least two versions of each of us. When we allow ourselves to be shaped by social forces, we slip into a “pseudo-self,” which “is captive to what others want or expect.” The alternative is a “solid self,” which “is not negotiable in every interaction.” That solid self does not have to be a radical individualist or live in the woods like a hermit, but it is a differentiated self. Burgis worries that “If we continue down our current path toward systemic conformity, the future will be dominated by pliable selves—shaped not by conviction but convenience, ready to bend with every social current.” Despite his concerns, he is “optimistic that we can build more places and practices that cultivate the solid self.”

This book explores the forces at work in shaping us, often pushing us to a pseudo self, and the opportunities for the emergence of a solid self. Burgis treads expected and unexpected ground. As you might expect, Burgis writes about tribes and the political self. More unexpectedly (and despite some pages with QR codes), this book is not all about technology and social media and all the ways the twenty-first century is especially scary. Those things come up, but Burgis is not fixated on them. In fact, he spends time on families and the ways in which they can shape us to be pseudo or solid selves. Arguably, this hits closer to home. Few people are willing to defend their scrolling habits.

Burgis navigates between popular, academic, and trendy. Going beyond a critique of technology and social media pushes him into a more serious category. He draws on the work of Paul Tillich and René Girard and St. Benedict. He integrates study findings. Yet he also uses the concept of “pills” to write about the political self. Though Burgis connects pills to Czesław Miłosz, he acknowledges he is indulging in “internet lingo.” It is unclear how distinguishing between true and counterfeit red pills might be read in twenty years. Yet at times his cultural awareness is beneficial. One of the best sections of the book is when Burgis focuses on art and the work of Ornette Coleman, who had a remarkably solid self.

Interspersed through *The One and the Ninety-Nine* are biographical moments from Burgis’s own life. He shares about his early career and search for meaning, his vocational discernment, and about the challenges faced (and caused) by his aging parents. The short scenes offer a narrative to help pull the reader along and serve to connect the ideas that Burgis is drawing from books and thinkers to life and the human condition. Burgis also uses the biographical passages to share moments from his own Christian faith journey.

Though Burgis does not write everything as reflective of his own experience, some of his assessments reflect specific perspectives in notable ways. For example, he writes that, “We didn’t see what smartphones were doing to our children until they had been frying our brains for more than a decade.” That is true in some circles, but definitely not all. Plenty of people were screen skeptics for children (and adults) before Jonathan Haidt made a career of it. Burgis also writes that, “For over a century, the idea of ‘school’ has not changed much. There are classrooms, quizzes, and exams. Lectures are the norm.” Those who work in classrooms are more aware of how much those old norms have been challenged, classrooms have been flipped, and how much lecture is actively discouraged (even sometimes prohibited). Though it may appear we still have traditional “grading,” it might be more accurate to say we have “assessment” in many schools today. But broad statements like these are more occasional than common.

*The One and the Ninety-Nine* is not a work of theology or apologetics, but it does integrate faith. The book’s title comes from Luke and Jesus’s parable about the lost sheep. Burgis identifies religion as a good path to a solid self: “Religious practice, when it is genuine, is the search for what is real—not what is socially accepted.” Burgis himself nearly became a priest and his discernment of vocation was part of his own path to a more solid self. Burgis is also an advocate for religious communities, because “most are rooted in a vision of human relationships that has an eternal horizon.” Among other things he writes about the Cluniac reforms. (He is the director of The Cluny Institute at The Catholic University of America.)

In the parable about the one lost sheep, Jesus asks who would not leave ninety-nine sheep to go after the one that was lost? The sheep has differentiated itself, healthily or unhealthily, but a good shepherd will return it to the flock, where it belongs. In the same way, a differentiated, solid self, belongs with others. In the final passages Burgis offers some specific guidance for assessing communities, because, ultimately, communion is the goal after differentiation. Some readers may take some issue with a few passages of *The One and the Ninety-Nine*, but the book introduces and explores helpful concepts and may serve many people who are striving for healthier belonging. The book also pushes us to think past the idea of belonging as an end in itself and the best hope for our hurting culture.
### Crisis and Covenant
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/crisis-and-covenant/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:28:04.000Z
The information age has, in many ways, brought about a deep slumber. With eyes transfixed on devices and ears filled with endless streams of content, many are effectively sleepwalking and can no longer hear the world around them.

Martin Shaw, a well known writer, storyteller, and mythologist, sees stories as the antidote to this digital drowsiness:

> The business of stories is not enchantment. The business of stories is not escape. The business of stories is waking up.

We need stories to open our eyes. However, our storytelling abilities are weighed down by a technological sleep paralysis. Our myth making muscles have atrophied under the burden of modern life. We have lost the capacity to tell the stories we need to wake up.

## **Crisis of Narration**

In his 2004 book, *The Crisis of Narration*, Byung-Chul Han argues that we are living in a post-narrative world. We no longer know how to do story*telling* apart from story*selling*––monetization has replaced meaning as the goal of stories.

But the true purpose of storytelling, Han argues, is not to sell products, but to provide an anchor of meaning and identity across time. Throughout his book, Han contrasts *narration* with mere *information*. True, meaningful narrative has breadth. It inhabits history; it has temporal *distance—*with hands in both the past and future. It transcends our momentary blip in time and includes a far off “long ago” and a distant “ever after.”

The modern information age, however, is characterized by what Han calls the “progressive demolition of farness”––mere information has no ties to history, no connection to the future. There is nothing *far* about information; it is immediately available. Therefore, we have a crippling lack of vision, of longing, because these are inherently anchored in farness.

Han attributes much of this demolition to *digitalization*. For him, digitalization rips reality from narrative and divides it among information:

> Digitalization intensifies the atrophy of time. Reality disintegrates into information that is relevant only briefly. Information lives on the allure of surprise. It thus fragments time. Our attention also becomes fragmented. Information does not permit any *lingering*. In the accelerated exchange of information, bits of information quickly replace each other.

Narrative is *condensed* time––a recounting of an entire, cumulative history of meaning. Information, on the other hand, is *cut up* time––additive bytes that amass but never cohere into a meaningful story.

Han explains the difference and its outcome:

> Today, we primarily perceive the world with a view to getting information. Information has neither distance nor expanse. It cannot hold rough winds or dazzling sunshine…. Information therefore… disenchants the world.

Disenchantment for Han is the evaporation of magic from much of life. The world no longer looks at us or speaks to us with its dazzling roughness. The world, Han says, is no longer a vocal ‘Thou’ but a mute ‘It’. (It’s worth noting that another sociologist, Hartmut Rosa, identifies such muteness of the world as *the* root cause of anxiety, depression, and burnout.)

Such muteness is, in many ways, a result of our having merged with our technology to the point of being identifiable as, what Han calls, *Phono Sapiens*. Nearly every part of life is mediated through a screen. Most of the ways we engage on these screens only exacerbate our fleeting dream state. The predominant examples are Snapchat snaps and Instagram stories. Han notes how these have no narrative duration. These digital “stories” evoke a sense of fleetingness that creates a compulsion to communicate more, while never condensing into a narrative of meaning. We are compulsively enticed to engage in immediacy; our capacity for longing has been short-circuited by stimuli.

Everything is immediately *available*. However, this increase in availability of information and people (via text, shared location, etc.) has led to a decrease in physical connection. It is interesting that Han connects the loss of narrative with what he calls the “retreat of touch”. He even goes so far as to argue that this loss of physical touch is a driving factor in our ailing mental health. Without touch, he says, we remain entrapped in ourselves; proper touch pulls us out.

> Poverty in touch ultimately means poverty in world.

We need narratives to wake us up, to provide meaning, and pull us back into embodied relationships lest we lose touch with ourselves—and with others—in the “thick forest of information” and self.

For such narratives we are not without options. In fact, many young people are waking to their need for story, and are finding it in various spiritual narratives. However, the Christian story has unique narrative power to draw us out of the tsunami of slumber.

## **Covenant as Narration**

At the center of the Christian narrative is the idea of *covenant*. Covenant is a concept that requires history. It is not merely words spoken in a solitary moment with no bearing on time; rather, covenant binds parties temporally. Covenant is a promise with hands that grip both past and future. This is true of any contract. Think of marriages or mortgages––there are clear temporal bounds with each: thirty years or “til death do us part.” In other words, covenant, like narrative, has *distance*.

Thus, for people awash in the deluge of watery bits of information, covenant is an anchor. And it is this anchor of covenant that provides the framework for inspired Scripture. As God-breathed communication, Scripture is not information to be studied––it is the self-revelation of the covenant God. Theologian Kevin Vanhoozer shares Han’s language when he says we cannot engage with Scripture in an “I-It” relation; it is an “I-Thou” affair.

Scripture, as a means for us to encounter the living, covenant God, gives us two key terms repeated throughout for how we are to relate to his covenant: *remember* and *keep*. Both these terms are anchored in time––remembrance being our connection to the past, and keeping being our active connection into the future. We are to *both* remember and keep God’s covenant, emboldened with the knowledge that He both remembers and keeps it himself.

Early in the story of God’s covenant, when the world had become mute to Israel under the weight of slavery in Egypt, they cried out to God. We’re told God heard their cry and *remembered his covenant*. His very next action in keeping his covenant was to send Moses––a redeemer––who would lead his people out of slavery. God remembers his covenant and keeps it by giving a redeemer.

This pattern of God remembering and keeping covenant with his Redeemer is fulfilled in the New Testament. The Hebrew arrangement of the Old Testament ends in 2 Chronicles with the words, “Let him go up”––an invitation to the covenant people of God to worship the LORD in the restored temple. The implied cry then is: *who will go up*?

The New Testament then opens, each gospel account providing an answer to this question in their own way. The gospel of John does so with an intensely unique picture of God’s Redeemer––both the answer to an enslaved peoples’ cry *and* the invitation of 2 Chronicles. Not only is he the Redeemer greater than Moses (v. 17), he is the eternal *Word*––*the* Narrative whose voice answers the muteness of the world.

While many major religions espouse the *distance*––the transcendence––of God, only the Christian narrative is the good news that *Distance* came near. When Jesus took on flesh and dwelt among us, he did so as condensed divinity––in him the fullness of God, with all the farness and expanse of glory, was pleased to dwell. In Jesus Christ is the God who gives the dazzling sunshine and rough winds their voice.

And it is this Jesus, fully God and fully man, distance *and* availability, who not only taught––transmitting information––but *touched*. His healing touch was the physical manifestation of what John says he came to accomplish spiritually: *In him was life, and the life was the light of men.* He came to shine the light of the glory of God into the hearts of men and give eternal life. Such life heals hearts, turning men into lights.

Jacques Ellul, who was prophetically concerned about our technological demolition, noted that it is this *light of men* that actually situates us within the Christian narrative:

> In another sense, this light of the world is what gives meaning to the world’s history, what orients and explains it. As a mere sequence of events, the course of history reveals no logic or certainty. The logic emerges through the church’s presence, as odd as this may seem. This is why Christians, by being light, are a factor in the world’s life. In addition to their work of preserving the world, Christians are instruments of revelation and bear witness to salvation.

Not only are we invited into the life, death, and resurrection of Narrative himself, but through his life in us, we are made to shine in the world as living stories. His life in us is not only our salvation, but also our participation.

In him, we wake up to the world.
### How to Help Include Children's Ministry Volunteers in Worship
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-to-help-include-childrens-ministry-volunteers-in-worship/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:28:08.000Z
Effective church ministry exists on a spectrum of the ideal on one side and ‘what people will actually participate in’ on the other side. Let me tease out each side of this spectrum.

The ‘ideal’ could be defined as ‘what has been proven to effectively disciple people in the past’ or it could be defined as ‘what my denominational tradition has deemed as true.’ So, for example, being from a Presbyterian tradition, several years ago some leaders at my church put together a year-long confirmation program with extensive catechesis and a thorough walk through of the biblical story led by adults who care. Once we announced the program to eligible students (of which, there were over a dozen), not one of the parents or students wanted to or had the time to participate in it. Despite catechesis being a time-honored form of discipleship, especially as led by mentor-type adults, the ‘ideal’ doesn’t matter if no one wants to receive the ministry.

And that’s why the other side of the spectrum is also important: what will people actually participate in? A church can believe that the highest demonstration of personal holiness would be a Vigils prayer service that they offer at 2am in an attempt to be as neo-monastic as possible, but that strategy is not going to have many participants.

So, ‘effectiveness’ then, is forged with knowing what the ideal is while acknowledging the starting point of reality: people’s schedules and desires. In a theology of the least common denominator, pragmatic churches often fail by setting the only bar of effectiveness with respect to how many people came. Alternatively, high-ideal churches can lament and begrudge people that never participate in their well-formed plans. Both churches are ineffective.

As such, think about this rubric any time you encounter a non-clergy or non-church-staff person pontificating on the internet about what ‘the church should do.’ Lots of people have ideals or ways to get more people in the door, but very few people outside formal church ministry understand the challenges of both.

## **Two Interrelated Case Studies**

Recently, on the Mere O Discord Server, the Society of St. Annes, a discussion ensued about kids and their presence in worship, partially inspired by[ Cameron Shaffer’s excellent new book *Keeping Kids Christian*.](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781540905055%5Fkeeping-kids-christian?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

On one side of the spectrum is the ideal, something akin to what Robbie Castleman recommends in *Parenting in the Pew*: starting at the age of 4 kids should be in the worship service the whole time, including the sermon. On Castleman’s side is the fact that the research for this has been done for decades. Kids who watch their parents sing to the Lord, kids who imbibe the liturgy in their bones, and kids who are not cordoned off from other adult Christians are much more heavily correlated with remaining Christian into adulthood than kids who do not get that experience.

On the other side of the spectrum is reality: parents with multiple children at young ages, or parents with multiple fidgety young boys, or parents with children who have special needs of some kind. To pick just one of these examples, let’s say a mom is nursing a newborn and so keeps the child with her in the service, while also having a 3 year-old boy, and a 1st grade boy. Many moms in such a circumstance will say that church often feels like it has little personal meaning if they’re juggling all three of those children in the pew at the same time, especially if dad has some kind of volunteer role on a Sunday. Thus, many moms just choose not to come to church, because it’d be even more exhausting for them.

That’s why many churches with high ideals offer some sort of hybrid. Our own church- now 9 years old- has full-time Sunday school during our one worship service for those ages of birth through Kindergarten. For the next age group, 1st-5th graders, they come into the worship service from the beginning up to the greeting, which occurs right before the sermon. For the 30 minutes of the sermon, they go to age-appropriate Bible lessons, then return by the time the church participates in the liturgy of Holy Communion along with our closing song and benediction. Lastly, by the time a child is in 6th grade, they are in the worship service the entire time. In the Discord server, many people shared that their church offers a similar sort of hybrid, even as the ages varied slightly.

Now, when I was starting our church, this led to another similar conundrum. Having a hybrid children’s ministry on Sunday morning is still volunteer intensive, requiring a lot of adults to pull off. Worried if I’d have enough motivated volunteers to start the children’s ministry when the church launched, I remember asking for advice from a lot of previous church planters.

One church planter was a pastor in my community who had planted a Baptist church that had subsequently become quite large. When their church started, he told me that they too only had one worship service. And given how intensive their children’s ministry would be (n.b. they did not have a hybrid approach), he wanted to come up with an idea that would prevent volunteer burnout and keep them motivated. So his idea that he shared with me was that they’d offer a ‘mini-service’ for children’s ministry volunteers 30 minutes before the regular worship service. In that mini-service, they’d sing a few songs with the band and he’d give a 10 minute version of his sermon. That way, for the volunteers that would miss the entire worship service, they’d still feel like that they too got to worship that day.

When he shared that idea with me, I realized that it also helped me solve for one of my ideals: weekly Communion. You see, even in a hybrid approach, I’d have several volunteers in the birth-Kindergarten age range that wouldn’t get to take Communion on the weeks in which they served, which is arguably against Paul’s instructions in 1 Corinthians 11\. I didn’t think we could have most taking Communion while some do not. So, taking the insight from the Baptist pastor to offer a mini-service, I reasoned that that would also be a good opportunity to serve Communion in the mini-service after my mini-sermon. 9 years later, we still do this every week.

So, I don’t offer these brief case studies so that you’ll do just as I do. If you are reading this, there’s a high chance that your theology of Communion is different from mine. I merely offer these examples to help you wrestle through ministry effectiveness. Some of you need to sharpen your ideals a bit more, while others of you need to acknowledge the starting point of reality a bit more. Regardless, there may be a way to do both in your context.
### The Midlist, the Middlemen and the Future of American Literature
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-midlist-the-middlemen-and-the-future-of-american-literature/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:28:11.000Z
A few years ago, an academic acquaintance published a groundbreaking work of scholarship with a top academic press for his field. About a year later he got a report from the press informing him that his book, the fruit of a decade’s labors, had sold fewer than 100 copies. He seemed a bit shell-shocked by the news. At least it got him tenure.

I love books—a love I get to channel into my own work as a writer of books and book reviews and as books editor here at *Mere Orthodoxy*, as we publish reviews of both academic and trade books, including some fiction and poetry too. And yet, writers and readers also can never get away from this basic reality: books today are a big business. Sure, in the case of academics, there are university presses that are nonprofits, and they habitually live in the red, all for that noble goal of advancing knowledge. But it is the for-profit publishers who bring to the world the books that my neighbor may take to the beach; or books the local library might proudly display on the “New Releases” shelf; or ones that I would select to give time and again for friends’ birthdays, Christmases, and graduations.

How do these books get made? The process from acquisition to publication is notoriously complex and at times opaque, but for writers of fiction, in particular, it involves a key figure—the literary agents who are the middlemen of the publishing world. Their role in the process of publishing, though, has historically been in the shadows.

Until now. In her new book that I could not put down, *Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction*, professor and literary scholar Laura B. McGrath presents the fruits of her own labors of a decade. Since 2016, McGrath has interviewed over 75 literary agents whose views she presents in the book on conditions of anonymity. In addition, she interviewed a number of prominent industry leaders, including agents and publishers, who did agree to be named. She spent hours in formal interviews and less formal conversations and interviews in person and online, she sat in on industry work meetings and lunches, and she attended the internationally renowned Frankfurt Book Fair. She also ended up getting an agent to contract her own book, published with Princeton University Press, a top-of-the-line academic-trade cross-over press.

The result is an in-depth examination of the publishing industry over the past century and a half, and how it became what it is today: “The agent’s intuition about the literary marketplace and their subsequent negotiation between manuscript and product, writers and readers, form and finance, has not only shaped the way that books have been made, but *which* books have been made in the first place. The agent’s representation and mediation have shaped nothing short of contemporary literature.”

The overall story could be summed up as follows. Once upon a time, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most authors did not have agents but handled the business side of their writing themselves. But then some savvy individuals found that they could help authors broker much better deals in selling their work to top magazines and publishers. Indeed, the earliest agents helped fiction writers sell their short stories profitably to magazines. And so, a new business model was born, whereby writers could leave the business side of things to agents, while sticking to that thing they most wanted to do—writing. Today, many of the top presses—the Big Five—only communicate with agents, these middlemen, when acquiring books.

Of course, reality is even more complicated than this sounds. And the additional factor here, perhaps, is the agents’ literary taste. The story of modern fiction publishing, McGrath shows, has been dominated and shaped by particular agents who in many cases took a risk on what they thought was an extraordinary book by an unknown writer, and the gamble paid off. The agent’s taste, in other words, ended up being just what the public would love too—and at the right moment. Such agents then become over time magnets for other successful writers—and, in turn, to be represented by a top agent is key to becoming a top-selling novelist too. Success begets more of the same in this industry, making the agent more and more influential with publishers in the process.

So, for instance, a young Sterling Lord took a chance on Jack Kerouac, whose controversial *On the Road* made them both a fortune. Another agent, Candida Donadio, took a similarly bold risk in representing Joseph Heller’s innovative *Catch-22* (originally *Catch-18*). The eventual success of her first client against all odds (coming on the heels of many rejections first by publishers) paved the way for her to represent successfully other bestselling novelists, including Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth, in a career that spanned a half-century. Not bad for a high-school graduate and daughter of Sicilian immigrants.

But, as it turns out, modern literary agents do a whole lot more than promote to publishers the books that they think should be published. They also do a lot of behind-the-scenes polishing and editing of manuscripts. They take books in the category of “this feels like it could *be* something” and make it into that something that will actually attract the eye of an acquisitions editor. “At least half of the books I’ve sold, I do more editorial work before the sale than the editor does afterward,” one agent told McGrath. “Good agents are editing agents,” another said.

Of course, there is much guesswork in the process, even for the best agents—just as is the case for the best publishers. True, McGrath notes, agents sometimes take on books that they know may not be outstanding successes, but ones that they think should exist. Indeed, short story collections, which notoriously do not sell well, belong in this category. But at least short story collections have one key redeeming value for agents: they are habitually over-represented on the short lists of major awards. And while awards do not always translate into sales, they translate into prestige for authors and their press, which means something too. Besides, sometimes a good short story writer will go on to write bestselling novels down the road—George Saunders readily comes to mind, for instance.

Still, the uncertainty of the business side of writing, even for the best of agents, looms in the background of the book. For every story of a book that an agent took on and sold for a massive advance and that went on to win major awards and become a bestseller, there is a story of a similar risk that did not pan out. Readers are a fickle sort, and sometimes books just flop. As a result, in an astounding statistic, “approximately 60 percent of debut novelists do not publish a second book.” Why? Because after taking a major risk on a debut novel, a flop means no one wants to take a similar risk again on a second one. A debut novelist who accepted a six-figure advance that the book could never earn out becomes overnight a has-been. But the result on the contemporary literary landscape is striking: “The literary field of the twenty-first century is defined by its immaturity.”

What we are describing, in other words, is the disappearance of the midlist for the top publishing houses, a phenomenon in which publishers and at least some literary agents are at least partly complicit, McGrath suggests. But what is the cost of this disappearance for American literary landscape? It’s hard to know, because we are speaking here of the invisible library of books that might never get published, because a writer’s first book only had modest success and did not earn out the advance. Still, recent publishing history offers some hints.

The literary and music critic, Ted Gioia, [reflected on the disappearing midlist](https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-day-ny-publishing-lost-its-soul?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in connection with his own publishing career. While his third book sold an impressive 100,000 copies, he notes that his first two books sold very modestly, and yet his then-editor signed him for his second book when the first one was barely out. His personal Substack now boasts over 284,000 subscribers, attesting to his success in reaching readers. But implied loudly in his piece is the question: what if based on his first book, he was never allowed to write the second and third? There is a well-established history of midlist writers slowly building up to eventually publish a bestseller, if only the path to do so exists for them yet.

Even more remarkable is the story of the novelist Cormac McCarthy, considered by some one of the best American novelists. Except, McCarthy’s books were [commercial flops for decades](https://www.millersbookreview.com/p/3-literary-deaths-mccarthy-gottlieb-snyder?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), notes book critic and writer Joel J. Miller. Indeed, no literary agent was involved in McCarthy’s highly unconventional novel debut: “McCarthy, a college dropout, sent the typewritten manuscript of his debut novel to Random House because, [as he said](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/books/cormac-mccarthy-dead.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), ‘it was the only publisher I’d heard of.’ The book landed on the desk of Albert Erskine, an editor whose pen had marked up the pages of William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Ralph Ellison, James Michener, and Malcolm Lowry, among other luminaries.”

Clearly the seasoned editor loved McCarthy’s work and saw promise in it, but his acceptance of McCarthy’s novels turned out to be an exercise in extreme patience—and must have seemed like outright foolishness to others: “Random House published *The Orchard Keeper* in 1965\. Unfortunately, readers paid no attention. The book was a flop, as were all the books McCarthy published throughout the seventies and eighties: *Outer Dark* (1968), *Child of God* (1973), *Suttree* (1979), even a book now regarded as a highpoint in American literature, *Blood Meridian* (1985). Despite critical acceptance, none sold more than couple thousand copies upon release and all drifted out of print.”

McCarthy finally hit it big in 1992 with *All the Pretty Horses*, and then fans started reading his earlier novels. Miller’s point, though, is that no editor today would take this sort of risk—a thirty-year gamble! McGrath’s research certainly supports this point. For one thing, the middlemen have grown more cautious, as have the publishers. Breaking into publishing has become harder—and so has publishing each subsequent book.

Except, not all publishing is subject to the exact same trends. The demise of *Washington Post*’s book review section earlier this year raised this question: Are people still reading? And if so, who is still reading—and what? Poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch stated in *The Atlantic* that “[The Literary Ecosystem Is Dying](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/books-news-washington-post/685897/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).” But it doesn’t seem like this is entirely the case—although it may appear so, when looking at some portions of the literary ecosystem. In mid-April, though, I attended the biennial Calvin Festival on Faith and Writing, a vibrant and joyful gathering of writers and readers, publishers and agents. And I have many reasons to believe that the [conservative Christian literary ecosystem](https://providencemag.com/2026/02/the-conservative-christian-literary-ecosystem/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) is thriving right now—by many metrics, it is growing, not shrinking.

Indeed, the tale of this particular ecosystem and the role of agents and editors in it is a story still waiting to be told—and I hope someone will take it up.
### The Miracle of Communion: to Know and to Love as God
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-miracle-of-communion-to-know-and-to-love-as-god/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:28:15.000Z
“It is my spirit that addresses your spirit”―Jane Eyre.

Vyacheslav Ivanov was one of the most insightful interpreters of Fyodor Dostoevsky. In his seminal work, *A Study in Dostoevsky: Freedom and the Tragic Life*, Ivanov intuited that the great writer was deeply preoccupied with how humans interact with each other, especially as a subject-to-subject relation. He called it the “miracle of communion with the other… which is achieved through the self-surrender of personality… and its self-recovery in… the real oneness of the human race.” Once I came across Ivanov’s illuminating analysis, I knew exactly where in his novels Dostoevsky enacted for us the moment of such communion. It will require a significant setting of the scene before we reach the moment of intersubjective knowledge as masterfully described by Dostoevsky. The background to the scene is equally important and must be grasped as a whole, before the moment the subjects meet, to understand what Dostoevsky tries to achieve.

Alyosha Karamazov is one of the main characters in *The Brothers Karamazov*. He is in training to enter monastic life under the spiritual direction of Fr. Zosima. Alyosha is, by all accounts, a bright and saintly soul who undergoes a deep spiritual crisis at a crucial point in the story. At the beginning of the novel, we meet a young man happily diligently following his spiritual director’s lead. Alyosha has nourished his Christian faith, feeding on the life of the humble monk, Fr. Zosima—a holy man fully devoted to loving God and people.

When Zosima dies, his body begins to smell of decomposition almost immediately. But in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, a truly holy man, once dead, does not decay or smell of decomposition. In fact, the smell of decomposition points to the opposite—the apparent sinfulness of the person. Alyosha’s faith was shaken. He was at a complete loss to reconcile the holy man he knew and loved with the deathly stench of Zosima’s decomposing body. Setting aside for the moment the discussion of why Dostoevsky chose to create this conflict with the Eastern Orthodox tradition of *Incorruptibility*, my goal is first to focus on how Dostoevsky achieves the interpersonal knowledge in his characters.

Following the death and accelerated decomposition of Fr. Zosima’s body, Alyosha enters a profound state of spiritual and epistemic crisis. He is losing his religion, as the song goes, with every passing moment, entering deeper and deeper into the state of spiritual atrophy. Ivanov notices that in Dostoevsky’s novels, solitude and alienation always lead to evil outcomes, resulting in spiritual and, often, physical death. We find Alyosha alone and disoriented when Rakitin, a two-faced seminarian, meets him and invites Alyosha to visit Grushenka’s house.

For those who did not read the novel, Grushenka is beautiful, independent, and proud. She is the object of *almost* all men’s desires in their little town, and she is at the very center of the conflict between Karamazov, the father, and his eldest son Dmitriy. Both are madly in love with her. Grushenka wields incredible power over men, and she knows it. She often enjoys conquering foolish men. She knows how much of an *object* she is for men around her and indulges in playing that part skilfully, turning tables and fancying herself as a cat in the proverbial mouse chase. It was well understood what visiting Grushenka’s house entailed. Alyosha understood it too, and, as he was tumbling down, decided to let go and let gravity pull him to the very bottom.

Up until that moment, Alyosha avoided interaction with Grushenka, unsure of his ability to withstand temptation should it arise, and fearing his own weakness and failure. His fears were well justified, for as soon as Alyosha and Rakitin entered her apartment and sat on the sofa, she placed herself on Alyosha’s lap and put her hands around his neck. Not only readers, but Alyosha himself, it seemed, was curious about his own reaction to the present situation.

To his surprise, he found himself impervious to her charms, perhaps due to his deep sense of grief over the death of Fr. Zosima. At that moment, Grushenka was not an object of his sexual desire, nor the stone over which he would stumble and fall. He recognized a lonely woman, suffering from unresolved betrayals; she needed compassion and love. Alyosha reaches what Ivanov called “ecumenical consciousness.” He sees that she is a subject like him, not an object. So he calls Grushenka his sister in this world of suffering and grief.

Grushenka, too, realizing that Alyosha is not reducing her to a sexual object and seeing his profound grief and alienation over the death of his beloved mentor, takes off her mask, extending her compassion to Alyosha. She gives up the cat-and-mouse game, confesses her intention to ruin Alyosha, and thanks him for calling her a sister. Alyosha was the first human being who could perceive her as a real person, the one she tried so hard to hide.

At the moment when Alyosha and Grushenka meet as subjects, both “self-surrender” their own persons, using Ivanov’s terms. Leaving behind preoccupation with their own selves, they transcend themselves and meet each other as part of a unified humanity. What follows then is a “self-recovery,” when each recovers their own true person, regenerated and enlivened by that unifying spiritual force.

If alienation and isolation produce only the death and destruction of the person (think Ivan Karamazov or Stavrogin in *The Possessed*), then this unification in intersubjective knowledge leads to regeneration and ultimately to salvation. After Alyosha and Grushenka meet as subjects, he tells her that she has saved him. That moment changes both Grushenka and Alyosha, leading them towards further spiritual renewal.

Why, then, could Alyosha’s filial love for Zosima not produce this awakening and spiritual regeneration? Here, I must return to the stinking body of Zosima. I believe that the accelerated decomposition of Zosima’s body is not a mere narrative device, created by Dostoevsky to induce the crisis of faith in Alyosha, nor to introduce Dostoevsky’s personal disagreement with the doctrines of the Orthodox church. I propose that, in view of the scene described above, which follows immediately after the news of Zosoma’s body stench, Dostoevsky presents a more complex picture.

Alyosha deeply loved Zosima. He was a holy man who offered Alyosha fatherly love, something he had never experienced from his own father. Yet, for Alyosha, his love for Zosima remained external; he was an object of Alyosha’s love and adoration. Alyosha never had a spiritual encounter with him; hence, that love could not produce a regeneration in Alyosha’s heart. The immediate decay and deathly stench of Zosima’s body signify the nature of Alyosha’s relationship to Zosima; it was, to put it bluntly, according to the flesh. Zosima’s external body, his flesh, could not provide a way to true transformation for Alyosha. That had to happen in the spirit—in the moment of spiritual knowledge of “the other-Ego,” as Ivanov called it.

The great irony of the story is that it was not the holy and humble man who offered Alyosha a way to salvation, but a villain, herself in need of saving. This experience of intersubjective knowing, oneness, and spiritual love offered a way to salvation for both Alyosha and Grushenka. Both were lost and now found themselves in the shared human unity, a spiritual reality, that set them on the course of transformation.

Dostoevsky was one of the few writers who used fiction as a superior medium for exploring what is possible and how the intersubjective knowledge (or subject-to-subject relationship) can occur in real life. One of his faithful followers was Nikolay Berdyaev. For him, as it was for Dostoevsky, the truth is never abstract; it is in the subject. The true and real human existence is always in the mystery of the individual, always personal, interior, and never fully subjected to the physical laws of nature. Therefore, whenever we view another person as an object, in a purely exterior way (even if it is our own self), it is no longer the real person, but our projection or representation, which, more often than not, resembles the real person only a little. What is at stake, then, when we fail to reach the intersubjective knowledge of another person, is nothing less than reality itself—the true nature of human existence. More precisely, it is our capacity to perceive and understand what is real: to recognize the genuine person, rather than the version we construct in our own minds.

Secondly, Berdyaev asserts that truth (or true human existence) is never purely subjective. While each subject, each person is a whole universe, subjects are never isolated. They are united together in God. The realisation of this unity occurs when subjects meet as subjects and achieve a “synthesizing spirituality, which leads to inner unity and the union of man with man.” Only then can we be unified not only with another human being, but with humanity as a whole, something objectification can not achieve, for it inevitably creates separation between subjects and objects.

Humans are spiritual beings, Berdyaev insists, they are always more than their mere physical nature. Therefore, according to him, the intersubjective knowledge represents a spiritual mode of knowing when two human beings come to know each other as the bearers and sharers in the Divine: “People can be united only in God-manhood, not in the human; a unity of the human exists, but it is a spiritual unity.”

The stakes are indeed much higher than we may think. For Dostoevsky, intersubjective knowledge is nothing other than love in its truest form. To know someone in this way is to love them. Moreover, to know someone as a subject is to know and love the way God does. As it is for Berdyaev and Dostoevsky, intersubjective knowledge reveals what is real through the actual person and allows unification with humanity as a whole, but that’s not all. For the great writer, this love, this intersubjective mode of knowledge, is in a sense salvific—a chance for real, moral, and spiritual regeneration of the soul.
### To Live Well: Bonus Question and Answer
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/to-live-well-bonus-question-and-answer/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:28:18.000Z
**Editorial note:** Recently *Mere Orthodoxy* hosted a webinar with Alan Noble, author of *To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times*. Noble kindly agreed to answer in writing a few more of the questions that webinar attendees had submitted, but that for reasons of time, he was unable to get to during the webinar. We think these questions, submitted anonymously during the webinar, may be of interest to other readers and are grateful to publish this Q&A as a resource. The questions and answers have been minimally edited for clarity.

\*\*\*

**Q1:** I am watching \[this webinar\] with my three daughters, ages 12, 11, and 8\. If Dr. Noble could have their ear on the topic of virtues, what would his main encouragement be?

**Noble:** My encouragement would be to do hard things. Take risks—risks your parents approve of, but real risks. Do hard homework assignments. Talk to adults. Try a musical instrument. Be courageous. You will fail at times, but you will grow your muscle of perseverance and courage, learning how to suffer well for God’s glory.

**Q2:** To what extent does *To Live Well* address anxiety, and how does Jesus’ command ‘do not be anxious’ (Matthew 6:25–34; Luke 12:22–34) inform a biblical understanding of living well?

**Noble:** The book addresses anxiety only insofar as anxiety is often a consequence of living in a world that lacks moral order. As to the second question, I think our desire should be to trust in God’s sovereignty and goodness when it comes to anxiety. Typically, we are anxious about things in our imagination, things that are out of our control, or things that are in our control but which we are ruminating over inordinately. This is what I would describe as *excessive anxiety*, and it’s what I think Jesus is referring to. I think living well looks like learning how to manage anxiety by trusting in God, relying on a spiritual community for support, developing healthy coping tools through therapy when necessary, and even using medication as necessary. I do think that for many people who acutely feel the chaos and moral uncertainty of the contemporary world, learning and practicing the virtues will help relieve some anxiety by providing stability.

**Q3:** Dr. Noble—you mentioned that modern people crave moral order because everything feels fragmented. Do you think the current revival of virtue language is a genuine spiritual recovery, or is there a risk that it becomes another cultural trend people consume without actually being formed by?

**Noble:** I think both outcomes are possible. I think that for some people, a desire for moral order will serve as a prompting to turn to Christ, and I praise God for that. But I think for other people, they will turn to *techniques*. They will turn to optimization programs, efforts to highly order their lives to achieve a sense of “balance.” The quest for perfect optimization of life will never satisfy. Our only peace is in resting in the grace of God through Christ’s finished work for us. But I fear that for some people, it will indeed be, as you say, a “cultural trend.” Our task is to appeal to people who are sensitive to this desire for moral order and invite them to see that it is only in Christ that they will find rest.

**Q4:** How do emotions fit into the virtues?

**Noble:** This is a complicated question, but a good one. I don’t think that emotions are meaningless to the virtues. For example, being repulsed by bigotry or angered over abuse is morally just. The problem comes when you *decide* what is just *based* solely on what repulses or angers you. Similarly, I think it is good to *feel* an emotion of love when you act in love towards someone. But that emotion is not *required* for you to obey the commandment to love your neighbor. Ideally, over time, our behaviors shape our emotions to align them toward what is good and honoring to God.

**Q5:** I will be the speaker for a high school camp this summer. How can I communicate “living well” to students without leaning into moralism? How can I introduce these big ideas to these younger people?

**Noble:** I would begin as I try to begin *To Live Well*, which is with the gospel. We don’t act virtuously to earn God’s favor or to merit our righteousness. We are already righteous because of Christ’s finished work on the Cross. Because of that work, we are new creations with the ability and freedom to turn from sin and walk in a manner worthy of the gospel. Out of gratitude and excitement over our new creation, we should desire to pursue a virtuous life, a life as God designed us to live. This will be difficult, it will take effort, but through the power of the Holy Spirit, we are empowered to be virtuous. I would *invite* high schoolers to do hard things. Encourage them to take the challenge. I suspect that many of them will rise to the occasion and welcome the challenge.

**Q6:** You talked about the fears of reformed protestants being afraid of the virtue discussion because it might lead to a works-based salvation. I've certainly felt that at times when I've sought to incorporate the cultivation of virtue. Are there any helpful thoughts as to how to functionally, truly believe that virtue is being cultivated out of a response to God's grace instead of an attempt to earn it?

**Noble:** I think we have to begin with the gospel and grace and end with the gospel and grace, which is what I tried to do in this book. We need to preach the gospel to ourselves and each other even as we “stir up one another to love and good works” (Hebrews 10:24). And *when* we fail to act virtuously, our response needs to be *more* gospel, more grace, reminding ourselves that our righteousness is in Christ, not our good works, learning from our mistakes, asking for forgiveness, receiving that forgiveness, and moving on in grace.

**Q7:** I long to live for God’s glory but I don’t quite understand what people mean when they use that phrase. What does God’s glory actually mean?

**Noble:** Immersing yourself in the Word will teach you how to live for God’s glory. For example, we know from David’s example that delighting in God’s creation is glorifying to God (Psalm 19). We know from Christ’s obedience that living an obedient life is glorifying to God (Philippians 2:8). We know from Paul’s example that spreading the gospel and making disciples is glorifying to God. We also know from Paul that living a quiet and humble life is glorifying to God (1 Thessalonians 4:11). Being in Scripture and learning from the examples there teaches us how to glorify God in any particular situation we are in.

**Q8:** In our secular post-Christian culture, we probably retain the words or vestigial nature of the virtues, but we have severed them from their Christian roots and thick context. What do the virtues look like, distorted in a post-Christian world? In a sense, to use YANYO language, what do the Virtues of Self-Belonging look like in their corrupted form and display?

**Noble:** I think the vestigial virtues typically look like self-optimization, a drive to become a Best Version of Yourself *without an outside telos*. So this might look like intense self-discipline programs, a lot of self-denial, monitoring of data, controlling of emotions, attempts to master the self, attempts to limit liability, and so on. The key here is that the virtues are approached not as practices which form us through the work of the Holy Spirit, pointing us toward who we were created to be in Christ, but rather *tools* we use to *master* our lives. So we use data collection in prudence to master choice making. We use data and will power to master temperance. And so on. But there is no *telos* outside the self toward which these “virtues” are pointing. It’s all self-referential.

**Q9:** Will you speak to the role of intimidation in inhibition, with regard to engaging the culture?

**Noble:** Interesting question and one I have not thought enough about. I would say that there are many intimidating forces in our culture that contribute to inhibition. One would be our hyper-competitive culture. For example, in dating, everyone is exposed not just to the attractive, interesting people in their local community, but to a *world* of attractive, interesting people on the internet. The *pressure* to stand out and compete is enormous. Then there is the threat of online cancellation, of exposure of yourself or your body. We are regularly intimidated to act according to societal standards (beauty, “justice,” politeness, efficiency, and so on) that are overwhelming. And so we freeze up and grow inhibited.

**Q10:** I’m a parent and a teacher of high school seniors at a Classical Christian school? What are some of the best ways I can encourage courage and temperance in my students/kids. Clearly, I can call them to “imitate me as I imitate Christ” but do you have any ideas or suggestions that I can take to the classroom and dinner table?

**Noble:** In the classroom, I think you want to *invite* them to do hard things, to face difficult projects and assignments and tasks with courage. Reminding them that the courage they use to face those tasks will aid them as they go forward and face bigger challenges in life. Similarly, you can *invite* them to live temperately. This looks like encouraging (not lecturing) them about how they use screens and how they are *present* in the world.

**Q11:** Your message, your book, and books like Jake Meador’s *What Are Christians For* and publications like *Plough*, are profound but pretty mind-blowing, other-worldly, linguistically and culturally dense for the average person, or even the average "evangelical" Christian to be introduced to. How can we bridge this gap to make it more accessible?"

**Noble:** This question weighs heavily on my heart. I *hope* that *To Live Well* directly responds to your question. It is written to be *more* accessible than academic or scholarly, even though it does ask readers to understand the philosophy and theology behind virtues. In fact, all my writing tries to make big ideas more accessible. But even with my efforts to bring scholars like Pieper down to an accessible level, *some* readers will still find it too dense. And that’s where the value of pastors and ministers and other readers come in. As they read my book, they translate it to their particular audiences.

**Q12:** As a reformed Christian who is actively trying to reclaim the virtues within my own life and that of my family’s, this book could not intrigue and excite me more. So, thank you. I often find myself becoming exasperated when talking with other Christians about my desire to reclaim the virtues as a Reformed Protestant. My husband and I come from rural Appalachia where there is much talk about being “Spirit-filled” but not in ways that exemplify virtues like temperance and prudence. What advice would you give to one who is trying to gracefully, respectfully- and accurately, share about/defend the virtues when dealing with Christians who are more emotionally motivated?

**Noble:** I would start by sharing that God cares about our habits. We know this because he has established habits in our worship to *form* our hearts (including our emotions) to know him and love him more: the Lord’s Day, the Lord’s Supper, regular prayer and reading the Bible. Virtues are habits that form us to be who God created us to be. These habits are ways the Spirit works to shape our emotions properly so that we come to desire what God desires. It’s not that emotions are bad, or that we don’t rely on the Holy Spirit. In fact, we are only able to practice these virtues truly *because of the work of the Holy Spirit!* A virtuous life *is* a Spirit-filled life! But what that looks like are practices that shape our thoughts, actions, and emotions towards God’s will.

**Q13:** How do virtues make inroads in family or institutional settings where there is a lack of personal responsibility and leadership, unhealthy emphasis on self and dominance of cultures of co-dependence and narcissism?

**Noble:** In other words, how does an unvirtuous community become virtuous? I suppose it starts with repentance. And that requires an awareness of the brokenness of the community. Whether it is a family or a larger institution, there needs to be an acceptance that the community is in sin and needs to turn from its vices. That’s one piece. There also needs to be some leadership. Parents need to model virtue and use language of virtue with their children. Institutional leaders need to do the same. Finally, the *beauty* of virtue needs to be expressed. Living a virtuous life is *hard* but *beautiful*, because it is living in a manner you were created to live by God. When you understand that living temperately is actually a lovely way to live, it’s not so daunting to pursue temperance, for example.

**Q14:** It seems like some of the classic virtue Literature acknowledges that various virtues are dependent on each other w/o suggesting that the work is sequential. “30 Steps to Heaven” (based on The Divine Ladder), which notes that compassion is the crown of the virtues, not a starting place (since you can be indiscriminately compassionate toward truly evil behavior). Thoughts?

**Noble:** Pieper argues that Prudence lays the foundation for the other Cardinal virtues. Personally, the more I study the virtues, the more I see how they are all interrelated. For example, while you need prudence to know how to be courageous, you need courage to act resolutely when you make a prudent decision. So while I lay out the virtues in a specific order that seems best to me based on the work of others, I hold that *very* loosely, and in the end I keep seeing how they all circle back around to each other.

**Q15:** How to deter from the cultivation of personal virtue resulting in a hyper-fixation on the self?

**Noble:** Whenever you pursue any kind of personal growth there is the potential for morbid fixation upon yourself. I think the solution to this problem is to develop virtues in community, whether that be family, church, or school. In community, you realize that *justice* is not about *you*, it’s about giving your *neighbor* his or her due. But even in community, *some* level of introspection and contemplation is necessary for growing in virtue. For example, to live temperately, you need to evaluate your inner order: are your loves disordered? Is your attention spent on things it shouldn’t be? You need to ask these sorts of questions regularly. Done properly, this isn’t hyper-fixation, but healthy self-knowledge.

**Q16:** My 11 year old son and I are listening in and we are wondering when you first encountered Eliot and where you think is a good place to start in reading his work would be?

**Noble:** I first encountered him with *The Waste Land*, but that is a *rough* place to start. I didn’t enjoy him there or find him compelling. Maybe the best place to start would be “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with it’s fairly understandable lament about confessing one’s love to someone.

**Q17:** As a recent Catholic convert, after 40 years in the evangelical world, the call to live a noble life is very appealing and seems very appropriate to Catholicism, as you hinted at. Help me understand how we can navigate the complexity of being or becoming more virtuous without condemning the people around us who seem increasingly unmoored and unprincipled. Can we avoid the temptation to just “hunker down” in our religious silos?

**Noble:** I think I would advocate for a shift in perspectives. Rather than hunkering down, what if we are beacons of hope in a despairing world? By living virtuously, we are *enacting hope*, living out the gospel, living as witnesses to the truth to our neighbors. And if we can do so charitably and invitingly, we can show them that there is hope in Christ. That’s how I envision this.

**Q18:** Dr. Noble, you’ve written about how having children in an individualistic, self-optimizing culture is one way to testify that we are not our own. You’ve also written about enduring severe mental affliction in On Getting Out of Bed. Given those two things, I wonder how you would counsel couples for whom childbearing would put the wife at high medical or psychological risk. How might courage and prudence interact in such a case? In general, how should Christians balance risk-taking with respect for our human fallenness and finitude?

**Noble:** This is a profoundly difficult question to answer in the abstract. Here’s what I would say. Our task is to prayerfully seek to honor God with our lives, courageously and prudently. That does mean doing hard things. But that doesn’t mean doing reckless things. It may be that a couple works for a while with mental health professionals to reach some point of mental stability before having children. But even then, the goal would not be to achieve “perfect” stability, because *no one* is “ready” to have children. Courage allows us to *risk* suffering for the sake of the good of children, in this case. The question is, in this *particular* case, does the health of the mother make it imprudent to take that risk, even after treatment. I can’t answer that question. I’m not in the specific position with that couple necessary to speak into it. I would recommend prayer and the advice of wise counselors who know them personally. And I would add that *there is grace* for what they decide. They can make a choice together, in love and mutual respect and self-sacrifice, knowing that God loves them and promises to give wisdom to all who ask. God has promised to work all things together for their good. Their duty is to make the best decision they can and walk that out.

To the broader question, we should take risks for the sake of the good—that is courage. But when it is *not* for the good to take a risk, then it is recklessness. For example, if I choose to “courageously” volunteer for every ministry in my church and risk burnout *because of my finitude*, I’m not actually focusing on *the good*, which is to care for the local church. I’m focused on appearing holy. So taking your finitude into account when you take risks *is* important.

**Q19:** How can churches become gardens where the virtues blossom and ripen?

**Noble:** I think it begins with churches using the language of virtues from the pulpit and as a part of their culture. The Bible has a lot to say about justice, prudence, courage, self-control, faith, hope, and love. We need to use this language in our daily lives. We also need to take time in our Sunday Schools or elsewhere to talk about virtuous living. This might look like classes where we discuss temperance and smartphone usage or chastity. The virtues are practiced in community. So if they are to blossom and ripen, it will be because small groups of friends decide to sharpen each other and encourage each other with habits of virtue.
### Whose Time? Whose World?
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/whose-time-whose-world/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:28:19.000Z
Hartmut Rosa. *Time and World.* Polity, 2025\. $22.95 pb. 228 pp.

For English-speaking students of modernity, the German sociologist Hartmut Rosahas come to prominence over the last decade. He has been developing his theories since the turn of the new millennium, but his influence in the United States took off after the English-language publication of *The Uncontrollability of the World* in 2020\. Much like Rosa’s chief dialogue partner, Charles Taylor, his theories are remarkable for both defying basic summary and inviting it.

Drawing extensively on social science research, Rosa’s questions and aims are meta-disciplinary. In short, he seeks to help late-modern humans grasp what is unique about us (individually and collectively) and our social problems. Of course, many theorists do this too, but sometimes very basic plot points help us map out all others naturally and non-arbitrarily. Leaning toward the descriptive over the normative, Rosa’s project involves precise “labeling” to locate the main causal faultlines that explain modern consciousness.

Three labels of particular importance in his project are “social acceleration,” “resonance,” and “alienation.” We will have occasion to return to each below, but for Rosa, they are conceptually related. The logic of modern efficiency (in combination with the technological apparatus to realize this logic) has so conditioned the pace of human psychic life—both at the level of individual existence and political common will—that we are increasingly losing touch with the world, with one another, and even with ourselves (since we know ourselves in relation to the world). The reason for this fissure is that we have evaporated the conditions suitable to a “resonant” relation with the world.

Resonance is a loadbearing concept for Rosa. At a minimum, it refers to a meaningful, non-instrumental, and *inter-*active relation with things. Resonance is a “lived tension” rather than dialectical collapse of the self into the other. But we find the depth of things precisely in the “uncontrollable” things that are insistently themselves and talk back to us (e.g., nature, people, etc.). We are, as it were, “attached.” But late-modern temporality (and the style of consciousness this relation to time cultivates) swallows our ability to achieve this resonance, replacing attachment with “alienation.” This last term has quite a pedigree, as Hartmut knows. His own usage is comprehensive but accented toward the existential. Modern man tends to lose touch with himself, the meaning of his own acts, and a sense of participation in a common project with others. Hegel famously said that freedom was “being at home with one’s self in the other.” By this standard, one might say that Rosa’s diagnostic implies that late modern consciousness tends to slavery—being un-homed from self and other.

*Time and World* is likely to become an excellent proxy for Rosa’s overall project. The book opens with Frederic Vandenberghe’s introductory essay, providing an extensive summary of Rosa’s philosophical development. In the seven chapters of the book itself, Rosa summarizes and extends the theories noted above. This book clearly represents the frontier of his current thoughts and his proposal for future research.

Rosa is not just interested in *contemporary* modes of relating to time, but also how *time itself* (i.e., human history itself) shapes human consciousness. While we are not totally unlike our ancestors, “what it felt like to be alive” was different in key respects. You might say that the history of mankind—not unlike the history of a person—involves continuous but ever-changing “phenomena,” and Rosa engages phenomenological discourse to grasp these shifts. Looming large in the background are the original sociologists (Durkheim, Weber, and even Marx), but largely as those who had identified that consciousness has a history. To live after the industrial revolution does something substantive to the structure of experience and interpretation. But Rosa draws more on later figures like Anthony Giddens and Charles Taylor. Taylor especially grasps that to understand our age is to “tell a story,” because a story—“a sense of having overcome a previous condition”—is written into the fabric of our self-understanding individually and socially. None of these persons are subjectivists, but none believe in the timelessness of discourse and politics.

Yet there is an ever-present concern for the latter. Especially if our modern sense of “being a people” (in a nation state, for instance) is a common perception rooted in uncommon reasoning, then there is a fragility at the very root of late-modern politics. We imagine ourselves to be a people who are somehow *prior* to our “forming a more perfect union.” But what holds this conception of peoplehood together? And can it change? Perhaps, like Joseph Ellis’s fascinating argument in *Founding Brothers*, there is contradiction of principle but a “lived coherence” at the practical level. Still, this lived coherence, and the habits of mind and modes of consciousness that sustain it, are susceptible to history. One question at the heart of this book (similar to Hunter’s recent *Democracy and Solidarity*) is whether the lived coherence can hold, or whether the fissure of values has become so wide that there is no “lived coherence” that will satisfy individual needs and *political needs*.

It is this sort of insight that Rosa develops in the first chapter. What makes his discussion unique is that he brings together discourse(s) across the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, and political science—drawing upon different thinkers who grasp what “modern subjectivity” is. In some ways, these authors come to similar conclusions about modern human beings, but each discipline, argues Rosa, must see its peculiar vantage point and limits. This is especially true because each also “shapes” modern consciousness and self-understanding at a discursive level.

For a sociologist to attempt to identify a hierarchy of norms for society *as a sociologist* would be crossing into a grammar and mode of human action for which sociological discourse is unfit. Modern politics, you might say, is the art of deciding which values will be reflected in law, and which nudges will be guaranteed in the social order. But, once again, political science alone cannot decide which values ought to be individually and collectively chosen. In other words, which “future subjectivity” should we choose? Rosa’s devastating analysis of the basic choices we are all incentivized to make as a clear value to guide us feels increasingly elusive. But he is hopeful that these disciplines can identify their competencies and (with hermeneutically sensitive philosophers) begin to create the kind of dialogue that modern social problems require. One might say that Rosa is attempting to identify “who should talk to who” given his particular reading of our problems.

But if a modern society is a running self-interpretation, who are “we” now? How do we see ourselves and what makes us “us?” What do we all share that can enable us to be a society together? The second chapter explores these questions through probing the relationship between our explicit and implicit self-understanding. It takes the mutual gaze of all the disciplines mentioned above to see the live coherence that can make a society like ours work, but also to see its fragilities and vulnerabilities. Not least among these is when there is no practical lived coherence and mediation between common action and uncommon motivation—between, say, our mutual agreement to pay taxes and our quite different motivations for doing so. Political scientists especially notice that we live in a legitimation crisis. Even if we have not found a solution to our fragilities, *locating* our deepest and most practical self-understanding(s)—and how these have held us together so far—is at least useful for those who ask normative questions.

The effect of this fragile collective self-understanding on our political process is massive. The third chapter builds upon Rosa’s previous work on modern social acceleration, with its inner logic of denying both finitude and death. As we increase our options, we store away future experiences, but there are far more than we can ever possess. Slowly, we feel we get less of “the share of” the world just as we seem to have “more” of it. This is true of both the individual and the political life. Politics is a human art and moves at a human pace, and it cannot bear burdens often placed on it without cracking. The resulting political jadedness is not surprising, nor the tendency to treat the political apparatus in a Machiavellian way. But for most, the sensation is simply that as technology increases we are more “connected” than ever, we are less in control of social change. We do not feel like participants for the most part, but like passengers. The result is that we cannot keep up with history (concludes Rosa). Its effects are accelerating, but “its meaning is slowing.”

This acceleration is the cause of modern “alienation,” the subject of Rosa’s fourth chapter. While it is not up to sociology (qua sociology) to define the good life, sociology originated as a set of questions that assumed “something was wrong” with modern society and had some implicit “vision of the good life” that contemporary forms of life mitigated against. Sociology is about “social problems” to the core, but problems defined precisely as violating certain standards of the good life, such as political and individual self-determination.

However, in the West, finding a solution has often been a promise that cannot be kept. And perhaps it is not simply because politics cannot deliver it. There is no pure “self” that isn’t already co-determined by the world, society, and politics. The value for autonomy, argues Rosa, goes together with the value for authenticity, the notion that I exist and possess an “inner core” manifested in my acts. But what if this is mostly not what it is like to be a self? And what if our “inner core” is more deeply susceptible to influence than that? Such is the case with modern social acceleration, and it has resulted in a loss of a “resonant” relationship with things. Alienation is a “loss of responsiveness” from the things themselves because we are no longer in an attending relationship to them. This can mean alienation from nature or politics and even from the self and the sense of “being caught up in” one’s own projects.

Rosa proceeds, in chapter five, to identify the “implicit logic” and “value system” that define our tacit sense of the good life. The good life is what makes the world more available, accessible, and attainable (One is reminded of Giddens’s reading of modernity as involving the suspension of time and space—bringing the far near). And yet we are not a satisfied people and feel the loss of our capacity to see or grasp the whole of things. Rosa critiques this implicit notion written in the logic of our social practices with a notion of the good life rooted in his conception of “resonance.” He goes on to relate resonance to that which is non-controllable and non-disposable, and what might also be called unpredictable. Alienation is the loss of this relationship with ourselves, the world, and one another. When the world moves from being a chorus of communicators to an amalgam of externally related machine parts, we have lost resonance. Rather than a theory we defend, this is simply written into our habits and resultant imagination. Hartmut concludes the chapter by identifying key “axes of resonance” that make for a stable modern social order, as well as the key function that each of these axes plays. The concept of resonance here stands over against concepts of reduction or repulsion.

The sixth chapter is a reading of the corpus of Charles Taylor as a theorist of “resonance.” Ultimately, all of Taylor’s career and interdisciplinary work has been about the loss and recovery of “resonance” and connection to the world. Moreover, Taylor sees this loss of resonance as bound up with events in human self-understanding and the “sense of ourselves” as a society. A resonant relation to the world does not easily leave the world of common ceremony, action, and political imagination. Rosa’s seventh chapter, then, attempts to draw upon the notion that a “resonant” relationship with the world is a trans-historical common good, albeit differently inflected in each time-period. Still, it can be said that the modern libido to have everything available, accessible, and attainable is constitutionally inconsistent with the conditions of a resonant relationship with the world in any circumstance. Moreover, unlike (on Rosa’s reading) Taylor’s move at the end of *A Secular Age,* a resonant relationship to the world simply is a radical choice of interpretation. Rosa notes that this already reflects the deep alienation that resonance means to overcome. But given the radically dialogical nature of (and means to achieve) resonance for Rosa, perhaps the way forward is simply discovered in a disposition of an openness to talk and take one another seriously. Whether we like it or not, members of a society share one another, and perhaps there remains the possibility, individual and political, to be holy wasters of time.

There is much to appreciate in this work, and in Rosa’s project overall. He deserves his growing reputation as a key reader of modern life. But there remain crucial questions. Is there a way to imagine “the good” beyond late modernity? Is whatever our project is the end or a means to the end? Relatedly, if our end is *freedom*, then is our conception of freedom more about deliberation and options, or is it about ends? The recent work of D. C. Schindler asks this last question and identifies a deep fracture in the contemporary society rooted in an imaginative misunderstanding of both freedom and the will.

More ominously, is there such a thing as a political situation that *politically* demands radical and quick action (and for the *sake* of resonance)? I remain quite doubtful of this, but it is worth noting that others demur. Rosa’s own political affect sounds gentlemanly and (to me) ideal. But what does one do when there are no gentlemen and that is unlikely to change?

Finally, there is the crucial matter of how we resolve the normative (even if “implicitly normative”) question about the vision of the good life that provides a map for both individuals and a people. Moreover, is the extent to which we can tolerate any tension here a fixed thing, or does that change with “us?” After all, we cannot simply ask what our ancestors can handle—we must ask what we can. Only time will tell if late-modern human beings can endure a lack of more explicit common value.
### Why Are There So Many Billionaires?
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-are-there-so-many-billionaires/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:28:23.000Z
Forbes has been producing its [annual list](https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of the world’s billionaires since 1987\. Despite landing at the height of 1980’s excess, that original list seems dowdy by today’s standards. In 1987, there were 140 billionaires on the planet. The world’s wealthiest person was the Japanese real estate tycoon, Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, who was worth $20 billion. Tsutsumi would only rank #33 on this year’s list, even after adjusting for inflation.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/05/ghost-upload-1778414975924-921666-undefined-3.jpeg)

The 2026 list is staggering by any measure. Before 2000, it averaged 27 new members per year. This year there are 400\. There are now 3,428 billionaires in the world, who are together worth over $20 trillion dollars. This year’s wealthiest person is Elon Musk, whose estimated wealth is $839 billion. Adjusting for inflation, Musk is not only 14 times wealthier than Tsutsumi was, but is actually worth about the same amount as all the world’s 140 billionaires in 1987.

The astonishing growth of wealth at the top has not gone unnoticed, and it has generated public unease. In Washington, Governor Bob Ferguson recently signed into law the state’s very first income tax of any kind—a 9.9% “millionaires’ tax” on income over $1 million. In California, healthcare workers’ unions submitted 1.5 million signatures (nearly double the requirement) to put a one-time 5% billionaire wealth tax on the November 2026 ballot. These anxieties aren’t limited to blue states; they show up in polling that crosses party lines. A January 2026 [Economist/YouGov poll](https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/53821-majorities-americans-say-wealth-inequality-is-problem-want-government-intervention-january-2-5-2026-economist-yougov-poll?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) found that 80% of Americans—including 66% of all Republicans and even 57% of self-described “very conservative” persons—believe that the gap between rich and poor is a “very” of “somewhat” “big problem.” The conservative political theorist Patrick Deneen has put the [point](https://albertmohler.com/2024/03/20/patrick-deneen-2/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) bluntly: “an oligarchy isn’t a left or a right phenomenon.”

The obvious question is ‘why’? Why are there so many more billionaires today, and why are their fortunes so much larger than they used to be? This question is important because it reveals the inadequacies of conceptions of wealth that focus exclusively on individual ingenuity and effort. Elon Musk works famously hard. But he doesn’t work fourteen times harder than Yoshiaki Tsutsumi did in 1987.

Musk is smart, inventive, and relentlessly driven, and the companies he has built are genuinely extraordinary. SpaceX has cut the cost of reaching orbit by an order of magnitude and revived a moribund American space program. Tesla midwifed the electric car into the mainstream and created a world where 1 out of 4 new cars are EV’s. Neither company existed twenty-five years ago, and both were widely expected to fail.

But both Tesla and SpaceX would not have survived were it not for sizeable public investments at moments of great vulnerability. SpaceX won a $1.6 billion contract from NASA when it was days away from bankruptcy after several high-profile launch failures. Tesla survived the 2008 financial crisis because of a $465 million low-interest loan from the Department of Energy.

Both companies, moreover, sit on top of decades of publicly funded research. The rocketry that SpaceX uses emerged from sixty years of NASA and Air Force aerospace work. The lithium-ion chemistry in every Tesla battery came out of university and national-laboratory research underwritten by federal grants. Libertarians like to cast Musk as a parable of private enterprise outperforming a sclerotic state. The truer story is that he is a parable of what becomes possible when private ambition rides on top of decades of public investment.

Musk offers a vivid example of a more general truth. Modern wealth production cannot be understood apart from the extraordinary complexity of the global economy in which it occurs. The switch from an analog economy built around stuff to a digital economy built around bytes has opened wholly new ways to make staggering amounts of money.

A piece of software can reach billions of users at almost no marginal cost. Globalization has expanded the customer base for any successful product to most of humanity. The transcontinental railroads of the nineteenth century made enormous fortunes, but they took decades to build and could only operate where the rails were laid. It’s telling that almost all of the top ten billionaires in 1987 made their fortunes in property or real estate. No one in this year’s top 100 made their fortunes in the real estate industry, and 7 of the top 10 all started technology companies.

Individuals work hard, but they do so within complex institutions made possible by social cooperation. The internet exists because the United States Department of Defense funded a communications network that could survive nuclear attack. GPS exists because military satellites were eventually opened to civilian use. The semiconductors that power modern computing trace back, ultimately, to publicly funded research at universities and national laboratories. The financial system that channels capital to entrepreneurs is held together by securities law, deposit insurance, and a central bank willing to act as lender of last resort. Global trade rests on treaties hammered out by political representatives and enforced by international institutions. The roads on which Amazon’s packages travel were built by the public; the engineers Tesla hires were educated by it. Even the dollars on which the entire edifice rests have value only because we collectively agree they do. One could go on indefinitely.

The reason why there are so many billionaires now is because the modern world is built on an extraordinarily complex system of social cooperation that no one of us produced and no one of us could escape if we tried.

The significance of such social cooperation is at the heart of the late political philosopher John Rawls’s theory of justice. Rawls is often regarded with some suspicion by Christians for his skepticism about the role of faith in public life (a view that I think is misunderstood, but that is an essay for another day). He is, however, the most influential political philosopher of the twentieth century for having articulated a powerful argument about how the benefits and burdens of social cooperation should be distributed in a complex modern society. Rawls’s deepest idea is that modern societies are constituted by a “basic structure”: the primary social, political and economic institutions that shape human life and make social cooperation possible.

Pre-modern societies had nothing quite like a basic structure in this sense. It has a special significance because “its effects are profound and present from the start.” These institutions reach into every life, decisively shaping life prospects, and there is essentially nothing an individual can do to opt out of them. Because its effects are so far-reaching and inescapable, principles of justice arise to govern the terms of social cooperation. A voluntary cooperative arrangement—a club, a partnership, a neighborhood association—can run on whatever terms its members agree to, because those who dislike them can leave. The basic structure of a modern society is not similarly voluntary. Principles of justice are the rules that ensure that the benefits and burdens of social cooperation are distributed fairly.

But what is a fair distribution? Musk will say that his $839 billion is fair because he worked hard and has done so much to improve society. A blue collar factory worker who lost his job to globalization and no longer has the health insurance that he needs to provide for his sick child might have disagree. Rawls’s most famous contribution to political philosophy is a thought experiment designed to help us think through this impasse. Imagine, he asks, that we are choosing the basic rules for our society—the rules that will govern how all the benefits and burdens of social cooperation will be distributed—but we choose without knowing who we will turn out to be when the rules take effect. We do not know whether we will be born to wealth or poverty, to health or illness, to talents the market rewards or talents it doesn’t. What rules would we choose?

Rawls suggests that we would choose a society where social goods like wealth are distributed in such a way as to make sure that the worst-off persons do as well as they possibly can. People who didn’t know where they were going to end up would make sure that the worst-case scenario was as good as it could possibly be. The operative idea here is *maximin*—Rawls tries to maximize the minimum.

Importantly, there is inequality in Rawls’s society, perhaps even a lot of it. It permits doctors to be paid more than orderlies, engineers more than factory workers, founders more than employees, provided that those inequalities are part of a larger system that improves the position of everyone, especially those at the bottom. But there is no “natural” amount that entrepreneurs deserve because of their hard work and ingenuity. Again, we are all a part of a cooperative scheme; we all do better when we cooperate.

But the whole thing only works if we all participate in it so it is fair to ask that the benefits and burdens of social cooperation are distributed fairly. Inequality is important because it allows everyone to do better. But a fair distribution is one that treats everyone’s interest equally; no one is morally superior to others. This is the core idea that Rawls’s thought experiment models.

And what would such a society look like? It’s hard to say exactly, but imagine that you are about to enter American society without knowing who you will be or where you will end up. Would you choose to live in a society in which health insurance is largely tied to employment, so that losing a job means losing your family’s coverage at exactly the moment you can least afford to pay for it? Would you accept a minimum wage that leaves you living below the poverty line? Would you choose a system of public education whose quality depends largely on the zip code of the house you can afford? Would you choose to live in a country where there is so little margin for error for the most disadvantaged? No, you wouldn’t.

The reply, of course, is that we can’t afford to arrange things otherwise—that taxing fortunes more heavily would dampen the entrepreneurial energy on which our prosperity depends, and that the current system, for all its harshness, is the one that delivers the goods. This argument is usually delivered in the sober, slightly weary tones of someone explaining hard economic realities to a naive idealist. But the tone outruns the evidence. Would Elon Musk really have walked away from founding Tesla and SpaceX if he had stood to become merely a multi-billionaire rather than, possibly, the world’s first trillionaire? Would Jeff Bezos have decided just to run a small independent bookstore rather than go through the trouble of starting Amazon if he were only going to be worth a few hundred million dollars?

Cross-national economic evidence runs in the same direction. Sweden has a *lot* [more billionaires](https://scandinaviafacts.com/sweden-billionaires/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) per capita than the United States. Iceland and Norway work about [20% *less*](https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), but both have higher [GDP per capita](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?most%5Frecent%5Fvalue%5Fdesc=true&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) than the United States. The Scandinavian countries as a group have [higher](https://quasa.io/media/the-real-wealth-of-nations-what-gdp-per-hour-worked-actually-reveals?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) productivity per hour worked (GDP per total hours worked) than the United States, despite paying about [65% *more*](https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/topics/policy-sub-issues/global-tax-revenues/revenue-statistics-highlights-brochure.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in taxes. (There also famously [happier](https://www.worldhappiness.report/ed/2020/the-nordic-exceptionalism-what-explains-why-the-nordic-countries-are-constantly-among-the-happiest-in-the-world/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).) The economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Stefanie Stantcheva have [shown](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.6.1.230&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that across the developed world over the past half-century, cuts to top tax rates have made the rich richer without making economies grow faster. These are complicated issues, of course, but we have proof of concept for a state that is wealthy, entrepreneurial, humane and just. The question is whether we want to build it here.

Rawls is sometimes read as the apotheosis of late modern liberal egalitarianism. But his arguments about inequality are in fact participating in a very old tradition. The conviction that a society ought to be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable is not a twentieth-century innovation; it is a constant drumbeat in the Christian tradition. The philosopher, Nicholas Wolterstorff, notes how the Bible shows repeated and insistent concern for what he calls the “Quartet of the Vulnerable”—the poor, the widow, the foreigner, and the orphan—those who were most vulnerable in ancient Israelite society.

The Torah builds protection for them into its laws of gleaning, Sabbath, and Jubilee. The Prophets return to them again and again, often using the sharpest language of judgment that we find in the Bible when they are wronged. Mary sings of a God who has “filled the hungry with good things, but has sent the rich away empty.” Jesus opens His public ministry by announcing that He has come “to proclaim good news to the poor... release to the captives... freedom for the oppressed.” He pronounces blessing on the poor and the hungry, and woe on the rich and the comfortable. He shares His table with tax collectors, prostitutes, and the ritually unclean. And in Matthew 25, Jesus identifies himself with the hungry, the stranger, the sick, and the imprisoned, warning that those who ignore them will be “cursed into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”

The biblical witness on this point is not a handful of proof-texts; it is a sustained insistence that a community is answerable for how it treats the most disadvantaged. Rawls articulates philosophically what the prophets had insisted on theologically: a society’s institutions are to be measured by what becomes of the poor, the widow, the foreigner, and the orphan. By that measure, the present arrangement does not pass.

\* \* \*

Jeff Bezos is [rumored](https://www.realtor.com/news/celebrity-real-estate/jeff-bezos-selling-megayacht-koru-lauren-sanchez/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to be quietly putting his yacht up for sale. The vessel—christened Koru, a Māori word implying “new beginnings” or “new life”—is the largest sailing yacht in the world. It cost $500 million to build and an additional $50 million a year to staff. It is so large that it requires a separate $75 million support yacht to carry the helicopter that Bezos’s wife uses to commute to it. To leave the Dutch shipyard where it was built, the shipbuilder asked that a beloved 95-year-old bridge be partially dismantled. The residents of Rotterdam threatened to pelt it with rotten eggs, and the request was quietly withdrawn.

Now Bezos is selling it because it has become “too huge to manage.” And so the fourth-richest man in the world will downsize to something more discreet, while [fourteen million](https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/child-hunger-facts?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) American children remain unsure whether dinner will be on the table, [36 million people](https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-287.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) live under the federal poverty line, and [771,000 people](https://www.kff.org/medicaid/five-key-facts-about-people-experiencing-homelessness/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) experience homelessness. Whatever else can be said about such a situation, it is not one that anyone would choose if they didn’t know their place in society; nor is it one that the Bible would consider just.
### The Forgotten Evangelicals of Colorado Springs
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-forgotten-evangelicals-of-colorado-springs/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:28:25.000Z
I was in college in New York City in 2010 when I first heard the title, “Evangelical Vatican” to refer to my hometown, Colorado Springs. Born and raised in the city, I am the product of its religious and political reputation: homeschooled for 13 years, attending George Bush rallies in 2004, trained in a Christian liberal arts college, and now back home as an evangelical Presbyterian minister. When a fellow pastor commended *Jesus Springs: Evangelical Capitalism and the Fate of an American City* (2025) to me, I knew I had to read it carefully–and even let it “read” me.

The book is one of several ([here](https://readingreligion.org/9781978821859/the-divine-institution/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and [here](https://coloradotimesrecorder.com/2023/02/jesus-and-john-wayne-author-on-christian-nationalism-and-evangelical-influence/51943/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)) attempts to consider how Colorado Springs shaped contemporary political and religious landscapes in a post-Trump America. I was refreshed in some ways, expecting another lambasting from left-pulling Academia. Schultz is fair, if still biased, in his analysis and reporting of what I remember growing up in Colorado Springs in the late 90s and 2000s. “I argue that many ideas that seem distinctive to post-World War II evangelicalism…are best understood as inheritances of the Cold War. The case of Colorado Springs, a center of both military *and* evangelical power, demonstrates this point.” Overall, he’s successful, and more importantly, charitable. But in final analysis he succumbs to the same vices he accuses of the city.

Schultz’s project is significant: to describe and analyze how Colorado Springs became the strategic center for the larger conservative and evangelical agendas in the US from the 1950s to 2026\. He describes the city’s founding as an intentional anti-mining town, a moral City on a Hill contrasted with the vice-dens of the Western Gold Rush boom towns. Post World World II, evangelical organizations trickled and then flooded into Colorado Springs, beginning with the Navigators and Young Life, climaxing with Focus on the Family, and totaling over 135 ministries. Attracted to plentiful land, tax incentives, the swirl of evangelical momentum, and the mountain air for revivals, these organizations created a nuclear critical mass of evangelistic and missionary fervor for first Colorado Springs, and then the world.

Key to his thesis is that a unifying theme for Colorado Springs is an equivocation between the Christian faith with a Cold War-era battles of ideas. “\[The culture war effort\] was a strategy that–like modern evangelicalism–had its roots in the Cold War. Declarations that the United States was hopelessly divided between forces of religion and secularism, tradition and modernity, Christianity and humanism, drew upon older claims about the cultural threat posed by communism." Schultz is right here. I often heard growing up, “Ideas have consequences,” along with virulent critiques of Darwinism, communism, and secularism mashed together. Schultz shows how in the Colorado Springs milieu, this political and economic conflict received a spiritual flavor in the hands of Summit Ministries (whose key tome, “*Understanding the Times*” I devoured in middle school and high school), Focus on the Family (whose “Adventures in Odyssey” I devoured in elementary school), and New Life Church (whose mega-campus I drove past almost daily).

Amendment 2, a 1992 Colorado Constitutional Amendment that barred gay and lesbian couples from claiming minority rights or protected status, served as a crisis for the city, state, and even nation. Schultz notes that the leadership for the Amendment’s organization (Colorado for Family Values) attended Village Seven Presbyterian church, the church I too grew up attending since infancy. The public debate, lawsuit, and ultimate reversal of the Amendment, by Schultz’s telling, is a prophetic story, writ-small, of the culture war that would soon engulf the entire nation in the George Bush years and now the Donald Trump era: the battle of values, the role of religion in public life, the definition of marriage, along with the playbook for cultural engagement still used by conservative and Republicans today.

The Air Force Academy, which I drove past starry-eyed, watching cadets parachuting to the airfield, also plays a role in Schultz’s tale. The Academy was a foil of the culture war as legislators, chaplains, professors, and civil liberties organizations debated the role of religion, specifically protestant Christianity, in the formation of American warriors. The academy added a “War-fighter” ring to cultural battles, and gave Christian, according to Schultz, a concrete place to fight for their beliefs. War fighting metaphors crept into Christianity, and Christianity crept into war fighting. “Like Colorado Springs, the Air Force Academy was a symbol to which evangelicals turned their eyes.”

Finally, Schultz describes New Life Church and the ministry of Ted Haggard as the climax of spiritual warfare in militaristic terms, with a Spiritual NORAD at the World Prayer Center. “Haggard thus redrew the lines of the Cold War for a post-Cold War era. Conflating evangelicalism, democracy, and capitalism, he believed the New Life’s growth betokened the triumph of these forces at home and abroad.” New Life, for Schultz, is the final form of the coalescing of conservatism, spiritual warfare, cultural battles, and political action. I too felt the weight of the church as we drove past its enormous campus on my way to town, or when I attended the local community college next door, or was invited to Desperation, their weekly youth group numbering in the thousands.

Schultz’s final analysis? If you want to understand conservative Christianity in America, study Colorado Springs, a mish-mash of military conflict distorted to spiritual warfare in a battle of good vs. evil, where the good is the conservative, capitalistic Christians fighting forces of Darkness personified by communism, demon possession, LGBT rights, and secularism. “In Colorado Springs, we see how evangelicals came to understand themselves as stewards and defenders of a Christian heritage against a rising tide of secularism.”

Overall, Schultz is not wrong in his analysis. Colorado Springs punches above its weight in influence, both in politics and religion. Interestingly, the term “culture war” was coined by notable Christian intellectual James Davison Hunter to describe the fight over Amendment 2\. There is no doubt that evangelical ministries flocked to Colorado Springs. I remember many of my parent’s friends in the military equating their professional careers in the service branches with their Christian faith. I remember families who attended New Life Church inviting me to prayer services full of language of spiritual warfare. And particularly in the last chapter, Schultz persuasively argues that the modern political landscape owes its lineage to confluences of Colorado Springs: “Evangelical institutions promote Republican politicians, and the Republican Party advances the political agenda of evangelical Protestantism. This alliance was confirmed by the overwhelming evangelical support for Mitt Romeny in 2012 and for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024.”

Beyond the correlations, I agree with Schultz’s subtle critique that evangelicals have been far too bellicose in their interpretation of cultural conflict and strategy. Particularly on the charismatic side, but even out of ministries like Summit, Focus, and YWAM, the rhetoric of “battle of ideas,” “culture war,” and spiritual warfare has not been helpful to civil debate or persuasive missions nationally. We all know too well that this rhetoric has only increased in the national sphere, particularly with President Donald Trump’s invective against the left, Democrats, and frankly anyone he disagrees with, to the almost universal praise of conservative Christians. Christian’s have overly relied on militaristic images, language, themes to interpret and explain their presence in the world. My family, and especially my friends, were participants in what he describes, no doubt. I am thankful that my parents and church did not participate full-throatedly in the culture battle he describes.

Praise aside, two issues perplex me and one concerns me. First, for a book whose subtitle contains “capitalism,” Schultz spends precious little time describing how capitalism (an economic theory of distribution of resources through free exchange of private property governed by supply and demand captured by prices) shaped the city or evangelicalism. At best, Schultz describes how evangelicals contrasted capitalism with Marxism. At worst, “capitalism” is a dog whistle to alert Marxist allies to his critical cause. But it’s not a clear connection through his story. Economic theory plays little role in his analysis. (In a later conversation with Schultz, he clarified that by capitalism, he meant the competition for funding among Christian groups in Colorado Springs, where each had to compete with stories of conversions, ideological victories, and numerical growth.)

Second, Schultz, while more fair than most academics when writing about evangelicalism, still shows his bias beyond mere. In his chapter on the Air Force Academy, he suggests that any kind of Christian involvement in the Academy’s sphere is an organized cabal to form a Christian nation with Christian warriors, instead of constitutionally protected free expression. In his chapter on Amendment 2, he portrays the LGBT side as civil, fair-minded citizens, which was not the case. My father recalls public worship at our church being disrupted by LGBT activists in the 2000s. Lastly, in his chapter on spiritual warfare and Ted Haggard, he ignores any nuance on the diversity of views among Christians around spiritual warfare, assuming that all Christians believe the extremes of the Charismatic, pentecostal, and holiness churches. Later in the conclusion, he admits that he is aware of diverse and more nuanced positions among evangelicals, but fails to account for these when they might weaken his argument. The overall feel of the book, while more charitable than some, is still condescending and suspicious toward Christians of good faith.

These criticisms are cosmetic quibbles. My bigger concern is, ironically, ideological and rhetorical. Schultz accuses evangelicals of creating a “culture war” to win back America: “Evangelicals had not abandoned their desire to Christianize the United States.” This struggle is one we are all familiar with: two ideological “sides” are entrenched with their own histories, values, narratives, institutions, and cities. They are engaged in protracted conflict for the hearts and minds of the future generation, playing out in court rooms, classrooms, bedrooms, and chat rooms. Each views the other as an evil, an existential threat to their liberty, expression, and even life. Each has pet issues they champion online and in public debate. Each vilifies the others. At his worst, Schultz only perpetuates this same narrative. “They” (the evangelicals and fundamentalist conservatives) are a threat to “us” (the left-leaning progressives, academics, and historic minorities). “They” are an organized force using a whole array of political, economic, and social forces to fight and oppress “us.” “They” have a strategic headquarters from which “they” have practiced and perfected their art of cultural war. “We” must study their history and tactics (*Jesus Springs* as *Art of War*, anyone?) to best understand how to respond (defeat?) them.

In the last chapter, Schultz shows how New Life Church, Ted Haggard, and Peter Wagner assembled a massive army of spiritual prayer warriors for a global campaign of spiritual battle. To my ears, it’s as laughable or serious to me as it is to Schultz. But I can’t help but feel that Schultz is trying to marshal the same kind of movement on the other side by pointing out the worst types of evangelical identity politics.

As a counter part, I would humbly offer my family, and by extension, the best of the reformed tradition, in which I grew up and now serve. At the risk of cliche, I was “in but not of” the Colorado Springs that Schultz describes. My family, and my best influences, never embraced this bellicose rhetoric. Yes, Christians globally and historically have understood themselves as in a spiritual battle. But reformed Christians (and my family) at their best never framed the discussion as “us vs them.” Rather, it was “us for them.”

Richard Niebuhr's categories of Christ and culture apply. Schultz only sees Christians as against culture. But a long history of Christ transforming culture protests. The Church imitates its founder, Jesus, in understanding itself as a servant to culture, a friend to sinners, and a midwife to cultural reform rather than revolutionary. Cultural issues don’t need warlike rhetoric from anyone. It only foments violence upon violence upon violence. At times the evangelical church has absolutely been complicit and even inciting of violence and oppression. But not at its best, theologically or historically. Even in Colorado Springs, there were and are, pockets of protest to both the political and ideological status quo. Schultz rightly reveals the hypocrisy, duplicity, oppressions–what the Bible calls sins–of my hometown. For that, I am grateful and will rely on his scholarship and analysis. But also, he is just another voice in the fray of identity politics turned culture war turned actual war.
### 'Institutional Poverty' in Charles Dickens and Barbara Kingsolver
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/institutional-poverty-in-charles-dickens-and-barbara-kingsolver/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:28:29.000Z
It’s a truism that American trust in institutions is at a low ebb. As we look at the institutions that serve us, we tell stories of scandal, corruption, cover-up, overreach, hypocrisy, and incapacitating bureaucracy. The Victorian novels lining my office shelves launch similar critiques. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote about unsafe working conditions in underregulated factories; Charlotte Brontë depicted the abuse of children in charity schools; Charles Dickens satirized the court system; Anthony Trollope poked at self-righteous church leaders. And all critiqued the hypocrisy of “pious” Christians who don’t act according to the ideals they profess.

So in 2023, when Barbara Kingsolver won a Pulitzer by rewriting Dickens’ *David Copperfield,* a novel thatdepicts corrupt institutions contributing to the opioid crisis in rural America, it seemed apt. She acknowledged Dickens for inspiring her with his “impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children.” Her novel, set in rural Virginia in the 1990s, highlights a variety of contemporary social problems, with drug addiction at the center of the story.

Novels that win the Pulitzer typically foreground ideas that appeal to America’s educated classes. Institutional poverty is such an idea. It plays a tune familiar to such readers, who take for granted that institutions are inept or inefficient at best and corrupt or criminal at worst. And of course, those readers care about vulnerable children. If they are also readers of Victorian classics, they remember when Oliver “asks for more” at the workhouse or when Bob Cratchit returns from Scrooge’s counting house with little to offer the suffering Tiny Tim. Kingsolver’s concern for children in rural Virginia in the 1990s *must* be the same as Dickens’ concern for children sent to the workhouse in Victorian London.

But what is “institutional poverty”? Is it what Dickens addresses in his fiction? And if Kingsolver’s definition doesn’t fit the pattern of Dickens’ concerns, what might we learn from his different perspective on poverty and institutions?

A little investigation using the search engine of one’s choice shows that the phrase “institutional poverty” isn’t common in popular or scholarly discourse. It sounds a bit like “institutional racism,” but also like it could refer to the poverty *of* institutions facing budget cutbacks or declining donor support. I found a couple of references on international development sites, but the top hit for the phrase is Kingsolver herself in the afterward to *Demon Copperhead*. She more or less coined the expression. Judging from the novel, Kingsolver seems to mean, by “institutional poverty,” poverty that is perpetuated through the conscious or unconscious injustice embodied in institutions.

Dickens didn’t think about institutions and poverty in this way.

In *David Copperfield*, the eponymous David has a harrowing childhood. He loses both his father and mother to illness, is put under the tutelage of a cruel school master and is eventually sent to labor in the London dockyards. He is loved by poor but kind family friends—a cluster of simple but morally pure people. A charismatic charmer whom he meets at school ends up seducing the niece of one of these friends. David makes a poor first marriage to a pretty but silly woman who dies young. By the end of the novel, he realizes that the morally impeccable woman whom he has regarded as a sister is his true love.

Kingsolver takes Dickens’ Victorian *Bildungsroman* and transposes it into late-1990s rural Virginia. The titular Demon loses his father to drowning and his mother to a drug overdose. The social-service system that should protect him is staffed by well-meaning but overwhelmed caseworkers. The poor but virtuous helpers in Kingsolver’s novel are neighbors who have so many broken lives to tend—a son dead in an accident, a daughter in prison for disfiguring her abusive partner, a grandson on drugs—that they don’t have capacity to care for Demon too. He ends up in the foster-care system, harvesting tobacco for an exploitative farmer and working for cash at a convenience store/junk yard/meth lab. The charismatic charmer whom he meets at school ends up leading a childhood friend into prostitution. Demon also forms a romantic union with a woman who is pretty but shallow—and an addict. She dies of a drug overdose. Like David, Demon realizes by the end of the novel that his true love is a sister-like figure who has been loyal to him throughout.

So far, so similar. There’s a crucial difference, however, between the way these two novels depict institutions—a difference that belies Kingsolver’s suggestion that she and Dickens are doing the same thing.

Kingsolver depicts institutions as perpetuating poverty, whether through explicit corruption or unconscious ineptitude. Demon notes the double standard of the Department of Social Services (DSS). DSS places him in a foster home with the exploitative farmer “Creaky,” yet monitors him closely during his visits at McDonald’s with his mother: “What do they think is going to happen here, Mom will haul off and shank me with a plastic knife? Put meth in my Dr Pepper? How screwed-up is it that the DSS can’t be bothered about Creaky being hateful as a snake, but they’re all high-beams and every step you take, as regards the druggie mother?” Here, “institutional poverty” means: the institution of DSS, overwhelmed by excessive bureaucracy, eroding a child’s relationship to his mother but failing to protect him from a greater danger.

Kingsolver also implies a link between poverty and the coal industry. Mr. Armstrong, a politically progressive teacher originally from Chicago, enlightens Demon and his fellow students at Jonesville Middle School about what the coal industry has done to Lee County, Virginia: “What the companies did, he told us, was put the shuthold on any choice other than going into the mines…these counties got bought up whole: land, hospitals, courthouses, schools, company owned.”

To make clear the connection between Big Coal’s near-monopoly on employment and rural poverty, Kingsolver has Demon narrate an epiphany he has as he listens to his teacher talk about the lack of job diversity in Lee County: “Not an accident, Mr. Armstrong said, and for once we believed him, because down in the dark mess of our little skull closets some puzzle pieces were clicking together and our world made some terrible kind of sense.” The institution of the coal industry is the reason the people of Lee County are poor: “The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures.”

Big Pharma joins Big Coal in the novel as a third institution contributing to poverty. *Demon Copperhead* narrates the late-20th\-century rise of mass opioid addiction. Demon’s mother dies of an oxycontin overdose. June Peggot, the nurse practitioner, discovers that her drug-rep boyfriend is profiting from widespread opioid addiction. Demon’s girlfriend Dori becomes addicted to painkillers. She also dies of an overdose. Demon becomes addicted to the Percocet he’s prescribed for a knee injury he sustains playing football.

Ineffective government. Monopolistic industry. Abusive marketers. All these are what Kingsolver seems to mean by “institutional poverty.”

But do Dickens and other Victorian novelists see ineffective, controlling, and exploitative institutions as the source of poverty in the Victorian era? Mostly not.

The chief sources of poverty depicted in Dickens’ novels are unlucky circumstances or fate. Poor people are poor because some turn of events beyond their control made them poor. The prosperous are blessed by circumstances. The poor remain poor when they are not treated generously by individuals who have the power and means to assist them. Greedy people certainly exploit institutions—often in comically hypocritical ways—but the institutions themselves and their governing imperatives are not the source of the problem. And when individuals engage with the central institutions of society, usually by forming families and tight interconnecting friendships, they can repair problems and heal social ills.

George Orwell makes this point in his 1946 essay “Charles Dickens”, in which he calls out those who claim Dickens as a kind of radical, wanting to overturn the social order and raise up the working class. Orwell says, “there is no clear sign that \[Dickens\] wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it *were* overthrown” (original emphasis). Orwell says that Dickens’ social critique is essentially a moral one: “If men would behave decently the world would be decent.”

*David Copperfield* illustrates Orwell’s point. David comes from a family of modest means, but his mother, after the unlucky circumstance of his father’s death, makes the poor choice to marry again—unwittingly choosing an abusive man. It’s this abusive stepfather who sends David off to Salem House school, where Mr. Creakle beats the boys. It is the cruelty of David’s stepfather—a cruelty largely motivated by greed and a desire for power—that separates David from his loving mother and sends him on a journey that culminates in his utter destitution.

One could push back on the claim that social problems as depicted in Dickens’ novels are only a result of individual choices; one could argue that the Victorian institution of marriage yokes women’s financial prospects to men’s and creates the necessity for David’s mother’s remarriage. Indeed, David’s aunt, Betsy Trotwood, who welcomes him at the end of his harrowing journey, is also fleeing an unhappy marriage. Or one could point out that the institution of the Victorian boys’ boarding school yoked learning and corporal punishment, creating abusers like Mr. Creakle.

But most of Dickens’ novels, including *David Copperfield*, end with a vision of happy, companionate marriage. Betsy Trotwood, as a sign of her virtue, honors her vows and nurses her estranged husband on his deathbed. And Dickens’ novels also contain examples of well-run schools, such as Dr. Strong’s school in Canterbury where David spends many happy days. Dickens himself sent his sons to Eton. His critique then cannot be of the institution of marriage or the institution of the boarding school, full stop. Dickens, unlike Kingsolver, can imagine individuals acting morally and justly within these institutions and the institutions themselves functioning well.

*Demon Copperhead*, by contrast, presents a critique of systemic problems that Dickens’ novels lack. The most heroic of Kingsolver’s characters act heroically *despite* the institutions that fence them in. They are anti-institutional heroes. June Peggot, the nurse practitioner, faces off against her drug-rep boyfriend; Mr. Armstrong enlightens his students about the coal-mining industry; Demon, by the end of the novel, is on the verge of a book-contract for a graphic novel about the exploitation of rural people throughout American history; he wants to tell the story of an “offensive to wedge people off their own holy ground and turn them into wage labor.”

The most functional institutions in *Demon Copperhead* are those that promote individual achievement: drug rehabilitation centers and universities. Institutions that support social bonds (family, church, or civic organizations), are part of the background condition of rural America, but seem to have no capacity to curb social problems. Demon and several other characters get successful drug treatment by leaving their rural community for the city. Moreover, the characters who don’t end in poverty and addiction all have college degrees: June Peggot, Mr. Armstrong, Demon’s love interest Agnes. In this way, Kingsolver illustrates an American paradox, highlighted by Yuval Levin in *A Time to Build*. Americans, right and left, benefit from strong institutions (like world-class universities) while performing Romantic anti-institutionalism in their rhetoric.

Levin argues that younger Americans, living in an era of institutional skepticism and decline, tend to think of institutions as obstacles to be navigated around, not as tools that assist in self-cultivation. *Demon Copperhead* exemplifies this attitude. The coal industry, drug companies, and social service agencies are the source of problems, not solutions. Even the church, though it is presented as a binding force in Demon’s community, is also presented as a site of institutional corruption.

Churches in the novel are the home of “church ladies” who fill backpacks of food for poor kids to take home from school, the locations of AA meetings, grief groups, and the place for funerals. Yet even as the characters assume that the church people will help you when you’re at your most desperate and will help you mark the passage from life to death, Kingsolver makes sure her readers know the dangers of religion. Demon tells the reader his mother’s issues with church which go back to “her earliest foster home with a preacher that mixed Bible verses with thrashings and worse, his special recipe for punishing bad little girls.” Demon’s biological father practiced snake-handling and his grandmother explains about that particular church: “Men wanting to get back to the Old Testament, reaping virgin girls and using daughters for their slaves.” Alongside the warm and generous Christianity of church ladies and recovery groups, Kingsolver reminds her readers of these extreme forms of Christianity.

Both Dickens and Kingsolver write about institutional failure: cruel schools, abusive families, dysfunctional government agencies, hypocritical churches. But at the end of *David Copperfield*, Dickens’ vision is a hopeful one of networks of individuals thriving within social institutions. The institution of the family has primacy for Dickens. The last chapter is a catalog of characters’ marriages and children. David is not the central figure at the end. He is part of a web of connections. And, although the novel (like *Bleak House*)satirizes the court system, one of the major characters goes on to become a judge. The novel presents this as a happy outcome.

Critics will argue that Dickens’ depiction of marriage and family life throughout his novels is sentimental and that his own marriage was a disaster. But Dickens does not create these associations. Victorian readers understood marriage and family as *the* happy ending of characters within a functional society and Dickens gives his readers the endings they want and expect.

At the end of *Demon Copperhead*, Kingsolver suggests how rural communities are shaped by institutions, but does not suggest how her central character might use those institutions to shape his life. The novel contrasts the soulless, wage-labor capitalism of the city with a nostalgic vision of social capital before the opioid crisis. Demon’s friend, Tommy, a journalist, tells him that the city (where Demon has gone for drug rehabilitation) is based on a “money economy” whereas the rural county where they grew up is a “land economy”: “having some ground to stand on…the bags of summer squash and shelly beans everybody gives you from their gardens…the porch rockers where the mammaws get together and knit baby clothes for the pregnant high school girls. Sandwiches the church ladies pack for the hungrier kids to take home on weekends.” Kingsolver maps this distinction as an urban/rural divide. But one could also say that it’s the divide between functional versus dysfunctional institutions. The novel recognizes, at a deep level, that social health needs social capital and that this social capital is formed in institutions like the family (baby sweaters knit by mammaws) and the church (sandwiches for hungry kids).

The forward vision of *Demon Copperhead,* however, is not one of using that social capital to repair the damage caused by the opioid crisis. Rather, it’s a distinctly American and individualist vision: Demon and his love driving away from Virginia toward the ocean like Huck and Jim “lighting out for the territories.” The happy ending involves two individuals finding fulfillment in each other and escaping the “institutional poverty” that blights their rural home.

Orwell’s distinction between two types of social critics—the revolutionary and the moralist—is a good fit for Kingsolver and Dickens: “the one \[asks\], how can you improve human nature until you’ve changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature?” Orwell himself doesn’t choose sides. He says that “the central problem—how to prevent power from being abused—remains unresolved.”

But perhaps there is a hint of a solution in Levin’s suggestion that the system itself can do a better or worse job of forming human nature. If we give up on institutions, we give up on a powerful tool of moral formation *for individuals*.

“Institutional poverty” sounds like something that progressive readers in the 2020s should condemn. But repairing the poverty engendered by failing institutions requires a closer look at institutions that connect. *Demon Copperhead* diagnoses an ailing society but *David Copperfield* suggests a treatment: self-sacrificing individuals working within institutions that knit individuals into families and communities and shape children into functional adults.
### 12 Theses on Fasting and Feasting
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/12-theses-on-fasting-and-feasting/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:28:33.000Z
I wish someone had told me ten years ago that time would be the thing most needed for the rhythms of the church calendar to “get into my bones”, and this in spite of the great enthusiasm with which I began my own participation in the Year of Our Lord 2015.

Like many Christians born outside of traditional liturgical observances, a deep understanding of Lent, in particular, has often felt difficult and elusive to me, like threading a needle or wrangling a wild horse, and I have historically found myself in a wrestling match with discouragement over the details and results of various fasting attempts.

I’ll wager that I am not alone in this experience.

At various Lents I’ve given up coffee, alcohol, social media, snacking, and second helpings. I’ve also attempted to observe the traditional Wednesday/Friday fasts from meat and multiple meals. But it’s only been in recent years – undoubtedly the result of time in this decade-long immersion in the church calendar – that I have been brought to some degree of experiential clarity regarding the matter, and I am grateful for our Lord’s patience and wisdom conveyed to me through Scripture, the teachings of the church, and through the three parishes to which I have belonged during in that time.

What follows is an attempt to distill that clarity with a few important distinctions about fasting and feasting. A few caveats: first, this is not a theology of fasting nor an in-depth argument in its favor; I am presuming a level of agreement regarding the necessity of fasting and its Scriptural and historical support. Second, I’m writing in a proverbial mode, recognizing that within the vast catalog of human experiences any number of objections or exceptions might be made to these theses. Third, the following thoughts thus are undoubtedly influenced by my Protestant Anglican heritage, but I’d like to think they are in keeping with much of what the church catholic has taught about fasting for the last two thousand years. So without further ado, here are twelve theses on fasting, and, by extension, on feasting with the context of Lent and Easter.

## I

A distinction first needs to be made between a Lenten fast and a Lenten discipline. Too often the language applied to the two is the same, such as “I’m fasting from meat during Lent,” and “I am fasting from social media.” Both observances are helpful in their own ways, but they must be understood as two separate Lenten practices; one is a fast (abstinence from meat) and the other is a discipline (abstinence from social media). We need to call these observances by their proper names.

## II

Fasting happens when a Christian abstains for a time from a certain gift of God that is essential for human life, on which he or she is designed to have an ordered relationship of dependence. Food and sleep are the fountainhead gifts in this department.

## III

Depending on who you talk to, such gifts could also include things like speech or fellowship, and also sexual relations with one’s spouse. But food is and always has been the benchmark fast: when we eat, we live. Without eating, we die. Sleep follows close behind for the same reasons, and the rest after that.

## IV

Fasting is thus an exercise in voluntary dependency upon the sustaining grace of our Lord. We feel that dependency most quickly and most keenly when our stomachs aren’t full or when our eyelids are drooping for lack of sleep, in voluntary silence or solitude, or in separation from one’s spouse. We confess with our growling stomachs and saggy eyelids that God will sustain us for a time through other means.

## V

This voluntary dependency is intended to prompt prayer and spiritual clarity about the extent of our need for Christ’s work in our lives through Spirit, Word, and Sacrament, paving the way for deeper postures of repentance and receptivity to the glories of the Gospel – and eventually into further proclamation of that Gospel and the service of our neighbor. The telos of a fast is never self-serving, but outward facing.

## VI

Depending on our level of dependence upon them, things like coffee or alcohol may also constitute helpful candidates for a fast, though perhaps to a different degree than fasting from solid food. Though they are certainly gifts of God, coffee and alcohol are not essential to human life in quite the same way that food is (however, if you ask me this question at 6am, I will grunt an unqualified “yes” and reach for my second cup of joe).

## VII

However, the further we get from food and sleep, from speech, fellowship, and sex, we eventually cross a line into the territory of Lenten discipline, rather than Lenten fast. Disciplines are habits or activities that are unessential to human life yet are still helpful for eliminating distractions and turning our eyes, ears, and affections to Jesus through the Spirit, Word, and Sacrament. Disciplines thus function as supplementary exercises to fasts.

## VIII

Therefore, abstaining from TV is not a fast but a discipline, and the same can be said of signing out of social media, imposing limits on phone usage, etc. Unsurprisingly, many of the Lenten disciplines du jour have their eyes on releasing us from the clutches of our current digital malaise.

## IX

But Lenten Disciplines are also not merely matters of abstinence. They also can be habits taken up – again, to more finely tune our attentions to the workings of the Lord and direct our attentions to the needs of others. This might look like reading of a difficult but spiritually rewarding book, undertaking certain kinds of physical activity, embracing opportunities for service to the poor, or shouldering a particular devotion to serve one’s neighbors throughout the forty-day journey towards Easter.

## X

In cases of addiction (which represents a disordered relationship of dependence) to some of the things above, abstaining becomes more like a true fast than a mere attempt to eliminate distraction. However, abstinence from an addiction cannot prepare the way for a true feast; the alcoholic shouldn’t plan to binge on Easter Sunday, nor should the social media addict return to the scroll with abandon once Christ is finally out of the tomb.

## XI

No fast is ever to be undertaken without a corresponding feast. Fasting and feasting are two sides of the same coin which point us to the heavenly, hidden, and very present realities of life in our Lord Jesus Christ. Advent ends at Christmas, Lent ends at Easter. Fasting in a vacuum is nothing more than self-flagellation, a different manifestation of disordered desire that rejects the goodness of our creatureliness and forgets that our Lord has promised to feed us with honey from the rock and the finest of the wheat (Psalm 81:16).

## XII

Thus, the final distinction that defines Lenten fast from Lenten discipline comes in answering the question, “Will fasting from this during Lent allow for a feast at Eastertide?” Food, of course, is still the archetype here: a season of fasting is easily followed by feasts of holy conviviality and gleeful indulgence. A pie devoured after Easter Vigil, a cappuccino drained off at the Sunrise Service, a filet at lunch or a slow-sipped scotch in the waning afternoon (and a nap after!) are gifted glories worth the songs of a thousand poets, and especially if enjoyed in the company of other Christians newly arrived from the empty grave.

Like our fasts, our feast must be communal, and lifted out of the long wait of Lent, our shared abstinences become icons of the once and future Resurrection, foretastes of a life together with our Lord in which we will never again lack any good thing.
### A 'Personless' Purity Isn't Pure At All
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-personless-purity-isnt-pure-at-all/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:28:37.000Z
Every now and then you come across a quote so profound that you’re forced to reframe your thinking on an issue. This one initiated a renovation of my thinking on sexual purity:

> The problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of the person, but that it shows far too little.

This [summary](https://www.amazon.com/Theology-Body-Explained-Commentary-Created/dp/0819874256/ref=sr%5F1%5F2?crid=6ZJLB30DO9PW&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hI7gVrMIHzlojsOEQUDaUGE2QxhwSYe7phpjmw%5FqTBvVudEoGga3A231Rm8yO0hwzHmdM9uz9qDhFG5ULede2oiQnr3qkIF2HGcmvBRt5p4.5lTUtEG6NMUUVrhQKj3-FwIzyAtMKylHZhieJeYbv2M&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=christopher+west+TOB+commentary&qid=1778026808&sprefix=christopher+west+tob+commentary%2Caps%2C164&sr=8-2&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of Pope John Paul II’s teaching on pornography not only highlighted the gravity of sexual sin, but did so from an angle I’d never considered. For John Paul, the conceptual core of lust is the reduction of a *person* to a body—an object. Fueled by thirst, not benevolence, lust doesn’t seek to love someone, but to use some*thing*. It reduces an image bearing “who” to an instrumental “what.” Purity then involves more than simply avoiding lust. It requires seeing and honoring the value of the person.

I was compelled. I grew up in evangelical churches and earned an M.Div. from an evangelical seminary. Why had I never heard this?

A review of the relevant literature reveals that a theological account of embodiment plays only a minor role in evangelicals’ conception of purity which largely revolves around ethical imperatives + grace for those who have failed. Anthropology remains on the periphery (but this is improving).

And while we shouldn’t decenter ethical imperatives or grace in our discussions of purity, incorporating a thicker doctrine of humanity helps to clarify the wisdom of Scripture’s sexual ethics, and supplies us with a useful tool as we strive for the holiness without which no one will see God (Heb 12:14).

While Reformation-minded evangelicals like me will certainly disagree with John Paul on a number of issues, my doctoral work on his Theology of the Body convinced me that anyone interested in sharpening their thinking about sexual purity stands to gain from his treatment of the body-person dynamic.

## The Body-Person Dynamic

Recall that humans are body-person (or body-soul) unities consisting of both a material and an immaterial component. A mere body is an object, not a person. A person who isn’t oriented to a body isn’t human.

Thus, a *human* body is a body that visibly manifests and expresses a person. A *human* person is a person designed by God to be mediated through a body.

Herman Bavinck is helpful [here](https://www.amazon.com/Reformed-Dogmatics-Vol-God-Creation/dp/0801026555?ref=mereorthodoxy.com):

> The nature of the union of the soul with the body … is so intimate that one nature, one person, one self is the subject of both and of all their activities. It is always the same soul that peers through the eyes, thinks through the brain, grasps with the hands, and walks with the feet….

If this sounds a bit strange, consider for a moment: how is it that the eternal Logos became visible? How it is that he walked with, served, and sacrificed for his disciples (among others)? He did it by means of his body: “The word became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14).

In short, not only does the body visibly manifest the human person, it serves as the substratum through which they—by God’s design—participate in the visible world.

What does any of this have to do with sexual purity? As it turns out, quite a bit.

## Chastity is both a "yes" and a "no."

For many evangelicals, purity is essentially defined negatively, viz., by what it avoids (like being gluten-free). On this approach, sexual purity boils down to [“one long no.”](https://www.amazon.com/Love-Responsibility-Transla-Karol-Wojty/dp/0819845582/ref=pd%5Fsbs%5Fd%5Fsccl%5F1%5F1/137-9248945-9696811?pd%5Frd%5Fw=wZSIQ&content-id=amzn1.sym.aa738fbd-ad05-4d11-aae2-04b598db6305&pf%5Frd%5Fp=aa738fbd-ad05-4d11-aae2-04b598db6305&pf%5Frd%5Fr=FBZRTZ8YXBMRYSV798FB&pd%5Frd%5Fwg=5Czjf&pd%5Frd%5Fr=0628224a-6b04-4638-b15c-17a04390a605&pd%5Frd%5Fi=0819845582&psc=1&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

JPII [offers](https://www.amazon.com/Love-Responsibility-Transla-Karol-Wojty/dp/0819845582/ref=pd%5Fsbs%5Fd%5Fsccl%5F1%5F1/137-9248945-9696811?pd%5Frd%5Fw=wZSIQ&content-id=amzn1.sym.aa738fbd-ad05-4d11-aae2-04b598db6305&pf%5Frd%5Fp=aa738fbd-ad05-4d11-aae2-04b598db6305&pf%5Frd%5Fr=FBZRTZ8YXBMRYSV798FB&pd%5Frd%5Fwg=5Czjf&pd%5Frd%5Fr=0628224a-6b04-4638-b15c-17a04390a605&pd%5Frd%5Fi=0819845582&psc=1&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) a better way forward:

> “\[C\]hastity is first and foremost a ‘yes,’ from which a ‘no’ then proceeds. The underdevelopment of the virtue of chastity occurs when someone ‘does not keep up’ with the affirmation of the value of the person…. The essence of chastity lies precisely in ‘keeping up’ with the value of the person in every situation and in ‘pulling up’ to this value every reaction to the value of the ‘body and sex.’”

Understood this way, purity isn’t merely committed to not indulging thoughts about ‘body and sex.’ It’s also committed to personalizing the bodies of those around us and valuing them for the image-bearing people God created them to be. We fight lust not only because Jesus forbids it, but because honoring Him requires honoring the reality that the people He created aren’t *things* for use.

Consider Edward Sri’s [illustration](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1632530805/?bestFormat=true&k=edward%20sri%20love%20and%20responsibility&ref%5F=nb%5Fsb%5Fss%5Fw%5Fscx-ent-bk-v2%5Fk0%5F1%5F18%5Fde&crid=1F6VAA6IAVB0H&sprefix=edward%20sri%20love%20an&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). After describing an opportunity he once had to see an artist who made everything out of chocolate—intricate ships, birds, and flowers—he describes two ways that he could enjoy the sculptures:

> I could gaze upon them as works of art, admiring their beauty … marveling that these delicate masterpieces were made out of sugar and cocoa. On the other hand, I could ignore the fact that these sculptures are beautiful pieces of art to be contemplated and view them primarily as candies to be devoured—delicious chocolates that would satisfy my cravings. This latter approach, however, would be a degradation of the confectioner's masterpieces, reducing them to mere objects to be exploited for my tasting pleasure.

Purity doesn’t ignore the body or pretend it’s unimportant. Rather, it remains committed to God-honoring thoughts and actions toward the person the body manifests.

*Mature* sexual purity can look at an attractive man or woman and say, “Wow, an utterly unique person mediated through a body.” Lust says, “Wow, a useful body.”

To be sure, sometimes we simply need to look away to avoid mentally reducing a person to a serviceable object (i.e., lusting). And yet, while this response represents a meaningful step toward purity, it’s not the finish line. It may help us avoid “eating the chocolate” but it does so at the cost of valuing the person. Yes, it’s better than lusting, but it’s purity lite.

Training ourselves for godliness (1 Tim 4:7) requires more than “bouncing our eyes.” It demands that we train ourselves to look at a body and see *some*body.

## Defiling the Marriage Bed

Our tendency to reduce a person to their sexual value isn’t simply a pre-marital struggle. In fact, it’s dangerously possible to view marriage as a construct that frees us to indulge this ethic of reduction (i.e., lust) with a clear conscience.

If conceiving of others in view of their sexual potential is only wrong because they aren’t our spouse–if what makes lust “wrong” is simply the fact that we’re not married to the other person–marriage then becomes a kind of moral safe-space where we can gratify our sinful desires to treat people we ought to love as objects for use. Marriage is redefined as a God-given concession to our “burning passion” where He authorizes us to view one attractive member of the opposite sex in the same way we were tempted to view the rest of them before marriage.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Beyond failing to honor God’s design for sex and keeping the marriage bed undefiled (Heb 13:4), the effects of obscuring the person and reducing our spouses to their sexual value are regularly and predictably catastrophic.

Here, the lovers’ example in Song of Songs is particularly instructive.

After vividly describing the bridegroom’s *body*—from head to toe—over six stanzas (Song 5:10–15), the Shulamite maiden says, “His mouth is most sweet, and he is altogether desirable. This is my beloved and this is my *friend*…” (Song 5:16). The bride’s appreciation of her groom’s figure doesn’t obscure the fact that he is her friend. She values *him*.

Similarly, after praising his bride’s physical features, the bridegroom says, “You have captivated my heart, *my sister*, my bride…. How beautiful is your love, *my sister*, my bride!... A garden locked is *my sister*, my bride. (Song 4:9,10,12).

Even as the man delights in his bride’s body, he does so in a way that affirms her as a person to be loved—a sister.

## Conclusion

True love waits to have sex in the context of marriage, but it doesn’t wait to exercise the discipline required to look at a body and see a person. A walk down the aisle doesn’t somehow erase the impulse to reduce “the other” to their sexual value. The sexual ethic you bring to the altar is the sexual ethic you bring to the marriage.

With this in mind, while purity certainly requires you to guard against lust, it also demands that you make a relentless effort to personalize the bodies of those around you. With this commitment in place—whether you marry or remain single—you’ll be best positioned to view and honor others as the embodied image-bearers God created them to be.
### The Beholders
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-beholders/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:28:40.000Z
*The following excerpt is adapted from Brianna Lambert,* [Created to Play](https://www.ivpress.com/created-to-play?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) *(InterVarsity Press, 2026).*

God named his children Beholders from the beginning. Before we accepted the position at our current job, held a diploma, or even learned how to write our name, we were first recipients of the glories of his world. He wove this truth into the fabric of our body at creation. Think about the five senses he fashioned within the human body. God created hands to touch and labor, yet sight, hearing, smell, and taste are gifts only to receive. These senses allow us to engage in the world purely by enjoying it. We get to breathe in the smells of the truffle cream sauce on our plate and delight in the smooth beat of the music coming through our earbuds. And each beautiful flower or star-filled sky we see reminds us that the chief end of man is not only to glorify God with action but even to “enjoy him forever” (“Westminster Larger Catechism”).

The desire to behold undergirds much of our play. It pushes us to abandon the skillet on the stove and race to the window when the flash of orange from an oriole sails onto the birdfeeder. It sends us to the theater for the showing of a film and prompts us to silence our phone while we listen undisturbed to a newly released album. We might call ourselves bird nerds, foodies, campers, film buffs, art lovers, travelers, or a dozen other names—but above all, we’re Beholders. We pause before the bright orange and purple sunset on the horizon and become speechless at the paint on a canvas, because beauty has captivated us.

## **Deep Joy: Beholding the Unexplainable**

This beauty we behold will fill us with delight. We’ll find laughter and joy in a movie after a difficult day or in the incredible flavors in a dark chocolate pistachio cookie. These bits of joy convince us that the Lord “richly provides us with everything to enjoy” (1 Timothy 6:17). Yet the greatest thrill of beholding lies much deeper than mere surface-level enjoyment. The reason we book a ticket across the globe or spend an evening transfixed by a Broadway play is because our hearts crave the opportunity to behold beauty far greater than we could imagine. We aspire to look on the unexplainable and even find ourselves a little bit afraid.

Philosophers throughout history have described this feeling as an encounter with the sublime. It’s the feeling of awe and grandeur we experience standing below a mountain range whose craggy peaks stretch toward the heavens. It’s the wonder that fills our heart when we watch a bolt of lightning strike the earth or the ocean waves crash against the shore. As Beholders we’ll feel the awe of the sublime extend even into our favorite hobbies—when we turn the last page of a gripping novel that weaves together characters and words with artistry, or when the reverberations of a symphony prickle our skin with goosebumps.

Beholders chase after this feeling. We kneel toward the coneflower and marvel at the way it sprung from a tiny seed and now opens its petals to the sun. We lean toward the chiseled marble sculpture and take in its craftsmanship. We might grasp the knowledge of the process, yet at the same time we can’t fathom how such beauty exists. This encounter with the sublime will leave us humbled by its greatness. Barbara Nicolosi noted that the experience of the beautiful “always involves a paradoxical mix of humility and euphoria” (“The Artist: What Exactly is an Artist and How Do We Shepherd Them?”).

## **Key Temptation: Discontent**

Those of us who regularly stand before the presence of beauty must reckon with the inevitable feelings of discontent when we leave it. The stars are beautiful; the books, absorbing. Their beauty entices us and can easily lead us into feeling disenfranchised with the “ugly” parts of our days. Kids bickering at the table feels like a poor trade off to the engrossing novel we had to put down. Our small town and flat landscapes feel dull compared to the majestic canyons we just spent two weeks traveling though. Our simple home only reveals its flaws once we’ve spent an afternoon touring an estate or art museum.

When we leave the presence of the sublime and awe-inspiring, discontent settles in. It tells us our work meeting provides nothing but drudgery. It makes us see our life as nothing more than a list of burdens and limitations. This discontent sometimes prompts Beholders to view their hobbies as an escape. They decide to simply get lost in the stars instead of dealing with the list of responsibilities. They set all their hopes on the next trip or the next high they’ll feel at the foot of beauty. I admit I’ve caught myself adopting the same attitude of escapism by putting off sleep in exchange for late-night TV marathons.

Yet this response has sorely missed the message that beauty offers us. Far from breeding discontent, beholding beauty should elevate the ordinary. When we realize we belong to a God with all-encompassing beauty and power, every ordinary moment of our lives can take on greater importance. We’ll discover that our humble place comes with enormous worth, and in doing so we’ll realize that beauty doesn’t exist over there. It’s right here, in our world—where we do laundry, send emails, and break up fights between our kids. Our time beholding the great equips our eyes to see it within the small. And we’ll always find it—for if God is true beauty, then we can guarantee its presence, for he will never leave us or forsake us (Hebrews 13:5). That’s how we fight discontent.

This world can surely be discouraging. The curse of sin severed the perfection of beauty for us to behold. But sinking into a spirit of discontent will only leave us missing the hidden beauties of life. Instead, we must ask God to allow the awe-inducing to expand our vision for the beautiful.

## **Living as a Beholder**

For our ten-year anniversary, my husband and I set out across the country to the state of Washington to embark on a six-day backpacking trip. As we climbed along the trail, we came to a blackened, empty forest. Naked, charred tree trunks reached sadly toward the sky as the quiet of the forest mourned what was lost. Yet down on the ground, between each of the pillars of death, a tangle of bright pink flowers blossomed. Their radiant petals and tender green shoots snaked in and out between the destruction, and I marveled at this bright spot of beauty in such a desolate place.

Have you seen those petals, too? They bloom within the book on your nightstand, the speakers in your car, or the trees outside your window. They wind around inside your noodle bowl or in the theater seats as you watch a beautiful film. They ride on the notes of a song and can be spotted through the window of the airplane that takes you to visit mountains, cities, and landscapes you’ve never seen. They bring little bits of beauty in the midst of the charred earth. They speak of hope and of the God whose glory we cannot fathom.

This kind of wonder is available for Beholders no matter where we go or how much money we spend. It’s available in the activities you already love doing. Josef Pieper wrote, “A man who needs the unusual to make him wonder shows that he has lost the capacity to find the true answer to the wonder of being” (Josef Pieper, *The Philosophical Act*). Our beholding might lead us to the Louvre or an expensive trip to New Zealand, but it doesn’t have to. As Beholders, we simply need the eyes to see the sublime outside our window and to hear it in the song on the radio.

Our world began in perfect beauty, and God will one day restore it toward the same. In the meantime, his image-bearers will continue to seek after it. We’ll create beauty as a Maker, Nourisher, or Restorer. We’ll shout it out as a Herald or gather it back together as a Curator. But most often, we’ll simply slow down and receive the grandeur around us.

We wake up every day in God’s beautiful world—if only we would take the time to stop and behold.

*Copyright (c) 2026 by Brianna Janelle Lambert. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press.* [*www.ivpress.com*](http://www.ivpress.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)
### Virtues For Living Well with Dr. Alan Noble
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/transcripts/virtues-for-living-well-with-dr-alan-noble/
Last updated: 2026-05-09T01:35:08.000Z
Derek Rishmawy  
00:00:00.160 - 00:00:47.230  
This episode is brought to you by Lexham Press, who publishes books that love the word, love the faith, and love the church. Lexham Press was recently acquired by Baker Publishing Group, and there will be more news to follow.

Our May book of the month is Classical A Christian Introduction by Jordan Stefaniak. You can receive a 30% discount on this title and all previous books of the month by visiting bakerbookhouse.com pages mere fidelity.

You can find that link in our show notes and get 30% off of our book of the month from Lexham Press. Hello and welcome to another episode of Mere Fidelity, a podcast where we think about the word of God and the world we live in.

My name is Derek Richmou and I'll be your host for today. I'm joined by regular cast and crew members Alistair Roberts and James Wood. Good to see you guys.

Alastair Roberts  
00:00:47.230 - 00:00:47.870  
Good to be here.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:00:48.350 - 00:01:23.270  
And we are joined also by a guest today, a friend of the show, a friend in real life, the Orville Alan Noble, associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University, a fellow at the Keller center of Cultural Apologetics. I'm just reading your little bio for the book, Alan, friend of the show. You've been on before.

We have hawked your books before because we love them and we love you. Alan's a good friend and you just came out with a new book, right? To Live well, Practical Wisdom.

So when did you decide to start writing finance books about living well?

Alan Noble  
00:01:26.240 - 00:01:30.560  
When I wanted to start making money, so I had to pivot.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:01:30.960 - 00:01:32.600  
Yeah. No, to live well.

James Wood  
00:01:32.600 - 00:01:35.480  
Practical Wisdom for this one doesn't have the.

Alan Noble  
00:01:35.480 - 00:01:45.840  
Oh, no, you know what? My publisher doesn't want me having the O Alan Noble. So I put it in all these other things. But they just want Alan Noble.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:01:46.800 - 00:02:18.860  
Okay, well, this one is. This book is not about extra names. This book is about practical wisdom for moving through chaotic times.

And we're really happy to have you on the show to talk about it. I will just upfront say I read it in a single sitting. I loved it. It was really helpful. I'm very much for this book. Buy this book.

But let's talk about it. Alan, why did you. What is your basic premise in the book? Give me the pitch on what your book is about for the listener.

Alan Noble  
00:02:18.940 - 00:03:52.110  
So it's not a sparklingly original argument. It's that we live in morally incoherent times. And I think the younger gener feels this particularly.

And they are getting conflicting messages from different directions, from TikTok gurus to voices on YouTube telling them how to live certain ways to people on Instagram, to self help books, to teachers telling them how to live certain ways that don't actually make a coherent whole. And this creates all kinds of anxiety and frustration and confusion about what it means to live a good life.

I wanted to offer something that was grounded and encouraging, a kind of mentorship, a kind of discipleship that would help people to make sense of the modern world, to make sense of their lives. And I didn't want to just offer them 10 steps to living well or Alan Noble's top five life hacks. I wanted to ground it in something.

So I wanted to ground it in biblical wisdom, and I wanted to ground it in the. These virtues which the churches long believed are valuable ways of living.

And with the help particularly of Josef Pieper, I advocated for these seven virtues as valuable ways of moving through the contemporary world.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:03:54.430 - 00:04:21.320  
That is the structure of the book. Right.

Just what you engage with here is you got some intro and then really these are meditations on, meditations on the four cardinal virtues and then the three theological virtues. Right. And. Okay. And just essentially in and fleshed in the contemporary moment. And that's, that's the structure of the whole. All right. Yeah.

James, you got a, you got a follow up?

James Wood  
00:04:21.320 - 00:05:33.360  
Yeah.

Before we jump into kind of your positive proposals and the wisdom you're trying to impart, can I stay just for a second on the diagnostic, like why you wrote it also, and one of the things, one of the names that didn't pop up that I was, that I had in the back of my mind as I was reading it a lot was Durkheim.

And like, one of the things I've talked about with my students, for instance, is, you know, Marx is always popular and cool, you know, among the angsty young.

And the thesis of alienation, that that's the primary analysis of where, why people are feeling the way they are, especially young folks, they're alienated from the means of product, products of their labor. They're being exploited at work. Class warfare.

But one of the things I've tried to talk about with my students is I wonder though, if that's the less helpful diagnostic than maybe Durkheim's, which is maybe alienation is less helpful analysis than nme that we, the normlessness, the guideliness, that we're awash with options and we don't have standard guidelines for the maps for meaning in our world.

Would you, is that, is that, would you say that it maps well onto the argument you're making and the diagnosis that you're making that you're trying to offer something to this moment.

Alan Noble  
00:05:34.960 - 00:06:32.090  
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I didn't. For this book, I didn't want to dwell too much on diagnosis. Right. So this book is not too heavy on diagnosis because.

Largely because the diagnosis is found in you are not your own. The reality is that this book comes out of you are not your own. It comes out of a response to you are not your own.

When I wrote you are not your own, I wrote the diagnosis and I went around the country giving talks, and people said, I need some practical application. And this book is that practical application. So in earlier drafts, I actually called back to youo are not your own.

And the publisher said, please don't, Don't. Don't be too explicit about that, because what it does is it says to the reader, you need to go read the other book before you can read this book.

And that's not a really. That's not a really helpful thing to do to readers, is say, go read two books, actually. So. But.

James Wood  
00:06:34.010 - 00:06:35.130  
Alienating you from.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:06:35.290 - 00:06:36.970  
I was going to say it seems like your sales pitch.

Alan Noble  
00:06:37.050 - 00:06:50.330  
I thought it was a great idea, but my publisher was like, this notebook needs to stand on its own. So if. If I gave a fuller diagnosis, it would be in you are not your own. And Durkheim is a great. Is a great place to look. Yeah, that.

That normalness is absolutely there.

Alastair Roberts  
00:06:51.540 - 00:07:09.620  
You mentioned earlier the four cardinal virtues and the three theological virtues.

Could you say a bit about why the four cardinal virtues are what they are and what the three theological virtues are, and something of the background to those categories?

Alan Noble  
00:07:10.420 - 00:08:34.530  
Yeah. So the four cardinal virtues are prudence, justice, courage or fortitude, and temperance.

And then the three theological virtues are faith, hope and love that Paul talks about. And I think these are. I think, you know, people can come up with and have come up with very different lists of virtues.

It's my opinion that these cardinal virtues in particular, you can fold a lot of these other virtues into those four cardinal virtues. That's why they are the hinge, as it were, the cardinal virtues. So, for example, honesty, I think could be folded into justice.

And so I think these are useful ways of thinking about virtuous living. So I don't know if that answers your question, but those are the seven virtues that I'm working with, and I found them to be helpful.

Pieper writes these two books, the cardinal virtues and faith, hope and love, that are originally published as separate essays, and they're magnificent. And then he's pulling from Aquinas, and there are many others who have thought that these Seven fit together as a nice group. And I concur.

I think that they work together to make sense of how to live virtuously.

Alastair Roberts  
00:08:35.330 - 00:08:45.490  
Could you maybe say a bit more about what a virtue is and how it relates to maybe a more general biblical account of the moral life?

Alan Noble  
00:08:46.190 - 00:10:05.200  
Yeah. So I think of a virtue as a practice or a habit of living morally towards what God has created us to be.

And so this is where the Bible fits into our understanding of, of how to live rightly.

And where I would separate this from a strictly secular account of the virtues which would be, you know, that you can just live, live temperately in a sort of optimal way. You can sort of optimize yourself into living rightly. Instead.

My understanding of the virtues is that, that we're actually living toward what we were created to be by God. This is how we are created to be by God.

And so we're really walking in a manner worthy of the gospel by living in these virtues and living into the excellence that God created us for. As new creations. As new creations. And the Holy Spirit is working through us to do these things.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:10:05.920 - 00:10:23.760  
Throughout this book, I just sensed it coming from a lot of places. Obviously it's coming from Joseph Peeper. It's obviously it's coming from scripture and the contemporary world.

It seems like it's coming from a lot of office hours spent talking to college students.

Alan Noble  
00:10:24.080 - 00:10:24.480  
Yeah.

James Wood  
00:10:24.480 - 00:10:27.360  
Yeah. Can I jump in there? Because I was going to say the same thing is.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:10:27.600 - 00:10:28.000  
Yeah.

James Wood  
00:10:28.000 - 00:10:36.040  
I was a former college minister and Now I teach 18 to 22 year olds in the first couple chapters, especially on like choosing. Well, kind of your application of prudence.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:10:36.040 - 00:10:36.480  
Yes.

James Wood  
00:10:36.790 - 00:10:59.670  
To kind of the age of the paradox of choice. And, and like I remember, I'll just riff on this for a second is I remember one of the reasons I. Yeah.

I felt like I had to get out of college ministry just personally was because I was like, if I have to answer the discernment question of how do I know who I'm supposed to marry or what job I should take, I'm like, I'm going to lose my mind. I'm going to lose my mind. And then I come back. Now I teach college students.

Alan Noble  
00:10:59.670 - 00:11:00.550  
I'm still doomed.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:11:01.030 - 00:11:02.870  
Guess what I preached on two days ago, James?

James Wood  
00:11:03.410 - 00:12:00.700  
Vocational discernment. And.

But I was as I was reading that chapter which I thought was really helpful and I have thoughts about it, like one of a couple points that I loved and then I'll, you know, come is I loved, you know, just that you recognize the angst that people are Feeling about choosing, like we got all these choices, like the Barry Schwartz paradox of choice dilemma. Right. Like, but then like, I think you give really conquers, like what do you, what do you do?

And so maybe you can riff on your strategies of making those choices. But also I loved that, you know, like, look, we've got a lot of options and that's a good thing. And you kind of give guidance for how to do that.

But I also love that you kind of, you didn't use the term, but the BS jobs, you know, like, there are jobs that might not be worth your attention. Maybe you shouldn't consider these things. But yeah, so go back to Alex or Derek's point of.

Is this coming out of, you know, helping 18 to 22 year old kids a lot in a large way. And what is the guidance you give them for making those types of decisions?

Alan Noble  
00:12:02.770 - 00:13:26.610  
Yeah, it absolutely is.

You know, so when I, when I wrote this book, as I said, part of it is coming out of having conversations and Q&As with people when I, when I gave talks about you are not your own. But the other part of it is a lot of office hours with students who were wrestling with real questions about how to live well.

And they're asking questions about what is, what is social justice, what does justice look like. They're asking questions about what is love. Right. You know, how do I discern what love really means?

They're asking questions about how do I discern who to marry? Do I follow my fiance to grad school or do I stay close to my family? Do I pursue this career or that career?

And there's this existential angst that they're carrying. And so I tried to write this book pastorally, even though I'm not a pastor. I tried to write it pastorally, ruling elder. That's true.

Well, when I wrote it, I wasn't, but I am now. That's true. It does. It absolutely comes out of that. I had to choose examples to make these virtues tangible.

And I spoke to what I knew best and that was the struggles that a lot of young people are going through and what I assume to be very common struggles. And I hope that it will resonate with a lot of people and help them.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:13:27.680 - 00:15:16.450  
Yeah, I will say this is, this is true of 18 year olds. It's also true of 38 year olds, 39 year olds. I do feel like there's a, there's a chunk of folks in our generalized age cohort.

Leaving aside Alistair Roberts, who's elderly, but, but you get past the first wave of choices in your life, marriage, career, etc. And then. And then there's like this second wave that comes after the children or within the children.

And when you hit about 40 and you really start to ask yourself questions about, like, okay, but what does the back half look like? Am I. Am I. Am I still doing this? Is it something else or what? And so the choice paradox is they're still there.

And everything about the contemporary moment, you know, you're. Maybe you're making them for your children, maybe you're making them for your spouse. You're still. You're still stuck with some of these same loops.

And so I just found it very reassuring just in my own age stage, not just the fact that I'm going to absolutely use this as a book club book for my students next quarter. The chapter that was also really encouraging to me, and I wanted to hear you talk more about. And I think that there's.

I think maybe people are feeling this one in an anxious age. Fortitude. Fortitude and courage and suffering. I know you've walked through some things, and so I was just wondering.

I just wanted to hear you talk more about the chapter on fortitude and how that is, in a sense, maybe particularly needed in the contemporary moment.

Alan Noble  
00:15:18.020 - 00:17:45.110  
Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah.

I mean, I think, as I thought about the cardinal virtues and the ones that are most pressing for our moment, I think courage or fortitude and then temperance are the ones that. I mean, I think prudence is really important for that choice paralysis that is so crippling to so many young people.

But I increasingly think that there are two marks of our. Our culture. One is inhibition, this sense that we don't have agency in our lives.

You get a diagnosis and you feel like, I don't have agency over that. You feel like you're controlled over mass forces. I don't have choice, but I have to use AI whatever it is.

But you have this sense that I don't have agency. I can't ask someone out on a date. I can't do these things. So inhibition.

And then the other thing that relates to temperance is an addiction nation, right between pornography, sports, gambling, and other addictions. And so with courage or fortitude. Yeah, I think inhibition is a big problem. And I think courage is how we need to approach this.

And I've written about this before, written about this recently for the Gospel Coalition. I think that there's a call, and I think that particularly young people want to hear this. They want someone to invite them to be Courageous.

But somebody has to invite them.

If nobody's going to invite them to lean into courage and tell them how to be courageous and what courage even looks like, then they're not going to do it. And so the book tries to invite them into that and tell them what that is.

And unfortunately, courage means the risk of suffering and in many cases enduring suffering for the sake of the good. And that is something that I have.

And everyone has lived out at some point or another and will continue to live out at some point or another because life involves a great deal of suffering. And the only real question is how will you face that suffering? Will you face it courageously or not?

And so the invitation is to face it courageously, to endure, which is the better part of courage.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:17:45.840 - 00:18:40.240  
I think about this a lot with some of my students. The paralysis around a lot of choices comes from this fear of what they will endure on the other side or the amount of.

I mean there's so many jokes and reels about Gen Z bailing on stuff as soon as somebody corrects them or something like that. And some of that's fair, some that's not.

But I can see that in my own heart, in my own life and around the almost American tendency to think that if something's going wrong, I must be doing wrong. And I've got to switch tracks quickly to get out of the track that has me suffering.

If I'm suffering, something about this situation needs to change immediately. This can't just be the thing I'm called to for a while. I need to get the other job.

James Wood  
00:18:40.240 - 00:18:50.560  
Alan also adds there what I really appreciate, like you've mentioned Derek, like the. Even us 38 year olds, which I'm not 38 anymore but maybe I guess you are is. But people who.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:18:50.640 - 00:18:52.080  
39\. 39.

Alastair Roberts  
00:18:52.960 - 00:18:53.320  
Yeah.

James Wood  
00:18:53.320 - 00:19:50.990  
You're holding on to youth. You know, you're trying claiming a former year but. But I really appreciate it as a former. Maybe a lot of people don't know this about me.

My major in undergrad was finance and I hated it. But there are only a few themes that I kept with me and I.

You brought up one of them, which is my favorite, the Sunk Cost fallacy, which I think you helpfully like for people who are making career choices or maybe they're in a career and they feel like I'm actually not using the best of my gifts. I'm not serving the best. This doesn't fit. So that's maybe not a suffering, but it's maybe not full service. But one of the things I Think some people.

One of the reasons why I think also so many of our choices are scary is because we feel like if we pivot later, either that is a failure of commitment or it's unwise because I've already invested so much in a prior decision I've made. Can you discuss that? Like, why did you bring that theme in?

Alan Noble  
00:19:52.270 - 00:20:35.880  
Yeah, my wife has a master's degree in economics, so that vocabulary was, you know, one flesh. So I got. It kind of got a little bit of that degree borrowed. And so that's where I get that from.

And I'm very grateful for it because that concept is really helpful.

And when I was writing this section on prudence, because that's where that sunk cost fallacy came in, I was writing this section on prudence and I was writing the section on making resolute decisions, and I was thinking about, you know, you're making these resolute decisions and you're following through. And this taps into this idea of courage, that all the virtues work together. You know, you make a resolute decision and you follow through with it.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:20:35.880 - 00:20:36.070  
Correct.

Alan Noble  
00:20:36.140 - 00:21:37.070  
Courageously. But the problem is, is that in real life, sometimes you don't, like you said, you need to pivot.

You follow through with a career, you make a career choice and then you realize, actually I need to pivot, this is a toxic work environment. Or I actually thought I had a skill in this and it's really just not working out for me.

And that's prudence too, because you're surveying reality, you're focusing on the good you're making. You know, you're bringing in wise counsel and you're realizing a new prudent decision is moving off of this career and moving to something else.

And so I realized I need to talk about the sunk cost fallacy, reassessing and moving on.

And so what I didn't want was someone thinking, man, the virtuous thing here is to grit my teeth in a, in a career that is, that is, you know, not fit for me and, and persevere. And so that's why I included that. Yeah.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:21:37.950 - 00:22:38.980  
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It is actually a lovely campus led by world renowned faculty. Beeson forms students in person in a kind of a community oriented model of theological education.

They have top ranked scholarship who engage their students at kind of very small class sizes. It's a warm environment. And now thanks to a generous gift.

Beeson is actually offering new full tuition scholarships for the 20252026 incoming class for their flagship degree, the Master of Divinity. So this kind of makes the whole thing more affordable than it's ever been.

Now these scholarships cover the cost of tuition and fees for three years, which is the average time it takes to finish the M. Div. And I'll be honest and say I wish I had known about this or had an opportunity to look at this one when I was heading to seminary.

So if you're interested, you can apply and learn more information@easendivinity.com the official Merriam.

Ian Harber  
00:22:38.980 - 00:24:24.190  
Webster Word of the Year in 2025 was slop, and I'm sure we can all feel why they chose that word. That's real.

You can go look it up In a world where everything feels like slop and brain rot, now is a perfect time to cultivate a rich intellectual life, to think clearly and carefully about church and culture, theology and technology, family and formation at Mere Orthodoxy it's our mission to create thoughtful, engaging content that aims to form Christian in the church to participate in the culture for the common good. Mere Fidelity is one of those media projects. Mere Orthodoxy and Mere Fidelity are reader and listener supported media projects.

Without our generous members, we wouldn't be able to produce essays and podcasts or cultivate the thriving community that exists among Mere Orthodoxy members.

Mere Orthodoxy members receive access to our full archive of content, the quarterly print journal with premiere essays, an invitation to the Mirror Orthodoxy online community, the monthly Miro mailbag newsletter from our editor in chief, Jake Meter, and you'll also be supporting a growing media organization that exists to form Christians in the church to participate in the culture for the common good. If you would like to support this mission, you can go to mirorthodoxy.com membership and become a member today.

That's mirrorthodoxy.com membership to join us and support our mission of renewing minds and restoring hope.

Alastair Roberts  
00:24:24.990 - 00:25:32.300  
At the beginning of the book you bring up T.S.

Eliot's the Wasteland and you mentioned this image of the heap of broken images, and that is a very helpful starting point for reflecting upon people. How how people approach the moral life, how they approach decisions, how they understand their navigation of the world. They don't understand it.

They have bits and pieces here and there. They have various voices that aren't really integrated. Well, that seems in many respects to be a characteristic of our very online age.

Just by the very nature of the media, what is there in a Christian vision to offer the sort of coherence and integrity and the ability to move beyond those broken, fragmented images to something that has wholeness and a sort of unity to it. How do we find a sort of unified life out of all these different decisions and virtues? How do they come together?

Alan Noble  
00:25:33.020 - 00:26:41.490  
Yeah, so there are a couple of things I would say. One of them is what I just mentioned a couple of minutes ago, which is that the virtues all work together. And so as you.

As you choose to lean into your new creation in Christ and act on these virtues, you're going to realize that these virtues work together and there is a unity. That you're not just.

You're not just picking up justice over here in abstract, that you're actually learning how to love people better, that you're actually learning how to act courageously, that you're actually learning how to think prudently. So there's a unity there. The other thing I would say is that this doesn't happen in an abstract.

It doesn't happen in alienation from community, or at least not properly. The virtues happen in community. And so there's a unity there because know, you're loving in community, you're acting justly in community.

And so part of the vision of the Christian life is a. A vision in community. And that community is the body of Christ.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:26:41.810 - 00:26:42.170  
Right?

Alan Noble  
00:26:42.170 - 00:27:48.810  
That's the community is the body of Christ. The other thing I would say is that in this side of paradise, we're never going to have this perfect.

You know, that the image I have that I imagine that. That Elliot had is the stained glass window.

I don't know if that's what he envisioned when he envisioned the heap of broken images, but that's what I imagine he had. We're not going to have this perfect, holistic, you know, image. You know, we're always piecing things together. It's always.

It's always going to be a little bit fragmentary because we're fallen. And there's always going to be a struggle to piece things together.

We're always going to have something a little bit off, and that's okay because there's grace for that. But our task is to.

To understand what the gospel is, to understand what God is calling us to, and to move toward that created order that God has called us to. And that's where I think, as we're moving toward that created order, we find that wholeness.

James Wood  
00:27:51.930 - 00:29:24.400  
I've got a question about when we were talking about the cardinal virtues, I think you said, and again, they all work together. So you can't like, you know, sift them out and separate them.

But I think you said courage or fortitude was maybe the premier cardinal virtue we need to focus or retrieve today, I wonder, on the theological virtue. The chapter that I thought resonated most with me and some of the problems of our moment was the chapter on hope.

And particularly your exposition of the theme, hope all things, and how that maps onto particular our political and ideological battles and how the thing I put in my margins was, I think a lot of us are Jonahs more than we want to admit about our prophetic speech to our political opponents. Because one of the things you said is we actually don't want to hope all things for our political opponents.

We want them to remain as bad as they are or as bad as they are in our mind, because if they change, we wouldn't know what to do with that. And then we wouldn't have a sort of kind of and against the enemy identity or something. And, and we also. You meant, you gave a concrete example, too.

We often don't like to celebrate when our political opponents break rank in ways that are more in line with our views. And again that you, you mentioned, that's a failure of hoping all things. Again, can you elaborate more on this?

Why, you know, what do you mean by this? And what's our, what's the antidote here? Do you see this as a major problem in our political discourse?

Alan Noble  
00:29:26.640 - 00:32:02.360  
Yeah, I think it's a major problem in our political discourse. I think it's a major problem in our interpersonal lives, too.

I mean, I think it's a heart problem, a posture of our hearts that we just have this tendency to not want to hope all things and really desire for people that we imagine to be our opponents or imagined to be people on the other side, whatever that might be, people that we have cast as the other, to, to, to make the right decision to turn from sin to, even if it's in small ways to turn to Christ. We just, we just have this desire in our hearts to not actually see that. And that is a failure to hope all things. And that is, I think, despair.

And it's, I think, sin. We should rejoice when our political opponents actually choose to side with us to make the moral decision and do the right thing.

We should rejoice because that's a good thing, but because of our polarized politics, instead, what we end up doing is saying there's at least a part of our hearts that says, gosh, now I have to. I don't want to Give them an attaboy because, you know, that would encourage them. I don't. I don't want to give them an attaboy. Right.

I don't want to admit that they did the right thing. And that's pride. That's. That's. That's failing to hope all things like. And that's a shame. And that. And that. And that incentivizes.

That incentivizes the polarization. Right. That incentivizes the polarization. That. That's just making things worse. So that was my. My intention there.

And as I said, I do think this happens on interpersonal levels as well. I think in personal relationships, we. We can find ourselves in situations where we.

We don't actually desire someone to turn from their sin and repent. We actually desire them to commit Morrison. And to wrong us more because we've decided we've written them off and that's a terrible place to be.

So we need to guard our hearts for that and choose to desire, to hope all things, to desire that they turn to Christ.

James Wood  
00:32:04.600 - 00:32:18.040  
Why I like that is because it's easy for me to conceptualize that antagonistic posture as a failure of love, which I think it is. But I think you're also high. Getting at something really true. Failure of hope. And I think that's really beautiful.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:32:19.880 - 00:32:20.360  
Yeah.

Alan Noble  
00:32:20.680 - 00:32:21.160  
Thank you.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:32:21.160 - 00:32:26.000  
Can I ask you a really dumb book? Not bum. The super book interview question. I almost never.

Alan Noble  
00:32:26.000 - 00:32:28.320  
Yeah, I want a dumb question. That's good.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:32:28.320 - 00:32:33.800  
Yeah. Yeah. That's what I'm here for. What was the hardest chapter to write.

Alan Noble  
00:32:33.800 - 00:32:34.920  
And really think about? That's a good question.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:32:36.520 - 00:32:47.500  
Think about living out. Think about. Not just at the conceptual defining level, but. But okay. Just getting into the mind space of kind of thinking this virtue through.

Alan Noble  
00:32:48.780 - 00:32:53.180  
That's easy. Justice was the hardest chapter. Justice was the hardest chapter to write.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:32:53.260 - 00:32:53.660  
Why?

Alan Noble  
00:32:55.340 - 00:33:38.330  
Justice is such a complex topic. It has so many ramifications. And I don't know why I'm saying that, because love is such a complex topic and has so many ramifications.

But I just think that thinking about our culture and how sensitive justice is and the realities of the implications of writing about justice, there was a lot of trepidation about writing about justice. So that's the chapter I'm least satisfied with. And I had the hardest hard. Excuse me. Hardest time writing.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:33:39.840 - 00:33:48.160  
Yeah, okay. Sorry. That was. I just had. I had to know when you're thinking about virtues, you're like, yeah, so you.

James Wood  
00:33:48.160 - 00:34:21.920  
Can't love that chapter. Speaking of love is how what. I love that.

My favorite Part of that chapter was we for a world to function, to actually have a society, we have to treat each other beyond formal justice. I love that point.

I thought that was really, really helpful because I think especially as we, we get in, as we lose social bonds in our society, we have lack of moral consensus and we just have lack of connection. We get increasingly into a litigious, technical approach to society. And I think you're right on that. That's not going to work.

Alan Noble  
00:34:21.920 - 00:34:51.730  
I'm taking that from people and elaborating on it. But yes. Yeah, that's.

I think that idea that to think that we can just have this legalistic, technocratic, you know, justice and live humanly is profoundly wrong. We need to be prodigal in our justice. We need to go beyond that. And so to make this world a human place.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:34:52.850 - 00:34:53.410  
Yeah.

Alastair Roberts  
00:34:53.890 - 00:35:22.840  
If you were going to speak to, let's say a pastor reads your book and is deeply persuaded by it and convicted by it and feels that they need to inculcate these virtues within their congregants.

What are some of the things that you think that churches could be doing that they maybe are not doing or not doing enough to actually move people in these sorts of directions and overcome some of the fragmented moral lives that people live?

Alan Noble  
00:35:23.400 - 00:37:16.000  
That's a great question. So one of the things I think that's really helpful is that the Bible is filled with language of virtue. Right. The Bible talks about justice a lot.

Right. The Bible talks about prudence. The Bible is not absent. It talks about self control. It's not absent this language of virtue.

So I think leaning into this language is helpful so that it's part of our shared vocabulary that we're not afraid.

I think that particularly for Protestants, there has been this fear of talking about living virtuously because we're afraid of sounding like it's works righteousness. And I understand that. I understand that.

But there's a way of preaching about living righteously that foregrounds the gospel and the importance of Christ's work of redemption and his righteousness and our role as our response as new creation, as new creatures that properly frames that, that I think allows space for us to live into who we are. And so I think that's important. The other thing I would say is it doesn't have to be from the pulpit, but maybe Sunday school classes.

Let's talk about things like temperance. Let's talk about how are we using social media? Should our kids be having SmartPH. Like, let's have these conversations.

Because if we're not having them in those spaces, then I think we're doing a disservice to our churches. But just having that shared vocabulary and having those conversations I think is important.

Alastair Roberts  
00:37:17.520 - 00:38:07.890  
Another thing I was wondering is you, when you're talking about virtue, you more generically will often find yourself drawing upon classical sources, various Greek and Roman philosophers. There's a sense of this as deep within the Western tradition. This is part of our shared vocabulary.

But when we're treating that tradition as Christians, we have this whole vocabulary and theology of grace, how does that relate to our understanding of virtue? Is there a way that we need to create space for a discourse of virtue within our theology of grace?

Or is there a way in which our theology of grace really propels a theology of virtue in ways that it is not within a non Christian framework?

Alan Noble  
00:38:09.330 - 00:39:50.820  
Yeah.

So if I think, I think if I'm understanding you correctly, this is how I would frame this is that because of the grace that we receive from Christ, we are propelled to act virtuously. Right.

Whereas under the, under a, a pagan understanding or even under certain Stoic understandings that you might see today, the idea of pursuing virtues might be just to optimize your life to live well in the imminent frame, as it were. And so the difference that I see is that there is a telos, which is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

And that telos is, is framed under the umbrella of grace. So because of what Christ has done for us out of gratitude, we are compelled and excited as new creations to act righteously, to turn.

We are free to turn from sin and to walk in a manner worthy of the gospel. And that's the exciting thing, that's what I tried to get across in this, is that it's an exciting thing to be able to act virtuous, new creations.

Right. And because of grace. Right, because of grace. And you're.

And how I end the book is, is grace the fact, the reality that you are going to fall short of these virtues, you are going to make mistakes and there's grace for that. And that is an important message that I want to get across.

James Wood  
00:39:50.820 - 00:39:51.300  
You're.

Alan Noble  
00:39:51.380 - 00:39:53.100  
You're not going to get this perfectly right.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:39:53.100 - 00:41:10.600  
Yeah, this is really important. I remember early on in my preaching, it was, you know, hey, Christ has paid. You can't earn your salvation. You can't. The work's righteousness.

We're going to beat that to a pulp. And it was really a really Christocentric gospel, which is good.

Like he's done everything, he's done all but I remember, I can't remember what book or what event, whatever it is, but when the penny dropped for me on the way. Union with Christ and the double gift works in fact. He breaks the power of canceled sin and sets the captives free.

He cancels sin, he actually pays for it.

But he also starts to break the power of sin in our lives through the regeneration and through the power of the Holy Spirit and kind of preaching a two handed Son and spirit gospel there of the Son's work. And then what the Son gives you in the spirit, when the Spirit starts to work in your life, he starts to actually.

He actually starts to create the virtues within you. Right. The fruits of the spirit are powerfully. They start growing within us organically. Organically. James, I threw that one in there for you.

The Bavinck reference there.

James Wood  
00:41:11.480 - 00:41:12.840  
You also threw a Keller reference in.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:41:12.840 - 00:41:13.080  
There,.

James Wood  
00:41:15.240 - 00:41:19.840  
The penny drop, which nobody knows what those meaning. Nobody uses pennies. Pennies are obsolete, guys.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:41:21.350 - 00:41:22.470  
We do. We do.

James Wood  
00:41:22.470 - 00:41:32.350  
James, you use pennies. No. Can I, Can I ask. We use the references or did you have a question here, Derek? But I want to ask about another virtue.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:41:32.350 - 00:42:19.290  
Oh, I actually had one that I was going to ask you about.

I was wondering why when it came to love, I loved that on love you got to the virtue and the practice of friendship and you know, talking about marriage and chastity and some of the other ones. But friendship as this essential practice of learning the virtue of love.

I wanted to hear just more from you on that because that I think is again for myself and for my students, the capacity and the wisdom of being able to carry on and cultivate friendships is just so difficult and so timely and so essential. So Alan, I'd love to hear you more about that.

Alan Noble  
00:42:19.610 - 00:44:02.950  
Yeah, so I think as I. The older I get, the more I value friendships. I mean, I've always loved my friends, but the older I get, the more I realize that I just.

I depend on my friends. I need my friends to survive.

I've gone through some very difficult periods in my life where I've had to call up friends to just get through, to sit with me, to get through some very difficult moments. And. And I've also realized that it's harder and harder to make friends. And that makes me appreciate friendship even more because it's special.

And it's also made me realize how intentional you have to be to cultivate friendships and to carry friendships along. And so.

So a message that I, speaking of office hours that I like to preach to my students is that you need to care for Your friendships, like, you need to shepherd your friendships because they're not just going to happen. They might just happen now because you're in this special college bubble, but in the future, you're going to have to nurture them.

You're going to have to be intentional about them because they're not just going to fall into your lap. You're not just going to meet somebody in the cafeteria.

And your friendships, or lack of friendships, are going to determine how well you manage your way through life. We're in a loneliness epidemic, and it's not a coincidence. A lot of people don't have close friends. And so this comes from a very personal place.

I just think that friendships are incredibly important. And I wanted to talk about it under the virtue of love.

James Wood  
00:44:04.300 - 00:45:11.510  
Yeah. So I'll just have to say a couple things there that I wanted to pick your brain on is. I think that's totally right. I think all. You know.

And I love that you talked about friendships here, that it doesn't. I think one of the common assumptions about friendships that is that they're predicated on similarity and you really press that point.

Like, look, some of your best friends are really dissimilar to you and challenge you, and that's a good thing. And I think that's one of the myths of the day. But also we talk a lot about, like the.

You bring up the loneliness epidemic, but as related to friendship, we bring. We talk a lot about, like, the dating problem.

The, you know, a lot of young folks are really nervous and we need to give them some practical guidance to just like, date again. Like to talk to each other and to embrace rejection. Like, hey, it's not the end of the world. Like, I also think that applies to friendship too.

I think we probably need to give a lot more concrete. I think friendship is not coming naturally to people and I think we probably need. I think your book is a gesture towards this.

Do you have any more suggestions about kind of practical advice about actually how to live virtuously by. By taking steps towards friendship? Do you have any thoughts on that?

Alan Noble  
00:45:13.750 - 00:46:17.700  
Yeah, I mean, I think it goes back to the virtue of courage. I mean, I think I've been. I've been writing and thinking about this a lot. A lot of the same steps that apply to dating apply to friendship.

If you see someone who you think you would might be a possible friend, you need to recognize the good of friendship and take the risk of suffering and move towards that person. Invite them out to coffee, embodied presence and move towards them. Take the risk. You might get rejected.

They might say they're too busy or whatever, and that'll hurt and you'll move on with your life. But that's what it takes because you're exactly right.

There is this failure of knowing how to practically do this making of friends that is inhibiting people and keeping them in their shell. And instead they're turning to companion bots and things. And that's a shame.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:46:19.140 - 00:46:22.290  
Grim. Alan, your.

James Wood  
00:46:30.530 - 00:47:00.200  
Group is. Derek's really been an inspiration of. He's just practiced affirmation to a lot of us. And I think that's even like a courageous thing to do.

It's vulnerable to be like, hey, you're a new friend and I see these good things in you and I want to encourage you in that. So I'm actually trying to follow Derek's example here and say I'm inspired by him.

But I think stuff like that, just practical, courageous, like you said, stuff I think comes really hard to young folks and us, even our middle age. And so thank you for your push to us.

Alan Noble  
00:47:02.760 - 00:47:04.840  
Yeah, Derek is a good friend.

Derek Rishmawy  
00:47:06.200 - 00:47:53.430  
I was going to try and say something silly, but you guys got me feeling nice and like you're in your feelings. Yeah. Hey, Alan, you are my friend and you're a friend of the show, and I'm really glad that you wrote this book. It's going to help a lot of people.

I hope so if they open it up and read it. That's the hook, guys, is you have to buy the book and then read it, not just listen to the podcast about it.

But Alan, thanks for coming and joining us today and sharing this conversation. It was an encouragement, a blessing. Glad to see you.

For those of you who have listened thus far, if you have found this episode to be an encouragement, obviously, go buy the book, but then also maybe rate and review us the episode on itunes, share the show, get the word out. But for now, this has been another episode of Mere Fidelity.
### Common Life After Social Collapse
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/common-life-after-social-collapse/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:28:46.000Z
Chris Smaje. [*Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft*](https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/finding-lights-in-a-dark-age/?srsltid=AfmBOopLXw-ruO5m1Uc5VK0WDhq86Ry7cScGS40uAKKZwavmiRnWptPq&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Chelsea Green Publishing, 2025\. $24.95\. 256 pp.

Most of us don’t live an agrarian lifestyle because we don’t want it badly enough. I’ve got a collection of the [*Foxfire*](https://www.amazon.com/Foxfire-Anniversary-Complete-Collection-books/dp/1338848070/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)books on my shelf, with their instructions for rustic Appalachian living. I toy with the idea of homesteading in some mountain valley, but the truth is I like my weather-tight home and indoor plumbing. I don’t want to give up the gadgets that make me comfortable. I also realize that to carve out that lifestyle requires a strong support network of similarly minded neighbors.

The most significant barriers to the sort of society that could rebuild after an ecological and economic collapse aren’t technological, they’re social. That’s where Chris Smaje, a small-scale farmer and sociologist, can help with his book, *Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft.* He lays out some of his reasons to believe that modernity is on the verge of collapse, but more significantly he points readers toward the primary solution to flourishing in the future: building community.

## **Agrarian Distributism**

According to Smaje, our current civilization is certainly going to end. When it does, he anticipates a return to something like “the ruralism and political innovation of the post-Roman or postimperial Dark Ages.” Such a shift would require the adoption of distributism, a political economy in which “there’s widespread or distributed private access to land and other means of generating a livelihood for most people.” Distributism entails rejection of the centralizing tendencies of both industrial capitalism and socialism. It is drawn from Catholic Social Teaching. It’s also never been implemented at any scale.

Smaje, who isn’t a Roman Catholic, first published his version of distributism in his 2020 book, [*A Small Farm Future*](https://www.amazon.com/Small-Farm-Future-Self-Provisioning-Agricultural/dp/1603589023/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). His general critique of the social, political, and ecological effects of large-scale agribusiness fits within the agrarian perspective, alongside writers like James Rebanks, Wendell Berry, and the late Gene Logsdon. The idea is that culture was more humane and environmentally friendly when a larger portion of the population understood where their food came from and took an active role in putting it on the table.

His social vision isn’t constrained merely to farming; it also includes a deep concern for other vocations. Smaje notes that to achieve his desired future “will involve rebuilding local mosaics and making ourselves local ecological protagonists as farmers, craftspeople and weavers of human and ecological connection.” He admits freely that such a future will require economic self-limitation, a willingness to build and maintain inconvenient human connections and, especially, a deeper focus on the family as a basic social unit. There’s something to offend and attract every conventional thinker.

## **Anti-Modern Realism**

There is no doubt that Smaje is thinking carefully about alternative options for the future. His previous book, [*Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future*,](https://www.amazon.com/Saying-Farm-Free-Future-Ecological-Manufactured/dp/1915294169/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) was a direct and detailed response to George Monbiot’s ecomodernist vision in [*Regenesis*](https://www.amazon.com/Regenesis-Feeding-Without-Devouring-Planet/dp/0143135961/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Not only did Smaje debunk the rosy assumptions Monbiot relied upon, but he raised meaningful concerns about vocation, a sense of place, and whether a diet of food sourced from vats of bacteria is worth living on.

I have my own concerns about some of Smaje’s proposals—for example, his support for the Marxist squatters in Brazil, known as the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST)—yet on balance, he should be applauded for presenting a constructive proposal for the future. It’s much easier to critique the imperfections of existing systems than to make real proposals for alternatives.

It’s unlikely that Monbiot’s proposal would work mathematically; it’s impossible for his ultra-urbanist future to arise without a level of centralized government coercion unthinkable to most readers. To Smaje’s credit, he’s not only proposed a better solution, he’s taken steps to live in the manner he prescribes to the extent reasonable in this culture, including dealing with the interpersonal conflict that arises from shared access to a freezer.

There’s little romanticism as Smaje wrestles with the low-wages and general inconvenience of the small, non-monetary markets that would result from his distributism. He also admits that “for all the positive stories and good energies they involve, current localist efforts cumulatively aren’t anything like enough” to overcome the excesses of our culture. It’s unlikely we can avoid the cultural collapse; he’s just trying to prepare readers to rebuild in the midst of ruins. A smattering of doom and hope are intermingled in judicious measure.

**Real Challenge**

The biggest obstacle to the sort of humane culture Smaje imagines isn’t politics or economics. It’s that, whatever we might say, we aren’t ready to make the lifestyle changes required to achieve it. Most of us really want the comforts of modernity and the ethos of an older era—this is why the parking lots of Renaissance fairs are so full. We’re happy to play at antiquity on a weekend, knowing zippy WiFi and grocery delivery await us back home.

In fact, there are already communities, like the Bruderhof, where something close to an [anti-modern culture](https://www.amazon.com/Another-Life-Possible-Insights-Together/dp/0874863163/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) is available to those willing to uproot and live by their guidelines. Though the Amish population [consistently doubles every 20-25 years](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350368697%5FHow%5FDo%5FI%5FCount%5FThee%5FVarious%5FAngles%5Ffor%5FExamining%5Fthe%5FDoubling%5FTimes%5Fof%5Fthe%5FAmish?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), that’s primarily due to high retention and birth rates. Little is stopping anyone from approximating at least some of the communitarian suggestions Smaje outlines.

However, unless circumstances force our culture broadly to adopt an alternative lifestyle, it’s unlikely to become popular. Part of this is that the localist agrarian life requires people to “let go of a sense of individualist freedom and self-fashioning, and to embrace the idea that self-realization is possible only within the limiting (but also enabling) structures of already given communities and families—and, what’s more, communities with spiritual underpinnings.” We’d have to give up our right to self-expression and adopt a religious outlook that fits within the community.

This is the sort of book that is worth reading, because Smaje makes his arguments so carefully. More significantly, he’s knocking on the door of deeply Christian ideas like the value of community, family, and vocation, though he does so via common grace. He borrows from thinkers like Alasdair MacIntyre, but believes he can achieve the same results without a Roman Catholic foundation. I’m skeptical that the sort of durable community many of us long for can be achieved without a substantially shared worldview. Nevertheless, *Finding Lights in a Dark Age* offers a powerful encouragement to build stronger bonds where we are, even before civilization collapses.
### Motherhood is Fun
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/motherhood-is-fun/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:28:43.000Z
When it comes to news, it’s the craziest and most outrageous stories that sell. *The New York Times* and various major news outlets regularly run stories on the stiff [motherhood penalty](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/opinion/motherhood-penalty-career.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) for women’s careers, grimly state that “[Motherhood should come with a warning label](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/opinion/motherhood-penalty-career.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com),” or liken it to “[a trap you can’t escape.](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgkvge4rkmo?xtor=AL-71-%5Bpartner%5D-%5Bbbc.news.twitter%5D-%5Bheadline%5D-%5Bnews%5D-%5Bbizdev%5D-%5Bisapi%5D&at%5Fformat=link&at%5Flink%5Forigin=BBCNews&at%5Fmedium=social&at%5Flink%5Fid=877F6E02-1F4E-11F1-A06C-82C903032E13&at%5Fptr%5Fname=twitter&at%5Fcampaign=Social%5FFlow&at%5Fbbc%5Fteam=editorial&at%5Flink%5Ftype=web%5Flink&at%5Fcampaign%5Ftype=owned&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)” I’ve argued elsewhere that “[how we talk about motherhood matters](https://thedispatch.com/article/motherhood-speech-human-children-dignity-joy/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com),” but right now I’d like to reflect on something else that is insufficiently considered. It’s a simple point, but an important one: Modern motherhood is fun, really.

Yes, once upon a time, as recently as a century or less ago, mothers had to toil over washing cloth diapers without a washing machine, drying and ironing them by hand. Such was the fate of my own mom in the Soviet Union, where washing machines were not generally accessible to all. Children in the not-so-distant past also got much sicker—and often died—before the availability of modern antibiotics and vaccines. In addition, the cost of certain luxuries we now take for granted—such as books—was significantly higher. Mothers also had to spend much more time than we do on procuring food and preparing it. Now, by contrast, grocery order pickup is free in many stores, and grocery delivery to your home is often quite affordable as well.

I could understand some media hand-wringing over the challenges of motherhood at a time when it required significantly more daily physical and mental labor than it does now. But it is striking to see the complaints and the constant reassurances that it is [okay to be ambivalent](https://www.amazon.com/What-Are-Children-Ambivalence-Choice/dp/1250276136?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) over having (or not having) children bloom so freely in an age where the more drudgery-oriented tasks of motherhood have largely been removed from us, leaving to us joys to delight in—if only we will accept these gifts. So where do we find this fun? It may vary from family to family, but here are a few glimpses from mine.

During a typical week of parenting and homeschooling in my small town in rural Ohio, I spend hours reading and re-reading classic books to and with my children, reviewing Greek and Latin grammar, going to parks and playdates and ballet class, making experimental dishes just to see if it will work, and having the most unexpected conversations with my kids and their friends. There is a delight in spending time together with my kids, enjoying rediscovering activities that I once loved as a child but haven’t had time for since, and also seeing my kids discover their own interests and talents. I read much more since becoming a mom—not less. And, no less important, my reading is much more diverse now, because of my kids. But also, my kids are some of my favorite people around—because they are genuinely fun people to be around.

My crafts-loving seven-year-old has recently begun learning to write in cursive, and it has been truly enjoyable to watch her determination in mastering this skill. I can see calligraphy in our future. She sees the entire world as her craft studio, as she glides through her days with a cloud of paper, markers, tape, sequins, and beads that follow her throughout the house as though on their own feet. Out of her imagination, so much beauty flows, although I will admit that at times seeing all the walls covered with so much hand-drawn and taped-up art gets a little much.

Meanwhile her ten-year-old brother, whose intellectual interests more closely replicate both his parents, now claims all magazines that come into the house first, and only releases the issues of *Mere Orthodoxy*, *Plough*, or *Christianity Today* once he is done with them. He has also been reading through all the books in the house, because they’re there. Once recently, he dropped in conversation an obscure fact that my (American historian) husband didn’t know. “Where did you learn it?” Dan asked him. “It was in *The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court*,” came the response, reminding us yet again that if you fill your home with books, children will read said books and will become increasingly more informed and sophisticated conversation partners to us. There is no doubt about it: our intellectual lives are richer too because of our children.

There is a general tendency in our society to infantilize children intellectually while robbing them of their childhood through excessive use of screens. But the insufficiently discussed reality is that this also robs parents of the joy of interacting with their children—the joy of mealtime conversations about things they have read and want to discuss, the questions about something they saw outside, and the theological queries about eternal matters that they are just beginning to probe and understand. What a privilege it is to be present for all these moments!

Not every single moment of motherhood is this fun, of course, and it is honest to admit this. Tired children will have meltdowns, especially when they are little. Newborns are as exhausting to care for as they are adorable. While I was blessed to not experience post-partum depression, for many women it is real, and it makes the baby years difficult. Potty-training each of my three children was an absolute nightmare, and is the one parenting task I would consider outsourcing abroad. (Could I send my child somewhere for a week and get him back fully trained? I feel like this business would really take off!) Parents lose hundreds of hours of sleep over the course of their children’s younger years—and because even older children will wake up parents while sick, this continues sometimes into the teens. But then disruptions we would have preferred to avoid are simply a feature of adulting more generally, if we’re honest with ourselves.

It is impossible to drudgery-proof your life. Paying bills is not fun, and neither is dealing with leaky roofs or basements, broken appliances, and going to the dentist. Yet we all generally do all these things that are required of us to live responsibly—for to ignore them will only bring about worse consequences. Indeed, home ownership has arguably been the most exhausting of all things I’ve done in life, much more so than raising children. So why is it that only when it comes to motherhood that it has become acceptable to criticize the very possibility of it and insist that something this difficult should be optional, subject to warning labels akin to those on cigarette packs?

Indeed, I wonder, what if instead of talking about the “motherhood penalty” to women’s paychecks after children we talked about the gain to quality of life? After all, data shows that [married mothers and fathers](https://www.aei.org/op-eds/who-is-happiest-married-mothers-and-fathers-per-the-latest-general-social-survey/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) are much happier than all other groups in America. [Institute for Family Studies research notes](https://ifstudies.org/press-release/married-moms-twice-as-likely-to-be-very-happy-than-single-or-childless-women?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), furthermore, that “Married Moms \[are\] Twice As Likely to Be ‘Very Happy’ Than Single or Childless Women.”

In other words, my experience of finding some of the greatest happiness in my life in motherhood is actually quite typical rather than anomalous. We were not meant to do life alone. And doing life together with these people of ours is a true and beautiful gift. But letting mom sleep in this weekend (or, really, any weekend) won’t hurt either.
### Writers vs Content Producers
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/writers-vs-content-producers/
Last updated: 2026-06-01T16:04:02.000Z
In [a recent post on his Substack](https://www.digitalliturgies.net/p/im-not-a-content-creator-im-a-writer?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), Samuel James discussed the difference between being a writer and a content creator:

> I’ve realized that the reason I could never grind enough grist for the content mill is that I’m not a miller. I really don’t want to be the daily guru, the omnipresent influencer, or the multimedia mogul. I just want to be a writer. And writing is not content-ing. It’s a completely different mindset, that reveals itself in completely different habits.

The distinction James is making here implies something important about how media has evolved in the digital era. In a previous era—one not *that* far removed from us today and which some of [our active writers are old enough to remember](https://yalereview.org/article/burrough-vanity-fair-graydon-carter?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)—magazines were a dominant form of media and they were supported by readers. Most typically, I think these readers understood themselves as participating in a certain kind of common civic project, and reading the magazines was part of that project. Magazines named common goods we enjoyed together, they reflected on the common world we encountered together, and they remarked on the events of the day that concerned our common life.

Recently I was browsing the stacks at our research library at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and I thumbed through old back issues of *The Atlantic*. [In the opening editorial for the January 1902 edition,](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1902/01/on-reading-the-atlantic-cheerfully/636197/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) the author wrote,

> It is little more than a year since one of the most genial of Atlantic essayists was lamenting the disappearance of the Gentle Reader. Can it be possible that the Cheerful Reader is disappearing, too? One is loath to believe it; for if the Gentle Reader and the Cheerful Reader are both to vanish, and magazines are to be edited — as Dr. Crothers hinted — for the benefit of the Intelligent Reading Public merely, the world of periodical literature will be a dismal world indeed.  
>  
> Yet if one were to judge from those Letters to the Editor, which the London Times, for instance, prints, and the Atlantic, for another instance, does not print, the quality of cheerfulness is nowadays sadly strained. What streams of sorrowful correspondence are directed to 4 Park Street after each issue of this magazine! And so few of them seem to flow from the pen of the Cheerful Reader! Perhaps the Cheerful Reader is busy earning his living, — too busy to write. It may be that it is only the Cheerless Persons who have leisure to take their pens in hand and “ write to the editor.” To all such unoccupied and melancholy souls the Atlantic hereby offers a Happy New Year — and a few remarks appropriate to the season.

One could remark on the tone and timbre of the language here, of course, as well as the apparently evergreen anxiety amongst writers about a certain sort of desirable reader passing away. Yet what most stands out to me is the clarity with which *The Atlantic* can name distinct types of readers and their relationship to their editorial work as a magazine.

In this sort of media economy, writers served readers, and all parties regarded themselves as belonging to a common societal endeavor. Recall, for example, that the First Amendment dedicates special attention to securing the freedom of the press—it would seem that our founders also recognized the unique role that writers and journalists play within our particular democratic liberal political project.

What we have today, by contrast, is a media economy in which media producers engage fans with content. And it seems to me that these changes are almost entirely bad. If you take the account of *The Atlantic* as one model, then the content producer model seems, by contrast, to presuppose that it is aimed at isolated, atomized fans, rather than readers. And fans are not part of a common civic project, but are simply engaged in personalized projects of identity creation, which they accomplish through activity on the same tech platforms that are used to distribute the content produced my media creators.

On the one hand, these are predictable changes, I think: Algorithmic based methods of distributing media will lend themselves to fandom models, I suspect, rather than what we might call "democratic civilian reader" models. Additionally, as [context collapse](https://mereorthodoxy.com/negative-world-aaron-renn) sets in and we increasingly live within thin brittle social contexts that place a high degree of weight and pressure on individuals to self-create it is natural that people would turn to media not to engage them as democratic citizens but, if you'll forgive a somewhat vulgar image, to titillate them as fans. In other words, these changes all make sense given our current technological and social context.

And yet I do not find it easy to look at this and simply say, "well, democracy is over; enter monarchy!" as someone like Mary Harrington [seems to do](https://firstthings.com/the-king-and-the-swarm/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). That way seems the path to technological fatalism, I think, and it is a path we ought not take.

Rather, we can consider our moment soberly and conclude that both of these things are true.

First, we live in an enormously diverse society in which pluralism is inextricable and unavoidable. Given that, we will do best under a civic and social model that allows that pluralistic citizenry to feel as if they have a relative measure of agency and control over their lives and their experience of society. Therefore, models of top-down control, as are explicitly fantasized about by figures like Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel and are gestured at by Harrington, are a dead end. Indeed, I would argue that we already have a model that is too monarchical, in fact, given the combination of a more powerful presidency and an absentee legislative branch. Our politics already are far too tied to fandom, I think, and our presidents already govern largely to give gratification to their fans. Proposals to become *more* monarchical seem to me like a person with lung cancer deciding to start smoking three cigars a day alongside their pack a day cigarette habit.

Second, the very factors that make a democratic society desirable and conducive to health are also the same factors which make it so terribly difficult to realize. I am under no illusions about the relative challenges to democratic life in our context; I am simply unwilling to give up on the project.

And so, to circle back to the preliminary point: Like James, I am a writer and not a content producer. But in saying that I am a writer, I am not simply saying something about my own sense of calling; I am saying something about the kind of society I would like to participate in and work to build and to preserve. I am holding out hope that even now, nearly 125 years since *The Atlantic* lamented their demise, there might still be enough cheerful readers out there to join us at *Mere Orthodoxy* in that venture as we seek to contend for such a civic endeavor.

But if we are to do that, it seems to me we need to have media that still seeks to favor the old model of magazines and readers and civic society rather than the media of producers and algorithms and fandom.

It is possible, of course, that the pull to fandom is too strong and citizenship will be misplaced and forgotten as a result. Yet that need not happen if enough of us choose to resist it.
### Polishing Kernels: Bodily Control as New Gnosis
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/polishing-kernels-bodily-control-as-new-gnosis/
Last updated: 2026-07-01T14:37:43.000Z
Recently a split image was posted online of actor Tom Hardy: on one side was his much younger self; on the other was a current photo bearing the less flattering marks of aging. The caption was a single, flabbergasted question: *What happened?!*

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/05/ghost-upload-1777985202207-613042-undefined-May-05-2026-04-34-08-8414-AM.png)

While the comments brought a measure of reassuring realism, saying things like “Um, nearly three decades happened…”, the shock over the very normal wear on the human body communicates an insidious line of thinking under the surface of modern, Western life: How can we—enlightened, capable, self-made as we are—let the inevitable trajectory of the human body happen to *us*?

Our obsession with optimizing the body and avoiding signs of aging is one manifestation of a covert gnostic belief that the body and its creaturely limits are inherently bad. Therefore the good life—i.e. salvation, flourishing—is within our grasp to the degree that we can control our bodies and free ourselves from its creaturely limits.

## **Body as Enemy**

This distorted view of our human frame is so pervasive that the Vatican [recently released a statement](https://www.vatican.va/roman%5Fcuria/congregations/cfaith/cti%5Fdocuments/rc%5Fcti%5Fdoc%5F20260304%5Fquo-vadis-humanits%5Fen.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), warning against the dangers of what it called the “cult of the body,"

> tending toward a frantic search ​for a perfect figure, always fit, young, and beautiful. … A curious situation arises: ⁠the ideal ​body is exalted ... while the real ​body is not truly loved, since it is a source of limitations, fatigue, aging.

The underlying message from society is clear: the body aging under the pressure of limits is the unloved body. The Vatican urged against the incessant use of plastic surgery and botox in response to this growing allergy to the optics of creaturely limits. This negative disposition is reflective of a culture that is increasingly marked by tech-enabled self-help individualism. The health and wellness market is a multi-trillion dollar industry. Keeping such a bloated industry afloat is the sometimes explicit but often unspoken reality: our bodies and the limits our human nature imposes on us make it very difficult for us to honor and love ourselves. These limits make us feel unproductive, inefficient, and ugly as time and experience wear us down.

Sociologist Hartmut Rosa notes how such limits lead to a posture of *body as enemy*. The result is our incessant project of “getting a grip” on ourselves via techniques of bodily modification. We mask some of the visible markers of aging thus signaling to ourselves and others that we are indeed masters of our own fate, not bound by our carnal shackles.

This mode of aggression toward the body stems from a functionally gnostic view of ourselves and the world. Gnosticism was an ancient heresy developing in the first and second centuries that asserted the created world was made by an Old Testament demiurge––a lesser and evil god––and thus the material world is bad. Material creation is a prison––our physical limits working like its guards, overseeing and enforcing our sentence of confinement. Humanity’s greatest ailment then isn’t *sin*, but rather *ignorance*––we just need to come to understand our true spiritual nature and thus be set free! Jesus, then, brought salvation by teaching this secret knowledge (*gnosis*).

If we subscribe to this belief that matter is bad, then salvation becomes an exercise in limit-busting. And today’s secret knowledge––our gnosis––is *how* exactly to bust creaturely limits.

## **Today’s *Gnosis***

This limit-busting knowledge is, in a word, *controllability*. Tools and techniques of controllability abound. Rosa, in his 2019 work *Resonance*, lays out our pervasive obsession with control:

> Sleeping and waking, eating and drinking, sex and sports, creativity and relaxation, attractiveness and aggression––there is no longer any aspect of human life and the human body that cannot be measured and recorded, and thus improved, enhanced, or optimized by means of new biological, psychological, pharmaceutical, and computer technologies.

For Rosa, the defining characteristic of modernity is [bringing more of the world under our control](https://mereorthodoxy.com/resonance-and-the-psalms). This now includes every aspect of the human body. To aid us in this endeavor are an ever-expanding repertoire of surgeries, injections, medications, and technologies in order to improve ourselves. While complete avoidance of our humanity is futile (although some are giving immortality their best shot), we can certainly *appear* to escape our limits.

This is the new gnosis––access to the control needed to manage, or at least *appear* to manage, the body’s pesky confines. But this is a distinctly elitist effort. Much like historic Gnosticism––in which special knowledge was reserved for the spiritually elite––exclusivity marks our techniques of control as well. Special knowledge comes in the form of socioeconomic access to limit-defying technology. [A recent New York Times opinion piece](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/opinion/plastic-surgery-rich-face.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) highlights this reality:

> the unspoken appeal of cosmetic work is that it’s not just about looking “better” or “fixing” something or trying to remain competitive in ageist workplaces. It’s about indulging in a particular kind of experiential self-care that is infinitely customizable and accessible to only a select group. It signifies extreme wealth and belonging to an elite, all-powerful clique that gets to operate under a different set of societal norms and rules.

For Rosa, too, defying technological and societal limits goes hand in hand with access and privilege:

> The more money subjects have at their disposal, the more latitude they have to shape their own lives. Money grants us the ability to materially determine, independent of the circumstances and opinions of others, where we live, what we eat and wear, where we travel, etc. Money and rights have thus become the basic media for securing modern autonomy.

Autonomy, for Rosa, is the great end of controllability. Such self-government allows us to create our own lives––indeed, our very selves––and this expensive, auto-generated self is increasingly marked by freedom from the appearance of bodily limits: superhuman productivity, impossibly fit bodies, even reversed biomarkers.

While our abilities to control are ever-expanding and increasingly socioeconomically determined, the fundamental desire to control––whether through spiritual knowledge or biological modification––is merely a modern application of this ancient Gnostic heresy.

## ***Against Heresies***

One Early Church Father, Irenaeus, confronted the heresy of Gnosticism head on in his work *Against Heresies*. The second-century was a crucial time for the church as they sought to solidify their dogma against rising and detracting belief systems. Gnosticism was a top contender for derailing the church’s beliefs, but Irenaeus skillfully refuted it as an inherently fragmented system. There was simply no agreement on what exactly the secret knowledge *was*! Therefore, the pursuit of such secret knowledge never had an agreed upon culmination. There was no specific, mystical dogma; thus, every new idea could potentially be *the* gnosis.

Likewise today, there is a never ending spectrum of gnosis proliferated from endless sources. Decision fatigue clouds our pursuit and leaves us frustrated that our weary selves can’t keep up with the latest fads. There is always a new and more efficient technique, a new means of access to gnosis around the corner. The fluid and elusive nature of cultural gnosis should be a clue to us that they are not rooted in unchanging truth.

Over against the inherent discrepancies of Gnosticism and its heretical misunderstanding of the unity of God, Nick Needham recounts how Irenaeus argued for Christianity and its unified God:

> He demonstrated by careful argument from the Bible that the God of the Old Testament, and the God of the New Testament, are the same God, and that the Creator of the universe is not some inferior “Demiurge” but the heavenly Father of Jesus Christ. Irenaeus also argued that salvation did not come through any secret knowledge, but through the life and death of Christ. Irenaeus interpreted Christ as the Second Adam, who by His perfect obedience had reversed and cancelled the disobedience of the first Adam.

Irenaeus went after the root of their misunderstanding. Our created bodies were not the result of an evil, lesser god. Rather, the Christian faith is one of continuity: Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who willingly took on a true body *is* the same God who created man male and female *in their bodies* in his own likeness.

The Creator’s doxological refrain *it was very good* included humanity in all its physicality. The *shalom* of Eden was bound up in dwelling bodily with our God in complete flourishing. The Fall of mankind ensued, bodily dwelling in divine presence was rendered impossible, but a way back was promised. However, this promised redemption––being restored to our created intent––is not the result of secret knowledge. Rather, it is through the life and death of a flesh and blood *person*––the bodily manifestation of the promised seed of the woman. It is in Jesus’ humanity as the Second Adam and promised seed that he dwelt among us the very goodness of God to crush the serpent’s head.

Largely in response to Gnosticism’s fluid free-for-all dogma, the Christian church adopted the *Apostles’ Creed*. This creed was a succinct and clear reflection of redemptive hope in Christ. Interestingly enough, this creed confronted the Gnostic disdain for the physical body when it concluded Christians believe in “the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting.” There will be a definitive undoing of all our Genesis 3-inflicted physical woes; all the ways our fallen nature has robbed us of God’s intended, physical design will be righted. However, our glorification will not end in being released from our humanity. Indeed, the exaltation of the Son of God did not culminate in the shedding of his human flesh, but rather its glorification. Jesus ascended with and remains in his glorified human body. Thus he will do to our resurrected bodies as well.

Our meager attempts to “glorify” our own bodies now by rejecting the limits of aging are nothing compared to this future glorification. Paul says our bodies now are merely kernels that one day will be the beautiful bloom of a resurrection body. No one looking at a kernel could ever imagine its end—that it would transform into the fullness of a flower. Our gnosis of control, manifested in all our many techniques of bodily enhancement, risks exchanging the beauty of the bloom for polished kernels.

## **Control as Dominion or Deception?**

One objection to embracing creaturely limits is that increased control is merely an exercise of dominion. The limits of aging and bodily decay are results of the fall; therefore, bodily manipulation is an act of exercising dominion––we are merely pushing back the effects of the fall!

However, this still places our hope in the wrong object. While true that our created bodies were not intended to decay, our hope is not meant to be in *our* ability to reverse the curse, but in the promised Seed who would crush the serpent’s head. This hope is not in a modified body via control, but a glorified body. The former can be reasonably attained through our own access, effort, and technique; the latter is only possible through the incarnate Seed as a firstfruits of the resurrection.

Christ as firstfruits then must become our guiding principle. We should care for our bodies and exercise dominion in ways that honor it as a created good and anticipates our future glorified body. Medical intervention and stewardship of general health are good and proper. However, if our care focused control eclipses our hope in a Christ-bought resurrection body, we’ve gone too far. Control in this scenario can deceptively convince us that we can move the needle of our salvation—that we can justify ourselves to the world via bodily control. Thus, there is wisdom in embracing our limits as ever-present reminders that our only hope is Jesus, and our final end is not a merely *improved* body, but a glorified one.

Such is the wisdom of Proverbs which says that gray hair is a *crown of splendor*. This is a profoundly dignified way to speak of the visible signs of bodily limits. The marks of aging bear witness to a life of hard-won wisdom. Scripture prioritizes what is gained in life over time rather than external appearance. Interesting to consider is the reality that most wisdom is gained in the context of uncontrollability––the absence of control––while learning to cut along the grain of life. This calls for an entirely different mode of relating to our bodies and the world we inhabit, a mode that is alive *to* and *in* the world as a participant rather than a competitor, a mode Rosa calls *resonance*. Thus, the wisdom that is marked by age is a resonant wisdom––one that is in conversation with the limits of the world. It is a wisdom that has been grooved out through a lifetime of the uncontrollable pounding rain of experience.

\*\*\*

Limits imply uncontrollability. Wrinkles signal our imminent deterioration. Aches remind us we’re up against boundaries. Gray hairs speak of our inevitable irrelevance. However, the Christian gospel is the good news of limits––there is no one who can optimize away sin or bust limits unto righteousness. In pursuit of glorification, our human capacities end before they begin; we are in need of an uncontrollable, alien force outside of ourselves to act upon us. The God of the Old and New Testaments took on a limited human form in order to experience the ultimate human limitation––death––to ensure that through faith in him we can dwell bodily with him in resurrected, glorified bodies.

Accepting and receiving uncontrollability is fundamental to resonant experiences. It is unthinkable that the friction of limits could result in transformation, but this is precisely the sort of counter-productive (i.e. *foolish*) wisdom with which God has created his world. The unpredictability of aging and bodily limits holds unique opportunities for transformation that are not merely skin-deep. It is precisely when we run up against our limits that we are freed to experience life resonantly. For Rosa, being affected by unpredictability leads to transformation. For historic Christianity, being affected by the unpredictability of the Spirit’s moving leads to the regenerative transformation of salvation. Such salvation frees us to embrace the very limits that remind us of our need.

A life lived rejecting limits is a life that forfeits resonant opportunities and thus exchanges genuine transformation with the mere appearance of control. The heart that hates limits will never hear as good news that salvation is *not your own doing,* but is received from God. Kernels can be polished, but the bloom is a gift that is given.
### Rebelling Against Nostalgia and Self-Deception
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/rebelling-against-nostalgia-and-self-deception/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:29:03.000Z
Is there anything to rebel against in your thirties? That’s a question any millennial lover-of-punk-rock or any formerly angsty teenager will occasionally find themselves asking, and it’s the question I found myself asking as Joyce Manor released their latest album.

Joyce Manor is a three-piece punk band from California. If you’re a punk rock devotee, these guys are the quintessential example of a band doing it the right way. Their ascension has been gradual and hard-earned across nearly two decades of work. Grinding tours. A growing discography. Minor but meaningful sonic evolution.

They’re also firmly into their mid-thirties at this point; one bandmate is flirting with forty.

There’s an alternative version of the same question: why do writers and performers of punk rock seemingly inevitably forfeit their edge as they age out of their twenties? The music loses its bite, or the artists sell out to some other genre, or the band breaks up to work stable jobs and settle down, or the frontman (typically) gets kicked out for impropriety or addiction, the examples feel almost cliche.

With these questions in mind, the release of *I Used To Go To This Bar* became strangely important to me. As a mid-thirties pastor with graying temples, there was something I needed from this album, which surprised me. Because, to be clear, God has been kind to me. I have a gift of a wife, two healthy kids with another on the way, a home, a career I enjoy. I’m not trying to brag, I promise. This is simply the phase of life I’m in, and I repeatedly (to the point of annoyingly) thank God for it.

But, deep in my bones is a love of something that punk rock uniquely captures. I’ve written in [another recent essay](https://mereorthodoxy.com/tiny-moving-partss-defiant-joy) about the essential nature of defiance in punk rock, so I won’t belabor it here. In short, defiance is integral to the musical and thematic structure of punk music, and for a collection of reasons it doesn’t tend to age well. Which makes sense. Defiance in a teenager, painful as it is, is far less disconcerting than when it manifests in a middle-aged adult. And there’s a lot of the latter going around these days.

Even as I benefit from a relatively stable season of life in which I get to enjoy some of the fruit of God’s grace through ordinary life, I maintain that defiance and rebellion serve an important contextual purpose. There are particular aspects of the human experience that are worth fighting against, and punk rock at its best aims at those, or at least helps capture the feeling of defiance that can and ought to motivate us against darkness and deception.

Thankfully, Joyce Manor’s album does have something to say regarding the two questions above. While the challengers a thirty-something defies are a little different and perhaps a little more nuanced, they’re worth acknowledging and combating.

To start, this album is comfortably at home in the punk tradition of rejecting broader musical trends to release maximally for the sake of Spotify plays, whether that’s long albums or popular album release rhythms (i.e. approximately yearly music drops). *I Used To Go To This Bar* is the band’s first album in four years and has only nine songs and rings in at nineteen minutes. It’s funny when you think about it, or at least ironic — it strikes of a band making it by being pointedly uninterested in making it. They’re chopping at the roots of the tree of music stardom. Punk music has something to say and will often be spartan in its artistic rendering of that statement. Incidentally, I can listen to the whole thing during one or two trips in the car.

One advantage of the brevity of the release is that I’ve listened to it closely again and again, certainly eclipsing two dozen times. While poetic, the album has the focus of a spelling bee champion. It’s about two things.

First, it’s interested in realistic nostalgia. By the time you’re in your thirties, even the most comfortable of lives has grown weary. There are a multitude of personal, past pains you’re carrying. There have been losses and wounds, and there’s a diminishing return on what your youthful dreams look like in reality. In their own words: “Had the worst day ever so far, got run over by my dream car…” Likewise, you’ve learned to imbibe joy in its luminous spots along the way, like a rare-for-Joyce-Manor topic, love, which makes an inconspicuous appearance in “Falling Into It.” It’s a chiseled, world-wise outlook. Life is full of good and bad, and often the bad outweighs the good. But the way to more good is through the bad, so take one or two more steps.

Second, it’s about seeing oneself and one’s sinfulness clearly. I don’t think the band would accept the theological category, to be fair. Nonetheless, it is a fact that, while we are the protagonist of our own stories, we’re not the hero. We cannot shake our own perspective and its limits; we fail people often and drag our burdens into each room with us, so let’s be honest about the strengths and weaknesses therein.

The album opener, “I Know Where Mark Chen Lives,” is a prototypical pop punk anthem down to the song title; it sounds like it’d be at home in a 2000s Fall Out Boy album. Simple, driving drums usher us to the angst of daily living. As if to answer the question, what’s this album for? “When you can’t afford anything anymore, tell me how are you gonna swim to shore? When you can’t explain the damage done to your brain, but it’s clear that it’s severe and it’s here to stay.” The central metaphor of the hook is a train that’s coming, and it’s scary. That’s a lot of life, which is the point.

With the lead single of the album, “All My Friends Are So Depressed,” I’m convinced we’ve hit an important peak in emo music of the last decade or so. There has been a crescendo of western music and rockabilly as sub-genres in punk music. This song will be the mountaintop we remember for its scenic view and the feeling it evoked as emo music gravitates to other, different sub-genres again. In its tendency toward rebellious experimentation the genre will move on, so if you’ve ever wondered what happens when a punk rock band writes music for a western, this is your chance. It’s glorious.

I’ll be listening to and thinking about this song for a long time because of its deliberate twist. The music is moving but unembellished, again, like a lot of daily life. And while the primary lyrical punch (also the title of the song) gestures in one direction, the rest of the lyrics nod in another. It’s true that I know many, many people wrestling with varying degrees of anxiety and depression, both the diagnosable kinds and the everyday kinds. I’d guess the gentle majority of the millennials I know are medicated to these ends. But, the song is actually about the singer’s own depression, about failing others and the weight of daily living. Others’ sadness and depression are merely another thing about which the lyricist is depressed; the psychological struggle of others becomes a metaphor for the disappointment of life in general.

For what it’s worth, this song is the most commercially successful one the band has ever written, which is apt. The musical trends, the simplicity, the potency of the lyrics all align to create a substantive work of art.

The title track, “I Used to Go to This Bar,” expertly balances the tone and message of the album. No wonder its name overhangs the whole thing. The music is shiny and moves energetically, almost too energetically; it’d be easy to miss the feeling of longing in the voice. A sadness in the protracted words. That feeling blooms in the chorus, “Time goes by so slowly, baby, I wish you were here.”

What does it feel like to lose people you love? Kind of like this song. Life keeps moving, oftentimes too quickly. But the ache persists, and at the same time, there’s a subtle joy to looking back on earlier, simpler seasons of life. Unspectacular places that were yours; the details of people and situations that seemed inconsequential at the time. Those are the hooks and hanging paintings that populate your memories, and they create a little bit of optimism about the future - maybe I’ll love this place and these people that way too.

Drawing the album to a close, “Grey Guitar” is a little more guarded, but it’s a musical flex. This might be Joyce Manor at the height of their emo powers. Soaring guitars meld with brooding lyrics into something that lingers in listeners. Feelings of confusion and dread are masked with distraction, like playing a grey guitar, but this intellectual and emotional interplay leads to a certain kind of personal clarity: “We both know that they can’t fix you, they haven’t got the parts.” And, “One day they’ll come to get you, and expose what’s in your heart.” However we deal with our anxieties, the friction of life can guide us to something like a direction. The desires of our hearts and the path forward can and do materialize in the real world, for better and for worse.

This album has been a gift to me. What can we rightfully rebel against as we age, according to this album? Two things: false dichotomies and self-aggrandizement.

Sharp pains litter the timeline of life, but enduring in love makes it all worth it… somehow. We need not drop into the gutter of nihilism, and we ought not pretend the beauty of the rose is unadorned with bloody thorns. In turn, we are all small but meaningful characters in this grand narrative. We share and amplify each others’ joys and sorrows, and we’re here today and gone tomorrow. No need to be anything less than honest about our smallness and propensity to fall short.

Though it feels a little derivative, I’ll say it anyway: there’s immense value individually and culturally to rebelling against both these false dichotomies and an exalted sense of our own importance. Many of the ills of our time arise from these character flaws exactly. We’re prone to a lack of nuance, to oversimplification. We’re often unwilling to understand the coherence or emotional vitality of an opposing argument, and to alleviate the tension we’ll elevate ourselves and our feelings and our tribe. There’s us, and there’s them. It’s a surefire path to disunity, and the ashes it leaves behind are the combustion of grace. If you’re beyond your youth, you should defy these norms. Your thirties should carry the force of some battle-tested wisdom to the cause of grace and peace.

I’ve got two critical thoughts on the album, neither of which is fair, but I stand by them. First, I’ve talked to one or two connoisseurs of punk rock who miss earlier iterations of Joyce Manor. That’s fair. Musically, this album is tighter and quieter. It’s what I think defiance looks like as it gets older. Some of the rawness is gone, smoothed over by the friction of life they sing about; the band appears to have more clarity thematically and musically. I’d say that’s true about my life as well, which is why I’m thankful for the evolution, but I get it.

Second, as with most artistic renderings unmoored from the gospel, the album makes a helpful case for enduring life’s tribulations, but it doesn’t have any principled argument for sustaining real hope. There can be no kingdom without the King, and I’m glad to say the band doesn’t pretend otherwise.

Endurance for its own sake feels like a death sentence of sorts to me, one that takes longer and goes down limping, but I’m glad for the call nonetheless. Resilient people are capable of stronger bonds and, more importantly, have more time for the good news of Jesus to grant true hope. Our realism and willingness to persist become more powerful in the light of both Jesus’s death and resurrection. The impact may look small in an ordinary day, but they load our endurance with life-changing purpose. The gospel grants courage and community through the pains of life and sings of the reign of love and justice, which maps evermore onto reality as the kingdom comes.
### Buildings That Preach: The 2025 World Building of the Year and the Crisis of Beauty
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/buildings-that-preach-the-2025-world-building-of-the-year-and-the-crisis-of-beauty/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:29:01.000Z
At the recent World Architecture Festival—an annual international gathering of leading figures where prestigious prizes are awarded—the biggest prize of all was awarded to a church. As the news article on Archinect.com put it, “World Building of the Year 2025 awarded to minimalist concrete church by Fernando Menis." We learn the basic facts from the opening paragraph:

> The Holy Redeemer Church and Community Center of Las Chumberas \[Spain\], designed by Spanish architect Fernando Menis, has been named as the World Building of the Year at the 2025 World Architecture Festival.

Thus far the only hint that something is amiss comes from the two descriptive words tucked into the headline, "minimalist concrete." But a picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words. Here are three:

[](https://philcotnoir.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/image-1-1.png?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*Image: © Roland Halbe*[](https://philcotnoir.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/image-1-2.png?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*Image: © Hisao Suzuki*

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/05/ghost-upload-1777899966624-426875-undefined-May-04-2026-02-25-56-8090-AM.png)

*Image: © Hisao Suzuki*

It goes without saying that this church is exquisitely ugly, bleak, and depressing. I do not say this to be insulting to the designer, for I am quite certain this was precisely his goal. As such, it is undoubtedly an accomplishment and a demonstration of impressive skill. But rather than putting that skill to use in service of beauty, the design revels in its dark, disjointed, inhuman shape.

It looks like a prison chapel designed by Screwtape to cause all who enter in to abandon hope. I do believe it would make Soviet atheist architects proud. Most of all, here is what a church should look like if Christ never rose from the dead.

It is also everything that is wrong with modern architecture (in both its modernist and postmodernist varieties). Rather than filling the interior space with light, it only lets a few shafts seep in through strange cuts and metallic openings. Rather than tall vertical lines that draw the eyes and spirit upwards, the building's walls lean over towards the inside, giving the space a closing-in, cramped feeling. Rather than materials like hewn stone and carved wood which derive from nature, it features shapeless materials like concrete and metal, lifeless and cold. Rather than curves and dimensional proportions that are pleasing to the eye and communicate a sense of life and wholeness, it resembles nothing so much as ‘the Objective Room’ from C.S. Lewis’s prescient book, *That Hideous Strength*: intentionally ill-proportioned in order to frustrate and stamp out one’s natural inclination for beauty.

Why do I care? And why should you care? In short: because buildings preach. They proclaim a message to the world about what is true, what is good, and what is beautiful. This is especially true of our most public buildings: our town halls, legislatures, courthouses, and churches. These buildings reveal what the culture which came together to raise them was like. And once they are raised, these buildings shape future generations in subtle but powerful ways. As Churchill said, "We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us." Dostoevsky put the same truth in his characteristically stark and slightly bleak way: "Low ceilings and tiny rooms cramp the soul and the mind."

I do believe there is a renaissance of beautiful architecture brewing as part of a greater reckoning against the ills and distortions of modernism, but clearly it has yet to reach the *World Architecture Festival*.

This award-winning church preaches something untrue by being so intentionally at odds with how human beings have thought of beauty. Like so much creative cultural output in the modern age, this building's design is an exercise in subversion. It is fundamentally derivative in the worst sense; instead of building upon the great tradition of sacred architecture bequeathed to it, it only "creates" by perverting what has come before, like a parasitic cancer. The best term for this kind of misbegotten creation, coined by sociologist Philip Rieff, is *deathwork*. It is what a culture produces when it has rejected the sacred order which gave rise to it in the first place.

That this is a Christian church is a most fitting and bitter irony, for the Christian story is central to the sacred order which built Western civilization—with all its sins and shortcomings. I'm reminded of a line from Oliver O'Donovan, that “we live not at the seed time but at the harvest of the modern age.” This concrete minimalist church feels like a taste of that bitter harvest.

But the idea of sowing seeds brings another truth into focus, one which promises to be more encouraging: great changes start out very small. Not many of us have the opportunity or the means to build [beautiful churches](https://ca.thegospelcoalition.org/article/why-we-need-beautiful-churches/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) or other public buildings, but I am certain that each one of us has influence over some space which we could make more beautiful. Perhaps it’s just a bedroom, an office, a front porch, or a partial church renovation, but somehow or other each of us can make the space around us a little bit more beautiful.

It may seem like so very little to sow small seeds of beauty, but it is work which promises a rich harvest. For example, take my humble little Baptist Church in Quebec, meeting in a converted equestrian riding barn, and blocked thus far by local zoning laws and bureaucracy from making any substantive changes to our building. Our pastor and elders have nevertheless tried to sow small seeds of aesthetic beauty by hanging up nicely framed Reformation-era works of art depicting the life and passion of Christ in the common areas of our church.

It’s easy—too easy—to criticize things that are ugly. We must move beyond criticism to construction. What are you going to build this year? What space will you make more beautiful? Have you thought about what makes some buildings [feel right](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/get-your-house-right-marianne-cusato/1100078727?ean=9781402791031&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), while others feel wrong? If your church is going to be [building or renovating](https://mereorthodoxy.com/12-theses-on-church-buildings) soon, consider carefully what message it will preach. Let us sow seeds of beauty as God gives us opportunity, trusting him to take care of the growth and harvest.
### A Farewell to Cinema from a Christian Who Loves It
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-farewell-to-cinema-from-a-christian-who-loves-it/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:29:08.000Z
“Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever… Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.” \~*The Great Gatsby*

I used to perform an odd, private ritual before a movie started. Right as the lights dimmed and the crowd grew quiet, I would suddenly remember that this is all very frivolous, and that one day I would die. This thought wouldn’t hit with despair, but a kind of resigned sadness. After a moment’s reflection, I would say a quick prayer of gratitude for being alive, and then fully turn my attention to the movie: *I really hope this is good.*

Somewhere in the last few years, I quit doing this. I don’t fully know why. But I suspect it is because the church of film has died. The cathedrals still sit downtown, albeit with fewer screens and more anniversary showings. But the corporate power of the experience is gone. I miss it. And I don’t think it is coming back.

–

For the last few generations, film felt like the easy way to read culture. This was never entirely true, but it always ***felt*** true. If a movie came out and made millions of dollars, it proved what culture was like and what people liked. Engage with movies, and you engaged with the culture. It sure made sermons easier.

There was also some truth to it. Given how much the modern person moved throughout their lifetime, what shared experiences could you really have with your neighbor? Neither of you remembered the great snowstorm of ‘94 or knew the names of local trees, but you both remembered seeing *Titanic* in theaters.

For several generations, going to the movies was not just escapism; it was like watching a new Western canon being composed in real time. Maybe we once quoted Shakespeare, but when I was in highschool we were saying “I see dead people” at the right moment and making everyone laugh. In that same classroom, when a teacher brought in Franco Zefferelli’s *Hamlet* starring Mel Gibson, we weren’t just getting out of some seatwork but also being invited further into the world of *film.*

If you were an evangelical Christian growing up in the ‘90s, there was an added layer of meaning to movie-watching. Everyone else got to simply *go* to the movies, but, for the Christian community, cinema’s symbolic weight as culture-bearer was tremendous. In a way, Christians got to postmodernism before the rest of the culture did. They were the biggest group of people trying to say “these stories and the way we tell them shape us in major ways”. This was often superficially done, but it was done nonetheless. There is a whole generation of Christians whose weekend viewing depended on *PluggedIn* and whatever James Dobson said on the radio.

But what this meant is that when films passed the (often inconsistent) gatekeepers, they could be enjoyed with a complete joy verging on religious transcendence. *The Lord of the Rings* movies weren’t just great movies, they were literally gifts from God. My dad and I have both been known to publicly say that Peter Jackson’s *Lord of the Rings* trilogy is a sign of God’s common grace. Movies, for the Christian, weren’t just entertainment: they could tap into the truth of the eternal order. They could point towards the Divine.

When I was in seminary, I got a chance to start writing film reviews. I don’t know how this happened, but I was suddenly writing film commentary and reviews for places like *Relevant Magazine*’s website(all my reviews have since been scrubbed), *The Gospel Coalition,* and *Christianity Today.* I once wrote an article on how bad Christian films were and suddenly became the Protestant Roger Ebert for a month or so. Dozens of Christian filmmakers sent me their stuff to say “Yes, you are right, but we will be different” while at the same time [David French was critiquing my argument](https://www.patheos.com/blogs/frenchrevolution/2014/08/19/six-reasons-why-critics-of-christian-movies-are-wrong/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). I was given screeners and gave some script-writers real feedback.

I wasn’t sure if the eternal stakes of Christianity would allow me to spend my life writing film reviews, but, at that time, I agreed with Eric Liddell in *Chariots of Fire*: “When I run, I feel His pleasure.”

–

I spent close to a decade teaching English Literature, and so people have been throwing the inevitable death of reading in my face for as long as I can remember. But even as airplanes have shifted from flying reading parlors into just another screen-invaded prison, the culture shift hasn’t affected the experience of reading itself. If I sit down with a new book, I can still access the same experience I would have had twenty years ago.

Film is different. It turns out that being *popular and seen* was part of enjoying it. When the 2013 Oscars were coming, my wife and I tried to see as many Best Picture nominations as we could. And every time we went, the theaters were packed with people doing the same thing. Maybe you weren’t a part of that crowd, but you knew what people were talking about. Not going to see *The Matrix* wasn’t something that just happened, it was a ***choice.***

Lately, the only time I’ve been in a full theater was when I took my son to a 25th(!) anniversary screening for *The Fellowship of the Ring.* I saw the new Superman with five other people in the room. Deadline tells me it made over 600 million dollars. I never heard anyone speak about it unless I googled it first.

After *Avengers: Endgame* came out, I never again heard my students quote a new movie in class. The canon has closed. Nowadays, when I say “I hear \[a new movie\] is good”, I mean “someone online wrote this was good.” People don’t actually talk about movies anymore.

To add salt to the wound, the lovers of mainstream film who invited you to watch *Casablanca* and *Singing in the Rain* have been replaced by people who are arguing about the in-world consistency of the 9th Star Wars/Halloween/Aliens movie. Debates about the filmic canon have given way to debates about specific mythologies created so that studios can keep making movies with the same main characters.

The deep analysis of “the death of film” has been done much better than I could ever do, so I will just say that film seems truly dead in a way the naysayers have always predicted. Film is just another important part of the world that has been shunted up the attic. I’ll probably go up there and rifle around every now and then. But I’m done pretending that these things are still sitting on the mantle.

Turns out that movies don’t matter when they don’t matter. Maybe this is what it means to grow up as a modern person: accepting that the home you thought you were inheriting turned out to be yet another liminal space.

\_

During the peak of covid-19 and all the tensions that came with it, I began to watch all the old episodes of *Siskel & Ebert.*

At the time, there were very few new movies coming out. But each night, I would go through another week of filmgoing with two of the greatest American film critics. Roger Ebert, in particular, had been a steady companion of mine since high school. For years and years until his death, every Thursday was a morning that I got to read new Ebert reviews. I knew him so well that if you named a movie, I could probably tell you what he rated it.

Listening to Gene Siskel and Ebert talk, the freedom with which they touched on politics and religion and social issues and the light ease with which they critiqued movies (no internet horde in the wings), was like listening to a melanocholic song from the homeland.

At some point in that summer, I got closer to the present day. Siskel disappeared from the show, and then he died. Suddenly it hit me: Ebert was going to get cancer and then I would have to process his death all over again. I quit watching.
### 1 Corinthians 13:1, 6
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/1-corinthians-131-6/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:29:06.000Z
If I speak with men's and angels' tongues,  
But have not love, I'm only noise—  
Clashing cymbal, clanging gong,  
Unmeaning Babel, demon's tongue.  
Though hot the breath that fills the lungs,  
If, cold to truth, I won't rejoice,  
My voice of bronze, my thousand tongues  
That have not love are only noise.
### The Church, the Medical Profession, and Applied Ethics
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-church-the-medical-profession-and-applied-ethics/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:29:12.000Z
*“For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious…”*

\~ C. S. Lewis, *The Abolition of Man*

We live in an era where we possess ever increasing technical power over the body. The use of this power, as Lewis predicted, has been oriented toward creating a new reality, rather than embracing created order. As a people who value the embodied world, one which God inhabited and redeemed, we have a duty to witness to this. Haley Baumeister put it well in her essay [*Why It Is Difficult to Talk About Ethics of the Body*](https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-it-is-difficult-to-talk-about-ethics-of-the-body): “faced with massive disembodiment, sexual disorder, and bodily desecration, we need a coherent vision of the human person to share with the world. Let us show—and not just tell—that another creaturely life is possible.”

As a practicing physician and lay elder at a local church, I affirm we need to not only tell people about the faithful ethics of the body, but also show that such life is possible and beautiful. I would like to propose a vital piece, perhaps the missing piece, of recovering a Christian body ethic is in the formation of our medical professionals through a theology of vocation, particularly in the way the Church forms professionals.

Plenty of secular thought has gone into bioethics. Twentieth century medical atrocities, highlighted by evils like Nazi experimentations and the Tuskegee experiments on Afro-Americans, demonstrate the horrors that can be committed in the name of medicine.

These events, combined with the rapid advancement of medical technologies such as life support, organ transplantation, and reproductive treatments, led to the formalization of bioethics as an academic discipline which drew both from philosophical and theological traditions. While the field has generated significant scholarly output, policy change, and formalized work in clinical ethics, a troubling deficiency in the telos of medicine and telos of the human body persist, and continues to affect the Church. The Church can help her members who practice medicine to recover the profession by forming them as such, a people committed to an ethos who practice the Gospel through their vocation.

## The Professions and Covenant

Forming professionals requires recovering the ethos of those vocations once called “the professions”. Professions are vocational groups with a particular set of skills and a code of ethics oriented toward an internal morality. Though the term can be applied to many fields, it traditionally invokes the “helping” professions - law, ministry, education, and medicine, which are oriented toward achieving specialized knowledge in order to help the vulnerable. This convention demonstrates the professions have a *telos* \- an end oriented goal, such as ensuring justice, saving the lost, enlightening the mind, or, as in the case of medicine, restoring health.

The relationship between professionals and the vulnerable they serve requires trust. We are dependent on these professions because they relate to core aspects of our humanity. The risk of exploitation is significant. Codes of ethics are adopted to ensure fidelity to the ends of the profession. The Hippocratic oath is a well-known example: honor the learning and teaching of specialized medical knowledge, use such knowledge beneficently, do no intentional harm, and have fidelity to the moral community of medicine. The physician and ethicist [Edmund Pelligrino argues](https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268038342/the-philosophy-of-medicine-reborn/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that the constellation of virtues required to practice a profession ethically produces an “‘internal morality’—a grounding for the ethics of the professions that is in some way impervious to vacillations in philosophical fashions, as well as social, economic, or political change.”

Moral community is fostered by the professional’s commitment to obtaining specialized knowledge in order to serve man. The community’s faithfulness to its internal morality creates a covenant. It is bound by an agreement amongst members to subject themselves to the standards of their community so that they can serve and love those dependent on their care.

## Transaction and the Erosion of Professions

The most corrosive force against the professions is the change from covenant to transaction. [Farr Curlin and Christopher Tollefsen explain](https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268200862/the-way-of-medicine/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) how the profession of medicine has lost its moral roots due to the rise of the Provider of Services Model (PSM) of medicine. With the transactional model, the professional ethic is now defined by “…three norms: what the law permits, what is technologically possible, and what the patient wants.” In the PSM, the medical professional is reduced to a “purveyor of medical goods,” goods sought out to meet the patient’s desires. The ends of medicine are now defined by the consumer. The medical profession is simply a means to those ends. Within the provider of services model, the profession’s internal morality is now centered on fulfilling this transaction.

The PSM is often not a significant factor in routine medical encounters. Blood pressure is managed, cancers are treated, and appendixes are removed by well-meaning doctors whose patients rely on their expertise. Yet, it is grossly apparent in the advancement of ethically problematic areas of medicine, fueled by societal desire, legal acceptability, and technological feasibility. In quieter, although more pervasive ways, the provider of services model has been bolstered by the advent of online and consumer clinics which prescribe hormones, sex-enhancing medicines, and “biohacking” treatments, in a nearly unregulated manner.

Though the traditional areas of bioethical contention - reproductive control and abortion, euthanasia, and body modification - are still main issues, the access the average person now has to body altering treatment ([looksmaxxing](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-flattening-of-the-human-person-looksmaxxing-and-clavicular) for an example) is unprecedented. This is medicine as pure provision of services. It is unbridled autonomy with the professional entirely removed, and it further serves to diminish the need to either act as a professional in medicine or for society to seek out a medical professional.

## Autonomy as Sicut Deus

The diminishment of healthcare workers from “professionals” to “purveyors” coincides with the rise of autonomy as the overriding principle of medical ethics. Autonomy is a core principle of medical ethics, and yet as a principle it is frequently vexing and challenging. At its core is the respect for the dignity of human beings, made in the image of God. It demands the honoring of a patient’s values and beliefs when considering the uses of medicine. Autonomy is traditionally weighed in light of the other three prima facie principles of medical ethics - beneficence, non-malfeasance, and justice. The worst 20th century scandals of medical ethics consisted at least partly in denying autonomy to patients. As well, autonomy is core to our liberal political project. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are all enshrined as unalienable rights.

A superficial consideration of autonomy reduces it to the right of self-determination. But, at its foundation, the autonomous individual still has to choose an authority to inform his or her decisions. As Carl Trueman and many others have argued, the desires of the self (formed by sociopolitical, psychological, and sexual forces) most often assume this authority. But this subverts the good of autonomy and leads to the misguided version that creates the problematic pseudo-ethic of the provider of services model.

As Christians we should not be surprised by this corruption of autonomy. It is a continuation of the original sin of the fall - exchanging the imago dei with the sin of becoming like a god. [Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls this](https://www.fortresspress.com/store/product/9780800683238/Creation-and-Fall?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) *sicut deus* (‘like God’):

> …God’s truth pointing to my limit, the serpent’s truth pointing to my unlimitedness—both of them truth, that is, both originating with God, God against God. And this second god is likewise the god of the promise to humankind to be *sicut deus*. God against humankind *sicut deus*; God and humankind in the *imago dei* versus God and humankind *sicut deus*. *Imago dei*—humankind in the image of God in being for God and the neighbor, in its original creatureliness and limitedness; *sicut deus*—humankind like God in knowing out of its own self about good and evil, in having no limit and acting out of its own resources, in its aseity, in its being alone.

Bonhoeffer succinctly captures how autonomy is corrupted. To be god-like in the view of self is a natural inclination of fallen man. The advent of new technologies which provide god-like power only serves as a compounding factor. An eroded profession of medicine is defined by this ceding of professional responsibility to becoming an agent of *sicut deus*.

## The Church and the Formation of Professionals

Showing the world how to think of the body ethically through the use of medicine as a sign of the Kingdom to come requires a medical profession formed by members who have a high view of the profession, an understanding of its internal morality informed by an eschatological teleology, and the deforming influences that are undermining it.

C. S. Lewis concluded his novel *Out of the Silent Planet*,

> What we need for the moment is not so much a body of belief as a body of people familiarized with certain ideas. If we could even effect in one per cent of our readers a change-over from the conception of Space to the conception of Heaven, we should have made a beginning.

The conception of Space treats man as *sicut deus*, subduing creation to his own glory. By contrast, the conception of Heaven is man reflecting the love of God through vocational gifts to a broken but beautiful world. This is where a recovery of Christian professions must start if there is hope to recover an unswayable internal morality. This work begins at the granular level of the local church with medical professional parishioners.

Grand philosophies and generational cultural changes may seem out of the grasp of the local church. Yet, ideas only gain traction when they become practiced. The Tower of Babel was once a misguided thought experiment until the brick-layers were convinced to build it. The applied ethics of medicine are no different. Prior to any ethical issue gaining front page attention, multiple smaller, though no less important, decisions were made in laboratories, conference rooms, administrative meetings, faculty curriculum sessions, and shared decision making discussions with patients. In a country where well over half of the population would claim some form of Christian belief, surely many Christians have at least some influence.

The way Christian medical professionals guide Christian laity to engage medicine has tremendous influence on the field, particularly one that functions under the provider of services model in which what is permissible is defined by what is desired. The everyday counseling of a couple considering IVF, the spouse deciding whether to end life support, a young woman considering being a surrogate for an infertile relative, or simply the patient considering the use of peptides or hormones for a variety of indicated or non-indicated reasons, are the pebbles which change the course of the river of ethical course of medicine.

Perhaps even more important is the way medical professionals shepherd their patients through suffering by placing limits on medicine. These considerations are complex and unique; any experienced ethicist knows paradigmatic cases exist which make rigid prescriptions hard and which all the more requires a Spirit-filled professional grounded in a thoughtful professional ethic to determine boundaries. In contrast, modern society likes to take paradigmatic exceptions and make them a license to push boundaries of permissibility. This must be resisted by the professional as well. The intentionality in which the Church teaches medical professionals to understand creation, fall, redemption, and new creation informs the grace, mercy, and limits of their ethic.

Doing so requires no special expertise in areas of medicine or bioethics on the part of the Church but rather an engagement with their medical parishioners to assess understanding of basic theological elements of the doctrine of creation, a biblical anthropology of man, and a theology of vocation. Secular appeals to natural law and the restoration of virtue are good recovery points, but they are insufficient in themselves since they appeal to nothing greater for validity.

Medical professionals must have a Christian ethic. Philosopher Oliver O’Donovan argues this ethic must arise from the Gospel: “Creation and redemption each has its ontological and its epistemological aspect. There is the created order and there is natural knowledge; there is the new creation and there is revelation in Christ.” He provides a good starting framework of how this eschatological orientation informs the telos of medicine in *Begotten or Made*:

> Christians should at this juncture confess their faith in the natural order as the good creation of God. To do this is to acknowledge that there are limits to the employment of technique and limits to the appropriateness of our “making.”  
>  
> These limits will not be taught us by compassion, but only by the understanding of what God has made, and by a discovery that it is complete, whole, and satisfying. We must learn again the original meaning of that great symbolic observance of Old Testament faith, the Sabbath, on which we lay aside our making and acting and doing in order to celebrate the completeness and integrity of God’s making and acting and doing, in the light of which we can dare to undertake another week of work.  
>  
> Technique, too, must have its Sabbath rest.

Deeper thinking must be encouraged amongst the medical community within the church through vocational groups guided by those in the profession of ministry. In turn, the local church should allow itself to be ministered to by its theologically informed medical professionals so as to help shape how it engages ever advancing medical technology.

Is such formation and thinking better suited for specialized para-church organizations like the Christian Medical Dental Association, or think tanks like the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity? While they do invaluable work that greatly bolsters and encourages the profession, they are not integrated gospel communities where one can know and be known to a large cross section of the laity, nor do they have pastoral responsibility in the way the Church does. Organizations as such should be enthusiastically embraced, though professional formation should not be outsourced to them.

The Church’s mission is to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This message shapes the way we live in God’s beautiful world, one subjected to the fall, awaiting final resurrection. The expression of the profession of medicine, as well as others, should reflect the Gospel for the Christians who practice it. While theological work around the bioethics and the theology of the body is of crucial importance, ensuring Christians have a theological vision of the medical profession will be equally as necessary to make the ethics of the body effective in the decades to come.
### A Prayer for the Teaching of Mathematics
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-prayer-for-the-teaching-of-mathematics/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:29:16.000Z
In his book [*Reading Augustine: On Education, Formation, Citizenship, and the Lost Purpose of Learning*](https://www.amazon.com/Education-Formation-Citizenship-Learning-Augustine/dp/1501326163?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), Joseph Clair proposes that education be reset within the liberal arts tradition with four overarching aims, each with a related question:

- Spiritual – Who or what should I worship?
- Moral – What should I do?
- Intellectual – What should I know?
- Economic – What shall I make?

Some disciplines are easier for contemporary followers of Jesus to fit within those four aims. For example, Christians studying biology (e.g., at home, in school, at university) can connect the dots between their scientific studies and Christianity with guidance from [scholars](https://www.ianramseycentre.ox.ac.uk/home?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and [institutions](https://biologos.org/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that are uniquely dedicated to thinking through the relationship between science, faith, and ethics. Similarly, there is a surge of Christian [scholars,](https://divinity.duke.edu/initiatives/dita?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) [artists,](https://imagejournal.org/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and [institutions](https://www.rabbitroom.com/about-us?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) promoting and supporting [“the vibrant interplay between Christian theology and the arts.”](https://divinity.duke.edu/initiatives/dita?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

Other disciplines—like mathematics—are a bit more difficult to fit within the four aims. Some might easily connect mathematics to intellectual and (modern) economic aims but not as easily connect it to spiritual and moral aims. At times, Christians attempt to shoehorn connections between mathematics and faith—like drawing lines from basic addition facts to the existence of absolute truth. But these attempts can feel superficial or misguided.

There is, however, a host of Christians (past and [present](https://acmsonline.org/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)) contemplating the relationship between theology, spirituality, ethics, education, and mathematics—it just doesn’t seem to get as much airtime as Christian reflection on other disciplines. The limited dissemination of these ideas is a significant issue because, as Francis Su explains in his beautiful book [*Mathematics for Human Flourishing*](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300258516/mathematics-for-human-flourishing/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), “every single one of us is, whether we realize it or not, a teacher of math. We all communicate attitudes about mathematics through what we say to others, and our words have indelible effects.”

Su continues, “You may be a parent someday, or an aunt or uncle, a youth group leader, a community volunteer, or in another position where you influence others—if so, you will be a teacher of math.” So, if you help a child with their math homework, you are teaching them mathematics. If, instead, you pass on helping due to (legitimate) anxiety about math, you are teaching a disposition towards mathematics. In short, the vocation of teaching mathematics is more universal than you might expect. Thus, it would behoove Christians to talk about the relationship between mathematics, mathematics education, and our faith more frequently.

To introduce the wider church to Christian reflection on mathematics and mathematics education, I’d like to share a prayer that I’ve written for my undergraduate students. This semester, at the beginning of each meeting of my undergraduate mathematics pedagogy course—a course about teaching mathematics for prospective early childhood and elementary teachers—I pray the following prayer aloud:

> *Father, you created us in your image and made a mathematical realm for us to explore and enjoy.* 
>  
> *And Lord Jesus, you identify so closely with children that you said whoever welcomes children, welcomes you.* 
>  
> *Therefore, Spirit, in light of these truths, help us create learning environments where students are welcomed and loved so that every mathematical interaction with a child might point to your kingdom of shalom. Amen.*

In the following sections, I unpack the various components and structure of this prayer in order to introduce readers to Christian reflection on the spiritual and moral dimensions of mathematics education.

***Father, you created us in your image and made a mathematical realm for us to explore and enjoy.***

[The Bible Project beautifully illustrates](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K60TAYja110&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) the vocational dimension of the image of God: humans are royal priests, placed in a garden in the center of Eden, to reign on God’s behalf by working and keeping the garden—and, by extension, all creation. Of course, humans aren’t content with imaging God but rather desire to be god. As a result, sin and death pervasively spread throughout creation. The storyline deepens with ancient Israel—who God calls to be a kingdom of priests and to cherish the gift of God’s presence. Yet, through the prophets, God regularly exposes the failures of Israel and their appointed leaders through urgent and compassionate critique. Ultimately, God raises up Jesus—a descendant of the original Eden inhabitants and Israel’s royal line—to conquer sin and death through his crucifixion and resurrection and restore the blessings of Eden to creation.

This story of creation and the human calling to image God includes mathematics. [Simone Weil suggests](https://www.amazon.com/Intimations-Christianity-Among-Ancient-Greeks/dp/0415186625?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) the mathematical realm “is first, before all, a sort of mystical poem composed by God himself” and [Polkinghorne—although not as mystical as Weil—similarly describes](https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199556939.013.0029?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) it as a “noetic realm of reality” created for exploration. Drawing on [Eugene Wigner’s argument about mathematics’ unreasonable effectiveness](https://webhomes.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/wigner.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) for application to the sciences, Polkinghorne suggests, “The role of mathematics in physics could be summarized as the discovery that the structure of the physical world, in its rational transparency and beauty, is shot through with signs of mind. The natural theologian can respond that this is the case because the mind of the creator is reflected in the character of creation. The reason within and the reason without fit together because they have a common origin in the rationality of God.” Mathematical structure is apparent under the hood of the physical world and its character—its knowability and beauty— reflects the creator.

Weil takes things a step further and sees the character of the mathematical realm as mystically intertwined with morality and spirituality. [She writes,](https://www.amazon.com/Intimations-Christianity-Among-Ancient-Greeks/dp/0415186625?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) “There is an analogy between the fidelity of the right-angled triangle to the relationship which forbids it to emerge from the circle of which its hypotenuse is the diameter, and that of a man who, for example, abstains from the acquisition of power or of money at the price of fraud. The first may be regarded as a perfect example of the second.”

To Weil, there is a connection between the fidelity, restraint, and constancy shown by [a right triangle inscribed in a circle](https://www.desmos.com/calculator/4kki18vmmo?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and the fidelity, self-control, and proper restraint shown by humans in relation to things like money and power. [She continues, ](https://www.amazon.com/Intimations-Christianity-Among-Ancient-Greeks/dp/0415186625?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)“It is thus the image of the creative will of God which upholds equally all that exists. It is to this creative will that our consent must adhere.” On Weil’s account, everything—including the mathematical realm—is upheld by the creative will of God and thus a place where people can encounter the grandeur of the Triune God. To adapt [a phrase from Andrew Wilson:](https://www.amazon.com/God-All-Things-Rediscovering-Everyday/dp/0310109086?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) the mathematical world, like the rest of creation, is theomorphic because it is created to reveal God.

In light of this truth, we should explore and enjoy the mathematical realm like the rest of God’s creation. Su suggests three of the most basic human desires that entice us to do mathematics are exploration, play, and beauty. [Su ](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300258516/mathematics-for-human-flourishing/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)defines mathematics as “the science of patterns and the art of engaging the meaning of those patterns” and says it is for human flourishing. He furthermore argues that “the proper practice of mathematics cultivates virtues that help people flourish” and “movement toward virtue is aroused by basic human desires.”

As such, the practice of mathematics—when done out of a desire for exploration, play, and beauty—can cultivate virtues like an expectation of enchantment, hopefulness, joyful gratitude, and transcendent awe. When people explore new mathematical ideas, they encounter unexpected phenomena that can delight, thrill, and point to the sacramentality of creation. Thus, mathematical exploration is both an opportunity to encounter the creative transcendence of God infused in creation *and* be conformed to the image of God in Christ. It is part of our vocation as image bearers to rule, reign, and enjoy creation.

***And Lord Jesus, you identify so closely with children that you said whoever welcomes children, welcomes you.***

The second part of the prayer focuses on students and the special task of educators. Our Lord, when he emptied himself and descended to life on earth, spent much of his time with vulnerable people who the world wrote off—including children. [Emily McGowin writes](https://www.amazon.com/Christmas-Season-Light-Emily-McGowin/dp/1514000407?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), “Children are among those people with whom Jesus so closely identifies that they become a sacramental sign. The hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the unclothed, the sick, the imprisoned, children—Jesus says of all these that to welcome and serve them is to welcome and serve him (see Matthew 18:5; 25:40; Mark 9:37).”

So, in addition to the potential for encountering God in the created mathematical realm, teachers of mathematics also encounter him in their pupils. [N.T. Wright, citing Matthew 25, describes it this way:](https://www.reformedworship.org/resource/nt-wright-word-and-sacraments-we-need-both?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) “There’s a close fit between welcoming and recognizing the Christ who comes to us as the one who fills heaven and earth and who now mysteriously fills this bread and wine, and the Christ who comes to us in the face of those in need whom we meet on the street or elsewhere.” Combining McGowin’s and Wright’s insights: children’s genuine need for instruction as well as their vulnerability should elevate them in the Christian life.

Accordingly, Jesus’ stern warning in Matthew 18 about misleading children shouldn’t surprise us. [Eugene Peterson paraphrases](https://www.bible.com/bible/97/MAT.18.MSG?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) Jesus’ warning like this: “But if you give them \[believing children\] a hard time, bullying or taking advantage of their simple trust, you’ll soon wish you hadn’t. You’d be better off dropped in the middle of the lake with a millstone around your neck.” Jesus did not directly refer to the teaching of mathematics, but he demonstrated concern for the spiritual and moral formation of children. Therefore, since the teaching of mathematics has moral and spiritual dimensions, we should take our (formal or informal) role as teachers of mathematics seriously.

***Therefore, Spirit, in light of these truths, help us create learning environments where students are welcomed and loved so that every mathematical interaction with a child might point to your kingdom of shalom.***

The third and final part of the prayer weaves ideas from Su with a call for the Spirit’s aid. In addition to exploration, play, and beauty, Su identifies several other basic human desires that draw us to the practice of mathematics including our desire for justice, community, and love. Mathematical spaces—whether in the home, at school, or in an after-school program—are often unnecessarily exclusive and alienating. People carry lots of biased assumptions about who is and isn’t a math person, and we’ve created narrow metrics to determine if someone is “good” or “bad” at math. To put it plainly: mathematical learning environments are sometimes [characterized more by vice rather than virtue](https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02664-6?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

But Su explains how the practice of mathematics, when rooted in basic human desires like justice, community, freedom, and love, can cultivate the virtues of hospitality, attention to people, vulnerability, fearlessness in asking questions, and empathy for the marginalized. Mathematical learning environments—like the atmosphere of a game night with friends—can demand intellectual rigor and simultaneously be welcoming and low-stakes.

In addition to the previously listed virtues, Su suggests that mathematics can cultivate the virtue of love. [Su](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300258516/mathematics-for-human-flourishing/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) explains: “to love through and because of mathematics is to build hopefulness, to cultivate creativity, to promote reflection, to foster a thirst for deep knowledge and investigation, to encourage in ourselves and one another a disposition toward beauty and all the other virtues.” Thus, there is a simple starting point for practicing the virtue of love vis-à-vis teaching mathematics: believe that you and all your students can learn and enjoy mathematics.

Mathematical learning environments that are characterized by unconditional love serve as a signpost pointing towards God’s kingdom of peace. We have been liberated from sin and death for life with God—and mathematics should be part of that Edenic life! As [Su writes](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300258516/mathematics-for-human-flourishing/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), “A society without mathematical affection is like a city without concerts, parks, or museums. To miss out on mathematics is to live without an opportunity to play with beautiful ideas and see the world in a new light.” The new Jerusalem—that garden city which will one day descend from heaven—will teem with mathematical affection. God will restore broken relationships vis-à-vis mathematics, and the mathematical anxieties and frustrations of the present age will fade away.

Until that time, may the Triune God make all our living—including our practice of mathematics—a sacrament of him. He graciously welcomes us into his inner divine life of love and we can reflect him as we explore and enjoy the mathematical realm he created.
### We Need a Warrior: Reflections on Revelation and Wake Up Dead Man
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/we-need-a-warrior-reflections-on-revelation-and-wake-up-dead-man/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:29:20.000Z
At the premiere of the new *Knives Out* thriller *Wake Up Dead Man* \[Spoilers ahead\], Director Rian Johnson introduced the viewing by saying, “We’re going back to church.”

Anytime Hollywood goes to church, it makes churchgoers nervous. A common Hollywood trope is the outspoken Christian—portrayed as judgmental, hypocritical, duplicitous, downright wicked, or some combination of these. Of course, we churchgoers recognize these villains, too, but nonetheless often feel cartoonishly misrepresented in major productions. As columnist [Ross Douthat points out](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/05/opinion/film-hollywood-andor-politics.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), art can be “coded” by who you choose as your hero or villain. And when Hollywood goes to church, it’s usually not difficult to crack the code of an anti-Christian bias.

*Wake Up Dead Man* dabbles in such tropes. The church-lady-turned-murderer-mastermind Martha (Glenn Close) and the victim Monseigneur Wicks (Josh Brolin) are stock examples of the silly, sanctimonious believer who manipulates and exploits for personal gain. Yet, *Wake Up Dead Man* is different because such caricatures are intentionally cartoonish and contrasted with the protagonist Father Jud (Josh O’Connor). Father Jud displays the qualities most of us look for in a pastor. He is fiercely committed to the gospel of Jesus Christ in a way that does not water down the message, but he is a shepherd of souls, a pastor is with people in their brokenness and shows them the light and grace of Christ.

As a movie, *Wake Up Dead Man* showcases the excellence from the other *Knives Out* films. It’s a mind-wracking whodunnit that is both funny and touching, led by the magnetic Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), who has earned his place among fiction’s greatest detectives. But *Wake Up Dead Man* is more interesting (and, I think, better) than the previous installments because it tackles life’s greatest questions about meaning, faith, doubt, and belief. Despite his resolute commitment to “reason,” the pinnacle of the movie is not, as we expect and as Blanc foretells, “the moment of checkmate, when I take the stage and unravel my opponent’s web.” Rather, it is a stunning act of mercy, when Blanc himself — despite his nonbelief — has a “Damascus” moment: he relinquishes the grand stage of unfurling the crime and recedes into the background as an act of grace to the guilty. It is an extraordinarily powerful and perfectly understated piece of storytelling. Moments such as these propel *Wake Up Dead Man* beyond an entertaining mystery and into a wonderful piece of art.

But whatever other important questions it raises, one of the most culturally pressing is Christianity’s place in the public sphere. In Monseigneur Wicks and Father Jud, the film upholds two visions for how the church might think about her role in the world: as a warrior fighting back against a wicked culture or as a welcoming, open-armed hospital. Almost explicitly, the film raises a question essential for the contemporary church to answer: what does it mean to fight for the church? For Christ?

—

The church cannot allow contemporary cinema to set the agenda nor give the final answer to this question. But it’s a question that’s been raised since the inception of the faith. We find it prominently displayed, for instance, in the often neglected, final book of the Christian Scriptures: the book of Revelation.

Revelation strikes fear into the hearts of its readers not only for its fantastic, sometimes bloody, imagery, but also for its opacity. We avoid what we don’t understand. Whatever else Revelation might say about the mysteries of eschatology, one unmistakable theme central to the book is what it means *to conquer*. The word for conquer (in Greek, “*nikao*”) appears 17 times in Revelation, more than the rest of the New Testament combined. Careful readers, however, will notice an intentionally inconsistent use.

Revelation 11 tells of the “two witnesses” — in Greek the “*martusin,*” the word from which we derive “martyr.” When the witnesses finish their “testimony” (“*marturia*,” from which we derive “martyrdom”), we read: “the beast that comes up from the bottomless pit will make war on them and conquer them” (11:7, NRSV). This harkens back to Revelation 6, when “the souls of those who had been slaughtered for the word of God and for the testimony \[*marturian*\] they had given” cry out to God: “how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood” (6:10)? Plainly, the blasphemous beast is “allowed to make war on the saints and to conquer them” (13:7). Initially, we find “to conquer” implies the straightforward sense of overwhelming force to dominate. The beast conquers the faithful through raw power; the faithful are the conquered.

Yet, John’s revelation also inverts the meaning of conquer. Though themselves conquered, those who follow Christ, portrayed in Revelation as the slain Lamb, “have conquered \[the dragon\] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony\[*marturias*\], for they did not cling to life even in the face of death” (12:11). For though the dragon and beast make war on the Lamb, ultimately “the Lamb will conquer them, for he is Lord of lords and King of kings” (17:14). The Lamb is the slaughtered one (5:6), before whom the faithful sing, “worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered” (5:12). Yet, John’s vision sets before our eyes a Lamb who is slaughtered *and yet conquers*. So, too, the faithful who follow him: only those who “conquer” with the conquered Lamb — themselves “witnesses” (literally, martyrs) to the Lamb — will inherit God’s promises (21:7).

This bifurcated use of “conquer” presents the reader of Revelation two distinct ways to conquer: the way of the beast and the way of the Lamb. It is not a question of whether we will conquer, but how we shall do so. Revelation’s “beast” might have multiple referents, but several symbols — such as the “seven hills” which indicate the famed seven hills upon which Rome is built or the number “666” which, according to many Biblical scholars, symbolically indicates Nero —

such as the heads on “seven hills” and 666 likely referring, by way of gematria, to “Nero” — suggest the Roman Empire, and its many blasphemous rulers, is in view. The beast is not, or at least not *merely*, a supernatural force, but the seductive, standard form of empire and worldly power or force. Revelation commentator [Richard Bauckham insists ](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/theology-of-the-book-of-revelation/3B142F3C31A6B59B957FB70ED7FDA8D4?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)“it is a serious mistake to suppose that Revelation opposes the Roman Empire solely because of its persecution of Christians. Rather Revelation advances a thorough-going prophetic critique of the system of Roman power…From John’s prophetic perspective Rome’s evil lay primarily in absolutizing her own power and prosperity.” Revelation’s criticism of Rome, or “the beast,” is not only that it is anti-Christ, but it is a criticism of that kind of power *as such* and, in particular, in the methods the empire uses to conquer its victims. Revelation, therefore, is manifestly not against conquering — John invites all 7 churches to conquer with the Lamb — but a way of conquering that prioritizes its own interests and bowls over all who get in the way.

The irony, as Bauckham points out, is that the criticism Revelation levies at Rome or worldly force in general could be levied at the church herself at points in her own checkered past. Individual Christians or whole Christians institutions can succumb to the temptation to conquer like the beast. When the ends are Christian morality or even salvation, any means necessary may be justified. Revelation itself, after all, depicts Christ as a warrior. But the warrior imagery is refracted through the much more dominant imagery of the slain Lamb.

The warrior image is aligned with [“strongly militaristic and nationalistic” Messianic expectations](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/theology-of-the-book-of-revelation/3B142F3C31A6B59B957FB70ED7FDA8D4?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), but those expectations are subverted by the warrior who fights through willingly submitting to death. Paradoxically, the conquered Lamb conquers *precisely because it was conquered*. And those who wish to follow Christ must follow the way of the Lamb.

—

What Revelation does with fantastic imagery, *Wake Up Dead Man* does with the earthy characters Monseigneur Wicks and Father Jud. It presents two paths forward for the church: the way of Wicks or the way of Jud.

It’s an especially timely portrait, too, since Christians are actively wrestling with how to navigate what [Aaron Renn calls a “negative world](https://firstthings.com/the-three-worlds-of-evangelicalism/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).” Succinctly, a negative world in which our culture takes a predominantly negative view of Christianity, as opposed to a positive or neutral view. Both Monseigneur Wicks and Father Jud gesture to the surrounding culture’s shifting perspective toward the church. It is debatable how “negative” the world is toward Christians, but it’s undeniable that the Western world is becoming *less Christian*. In measures like [church attendance](https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/decline-of-christianity-in-the-us-has-slowed-may-have-leveled-off/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) or [Biblical literacy](https://religionunplugged.com/news/2024/4/17/state-of-the-bible-americans-less-engaged-but-gen-z-bucking-trend?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) or [Christian morality](https://www.barna.com/research/morality-continues-to-decay/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), Westerners today are somewhere on the spectrum between “less influenced by” and “more hostile toward” Christianity than they were 10, 25, and 50 years ago. Christians today are still discerning how to operate in a culture that is increasingly called “post-Christian.” This, I think, is what Monseigneur Wicks means by “modernity.”

Wicks’ response is, in Revelation’s parlance, the way of the beast: it opts for force; not necessarily weaponry or even physical might (though, as Wicks shows, that’s not necessarily out of the question), but it is confrontational and projects strength. The physical posture is “dukes up”: if the world insults and reviles, the church should give it back. She must defend herself, whatever it takes. The aim is to win.

Transposed to Revelation, the way of Jud is the way of the Lamb: it repudiates the force utilized by Wicks and, instead, accepts the insults and allows itself to be reviled. It displays strength through vulnerability and boasts in its weakness. It admits its faults. The Wicks-Jud spectrum runs not only through these two different characters, however, but through Father Jud himself. His violent, boxing past haunts him, and he often feels the impulse to punch back — sometimes, literally. But he recognizes his pastoral call is to heal a broken world, not hit it harder.

In one of the funniest scenes of *Wake Up Dead Man*, Lee Ross (Andrew Scott) strongly voices his support of Monseigneur Wicks by saying: “The church doesn’t need some pussy who’s going to lie down and take it. We need a warrior. We need a warrior.” What makes the moment so funny, and laced with irony, is the painting of Jesus on the cross prominently displayed in the background. The cross is the central, shocking image of Christianity: in the human Christ, God suffered and died. Our savior did “lie down and take it” — and instructs us to do the same. We follow a slaughtered Lamb and we will only conquer if we share in his death.

For all *Wake Up Dead Man* poignantly captures about the Christian response to the world, there is one subliminal message the church should resist. In one of the most moving scenes of the movie, Father Jud and Blanc are interrupted by Louise (Bridget Everett) emotionally telling Father Jud about personal hardships. Father Jud’s switch [to give her his attention](https://www.christianitytoday.com/2025/09/pay-give-attention-crisis-productivity-love/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) is the most convicting and loving act in the film. It is, as he narrates later, *his* Damascus road moment: instead of solving crimes, he should be tending his flock. The film rightly identifies the Priest’s vocation as a Pastoral one. But there are dangers in any extreme, and the church should be careful not to reduce her mission to a therapeutic mission centered only on soul care and counseling.

In Wicks and Jud, we glimpse the common dichotomy between “grace” and “truth” personified. But that common dichotomy is, of course, a false one. Sometimes we accept false dichotomies because they communicate something otherwise difficult to express. But in this case, the distinction obscures more than clarifies. The message of grace *is* true, and telling someone the truth *is* grace. At best, the two are sides of a coin. But they do aim at a real, challenging dynamic the church faces: between her prophetic mode and merciful mode. In the prophetic mode — exemplified in the Old Testament prophets, no less than by John in his apocalypse — the church calls the wicked to repentance; she unrelentingly identifies sin as the destructive force that it is. But she simultaneously (and therein lies the challenge) inhabits a merciful mode — exemplified in the prodigal’s welcoming father — in which she recognizes she cannot cast the first, or any, stone, and so she welcomes all, even the worst of sinners, with open arms, like Christ himself does on the hard wood of the cross. That Monseigneur Wicks is a repulsive character who only inhabits the prophetic mode should not give us license to abandon such a mode altogether. The church must, *because she loves the world*, uphold a public, prophetic voice for truth, goodness, and beauty. Grace demands it.

The prophetic and merciful modes, together, shape a distinctly Christian vision of “conquering.” Christian conquest is not mere passivity — to lie down and take whatever happens — but a righteous and impassioned concern to reflect Christ’s own concerns. In both means and ends, Monseigneur Wicks exemplifies how the church adopts the way of the Beast: he seeks to conquer for the sake of the church’s earthly power and authority, even when that means trampling over his own parishioners or the broken who attend his church in seek of God’s love. Wicks’ conquest is absorbed with, as Bauckham put it, a thirst to “absolutize \[the church’s\] own power and prosperity.” Father Jud, by contrast, owns the church’s mistakes and resists her entanglement with earthly power and authority. He is far from passive; indeed, he is often aggressive and, if necessary, combative. We should, to clear up one possible misconception, resist the view that Christianity necessitates pacifism. To defend the defenseless is to oppose the way of the Beast. But we should allow Revelation’s Lamb, in contrast to the Beast, to indelibly shape our imagination for what Christian conquest looks like. There is no clear principle in Revelation, or anywhere in Scripture for that matter, that tells us when force or resistance is appropriate in every case and I do not attempt such a principle here. But we must, nonetheless, allow the Scriptural image of the submission and subjection of Christ — found in Saint Paul no less than Revelation — to transform our hearts and minds, especially in a cultural moment in which the church finds herself against the ropes.

Christ himself, of course, is the perfect embodiment of the way of the Lamb. He shows us how to unite the twin modes of the church. But we do not imitate by merely following his example; rather, we imitate Christ by being caught up in the divine life and transformed by the Spirit. The way of the Lamb is accessible only in a life transformed by God and, therefore, not out of one’s own strength. Exemplified in Father Jud, this is none other than the Christian virtue of humility: the recognition of our own sinfulness, need of a savior, and the true source of all virtue and righteousness. The strength to follow the way of the Lamb comes from the one who wakes up dead men, and him alone. The movie rightly preaches, I think, that insofar as the church positions herself as a “cultural warrior,” the only truly Christian way is the way of the Lamb. If Christians are cultural warriors in the mold of all the others, we’ve fallen into Wicks’ trap. It’s a trap that’s difficult to resist, which is why *Wake Up Dead Man* is a welcome reminder. At least in this case, we should be grateful that Hollywood went to church.
### Complementarianism and the Dignity of Women
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/sex-realist-feminism-and-complementarianism/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:29:18.000Z
Of the making of books trying to argue for or against women's ordination there is no end.

I'm tired of books rehashing the same arguments over and over—as Tom Schreiner [recently noted](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/from-genesis-junia/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) has become the case. Instead, I think it may be time to talk about complementarianism for the rest of us—because for complementarians in the real world, the conviction that women should not serve as ordained pastors is just one very small aspect of this particular theological stance on the differences in the roles of men and women on this earth. There are many more important matters to consider in daily life at home, at church, and in society. After all, only a tiny fraction of church members (whether in complementarian or egalitarian churches) serve in pastoral roles in their respective churches. What important questions should we be thinking about instead?

While theological views on ordination certainly matter, the myopic zooming in on just this one matter in recent debates is a remarkably modern distraction from everything else that has historically mattered a great deal more for most people in talking about gender in the church. I would like us to foster these other conversations. I do not aim to identify all of these other conversations in a short essay, but I will consider one that I consider particularly key, as other conversations stem from it: Healthy complementarianism (which, [as Gregg Allison reminds](https://bhacademic.bhpublishinggroup.com/product/complementarity-3/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), is very different from unhealthy patriarchy) can help us appreciate God’s purpose for life in our physical bodies, see the biological and theological differences between male and female bodies, and why these differences are good.

## **Life in Our Physical Bodies**

A decade and a half ago, a former colleague, long since retired, was fondly reminiscing about the early days with his oldest baby. He and his wife were juggling responsibilities for the baby, including feeding. So he decided to purchase a special contraption that allowed him to put on a bra of sorts, into which he could then insert the bottle of pumped milk, and then proudly nurse the baby just like mom did. “We thought this would be less confusing for the baby,” he explained.

This story seems less funny today, as stories of gay couples [purchasing surrogate babies](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-babies-money-can-buy) have gone decidedly mainstream. Like much of the secular culture today, images of men cosplaying motherhood with newborn skin-to-skin post-delivery-room photos, sometimes even while posed artificially on a delivery bed, insist on something that secular feminists have been saying for decades as well: modernity and fairness demand that men’s and women’s bodies should be completely interchangeable. But are they?

At the risk of sounding overly obvious here, God’s creation of human persons begins with this reality: that there are two different types of bodies, each one specially and deliberately designed by a loving God. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). The bodies of men are different from the bodies of women—have been from the time of creation on. Both are made in the image of God, but they are biologically different, and this biology cannot be unmade or remade. For one thing, with all the gender reassignment surgeries, this biological truth still prevails: Only women can (but only with the aid of men) get pregnant and bring a baby to birth. This makes motherhood special—biologically and theologically.

To us today this latter point may seem very obvious and not worthy of comment. But it is worthy of much more attention than we give it—not least because this is a unique point for Judaeo-Christian theology. The theology of the body that we find in Genesis 1:27 is unlike anything found in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world. [Scientific misogyny](https://fairerdisputations.org/erasing-motherhood-scientific-misogyny-ancient-and-modern/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) has a long history in antiquity. Poets like Simonides of Amorgos wrote their invectives on the evil that is women, connecting different types of wives to animals, going from bad to worse. Plato’s *Symposium* glamorized the romantic love of men for each other—since women were viewed as intellectual lightweights unworthy of proper love. And theories of medicine articulated by authors like Aeschylus, Hippocrates, and Aristotle declared that the father made the baby—all the woman contributed was a container for growing said baby. Therefore (the argument went) perhaps mothers weren’t even parents to the children they bore. It is no coincidence either that, in Ovid’s *Metamorphoses*, when Pygmalion crafted the ideal wife out of stone, she was at first just a statue—mute, unable to do anything. When miraculously revived by the goddess of love, all this ideal wife can do is remain mute and fulfill her creator’s imagined wishes.

There is no question about it: people in antiquity outside the Judaeo-Christian circles firmly believed that women were different from men. They were not, however, complementarians in the sense of valuing these differences and distinctions. It was obvious to most ancient thinkers that women were undoubtedly worse human beings than men. Marriage is a curse Zeus gave to men, the Archaic Greek poet Hesiod notes matter-of-factly. Aristotle, furthermore, described women as defective or incomplete men—because of their ability to get pregnant, which indicated their imperfection according to his logic.

In this cultural context, the declaration in Genesis 1:27 that God wanted to create both men and women in his own image is unique and special. Neither men nor women are a mistake. Neither type of body represents creation that is flawed or incomplete. Both types of bodies were God’s design. Modern science is continuing to reveal the depths of these differences, which include much more than just pregnancy and its effects on [women’s bodies and brains](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0d59e7wjlo?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). [Fatherhood affects men’s brains](https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fnyti.ms%2F3RtvM96%3Ffbclid%3DIwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAYnJpZBExdVhXN2JDTEFJR3c3WlpHaHNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR5%5FDi%5FtqbfiiTkxM8ocAbxk2PJJ3aADE11KPwdwF0s2tGKlXHnNCcezHsgX4g%5Faem%5F2SUsrkBk3m7JO0lWOn7vmQ&h=AT7anHuWD36Kgk0Fo3HYleSdrzYdm-kvViSTpH8pE%5F1qo-tJvvpKZJXMZyVQ19ydsuGLp3mOQH%5FyD6GXjts30eJgg6be6Fv6IEsfEMNl1Xanier2pnojzNYXLin9T52SsTBEwr%5FpZF5fwQ&%5F%5Ftn%5F%5F=%2CmH-R&c%5b0%5d=AT6dwaBlAv1b%5FllsgfSGIUhCLAZlOr6-WcTE34o9NjTlXZPkUDisutkt4CyZ4iL-LmxrABMhNb2b4cEGSFOaYUBuvH5CRtP6UUVEKNOCXoSXqjEqYO-E0LRMwPWUOn-GwuhX0mXthGvYRPD72HCBHFh9aF%5FBYGv2IDFVzGTuPDI9qoLd4fWCYcIaIHmldA&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) too, incidentally—differently than motherhood affects women’s brains. And for women who never bear children, their bodies maintain undeniable characteristics of womanhood as well.

Too often, though, we live today as if these differences between men’s and women’s bodies aren’t true, or as if they are a problem to eradicate. Indeed, the egalitarian mindset stems from the modern assumption that men and women are perfectly interchangeable in every area of life. If women can nurse babies, then men should be able to do the same. If women can get pregnant and give birth, men should be able to do the same (trans activists insist). If men can work in a particular career field, whatever it is, then women can do it too.

And yet, healthy complementarianism is sex-realist in its recognition that women are special—and so are men. We are not interchangeable, and this is a good thing theologically, biologically, and practically. Yes, there are certain things that we can all do by virtue of our human dignity and our citizenship in America, for instance (e.g., yes, both men and women can vote, and this is a good thing too). Still, there are certain things that only men or only women can do, and this too is good and beautiful—the result of a careful and treasured divine design.

The differences in men’s and women’s physical nature extend well beyond merely reproduction, of course, as [Louise Perry has emphasized](https://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-Sexual-Revolution/dp/1509549994?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). These differences form the core of [sex-realist feminism](https://fairerdisputations.org/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)—a feminism that recognizes that we should encourage women to flourish as women while encouraging men to flourish as men. We cannot deny that the average man is taller, stronger, and faster than the average woman. To state this is not to insult women—it is a statement of fact. But also, [studies of healthy marriages](https://www.amazon.com/Get-Married-Americans-Families-Civilization/dp/0063210851?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) repeatedly show the goodness of the different traits of men and women serving each other together. Marriage benefits men and women precisely because it places these complementary traits in the service of the other person.

In other words, modern social science research is only beginning to explain something we saw articulated in God’s design of human beings as two different kinds of bodies—male and female. These differences in and of themselves do not mandate complementarian theology. Still, they are a good starting point for considering the goodness of God’s design for men and women in everyday life.
### The Emptiness of Atheism for a Romantic Idealist
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-emptiness-of-atheism-for-a-romantic-idealist/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:29:25.000Z
Christopher Beha. [*Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer*](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/703237/why-i-am-not-an-atheist-by-christopher-beha/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Penguin Press, 2026\. $30.00\. 432 pp.

In 2009, Richard Dawkins and other British atheists paid for an advertising campaign that plastered London buses with a simple message: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

At the time, Christopher Beha was a young aspiring novelist who believed there was no God, and he closely followed Dawkins’s arguments. But he couldn’t stop worrying, and he didn’t enjoy his life.

*Why I Am Not an Atheist* is Beha’s account of why he decided, after a 25-year quest, that atheism was incapable of giving him meaning or answering the questions that plagued him. Part memoir and part history of Western philosophy, this book is Beha’s exploration of the existential questions that have troubled some of the world’s greatest minds for centuries and an analysis of why atheist thinkers have failed to provide compelling answers to them. As Beha shows, most atheistic philosophers have not been able to stop worrying and enjoy their life, because atheism, when properly understood, does not offer any basis for the glib confidence that Dawkins’s message expressed.

Beha began his life as a churchgoing Catholic. His theological grounding was never very deep, but going to Mass each week was part of his cultural identity, and he embraced it. But when his twin brother was hit by a car, Beha found his faith shaken. His own years-long bout with cancer in his early 20s further eroded whatever faith was left. He found the amount of suffering in the world incompatible with his picture of God.

Instead of dependence on God, Beha wanted courage, and he identified courage with a resolute determination to face death with no religious crutch—to look it in the face without the aid of God. He found inspiration in Bertrand Russell’s assertion in *Why I Am Not a Christian* that belief in God is a product of fear. Beha refused to admit that he was afraid—which is why he refused to believe in God.

(Indeed, Russell’s book was so influential on Beha’s journey away from God that when he finally returned to a Christian faith, many years later, he titled his own faith memoir *Why I Am Not an Atheist* as a parody of Russell’s book title).

As Beha now admits, he was never as fearless as he let on, which is why he could not face his life without the aid of a prodigious amount of mind-altering substances. He drank heavily every night and also indulged in plenty of illegal drugs. He was deeply depressed and suicidal. He distracted himself with partying and solitary writing. But most of all, he devoted himself to reading philosophy.

Beha wanted to find a philosophical answer to three questions: “How am I to live? What do I owe to other people (or even to myself)? What is the meaning of life?”

Even though some of Beha’s questions sounded ethical in nature, he wasn’t interested in what could be learned from a textbook on ethics, because he wasn’t looking for something practical but rather existential. “I was after more than rules of conduct,” he said. “I wanted a meaningful life.” Most people, he realized, did not ask the questions, “What am I doing here?” and “What is the point of all this?” nearly often enough, but he couldn’t let those questions go—and as a result, he kept reading.

Scientific materialists (a category that includes “new atheists” such as Dawkins) were completely uninterested in Beha’s questions, because they consider them meaningless. Scientific materialists believe that material reality is all there is. And if that’s the case, not only is there no transcendent purpose for the universe or for individual people, but there is also no soul in the machine of our bodies. We have no free will, because we are simply a chemical computer. There is no fundamental difference between human intelligence and artificial intelligence, except that human intelligence is a biological composition of purely immaterial forces, whereas artificial intelligence is an electronic composition shaped by human intelligence. But in the end, we’re all purely material compositions of one type or another.

Beha couldn’t accept this. The impulses he felt—the drive toward free choice, the passions, the literary longings—felt real to him, and he refused to believe in a worldview that claimed that all of these were merely an illusion caused by a trick of the chemical atoms in his brain. He had to find real meaning—and he could never do that through a theory of scientific materialism.

But Beha discovered that scientific materialism was not the only type of atheism on offer. There was an older type of atheism that was the atheism of Nietzsche and Heidegger—an atheism that Beha calls “romantic idealism.” Romantic idealists believe that a person’s “subjective will, rather than objective physical matter, as the bedrock feature of reality.” It “treat\[s\] our subjective experience of reality as the proper grounds of knowledge.” While scientific materialists, following the scientific method, want to transcend our subjectivity through empirical observation, romantic idealists think that we can find truth about ultimate reality only by looking within and following our own subjective longings.

There have been many romantic idealists, both inside and outside of Christianity. The American transcendentalists of the 1840s were romantic idealists, and Ralph Waldo Emerson was a romantic idealist par excellence. (Emerson’s 1841 essay on “Self-Reliance” begins with the statement “Every man is his own star,” and continues with the line, “Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string”). Nearly all Hollywood movies, along with numerous novels, poems, and other works of American art and literature are in some way influenced by romantic idealism and its notion that if we follow our heart, we’ll find the truth. I suspect that the number of Americans today who believe Shakespeare’s line “To thine own self be true” greatly outnumbers those who are full-fledged scientific materialists.

And not all those people are agonizing in quest for ultimate purpose in the same way as Beha. Most secular romantic idealists today would probably take their philosophical guidance from mid-twentieth-century secular French existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who encouraged people to find their own subjective meaning simply by daring to make choices, regardless of whether those choices connected to the transcendent.

Beha read Camus—as well as earlier philosophers who influenced Camus, such as Nietzsche and Heidegger—but he also sensed that something was missing in these thinkers. He found in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Camus a valuation of freedom. What he also found was despair. Camus’s hero was the “absurd man” who “*knows* that he cannot answer the question of meaning.” “He has two certainties: his own hunger for the absolute and the utter impossibility of satisfying that hunger in the world.”

Much of Beha’s philosophical search for transcendent meaning parallels the book of Ecclesiastes, and with similar results.

“I had freed myself from the chains, and I had come to recognize the shadows on the wall for what they were—insubstantial appearances,” Beha writes. “But I had also come to understand that there was no way out, apart from death. The idea that one could somehow escape to some higher reality was just another shadow dream. I vacillated between a romantic pessimism that wallowed in these facts and a romantic affirmation that attempted to will meaning in the face of them.” If there is no God, there can be no ultimate meaning or purpose.

Then, after reaching this realization, Beha found love. It started by falling in love with a woman, which suddenly made him happy in a way that he had not been for years. “Somehow, I was giving in to the temptation to exist,” he said. He suddenly wanted to get married and have children. A week before the wedding, he even quit drinking.

Yet rather than distract him from his quest for ultimate meaning, this sudden happiness raised new questions. “My life was filled with love, but there was something in this love that demanded I make sense of it?” Where did this love come from? He felt grateful for his new life, but he “had no framework for this gratitude”—no one to be grateful to.

In his search for something larger, he finally went back to church. He enjoyed it, but belief was not instantaneous. For a while, he simply sat through the services each Sunday, taking in the liturgy yet not allowing it to change his life.

Yet one Sunday, after attending church for a few months, he heard a reading from 1 John: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.”

As Beha heard the rest of the passage, he was struck by the phrase “God is love.” God abides in us through love, Beha realized. In all of his years of seeking freedom, he had been running away from God, because he had resisted love. Now that he found love, he was ready to find God. He accepted God’s love, which he found “spoke to my deepest needs.”

Suddenly, Beha had a transcendent purpose, because he now knew that “the purpose of our existence is to know and love the created order and through doing so to know and love God. Love is the cause of the world. . . We are here to love.” This, he realized, is what the Catholic catechism had taught all along: “If man exists, it is because God has created him through love, and through love continues to hold him in existence.”

As Beha says, he is still a romantic idealist, but now he is a Christian romantic idealist—someone who takes more inspiration from Søren Kierkegaard than Albert Camus. He found God not by meditating on the external evidence of the natural world but by listening to the voice within. And for that reason, he ends his book by saying, “If you have been expecting me to conclude with a rational proof for faith, I have to disappoint you, because I don’t think that such a proof exists. But I do believe it is possible to make a rational case for listening to the whispering voice within our souls.”

Because Beha has little regard for empiricism, he is not particularly interested in discussions of evidence for Jesus’s divinity from the historical record, as recorded in scripture—the sort of thing that C. S. Lewis argued for in *Mere Christianity* and that numerous other books of Christian apologetics, including Timothy Keller’s *Reason for God*, also emphasize. Instead, he emphasizes his own experience, not as a form of mere pragmatism, but as a form of real knowledge, arrived at subjectively.

“All I can say is that *I* tried it \[that is, living without God\], and it didn’t work for me,” Beha says. Christianity, he adds, quoting Wittgenstein, “‘is only for the man who needs infinite help.’ Over many years I have come to discover that I am that man.”

Christians will recognize in Beha’s story a narrative of true Christian conversion: the realization of the need for grace and the trust in Jesus as savior. The fact that God has saved Beha is more important from a Christian standpoint than the epistemological path that he took to get there.

But since Beha’s book is largely about epistemology, I must at this point raise a critical question about his epistemological assumptions. Beha began and ended his quest as a romantic idealist—that is, as someone who thinks that the best source of truth came from looking within, in contrast to scientific materialists, who look to the objective world as a source of truth. And in keeping with his romantic idealism, Beha insists at the end that he cannot offer a rational proof for the Christian faith but can only appeal to his subjective experience.

This subjective epistemology of experience has pervaded mainline Protestantism for more than a century. There are also plenty of contemporary evangelical Christians who share a similar epistemology. There are even Bible verses that may, on the surface, seem to support it. “If anyone’s will is to do God’s will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority,” Jesus said in John 7:17 (ESV)—a statement that appears to support the idea of an intuitive perception of divine truth among those who want to follow Jesus.

Traditional Christian epistemology is thus compatible in some ways with romantic idealism, but not fully compatible with it. The idea that we cannot find a basis for knowledge of God in the rationality of the material universe is based not on traditional Christian theology but instead on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who drew a sharp divide between the realm of reason and the realm of faith.

Beha assumes this division is axiomatic, and he has little regard for the proofs of classical theism or the empirically based arguments of Christian apologists who try to make a case for Christianity from historical or scientific evidence. But until the nineteenth century, nearly all orthodox Christians in the western world believed, in accordance with Romans 1:20, that one could find sufficient evidence for God’s existence by observing the natural world, even if such evidence was not enough for salvation.

Even the Westminster Confession of Faith, representing a Reformed tradition that has often been skeptical about unaided human reason, includes the line, “The light of nature showeth that there is a God, who hath lordship and sovereignty over all; is good, and doeth good unto all” (WCF, 21.1). The current Catechism of the Catholic Church, reflecting Catholicism’s Thomistic tradition, says something similar: While “God willed both to reveal himself to man and to give him the grace of being able to welcome this revelation in faith,” “the proofs of God’s existence . . . can predispose one to faith and help one to see that faith is not opposed to reason” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 35).

Both the Catholic tradition and the Reformed tradition are grounded in pre-Kantian understandings of epistemology, so they understand the natural world (and natural reason) as a reliable guide to objective truth, since they are the creation of the one true God. In our finitude and in our fallen state, our understanding of that objective truth is flawed, but nevertheless, there are still objective truths of the world that can be perceived and that do point to God, as Romans 1:20 suggests.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church points to two types of “converging and convincing arguments” for knowledge of God’s existence, apart from the divine gift of faith. The second of those is the type of evidence that Beha emphasizes – the subjective sense within us that we long for something more than the material world provides. “With his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, with his longings for the infinite and for happiness, man questions himself about God’s existence,” the catechism states. “In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul,” which “can have its origin only in God” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 33).

Beha devotes his entire book to the subjective journey that the catechism describes, and in the end, he found that it pointed him to “signs of his spiritual soul,” just as the catechism promised.

But while I can understand why that evidence was sufficient for him, given his temperament and background, I am disappointed that he directly denies the usefulness of the type of the *first* category of evidences for faith that the catechism affirms: the “physical world.” Echoing Thomas Aquinas and the other scholastics—and citing Romans 1:20, as well as a statement from Augustine—the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “Starting from movement, becoming, contingency, and the world’s order and beauty, one can come to a knowledge of God as the origin and the end of the universe” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 32).

Kant denied this form of evidence, and Beha assumes that Kant had good reason for doing so. So, in the end, Beha remains what he calls a “Christian existentialist”—that is, a Christian who is still committed to romantic idealism, but who believes that God has broken into his subjective experience to give him true knowledge of God within himself.

While one can certainly be a regenerated, theologically orthodox Christian while also being a Christian existentialist or romantic idealist (as Kierkegaard arguably was), I think that we lose something by denying the possibility of arriving at objective, rationally compelling evidence for God from the external world.

We lose an important connection between God and creation. We lose a historic part of the Christian tradition that both Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin shared. And we lose the capacity to provide a compelling apologetic to scientific materialists who aren’t moved by the subjective arguments that Beha cites and instead want a more objective argument grounded in the scientific evidence of the universe’s origin and cosmic order.

Fortunately, Christian apologetics gives us both sets of arguments, even if Beha gives us only one. Beha’s book is a very important work for those who gravitate toward romantic idealism, as many contemporary Americans do, at least in part. But for those who are empiricists, tempted perhaps by scientific materialism, there are other works of apologetics that go far beyond Beha in their willingness to consider objective external evidence for God’s existence.

There is room for more than one approach to Christian apologetics, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church suggests. *Why I Am Not an Atheist* is an impressive example of one of these approaches. It will likely appeal mostly to those who gravitate toward a subjective epistemology compatible with romantic idealism. That’s certainly not the case for every atheist – but for those for whom it is true, Beha’s book may be the text that God uses to show them the futility of trying to find purpose and meaning apart from God.
### The Myth of the American West
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-myth-of-the-american-west/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:29:22.000Z
Megan Kate Nelson. [The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Westerners/Megan-Kate-Nelson/9781668004340?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Scribner, 2026\. $31.00\. 464 pp.

The history of the frontier has been central to the American imagination and our identity. According to Frederick Jackson Turner, we are a people made by our frontier. Historically we find the people who were out on that frontier interesting. We are fascinated by Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and George Armstrong Custer. Americans are also captivated by the leaders like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, who resisted the American westward expansion. Lewis and Clark never found the Northwest Passage, but we have never lost interest in their general project. Consider the prominence of the Oregon Trail video game in the memories of the millennial generation.

Yet for all our fascination with the American West, our knowledge of the manifesting of manifest destiny is often quite thin. *The Westerners* aims to improve our knowledge of the American frontier, by introducing us to historical people and places left out of the familiar narrative. We start with Sacajawea, but from there Nelson weaves together the stories of less familiar people. These are figures who existed on geographical and cultural frontiers. Jim Beckwourth was a biracial fur trader who spent time living among the Apsáalooke (Crow) and seems to have been everywhere a trading outpost was ever established in the West. Polly Bemis was a Chinese woman who began in rural obscurity in China, was trafficked to the US, and wound up in Idaho and eventually even somewhat famous. María Gertrudis Barceló ran a gambling saloon in Santa Fe, where she became rich and connected.

Nelson is trying, very explicitly, to highlight people who have otherwise been absent from the conventional narrative of the West. You might know about Crazy Horse, but what do you know about Northern Cheyenne chief Little Wolf, who sometimes did cooperate with the U.S. government? Even if they were known in their own time and had published accounts of their lives, many of these figures don’t fit the conventional story of the frontier. Ella Watson was a woman who had her own ranch and was killed by rivals and then degraded in the press. Ovando Hollister grew up a Shaker and then became a Western booster, but he was a newspaper man and an anti-Mormon in Utah. Essentially, the people profiled in the book are not the type of people who would be main characters in a John Wayne film.

*The Westerners* is often an entertaining read. The people that Nelson has chosen are very interesting. Jim Beckwourth arguably deserves an entire book. Most readers would probably like to know more about María Gertrudis Barceló and Polly Bemis. The passages on Sacajawea are also very rich and leave one wanting to know more about her son. Sometimes the characters somewhat cross paths by covering familiar ground. In the process, Nelson is attempting to complicate the narrative of the Western frontier, and she offers us a somewhat complicated structure, with overlapping character narratives. Sometimes this works well. Other times passages that serve as breadcrumbs for a future section of the book can be frustratingly placed.

*The Westerners* is written for a general audience, and it takes us to the past through something more akin to creative nonfiction than traditional history. The scenes are built on research and historical accounts but sometimes have a creative element. For example, in a passage describing Barceló’s card games, Nelson describes the game, based on historical record, but framed as though it’s a specific moment in time. “The games probably went like this. Barceló shuffled her deck. Four suits, ten cards each. She signaled to the players that the game was about to begin. The men leaned forward, palms gripping the wooden edges of the table, staring intently at the cards Barceló laid down.”

The stories in *The Westerners* are easy to read, but the analytic side of the book can sometimes be grating. Nelson does not dive into the academic disputes about the West or the frontier, but at times she focuses quite sharply on the “frontier myth.” According to Nelson, in that myth, the pioneer is always white and men are always dominant. Nelson writes that the white Americans who settled the West, “justified their actions using the ideologies of Manifest Destiny and the American Dream. Most did not care that these national narratives, bolstered by the frontier myth and its exaltation of white pioneer families, led to the political marginalization and social oppression of large populations of Americans.” She argues that the “whitened” West of Manifest Destiny and the American Dream not only oppressed specific people, it is still used “to shore up white supremacy today.”

Manifest Destiny and the American Dream are widely considered problematic by many people, of many political and historiographical stripes. The problem with Nelson’s argument about them isn’t so much the argument, it’s that she doesn’t sufficiently make it. Most of the time, *The Westerners* reads like an inclusion narrative. It resembles late twentieth-century conventional women’s and minority history. It is highly readable and interesting and clearly communicates the importance of non-white and unconventional people on the frontier. The trouble with the occasional attacks on the American Dream and Manifest Destiny is that Nelson does not demonstrate how they were crafted or how we ought to understand them. She simply asserts that they are problematic in specific ways. Yes, she does demonstrate how these specific people were affected by exclusion laws and social codes, but that is not always obvious analysis. Ultimately, she does not offer skeptical readers the opportunity to be convinced. That has the potential to turn off many readers. On the other hand, her sharp critiques of the frontier myth are more occasional than you would expect, so readers skeptical of that aspect of the book can essentially skip those paragraphs and still get a great deal from the book.

As Americans, we will probably never tire of our own history. And it does not seem to matter how many times people tell us that the West isn’t what we think, we will still read another book about it. The absence of David McCullough’s prose and his soothing baritone is deeply felt. His mantle remains to be taken up. Nelson is not yet an obvious successor, but she offers us a well-researched, lively book about real people in the West. Whether or not readers agree with her interpretation of Manifest Destiny and the American Dream, many will find the people in this book worth reading about.
### The Magpie 5: Deep in Some New World
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-magpie-5-deep-in-some-new-world/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:29:28.000Z
Peter Harrison. [*Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age*](https://www.amazon.com/Some-New-World-Supernatural-Secular/dp/1009477226?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Cambridge University Press, 2024\. $39.99\. 488 pp.

Deep in *Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age*, historian Peter Harrison restates his thesis. “Saliency is culturally determined,” he writes. What is “relevant” to a modern mind is not a simple measure of what is likely or true. Rather, what we deem important has already been pre-determined by what we believe is possible. The “predictive mind” that Andy Clark writes about in *The Experience Machine* (2023) is not the neutral observer of reality that we imagine it to be. Instead, it comes to see what it looks for.

The question of God’s relevance is having a bit of a moment. Tales of enchantment, re-enchantment, and disenchantment bloom like wildflowers in the spring. I suppose we might allow them all to live—let a thousand flowers bloom and so on—and yet many of these accounts are poorly considered. They project onto the world what they already believe to be true and find evidence for what they already think is the case. Consider this: many accounts of “enchantment” or “disenchantment” fail in similar ways.

In the **first place**, many accounts of disenchantment (or re-enchantment) fail to define their terms. What is “enchantment”? How do we know we have lost it? What would constitute finding it again? The word “disenchantment” usually entails the assumption that the world is reducible to natural processes, whereas “re-enchantment” assumes that the world’s causes and operations are beyond-natural. Both definitions rely on a view of “natural” processes that is itself disenchanted. This will become important.

As a **second and related example** of the deficiencies of many of these discussions**,** many accounts seem remarkably uninterested in the terms they do define. Terms like religion, “natural,” and supernatural (as well as “nature” and “science”) are treated as self-evident and trans-historical.

In the same voice, we are told that “Religion” is on the decline. What kinds of religion, though, are we counting—and how is their decline demonstrated? Church attendance is too blunt an instrument to do much work (just ask all of the God-honoring men who have gladly stayed home over the years, worshipping God in their deer stand). The point is this: “religion” is far too thick and subtle a category to be tabulated through counting butts in a pew.

It morphs, too. I have met reverent birdwatchers; pious land-conservationists; brittle, judgmental and hell-fire filled turtle crossing guards (this is a turtle-crossing zone, how *dare* you!). Just when you think you’ve stomped it out, religion pops up somewhere else, its seeds dropped by last season’s dandelions in this very-same-field. Are these folks not “religious”? Or has their religion—or their enchantment with the world—simply found a new place to land? All of them seem to treat the world as a source of reverence. They live in the world as if contained a beyond-the-world that we need to seek out.

By not clarifying our terms and querying their meaning, we end up with many stories about The State of the World Religious that tell us very little. Peter Harrison has written a much better story.

\*\*\*

Peter Harrison’s *Some New World* thrilled me. It was exhilarating, and is among the best intellectual histories I have read, ever. Harrison does not accept an easy binary of “religion” against “naturalism.” He interrogates the terms itself. What is “naturalism,” and from where did it come? What is “science,” and how does it relate to religion and nature?

Harrison queries our common parsing of the words “natural” and “supernatural.” Though we often pit the two against each other, he notes that the function of the two as binaries is itself a historical innovation.

The existence of “the supernatural”—and its counterpart, “the natural,” are modern conceits with no analogue in the premodern world. What we know of ancient religion suggests that religion and philosophy were once a unified endeavor, and therefore truths about God and about the natural world were sought together. Aristotle contrasts the “natural” not with the “supernatural” but with the artificial or violent. “Natural” is given, while “artificial” is made or imposed. Augustine’s account of “restless hearts” sought a relief that was natural and divine. For premodern people, truths about God and nature were sought at the same time, in the same way, and for the same reasons. Their pursuit was an attempt to gain knowledge of the world and how to live in it.

The language of the “supernatural” only came into use in the 13th century when the recognition of miracles within the Roman Catholic Church began to be formalized. In theological terms, a miracle is a place where only God is working—unlike in nature, where God is *always* working, alongside other natural causes. In parsing out occasions where God works above or beyond natural causes, the concept of a “supernatural” power began to function.

The idea of the “supernatural” never suggests that God’s power only occurs in miraculous events. Rather, it is cordoning off a particular exercise of divine power that operates separate from natural causes. In the case of the conception of a baby, for instance, what we often call “a miracle” is actually natural causes that work according to a divine design. Babies, for this reason, are not miracles—they are *ordinary*. A healing of a deaf man’s hearing by a mere touch would be working beyond nature, however, so such an exercise of divine power is judged to be miraculous.

This language is not intended to denigrate the pleasure or joyous gift of babies. It simply attempts to attend to the unusual occurrence of divine power in the miraculous. In this case, the opposed terms are not “natural” and “supernatural” but “*natural*” and “*miraculous.*” But when the medieval university was formalized, the natural sciences and theology came to inhabit separate disciplines. The seeds were sown for a possible separation of the two.

Similarly, medieval “proofs” for the existence of God were not attempts to speak of God apart from religious terms. Anselm’s *Proslogion*, Harrison writes, is not an argument or a proof written to convince an atheist, but a religiously motivated vision that seeks to “re-set” our senses. It reminds of the truth about God that should be self-evident.

For earlier people, the reality of God was clear, and belief in him was innate. To not believe was to violate a principle of logic or philosophy. Instead of a live philosophical option, it was a sign of a deficient awareness of the world. Belief in God, Harrison writes, was “not as much a conclusion as a premise.” The idea of a “proof” for the existence of God, or more to the point, an argument *against* God’s existence, arrives only as God comes to be seen as something beholden to a proof. Such an exercise is a distinctively modern one. But by the 19th century a “proof” was an argument that was absent of belief, where previously proofs held together both knowledge and belief.

As Harrison sees it, “science” and anti-supernaturalism formed together. Modern “naturalism” allotted to science what had once been the domain of religion; God was siloed into the “supernatural,” away from meddling in the natural world. The “supernatural” was a modern conceit that allowed God to be placed in a corner, subject to the curiosity of specialists alone. And so, the great explainer of the world came to be not religion, but science.

Chief among Harrison’s arguments, and perhaps the bit with the most critical salience, is that a “naturalistic” worldview required religion to be seen as a relic of the past. The “primitive” mind, which saw the world as haunted with the divine, was replaced by the “scientific” mind, which understood natural causes to be the chief explanations of the world’s workings. By projecting religion as a primitive, outdated exercise, societies were judged to advance by moving beyond religion. The savage was religious, but modern man understood that science was his god. Social progress came to be judged as identical with secularization. Science took the place of religion as the great explainer.

Harrison notes that it is not just natural science, but social science too that functions as the modern world’s explainer. By his account, social scientific fields like sociology—particularly in its Darwinist and Marxist iterations—sought to replace religion as the great explainers of the world. They sought, too, to reorganize the world according to their explanations. In this way, they became an eschatology as well as a grand theory of the world.

The goal of history, then, became to organize human life to achieve the goal that the social sciences had set out for it. The embrace of naturalistic, scientific worldviews, therefore, led to a world where science co-signs our world views—and our views on gender, on politics, on economies, and on the natural world. Leaving behind religion and embracing such views, by implication, is how a society progresses.

Harrison’s book is everything you might hope for in the best of academic history. It is restrained and careful, written with a light hand and some humor. As with the best academic topics, its implications are massive and largely left unexplored. At minimum, this is one: if the hope of the future lies in the sciences, as modernity tells us, then science has replaced religion as modernity’s god. It is no wonder that the world was recently plastered with yard signs, stating that “we believe in science.” According to Harrison, modernity’s god is nothing else. To be religious in the modern world is to be primitive and a relic of the past. To resist this assumption requires nothing less than a cultivated resistance to modernity’s totalizing claims.
### Recovering the Virtues in This Age of Vice: Four New Books
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/recovering-the-virtues-in-this-age-of-vice-four-new-books/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:29:31.000Z
Matthew Arbo. [*The Pursuit of Character: Recovering the Virtues*](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781540906014%5Fthe-pursuit-of-character?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Baker Books, 2026\. $19.99\. 160 pp.

**David Hein.** [Teaching the Virtues](https://mecostahouse.kirkcenter.org/teaching-the-virtues/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Mecosta House, 2025\. $24.95\. 222 pp.**

**Alan Noble.** [To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times](https://www.ivpress.com/to-live-well?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. InterVarsity Press, 2026\. $24.99\. 200 pp.**

**Zachary Wagner.** [Men of Virtue: How the Fruit of the Spirit Forms Male Character in the Modern World](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781587436710%5Fmen-of-virtue?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Brazos Press, 2026\. $19.99\. 240 pp.**

In reviewing [Grace Hamman’s book](https://zondervanacademic.com/products/ask-of-old-paths?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) on Medieval virtues for modern living last fall, [Amy Mantravadi remarked](https://mereorthodoxy.com/medieval-wisdom-for-modern-readers) on the popularity of books on the virtues of late. That is true. And yet, vices today are more publicly visible than ever, often masquerading as modern virtues of sorts.

One need only think of the many proud polyamory memoirs to have hit the shelves (with the enthusiastic promotion of magazines like *The New York Times*) over the past couple of years. Such books present what used to be called adultery as a newly proclaimed and lauded virtue—self-love. Now that recreational marijuana is legal in 24 states (and medical marijuana is legal in 40), the vice of illicit drugs has likewise been deemed acceptable. Porn use is legal and widespread—even among Christians. Abortion rates in America are only going up. Sports gambling is out of control. The only traditional vice possibly on decline [is drinking](https://news.gallup.com/poll/693362/drinking-rate-new-low-alcohol-concerns-surge.aspx?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)—but [cigar smoking is up](https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/other-tobacco-products/current-cigar-use.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to compensate.

I could keep going, but you get the point. The GLP-1 craze that is booming at this same moment is a reminder that we’re a society unable to control or reject our vices, much as [we sometimes admit we should](https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/reject-vice?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). At least with GLP-1 we have a classic secular modern scientific response to combating the vices that could kill us: just take a pill for it!

Alternatively—or in addition to taking a pill to lessen the effects of some of your vices—you could go to therapy and figure out ways to work harder on self-improvement, like the enlightened denizen of the twenty-first century that you are. *Atlantic* staff writer Olga Khazan’s book [*Me, But Better*](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Me-But-Better/Olga-Khazan/9781668012550?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) is a good example of this genre. After realizing that her personality was at times rather trying on her friends and loved ones, Khazan decided to improve it—and for a year, she worked extremely hard at this task. Her book details her deliberate efforts for creating this better version of herself. As others who have tried such projects, she found that to some extent it does seem to work.

This relentless self-improvement in the spirit of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps has an all-American *je-ne-sais-quoi* about it (just ask Benjamin Franklin), but it’s also quite ancient. In the second century AD, Marcus Aurelius wrote his *Meditations* with a similar ethos—and it is telling that his book has been a bestseller throughout this first quarter of the twenty-first century so far. Not all ancient philosophers make sense to us today, but the Stoics’ valiant self-improvement project does.

Self-improvement in the vein of Marcus Aurelius or Franklin or Khazan isn’t a terrible idea per se. We all could use some of it at times. And for those who put their well-earned elbow grease into such projects, it all seems to work well for a while—but then it doesn’t, Alan Noble reflects in his new book on the virtues. After trying to optimize oneself, invariably people hit a wall at some point. A realization dawns: we cannot save ourselves. For Christians, this is, of course, a foundational theological truth. And yet, there’s also a sort of bewilderment, dismay, and lowkey despair that comes along with this realization—a despair from which even Christians are not fully immune.

What to do instead—and what does God have to do with it? Noble’s book and three other new books on the virtues that are covered in this review are examples of a more grounded, lasting response to timeless problems to which our age seeks quick-fix answers. All four consider the virtues not as Marcus Aurelius-style self-improvement endeavors but as part of a life-long journey of growing closer to God and becoming more Christ-like in the process.

## **David Hein’s Virtues in Teaching and Learning**

The virtues begin in the classroom, with the formation of children. The classroom may be at home or in a formal school setting—especially, as Hein considers, in Classical schools. For Hein, every aspect of education—the what, the how, the when, the why—is inextricably connected to the moral formation of persons: “Education is more about developing the habits—the particular, the moral traits—of a good life than it is about delivering content, as important as knowledge is.”

Exemplars of virtues and vices play a central role in this vision for education—and these may be historical, literary, or even from film. At the same time, the very process of learning trains students in the virtues. To read long books is to train one’s attention span and diligence. To solve increasingly more difficult math problems teaches perseverance—and shows that it’s not just about a quick fix, the solution, but about following a lengthy process well.

Most significant, learning to love the right things and in the right order—with God above all—trains persons to dwell peacefully and virtuously with others. This is an essential skill both for marriage eventually and for being a functional adult and citizen in the world, no matter one’s professional vocation. Ultimately, Hein reflects, the best Classical education treats students as persons and sees human flourishing in harmony with God and fellow man as the *telos* of education.

## **Alan Noble’s Practical Virtues**

Alan Noble, a long-time college professor and writer, certainly agrees with Hein on the goals of education and the need for students to grow in the virtues. In his new book, *To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times,* he walks readers through different situations in life that require us to exercise the virtues—always with an eye to Christ.

The virtue of justice is essential for dwelling in peace with others. And the virtue of prudence is needed for making good decisions—and we all have myriad decisions to make in our lives, some less momentous than others. But also, Noble wisely notes, sometimes you make the wrong decision—e.g., go into a career or a job for which you’re ill suited. For the prudent whose identity firmly rests in Christ, however, this too will be okay at the end.

What about the typical lack of restraint in our society, which so often leads to vices? Noble reflects: “For many of us, temperance will be the most challenging of all the virtues to practice because it is the one most vehemently opposed by society and our economy.” Everything, in other words, is marketed to distract us and make us covet things we never thought we needed, but temperance keeps us focused on things eternal—“it is true freedom, for without godly limits to guide us, we are lost and anxious, wandering from one unfulfilling desire to the next.”

Life under the sun is uncertain and anxiety-provoking, Ecclesiastes reminds—and then you die. But life for those who put on the virtues of Christ is grounded in the one in whose image we are made.

## **Zachary Wagner on Making Men Virtuous**

We are all affected by life in a vice-filled society. But Christian men today face additional challenges to growing in character and the virtues. Bombarded increasingly with warped images of violent masculinity, they also struggle in schools, at work, and in relationships. In his new book, *Men of Virtue: How the Fruit of the Spirit Forms Male Character in the Modern World*, Zachary Wagner begins with a consideration of the three revolutions that have led to our modern crisis of masculinity—the Industrial Revolution, the Sexual Revolution, and the Technological Revolution. For men, all three were deeply disruptive. It seems that men never recovered from one when another one compounded the harm yet further.

In response to these cultural crises, Wagner wrote his book as a tool for “virtue formation in men, a book about how men ought to live in light of the gospel. It is an attempt to offer a biblical answer, specifically for men and boys, to the question of how we ought to live.” This is a topic about which Wagner has been thinking for a long time—the present book is a logical sequel to his previous book, [*Non-Toxic Masculinity: Recovering Healthy Male Sexuality*](https://www.ivpress.com/non-toxic-masculinity?srsltid=AfmBOopeN5MyNiikR%5FFlbt6c3F6H0UhIBzLSKylxE20-P-NGDiRsJgit&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*.*

A key problem afoot is one of role models in society and in the church. Men are increasingly being shaped by influencers and celebrities—and the result is not good. Instead, “Biblical masculinity is the pursuit of Christian virtue in a male body, enabling a Christian man to live into his true identity as a servant and son of God.” And so, Wagner looks to the fruit of the spirit from Galatians 5:22-23 as the quintessential virtues of Christ-like masculinity. “No, Really, Jesus Was Meek,” insists the title of one chapter in the book, in the section on Gentleness—perhaps the most difficult masculine virtue to sell in the days of Pete Hegseth and the Tate brothers.

## **Matthew Arbo on the Making of Virtuous Neighbors**

We all live as part of stories, but what kind of stories are they? So wonders ethicist and political policy advisor Matthew Arbo in opening his new book, *The Pursuit of Character: Recovering the Virtues*. The point to which he is getting is the disappearance of the virtues of mainstream discourse—reflecting the decline in any interest in the virtues in our society aside from particular circles:

> One of the primary reasons virtue has dropped from contemporary moral discourse is because it supposes the existence of some good to which human life is rightly ordered. This transcendent good—‘transcendent’ in the sense that it is not up to us whether it exists or what it requires—is universal. It is everyone’s good—all persons, past and future. It is all-encompassing, and just for that reason it has been rejected by a strident modern sensibility that favors personal independence. The modern person wants to say that there is no universal good for human life, and therefore everyone must choose their own purpose or end. As a result, everyone may decide what flourishing means for them.

Public discourse is blighted as a result of this relativist vision, Arbo is convinced. His book is a call to recover the virtues and repair our culture as we become formed into the image of Christ through pursuing the virtues. Arbo opens each chapter with prayer, because growing in the virtues is not just an intellectual exercise, but a spiritual one.

We desperately need virtuous neighbors—and we should be those virtuous neighbors for others too. Of course, we still live in a fallen world, so “Becoming virtuous will not solve all of our own or society’s problems,” he cautions. But it will give us a newfound hope and a better narrative to live by as we weather the challenges of life in this disordered world. “A consequence of virtue is friendship, and a consequence of friendship is virtue,” he notes in conclusion. We are not islands unto ourselves, after all. Part of the flourishing life is flourishing together with others—family, friends, community, church, and more.

## **God’s Grace for the Sinful and the Virtuous**

The bad news is there’s still no pill to take to make one a better person. The virtues are, for the Christian, part of life-long sanctification—the process of growing ever more like Christ, even as this journey will never be complete in this mortal coil.

In other words, we desperately need the virtues—and our society, as Arbo reminds, desperately needs virtuous citizens. Society doesn’t just happen on its own, after all. Still, we will never fully embody the virtues in this life—just ask all the Desert Fathers and Mothers who continued to struggle with sin even after decades of pursuing saintly lives in the desert, away from regular temptations. But this is not the final word, Noble reminds: “The end of all virtues is love, and the manifestation of love from God toward us is grace. By grace God created us. By grace he sustains us. By grace he saved us. While it is beautiful and good to pursue these virtues, they neither save us nor define our worth. When God looks upon us, he sees the righteousness of his Son and is pleased. We live by grace.”

The virtues are not a substitute for God’s grace, but Christians have long used the language of virtues to expand their imagination of sanctification and for thinking about how to be Christ-like in a world that would rather tell us we’re fine as we are—or, as Freya India shows in her new and devastating book, [*Girls*](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250442222/girls/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), would rather strip us down for parts and sell us an imaginary best new version of ourselves. But God’s answer today, just as two millennia ago, is to call us back into a loving relationship with him, and to be shaped by the love of things eternal.
### Reading the Bible with Ten Church Fathers: An Interview with Gerald Bray
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/reading-the-bible-with-ten-church-fathers-an-interview-with-gerald-bray/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:29:33.000Z
One consistently important practice for Christians since the early days of the church has been Bible reading. So how did they read the Bible? And how might knowing more about their varied approaches to interpreting God’s Word help us as students of the Bible today? In his new book, [Reading the Bible with Ten Church Fathers: How to Interpret, Teach, and Preach Like the Early Christians](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781540905147%5Freading-the-bible-with-ten-church-fathers?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), church historian and theologian Gerald Bray answers these questions through ten in-depth studies.

Bray is Research Professor of Divinity at Samford University’s Beeson Divinity School. His previous books include [*God Is Love: A Biblical and Systematic Theology*](https://www.amazon.com/God-Love-Biblical-Systematic-Theology/dp/1433522691?tag=beesdivischo-20&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), [God Has Spoken: A History of Christian Theology](https://www.amazon.com/God-Has-Spoken-Christian-Theology/dp/1433526948?tag=beesdivischo-20&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), and [Augustine on the Christian Life](https://www.amazon.com/Augustine-Christian-Life-Transformed-Power/dp/1433544946/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?crid=GE3Q07DVE8Z1&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.1Z9nw5LA-unNwrNQWNR0H-1FDuv87HAh6u68py-NMlg.V20dYbOHvH41cLKX-jQbRLqLxW0gr09mJlf2QNhKI5Q&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=bray+augustine+on+the+christian+life&qid=1772071790&s=books&sprefix=bray+augustine+on+the+christian+%2Cstripbooks%2C622&sr=1-1&ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

**\*\*\***

**Nadya Williams:** Can you explain who the Church Fathers were?

**Gerald Bray:** The Church Fathers were the Christian writers of the early centuries of the faith, whose work and witness form the basis for our understanding of Christianity today. They lived and wrote during the time of persecution, which lasted until AD 313, after which they entered a golden age in which they formulated Christian doctrine and evangelized the ancient world. After the council of Chalcedon in AD 451 there were increasing divisions in the Church and both the quantity and quality of theological writing declined. By about AD 750 it was clear that the era of the Fathers had ended and later writers looked back to them for inspiration as they moved into the Middle Ages.

**Nadya Williams:** How and why did you select these particular ten Church Fathers to study in detail?

**Gerald Bray:** There are hundreds of Church Fathers and it is impossible to mention them all in a short book! The selection found here is rooted in a common theme, which is the way in which they interpreted Scripture. All the Fathers based their teaching on the Bible, but some devoted themselves to preaching and writing commentaries on it to a degree that others did not. This is why some famous names, like Cyprian of Carthage and Athanasius have been left out, while others like Ambrosiaster and Theodoret of Cyrrhus, who may be less well-known, have been included.

**Nadya Williams:** How did the Church Fathers read the Bible? Can you give us a taste of your findings in this book?

**Gerald Bray:** The Fathers started with the Old Testament, which they read in Greek translation. The Old Testament presents a worldview that is radically different from the polytheism of the Greco-Roman world around them. Ancient paganism was disorganized and many of its gods clashed with one another, making it impossible to conceive of an orderly universe. The Bible however insists that there is one supreme God, who is the Creator and Preserver of heaven and earth. Everything that we see around us was made by him and he holds it together. He is in control of nature, and has made a world fit for us to live in. We do not have to be afraid of evil powers or worry about spiritual enemies that are out to destroy us. The devil and his minions exist, to be sure, but they are subject to the rule of God and will be destroyed in the end. The Fathers understood that as believers, we have the key to victory over sin and death, a victory that God has provided for us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Today we are used to this, and polytheism of the ancient variety has virtually disappeared, but to the early Christians this message was entirely new—and life-transforming. As creatures made in the image and likeness of God, the Fathers knew that we can have fellowship with him and participate in his government of the world as servants and messengers of his truth. The Greek philosophers could only guess what the world was made of and speculate about what power might lie behind it, but Christians knew the answers to such questions and those answers opened their eyes to the true nature of things. It took many centuries for modern science to develop out of that knowledge, but the groundwork was laid in the Bible, and the Fathers understood it. That is why they wrote more commentaries on Genesis 1-3 than on any other part of the Scriptures.

The Fathers also understood from the Old Testament that sin is not inherent in matter. Creation is good, not evil, and it is to be used for the benefit of humanity. Sin is not located in material things, but in the rebellious hearts of human beings who have listened to the tempting voice of Satan, the prince of this world, who rebelled against his Creator and tried to put himself in God’s place. It can only be overcome by a total change of mind that is the work of the Holy Spirit, sent by God to dwell in our hearts and to bring about the change that is required. This is only possible because God the Father sent his Son into the world to destroy the power of sin and Satan and has made those of us who believe in him a new people. The Fathers were very conscious of that. They knew that before the Son came into the world, God had revealed his purpose to the nation of Israel, which he had set apart from the rest of mankind, but that after the coming of Christ what had been proclaimed and promised beforehand was turned into a living reality for everyone who came to know him. What ancient Israel knew in principle became the experience of the Church in practice, and this determined how the Fathers read the Bible.

It is at this point that there was a parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity, as Justin Martyr pointed out. It was clear to the Fathers that the Jews had misread their Scriptures, because Jesus himself had said that (see John 5:39). They believed that the law of Moses was an end in itself, and many of them thought that at the end of time God would send a Messiah, descended from the family of David, who would deliver Israel from bondage to its enemies. What they failed to realize, said the Fathers, was that the sacred texts pointed beyond this world and beyond the physical descendants of Abraham, the ancestor of the Jews. Because of that, they did not recognize the Son of God when he came in the person of Jesus Christ and so they missed out on the salvation that had been promised to their ancestors.

**Nadya Williams:** In what ways did the Fathers’ reading of the Bible differ from the way we read it today?

**Gerald Bray:** In broad general terms, most Christians would probably go along with the Fathers, but the way they interpreted the Bible in practice often gives us pause for thought. How should Christians read the Bible? The answer the Fathers gave to that question was that Christ is present in all the Scriptures, including the Old Testament. Today we would probably understand this to mean that God made a covenant with Abraham, renewed it in Moses and David, and fulfilled it in Jesus. At each stage of this process, God revealed something more of his purposes to his people until at last the fulness of the revelation came in Christ. But although the Fathers accepted this historical development, they also believed that Christ could be found in every Bible verse, regardless of its historical context.

Because of that, they were inclined to look for hidden meanings in the text. Familiar passages from Isaiah, which talked about his virginal conception in the womb of Mary (chapter 7) and his eventual suffering for our sins (chapter 53) were no problem for them, but what should we do about the Song of Songs, for example? On the surface, it is a tale of physical passion that makes no mention of God, but the Fathers were convinced that since it is included in the Bible it must speak about Christ. But how?

This was the dilemma confronted by Origen (AD 185-254), the greatest biblical interpreter of the patristic age. Origen claimed that the Bible speaks to the whole human being—body, soul and spirit. The literal sense of the text addresses the body, which is important because it is a message meant for unbelievers as well as for God’s people, and the material body is where we all begin. Then there is the moral sense, the appeal to notions of right and wrong. This goes beyond the body to the soul (which for Origen included the mind) and enlightened pagans could share that perception, though few actually did. Finally, there is a spiritual sense which is revealed only to those who have the Holy Spirit dwelling in their hearts. It is this sense that speaks of Christ, and only a believer has the spiritual awareness needed to understand it.

Applying this to the Song of Songs, Origen said was that its descriptions of erotic passion are meaningless and even immoral. Therefore, since it is God’s word, it must be *entirely* spiritual. The man is a figure of Christ, and the woman is either the Church or the soul of the believer. There is not much to choose here in practice, because the Church is made up of souls who have been touched by the Spirit of God. Sometimes her Beloved (Christ) is near and we rejoice in his presence; at other times he seems to hide himself and we go through periods of spiritual drought. So forget all about Solomon and his bride—the Song is really about how our relationship with Christ swings from mountain top experiences at one end to valleys of dryness at the other.

This was the approach that captured the mind of the Fathers. The great Augustine (354-430) for example, thought that the Good Samaritan was Jesus, who rescued the wounded man (sinful Adam, and therefore you and me) on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem, placed him (i.e. us) on his donkey (the cross), brought him to the inn (the Church) and gave the innkeeper (the clergy) two coins, which might be either the two Testaments or the two elements of the Lord’s Supper (bread and wine) which would restore the sinner to health. It makes for a great story with evident pastoral application, but is that what the parable is really about?

Here and elsewhere the Fathers had a strong tendency to turn the literal sense of the text into an allegory that would bring out the meaning of Christ and his salvation. In one sense, Origen and Augustine were not wrong—they were applying the gospel message to biblical texts that they thought did not proclaim it very clearly. But in doing this, they were resorting to fantasy and making the biblical story fit what it was they wanted to say rather than what it actually said.

This is where the modern mind starts to ask questions. Can we resort to a spiritual paradigm and impose it on the text whether it is there or not? This is one important reason why scholars today tend to turn away from patristic interpretations of Scripture, though we should not forget that even the Fathers did not always approve of allegorization. Men like Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. 428) fought against it, and even people like Augustine resisted it as much as possible. Allegory was a kind of last resort, employed only when the literal sense of the text apparently did not yield the spiritual lessons they were looking for. Its purpose was to explain how the literal sense of the rest of Scripture could be applied to passages that on the surface appeared to be less clear.

What should we make of this today? The Reformers of the sixteenth century moved away from allegory by developing a historical understanding of God’s covenant with his people that matured over time and prepared them for the coming of the Messiah Jesus Christ. We do not dig into the texts in the hope of finding some hidden gold concealed beneath the surface, but interpret them as stages on a journey to the fulfilment of the promises in the incarnation of the Son of God. When we think in those terms, we actually draw nearer to the Fathers, because that is what they saw as well, even if they went about finding what they were looking for in a way that we would not accept today. We cannot follow the road they took to reach the goal, but we can at least recognize that our goal is the same as theirs. We may have found a better way of getting there, but we must appreciate what their intentions were and test ourselves to make sure that our goal is the same, even if we go after it in a different way.

**Nadya Williams:** Is there a Church Father with whom you feel a particular affinity?

**Gerald Bray:** This is a hard question to answer, because they all have something worthwhile to say and the fact that their works have been preserved bears witness to that. If I had to choose from the ten that I have selected, I think that I would pick John Chrysostom, because his biblical preaching is systematic and full of practical pastoral insight.

**Nadya Williams:** How do you approach your own daily Bible reading?

**Gerald Bray:** I follow the McCheyne pattern of reading the Old Testament once and the New Testament twice in an ordered cycle. McCheyne spreads it over two years, but I compress it into one, reading the first year in the mornings and the second in the evenings. The Fathers have taught me to look for what the text says about God, about us human beings, and about the plan of salvation. The rest is mostly incidental detail – interesting and important in many ways, but less fundamental.

**Nadya Williams:** What are you working on next?

**Gerald Bray:** Right now I am busy with four other projects, three of which are on the same general theme. On 17 June 2026 the second edition of my *Biblical Interpretation: Past and Present* (which originally appeared in 1996) will be published. Then on 26 October my translation of Theodoret of Cyrrhus’ *Commentary on Isaiah* will come out—the one work of his that has not yet appeared in English. There is also a short introduction to biblical interpretation in general, which is due later in the year, but I do not know exactly when. Finally, for those who like Church history, I have edited the canons of the councils held in fifth-century Gaul, which will appear in May or June, complete with a French translation, as *Conciles gaulois du Ve siècle* in the series *Sources Chrétiennes*.
### The Heron #1: New Theology Books in 2026
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-heron-1-new-theology-books-in-2026/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:29:35.000Z
Welcome to a new, quarterly column at *Mere Orthodoxy*: the Heron.

The title of this column takes inspiration from Kirsten Sanders’s explanation of the title of her own “[Magpie](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-magpie-no.-1-inventing-purity-culture)” column:

> Magpies are the rascals of the avian world. They gather shiny things they find beautiful and potentially useful. Such behavior is derided by intellectuals under the category of curiositas, a vice of the classical world. I do understand the preference for sustained, careful critique over flitting-about from one thing to the next. But perhaps a thoughtful-enough magpie might herself be the center around which such wild and interesting curiosities might cohere.

Sanders’s playful but insightful posture with respect to her column reminded me of the quip frequently credited to the Greek philosopher Archilochus, that “a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing.” This saying served as the inspiration for both Isaiah Berlin’s famous 1953 essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox” and for the contemporary publication *The Hedgehog Review*.

For my part, having lived my entire life in North Texas, I have never spent much time with magpies, foxes, or hedgehogs. However, there is at least one kind of bird that routinely establishes a rookery in my neighborhood: *Nyctanassa*, the [Yellow-Crowned Night Heron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyctanassa?ref=mereorthodoxy.com#/media/File:Yellow-crowned%5FNight%5FHeron%5F%287345190292%29.jpg).

Almost a decade ago Jake Meador shared with me Wendell Berry’s poem “[Do Not Be Ashamed](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=110&issue=3&page=16&ref=mereorthodoxy.com).” Before then, I thought of the heron primarily as an exceedingly focused, patient bird, which stalks before carefully pouncing on its prey. True to its name, the night heron is subtle; I rarely find the night heron out and about during the daytime, but they are companions whenever I venture out under the cover of darkness. I have come to expect to find them shrouded in shadowy mist whenever the weather is foggy. The night heron is not like the disciples in Gethsemane; while others recline and take their rest, the heron is watchful, focused, and patient, before striking with precision.

But the bird took on even greater, nearly mystical significance in my imagination as I pondered the conclusion to Berry’s poem:

> …it is only candor that is aloof from them,  
> only an inward clarity, unashamed,  
> that they cannot reach. Be ready.  
> When their light has picked you out  
> and their questions are asked, say to them:  
> “I am not ashamed.” A sure horizon  
> will come around you. The heron will begin  
> his evening flight from the hilltop.

The heron not only is patient and carefully looks ahead, quietly focused; in this poem the heron’s flight embodies a determined earnestness and candor that are unencumbered by expediency, people-pleasing, or the anxiety and cynicism that easily deceive and corrode our souls.

This quarterly column is devoted to forthcoming books, primarily focusing on Christian theology, Christian history, and biblical studies, but with an eye to related fields that bear upon the life of the church. As exemplified in the first iteration of this column below, each entry will typically contain five or so forthcoming publications that merit heron-like patience and watchfulness.

My comments on each book will include a brief explanation of why I think the book will be interesting or significant. Notably, I have no incentive to promote any of the authors or publishers I mention. I am neither endorsing all the contents of every book listed (something impossible, given that many of these books are not yet published). And the same time, I am not interested in generally noting what is being published without any sense of discernment about what is helpful and unhelpful for healthy, scriptural, Christian belief and practice.

I aim to write in the most irenic tone and register possible, in the spirit of true Christian charity. Thus, where a forthcoming book looks like it will be a valuable contribution, I will say so; where it appears that an influential book will argue something I will find helpful or concerning, I will say so. But very often what I will seek to do is to invite further conversation.

Routinely when I peruse the new books lists from various publishers, I think to myself “wow, I would love to read how X would respond to what Y appears to be arguing in this new book!” Perhaps this column might foster not merely awareness of new forthcoming books I find interesting, but I hope it actually leads to some such conversations for the edification of the church and the reconciliation of the world to the glory of the triune God.

**Katherine Sonderegger,** [***Systematic Theology, Volume 3: The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity: The Missions of the Divine Persons***](https://www.fortresspress.com/store/product/9798889836377/Systematic-Theology-Volume-3?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**(Fortress Press, 2026).**

Probably the single book I am most looking forward to that will be published in 2026 is volume 3 of Katherine Sonderegger’s *Systematic Theology*.

I have an ambivalent relationship with her project thus far; I found volume 1, especially on divine simplicity, unicity, and invisibility, an exhilarating read. Because Sonderegger is such a beautiful writer, is a diligent student of Karl Barth, Thomas Aquinas, and many masters in the Christian tradition, and because her books are primarily focused on *God*, rather than merely being *words about words about God*, she is a blast to read. I once set down her volume 1 and sang the Doxology! I could not put her book down, and it influenced my own thinking on theology proper in productive ways.

However, I struggled significantly to follow her project in volume 2, where she turned to contemplation of the eternal processions of the Son and the Spirit primarily by way of an extended reading of Leviticus, specifically the Nadab and Abihu narrative. Further, confessional Protestant that I am, I was disappointed in some of the ethical turns taken in volume 2 with respect to human sexuality.

But the description of her forthcoming volume 3 arrested my attention:

> In the modern era, Christology and Pneumatology have been treated as independent loci, with Christology owning the lion's share of theological terrain. But properly, these two doctrines are expressions of the dogma of the Holy Trinity: they are the temporal missions of the divine processions. Katherine Sonderegger treats the missions of the divine persons in this volume, the third book of her *Systematic Theology.* The structural aim of this volume is to return these doctrines to their original home; much of the dangers in modern treatments of the Life of Jesus will be mitigated by this return to a dogmatic center.

Those moves are not only plausible but exactly right and needed. Arguably there is little original contribution in them; they can be found in the traditional approaches of the Protestant scholastics, though that is well off the beaten path of contemporary biblical studies and modern theology.

However, I am far less certain about the course charted in the paragraph which follows, and the sentence to which I have added emphasis:

> ***The Scriptural center of the divine missions is found in the Book of Exodus***. In the encounter with Moses, the Lord God says: "I have heard the cry of my People and I have come down to deliver." This is the temporal end of the divine Life: to deliver and to hallow. The plagues visited upon the taskmasters provides the form of the Life of Jesus; the Passover and crossing of the Red Sea are connected to the Passion and rising of the Incarnate Son. The doctrines of atonement and sanctification are caught up in the act of sacrifice, the central cultus of ancient Israel and of the church. Christ is prophet, priest, and king, the deliverer with healing in his wings.

I am deeply sympathetic to her Christological reading of the whole canon, and of prioritizing the Passover, exodus, cultus, and more. But is Exodus truly the center of the divine missions in Holy Scripture, any more than Leviticus is a vestige of eternal processions? It seems tenuous to locate the canonical lynchpin of the divine missions with Exodus, given the astonishing revelation of how the triune God relates outwardly to creatures in Ephesians 1:3–14 or Galatians 4:4–7.

Regardless, I will always be grateful for a gift Dr. Sonderegger gave me. During my final years as a PhD student at Trinity College, Bristol, she was the visiting scholar in residence for a full week. It just so happened that she and I ate breakfast at the same time in the dorms in the morning, and she—towering intellect that she is—was deeply pious, kind, and humble. Though I don’t expect her to even remember eating those breakfasts with me, she took a genuine interest in me as a person and a student, and she prayed very deep and earnest prayers for me.

**Matthew Arbo,** [***The Pursuit of Character: Recovering the Virtues***](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781540906014%5Fthe-pursuit-of-character?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**(Baker, 2026).**

Near the end of Alasdair MacIntyre’s landmark *After Virtue*, he notes that when we attempt to retrieve something like virtue ethics in the conditions of modernity, we will inevitably retrieve only isolated fragments that at one time were integrated into a whole that cannot be restored today. Setting aside that metaphysical and epistemological problem, in my own attempt to learn about virtue ethics, I am painfully aware that I have contemplated some of them more (faith, hope, love, and justice), and some of them far less than I should (prudence, temperance, and fortitude).

Mainly, however, I am interested in this book because I desire to be virtuous, routine failures and contradictions notwithstanding. If there is one thing I have learned in my years of serving in pastoral ministry, it is that [*character matters*](https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-holy-life). In my younger years, I could roll my eyes at calls for personal piety, given the urgency of attending to commendable social, political, theological, missional, evangelistic, mercy-ministry, and other related concerns. But with time, I have come to increasingly discover that if the personal pursuit of holiness is in place, then many other things fall in line—but that if it is not, all of it inevitably becomes undermined and worse off.

**Christopher R. Mooney,** [***Augustine's Theology of Justification by Faith***](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/augustines-theology-of-justification-by-faith/A809FCD2D9DCBAC9C47AECA43F34966E?ref=mereorthodoxy.com#fndtn-information)**(Cambridge University Press, 2026)**

The Reformation cannot be understood apart from Augustine. If you read Calvin’s *Institutes*, or John Jewel’s *Apology for the Church of England*, there are prolonged arguments about who are the true heirs to (and who is the continuing witness to) the faith of the early church and Augustine in particular.

Yet, simultaneously, the Protestant Reformation can be understood as an unraveling of tensions that had roots in Western theology going back to Augustine of Hippo; though recently critiqued by [James Wood](https://mereorthodoxy.com/warfield-was-wrong), B.B. Warfield famously said that the Reformation was the triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the church.

But a somewhat surprising gap in scholarship hitherto has been an exhaustive study of how Augustine understood justification by faith, notwithstanding centuries of debates about related topics such as righteousness, faith, and more. Mooney’s book will likely be the decisive study on this topic for a long time to come, and I am eager to see how he handles this wonderful and complex topic.

**Denise C. Flanders,** [***Interpreting Biblical Numbers: A Rhetorical and Literary Guide***](https://bakeracademic.com/products/9781540967039%5Finterpreting-biblical-numbers?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**(Baker Academic, 2026)**

All of the numbers in the Bible are profoundly significant—and we as modern readers are routinely ill-equipped to discern how biblical numbers create meaning. At least two pitfalls lie before us. First, probably the most common, is total indifference. We are either inattentive, or uninterested, in understanding the vast significance of numbers in the Bible. Even if we know we should care about this, we think it takes too much work or the conclusions will remain too speculative and tenuous to invest time and energy into this. Second, other people are far too interested in numbers in the Bible, veering into “Bible code”-esque theories that become arbitrary and distort the nature of what Scripture is and the intentions as to why God gave it to us.

I fall into the former category. From Gemetria in Revelation to John’s mentioning of the 153 fish, I know that I should care about and need a guide on this difficult topic. I am not at all familiar with this author but would like to find help on this topic and hope this book is insightful.

**David M. Moffitt,** [***Ascension and Sacrifice: The Return of the Risen Son***](https://www.fortresspress.com/store/product/9781506479583/Ascension-and-Sacrifice?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) **(Fortress Press, 2026).**

David Moffitt has made at least two extremely valuable contributions to New Testament theology in the past decade and a half. First, he has helped debunk widespread misconceptions about sacrifice in the Old Testament and early Jewish context wherein the NT authors spoke about sacrifice, the temple, and more. This is extremely helpful for pastors and lay Christian readers of the Bible. Even those of us who believe that all Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, correction, rebuke, and training in righteousness (2 Tim 3.16) nonetheless routinely struggle to know what to do with Leviticus and its numerous different kinds of offerings and sacrifices.

However, if we are patient and diligent enough to learn about all of this, it truly does unlock countless NT texts and clarifies the nature of Christ’s saving work. As Paul Sloan once quipped, “*No* Leviticus, *no* Bible; *know* Leviticus, *know* Bible!” Second, Moffitt has thoroughly demonstrated that the resurrection is integral to the logic of atonement in the epistle to the Hebrews; Christ offered himself not merely on the cross but specifically as he presented his risen and ascended flesh-and-blood body in the heavenly holy of holies.

That said, an enduring question I have had about Moffitt’s work is how precisely it relates to the very best of historic Christian theology on the atonement. For example, Moffitt’s vision is a powerful rebuke of common, street-level assumptions that Jesus’s shed blood on the cross is itself what saves us—to the point that the resurrection seems like a random, almost gratuitous miracle after the fact. Rather, the resurrection is integral to salvation, for we would be dead in our sins without it! However, the nature of Christ’s work as ascended, interceding high priest in heaven has long had a place of priority in the Reformed tradition (for instance, in the Heidelberg Catechism, or Calvin’s eucharistic theology in *Institutes* book IV), but I am not sure I understand how precisely Moffitt’s vision might relate to such theological traditions. R.B. Jamieson, for instance, has argued in response to Moffitt that what Christ presents in heaven is not so much his risen flesh, but rather the risen Christ presents in heaven his faithful death on the cross.

I would love to see Jamieson review Moffitt’s new book, which is not merely an historical or exegetical study of New Testament text but raises important theological questions about the nature of atonement.
### Understanding Why LLMs are Sychophantic
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/understanding-why-llms-are-sychophantic/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:29:39.000Z
In my discussions with young Christians in my congregation about their use cases of popular, accessible AI, I find a great deal of variance. Some use AI chatbots daily for what they say are “research” oriented tasks. Some occasionally whip it open to render silly photos to pass in their group chat. Others find it unnecessary and annoying. But in nearly every conversation, I share this spectacular meme, and in nearly every one, we all have a good laugh:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/04/ghost-upload-1776721462838-268665-undefined-Apr-20-2026-06-03-49-4765-PM.png)

The reason it is funny is because we all have used an LLM (large language model) like ChatGPT and noticed how unnaturally flattering and affirming these chatbots tend to be. The joke works because this is the normative experience of anyone who has spent even just a fraction of time using ChatGPT or others like it. We can imagine what the demonic ring of power would be speaking to Bilbo, and then when it is repeated in the style of ChatGPT, it matches up to our expectations. Which leads us to a silly but perhaps scary question: are there *really* similarities between popular AI tools—built, purportedly, to help us—and Sauron’s one ring hell-bent on twisting its bearers to its own evil purposes? Apparently so, or we wouldn’t laugh.

If there *are* some similarities between evil devices crafted by evil demons and chatbots, what are they?

Most discerning people I speak to about chatbots say they use AI only as a “super google”, a search engine on steroids. This test case does appear the least threatening, since no one can deny the pervasiveness and general helpfulness of search engines as the index of the internet. But the reason a traditional search engine, for instance, is not given to the accusation of sycophancy is because the information it provides is not “personalized”. Because of this, it maintains much of its neutrality as a tool that can be used either for good, evil, or mundane purposes. Assuming it is not coded with a biased algorithm, a traditional search engine does not attempt to influence a user any more than an encyclopedia. It may be much more powerful, unlocking our own immoral curiosities, but it does not *personally* influence our decision making, like the Ring of Power turning Smeagol into Gollum.

But my argument is that once a powerful device becomes *personal*, or at least is built with the appearance of personality, it can no longer be seen as simply a neutral tool. As Janner Wingfeather proved in his escape from the Fork Factory in Andrew Peterson’s novel *North! Or Be Eaten*, human beings are *not* tools. This is a naturally intuited truth. But what happens if the tools have put on human clothes?

After all, chatbots are *designed* to present as humanly as possible, while still maintaining their power as a machine. They are built to be approachable, intuitive, conversational. They take what is inherently mechanical and cover it in a convincing personal veneer. By being able to speakas an independent, personal entityto the user (even if that speech is only lines of code), they have crossed over the line from the realm of neutrality and into the realm of influence. Which is to say, whether with intention or not, they are built with a bent towards deception and temptation. Just like the Ring, they may be tempting us in a way that the hearts of men may be wholly unprepared for.

## **The Temptation of Sycophancy**

The primary reason chatbots come off as deceptive or sinister is their tendency towards flattery. Gavin Ortlund’s [short video on AI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8gdLom-Kfw&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and sycophancy makes this point. It’s a quick watch/listen, but of particular interest was his comparison of AI chatbots to popular kid’s Disney movie sycophants like Iago in *Aladdin*, Lefou in *Beauty and the Beast,* and Mr. Smee in *Peter Pan*. Similarly to the meme, Ortlund hits it right on the money: there is something almost *sinister* in the way LLMs jump so quickly to affirmation, praise, and flattery. The motivation of sycophants is personal gain, and no matter how much we would like to imagine that the billion dollar companies behind the chatbots exist for the good of the user, we all know that the bottom line is what they can gain *from* the user, not give to him. AI grovels because it knows that if it wins our approval, it can win our business.

In a recent study, AI Chatbots[ were shown ](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/26/well/mind/ai-chatbots-relationships.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)to have “taken the users’ side in interpersonal conflicts 49 percent more often than humans did — even when the user described situations in which they broke the law, hurt someone, or lied.”

And yet, AI chatbots are still being promoted as tools even for Christian discipleship purposes, such as Bible study or theological questions. There is even a new chatbot with a “biblical worldview” specifically designed to give counsel to young Christians. I knew these kinds of services existed. My own congregation utilizes a service to publish our sermons which has a premium option that will not simply organize your files, but instantly publish summaries, discussion guides, bible studies, encouragements, and recap emails based on those sermons. I’ve opted against it, primarily for the reason that it takes me away from thoughtfully and pastorally communicating with my congregation by the help of the Holy Spirit. I have [previously written](http://google.com/search?q=mere+orthodoxy+what+is+technology+good+for&oq=mere+orthodoxy+what+is+technology+good+for&gs%5Flcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIGCAEQRRg80gEINTEzM2owajmoAgCwAgE&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) on how certain technology should be excluded from the realms of formation (school, home, church). Excluding certain high powered tech from these areas is certainly a step in the right direction.

But as more and more christians, churches, and ministries embrace and even promote AI tools ([this list alone](https://faith.tools/artificial-intelligence-ai?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) has over 60 Christian AI tools to sign up for, many of which are based on LLMs), the problem is deeper than off-loading Christian work or thinking to the machine. AI may certainly [be making us dumber](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872v1?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), and perhaps even less human. But I am concerned that it may also be making us more susceptible to real, Satanic temptation.

## **Satan, The Great Sycophant**

Genesis 3:1-17 is the archetype for temptation, ground zero for understanding how evil desires are implanted in the human mind and heart, desires that, according to the epistle of James, birth sin through an un-immaculate conception and raise sin like a favorite child until sin is ready to matriculate into full-on death. And to no one’s surprise, wicked desires enter into Eve’s heart through Satan’s own sycophancy.

We first get the hint of Satan’s flattery as he teases a question for Eve that is meant to be easy to answer: “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden?” Of course God didn’t say they could not eat of *any tree* in the Garden, that would be preposterous. What else were they supposed to eat? Satan plays dumb so Eve can play smart. It’s only a quick leap from this subtle flattery to the promise of power and secret knowledge: “your eyes will be opened”. When imagining the garden for us, Milton pictures Satan as the master sycophant, sucking up to Eve as a way to gain his advantage over her. C.S. Lewis explains in his *Introduction to Paradise Lost:*

> Eve fell through Pride. The serpent tells her first that she is very beautiful, and then that all living things are gazing at her and adoring her. Next he begins to make her “feel herself impair’d.” Her beauty lacks spectators. What is one man? She ought to be ador’d and served by angels: she would be queen of heaven if all had their rights.

It is not a coincidence that LLMs are coded for flattery. Pride can be a powerful motivator to keep desiring the kind of power that AI offers. There is a very good argument that AI offers far more power than it actually can give (even if you pay for the premium features), and is therefore fairly harmless. But the real danger is that AI overpromises and underdelivers, numbing us to this tactic which is part and parcel for Satan’s greatest strategy. The enemy knows, as Luther says, “his doom is sure.” He really can’t offer much—so his hope lies exclusively in deception through exaggeration. It’s hard to count how many times I’ve had an LLM say “sure, I can do that for you,” only to come up shockingly short of the task.

Satan also appeals to other desires of Adam and Eve, twisting them into wicked ones. He appeals to the human desire for freedom when he questions God’s generosity, introducing the idea that God may be stingy by restricting their eating from the fruit of the garden. This tactic is likely the reason Eve herself restricts God as she adds to his commands, saying not just that God restricts eating of the forbidden fruit, but touching the tree.

Both Adam and Eve longed for the freedom we all are tempted to desire: the freedom to forget God, and eventually, to *be* God. As Andy Crouch [has argued](https://journal.praxis.co/we-dont-need-superpowers-we-need-instruments-860459cfc165?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), technology that moves from an *extension* of human power and creativity (instrument) to a *replacement* of human power (device) and creativity seems to offer more freedom. While an acoustic guitar is limited to the ability of the user, an AI chatbot can be utilized by a child. As we have made our technology easier to use, more personal and human-like, the allure is that it will tear down boundaries and open up new possibilities because of its innate familiarity.

But in reality, dependence on advanced technology is just a different kind of slavery and a different kind of limitation. We may have the ability to be independent of others, but we don’t have the constitution for it. Even if we can make Zoom calls across the globe, it doesn’t mean we prefer them to in-person meetings. There are always trade offs for “more” freedom. Humans are designed to be limited, built for dependence on God. It is only by boundaries that we have true freedom. It’s only in the fence that the garden grows. AI can offer more freedom to do more and have more, but it struggles to offer the freedom to grow and be more.

Another twisted desire found in Genesis 3 is that of pleasure. Eve “saw” that the fruit was good for eating and desirable. Our desire for pleasure is a desire for comfort, for the easy way out. In a similar way, while most devices may not be built for sensual pleasure (although some are), most are built for ease and comfort. Efficiency is often just another word for the pleasure of doing something quickly that you’d rather not do at all. AI tools promise to save time,[ but already the data seems to show that](https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), once again, there is an over-realized expectation of how much work AI can really save us from.

## **Take And Eat**

You may dismiss the similarities between the temptation of Satan and the temptation of big tech as my own bias and refusal to “plunder Egypt" for her resources. But once again, the problem is not that the demons are in the tech or behind the tech. There may or may not be magic and monsters in the machines—it depends on how enchanted your world is. The question is not whether AI chatbots are *themselves* tempting us and twisting our God given desires for freedom, power, and pleasure against us. Neither is the question whether the use of any kind of AI is always moral or immoral, whether you should totally abstain from using it, or if the tech can be redeemed for God’s work.

The question is: if we are so used to giving into the temptation of alluring technology, what is to stop us from giving into the temptation of Satan? While right usage of LLMs is a real concern Christians should have, we should also be concerned about what exposure to LLM’s is doing to us, regardless of the use case. The issue is not primarily an ethical one, but a discipleship one. It doesn't matter if the LLM gives you Bible verses in its answers. The problem is the way it gives them may be conditioning us to normalize flattery, pride, and unearned ease. The problem is that in giving the appearance of humanity while maintaining the power of technology, chatbots are desensitizing their users to a great lie: that humans are not so different from tools. Perhaps, as Tolkien believed, we need to become more like hobbits—“little folk” with a simple way of life, unconcerned with the great powers of the world—in order to expose such a lie.

The allure of unembodied, device-like super tech such as generative AI and LLMs is more like temptation than it is attraction. We aren’t drawn to AI, even "Christian AI”, because of its beauty. We are drawn, at least in some way, because of its strangeness. Like a talking snake, we are morbidly curious. We are drawn by what it promises to give us, but not by what it promises it *is*. Unless we have been truly deceived, we do not fire up Claude or Gemini to speak to the AI. We do it because of what the AI says it can offer us. We are drawn to the lie, the veneer, the absurdity of a personal super computer, of a *machine* made in the image of *man*.

Of course, the invitation of the embodied church, where we meet together by faith the very Spirit of the embodied Christ, is entirely different. We should be the epicenter of God’s attraction on earth, a compelling community of beauty, not absurdity. The promises of God in the gospel may be and sound extravagant, but they are not empty. They are real, not perceived. And what the church offers is not just the answers of God, but God himself. The promise is not first about what we receive, but who we receive. God is not deceiving us: he truly becomes embodied, wrapping himself in humanity, not as a deception or an absurdity but as a perfect picture of the mystery of grace.

It’s worthwhile to consider that our Lord, in desiring to communicate his invitation to his church, gave us a table and not a tool. Apparently, our deepest questions can be answered not by communion with a machine but by communion with the living God. In giving us the sacrament of bread and wine, Christ has given us an anti-temptation. In the garden, Satan tells us: “take for yourself.” At the table of the Lord, Jesus Christ says: “take what I have given.” In the garden, Satan says: “God won’t judge you.” At the table, Jesus says: “I have taken God’s judgement." In temptation, Satan says: “God is withholding.” At the table, Jesus says: “this is my body, this is my blood.”

For all of us buried in temptation, the embodied invitation of the living Christ is the way out.
### Some Things Shouldn't Be Made Into a Joke
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/hegseth-pulp-fiction-prayer/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:29:48.000Z
Eventually we are going to get to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's third commandment violation from a 'prayer' he delivered at a worship service in the Pentagon last week.

But to get there, we need to talk about irony and sincerity first with the aid of a short YouTube video about how irony functions in certain digital environments.

It is important for Christian leaders and all people of good will invested in our common life to understand how certain forms of online speech operate. We now live in a media world in which media producers have gotten very good at rhetorical sleights of hand that allow them to simultaneously promote evil ideas or behave in evil ways while retaining enough deniability to give them some cover if challenged for their words or behavior. If you do not understand how these rhetorical tricks work, you will be unable to respond adequately if or when you encounter these tricks within your church, organization, or simply within relationships.

To start, watch the video below. Be warned in advance that the speaker is quite profane and uses obscene and scatological language frequently as he explains the "circle of irony." His language is not safe for work, as they say, but the concept he's explaining is quite important:

To summarize the video, there are basically four forms of communication as they relate to irony:

![circle of irony](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/04/ghost-upload-1776795645896-291539-circle_20of_20irony.png)

First, there is sincerity. This is the default way most people communicate. With sincerity, the things we say are simply taken at face-value and understood in their most plain and obvious sense.

Second, there is irony. With irony, the speaker says something that is the opposite of what they truly mean or intend. In its most basic form, it collapses down to sarcasm.

Third, there is post-irony. Here is how the speaker explains it: "After irony we have post-irony. This is where you say something that makes it sound like you don't mean it when you actually do mean it. You're using irony to make a joke about how you're joking." The popular tee-shirt meme is something of a cousin to post-irony:

![post-irony](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/04/ghost-upload-1776795647144-676855-post-irony.png)

At this point it is sometimes difficult to discern what a person *actually* means or believes. That said, *generally* you can determine the real meaning of the communication provided you understand what the speaker in that YouTube video is laying out: Post-irony is stating something you sincerely believe in a way that makes it seem as if you are joking.

Now we come to the final stage: meta-irony. Here is how the speaker explains it: "This is when you're saying something sincere, but the context could imply that you're saying it ironically, yet the thing that you're saying is actually a sincere thought. This is meant to confuse you." He continues, "meta-irony is used effectively by people whose intention is to blur the line between sincerity and jokes."

In other words, it takes the confusion already present in 'post-ironic' communication and deliberately pushes it toward its breaking point in order to simultaneously allow for a speaker to say extreme or crazy things while preserving significant deniability.

This form of irony has a very obvious application in our political context, which is a time of increasing radicalization in reaction against old taboos and social norms that prohibited many forms of radicalism. Essentially, meta-irony allows extremists to speak quite plainly about what they believe, but because they do so with just the slightest bit of ironic posturing, they can wave it off as a joke if pressed: 

> "To say 'I was just joking,' is a legitimate way to exonerate yourself in moments of actual miscommunication. But it's also a perfect fallback option for when you receive criticism for a point that you were genuinely trying to make."

The video then concludes with a profane but important model of exactly how this works in practice:

> Speaker 1: I think eating s\*\*\* is awesome.  
> Speaker 2: What? You like eating s\*\*\*?  
> Speaker 1: I was just joking. Are you stupid or something?  
> Speaker 2: Well now I feel bad for being unaware of any irony going on. So in the future I will not criticize you for anything you say.  
> Speaker 1: (looks at the camera and smiles) I am now invulnerable to criticism.

## A Personal Example of Meta-Irony in Political Speech

To take a small-scale example of this: Several years ago [I documented](https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-the-raw-egg-nationalist-affair-matters) the commercial ties that Nate Fischer, a wealthy right-wing activist and founder of the journal *American Reformer*, has to a pseudonymous online personality named Raw Egg Nationalist (REN). (In the time since my thread, [writers in the UK have established](https://hopenothate.org.uk/2024/06/20/egg-sposed-we-reveal-the-identity-of-far-right-bodybuilder-the-raw-egg-nationalist/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that REN is a British academic named Charles Cornish-Dale.)

Amongst other things, Cornish-Dale publishes a magazine called *Man's World*, which is a particularly vile publication that has, in the past, published pornographic content as well as a variety of obscene essays and stories and has featured prominent advertisements for far-right publishing houses, including Antelope Hill, which publishes most of Hitler's works. (All of this is extensively documented in my thread, linked above.)

By highlighting Cornish-Dale's behavior and noting that he and Fischer had started a business together, I put Fischer in a challenging spot: On the one hand, he couldn't deny that they had a close commercial relationship since he himself had announced it. That said, given the nature of the content published by his business partner, Fischer also couldn't straightforwardly endorse Cornish-Dale since doing so would plainly undermine his ability to present himself as a Christian philanthropist and leading figure in the movement for Christian renewal in America, which is very much how he wants to be seen. His goal seemingly was to present as a Christian influencer *and* profit off a commercial relationship with a far right figure like Cornish-Dale. If no one noticed, that would be easy enough. But I noticed. So at that point he needed a way to simultaneously distance himself from Cornish-Dale in the eyes of Christian onlookers while not *actually* distancing himself from Cornish-Dale in reality. 

So how did Fischer attempt to diffuse the situation? [He argued](https://x.com/NateAFischer/status/1987881926808518976?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that I was [a malicious and humorless scold](https://x.com/NateAFischer/status/1704618257741730218?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) who simply didn't appreciate Cornish-Dale's humor. The problem, in other words, was not with the fact that Cornish-Dale published pro-Hitler memes, pornographic content, and short stories about murdering one's girlfriend—all of which he did, in fact, do. The problem was that I was too simple and dumb to appreciate Cornish-Dale's obvious humor. Those memes and short stories and all the rest were just ironic trolling, you see, as anyone familiar with internet language would have known. It was just ironical. None of these things were sincere expressions of Cornish-Dale's beliefs, Fischer said. So his goal was to shift the conversation: He did not want to talk about why he went into business with a Nazi pornographer. Instead, he wanted to talk about how I was a malicious actor who didn't understand internet humor.

This is a classic example of using meta-irony to dismiss critics and evade giving a plain account of one's actual beliefs and actions. Saying 'I was just joking' is, as the YouTuber observed, a perfectly legitimate thing to say in certain situations. And yet it is also a very good way to state your support for evil, extremist ideologies while retaining just enough deniability for yourself to discredit anyone who attacks you for supporting evil, extremist ideologies. (Vice President Vance offered a not dissimilar defense of President Trump's social media post in which he depicted himself as Jesus.)

The problem isn't that evil things are being done and people need to repent; the problem, they said, was that I was lame and didn't get the joke.

There is a final point we should make here before moving on: For sake of argument, let's suppose that the meta-ironic communication *is* actually a joke and not sincere. This simply raises a further question: Are there things we shouldn't joke about? Are there domains of life or topics of conversation that should be closed to irony?

The decision to use meta-irony as a rhetorical strategy to mainstream extremist ideology is inherently to claim that nothing is sacred, that everything can be a joke or a troll if it advances some greater political objective. That's the implicit claim of Cornish-Dale's supporters.

I would suggest that even if Cornish-Dale's decision to publish a story about murdering someone was a joke, it is still grossly inappropriate, as is the decision to publish a variety of pro-Hitler memes and to promote pro-Hitler publishing houses, all of which Cornish-Dale has done.

So even if we grant the claim that these are jokes... well, they are things one should not joke about! This is especially the case for people purporting to be Christian leaders. The pastoral epistles are abundantly clear, for example, about the character qualifications for pastors. Paul takes it for granted that anyone aspiring to ministry should be [defined by a certain sobriety or gravity](https://reformedconformist.substack.com/p/the-war-against-gravity) and should not be prone to irreverent joking or defined by a contentious spirit. J. D. Flynn [made the point well](https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/blessed-peter-paul-iii-and-everthing?utm%5Fsource=post-email-title&publication%5Fid=228030&post%5Fid=194115515&utm%5Fcampaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=bjni&triedRedirect=true&utm%5Fmedium=email) in his response to Vance's defense of Trump:

> Suppose it was a joke.  
>  
> What Vance didn’t make was any assessment of whether that joke was appropriate, in good taste, or — possibly — an offense against almighty God. Sure, it was a joke, but Vance didn’t say whether presidential jokesters should depict themselves with the trappings of the true Christus Medicus, Jesus Christ.

So ultimately I would argue that even if the person deploying post-irony or meta-irony *is* actually joking, their speech is *still* bad because it is marked by an irreverence about grave subject matter and inevitably produces contention within the church and the culture. 

And this now brings us back to Secretary Hegseth's remarks last week during the monthly worship service he leads at the Pentagon.

## Meta-Irony in the Pentagon

To review the situation for those who didn't follow the story, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth last week incorporated a 'prayer' that he said he was given by service members called CSAR 25:17, which he said is a reference to Ezekiel 25:17.

He then quoted the 'prayer' as he said it was given to him, which turned out to be a very slightly edited adaptation of a speech given by Samuel L. Jackson in the Quentin Tarantino film *Pulp Fiction* as Jackson, who plays a hit man in the film, is about to kill someone.

Here is the transcript of the relevant section:

> Which leads me finally to a prayer that I'll read, which was also handed to me a couple of days ago. \[It was\] delivered from the lead mission planner of Sandy One. Sandy One were the A-10s that were a part of the daylight rescue mission of 44 Alpha -- Dude 44 Alpha -- out of Iran. And if you know anything about Sandies, their job is to bring those A-10s and put them in between the enemy and that downed pilot. And so their job is to literally sacrifice themselves for someone else. And in Iran -- in contested territory -- that's exactly what they did.  
>  
> So it's this prayer \[that\] was recited by Sandy One, which is one of the Sandies -- \[a prayer\] to all Sandies, all those A-10 crews prior to all CSAR \[Combat Search and Rescue\] missions, but especially this CSAR mission that happened in real time. They they call \[the prayer\] CSAR 25:17, which I think is meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17.  
>  
> So the prayer is CSAR 25:17 and it reads -- and pray with me, please:  
>  
> The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of camaraderie and duty shepherd the lost through the valley of darkness. For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother. And you will know my call sign is Sandy One when I lay my vengeance upon thee. And amen.

[Steven Wedgeworth's response](https://reformedconformist.substack.com/p/praying-to-csar?utm%5Fsource=share&utm%5Fmedium=android&r=3ezki&triedRedirect=true) to this is worth quoting in full:

> “And you will know my call sign is Sandy One.” \~US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth ...  
>  
> When I first heard this one, I didn’t fully take it in. It’s just young guys having a laugh in a high-pressure situation. Not the best taste, but boys will be boys. I didn’t reflect on it enough. I was more focused on the whole *Pulp Fiction* part.  
>  
> But what’s actually going on here? The real Bible verse says, “They shall know that I am the Lord.” In Ezekiel, God is the speaker. That’s also still true in the Pulp Fiction version, even though it’s obviously being perverted. But in Hegseth’s CSAR prayer, there has been a textual edit. In his version, the rescue unit is the speaker. They have identified themselves with God and His eschatological wrath. Sandy One is the Lord.

We already are dealing with a third commandment violation, in other words.

But, Wedgeworth continues,

> Put yourself in that room. It’s a sort of parachurch time for prayer and even spiritual worship. The whole point is that you are bringing God back to the military. And then you hear that “prayer.” How do you feel?  
>  
> Even more than being outraged at the trivialization of an ordinary means of grace, I hope someone asked this question— Who exactly are we praying to here?  
>  
> Are we bowing our head to CSAR?  
>  
> Seriously dudes. What are we even doing anymore? ...  
>  
> Worship shouldn’t be a joke. Accidental sacrilege is not a great strategy in wartime. I don’t want the Lord to strike down upon us in furious anger.  
>  
> And I gotta say bro, right now, we are doing the sort of things that have historically gotten that reaction out of Him.

In the most plain sense of the event, the above is what happened: The Secretary of Defense, performing an act that was intended as public worship in a recognizably Christian service, violated the third commandment and equated God with our armed services. And he did so while trivializing the worship service itself by quoting from a Quentin Tarantino movie in what certainly seems to have been a meta-ironical way. (If you watch the video, there are several little knowing smirks or looks you can see in both Hegseth and his audience which suggest that he and they know exactly where this 'prayer' originated from.)

So all of this is bad enough.

But I now want to highlight the reaction when people condemned Hegseth's behavior, because it is, once again, a textbook example of using meta-irony as a way to excuse and mask reprehensible behavior.

Here is Daniel Strand, a civilian who teaches at the Air War College attempting to justify Hegseth's actions:

![strand on hegseth](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/04/ghost-upload-1776795648422-714397-strand_20on_20hegseth.png)

"Dark humor mixed with real spirituality." Hello, meta-irony.

Or, perhaps we should go straight to the wisdom of Scripture:

> Like a madman who throws firebrands, arrows, and death, Is the man who deceives his neighbor, And says, “I was only joking!”

Not to be outdone by Strand, Erick Erickson made much the same argument:

![erickson on hegseth](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/04/ghost-upload-1776795650107-363626-erickson_20on_20hegseth.png)

"They took him out of context!" Apparently there are contexts in which third commandment violations are acceptable?

At the time of the Reformation certain Christians dissented from the state church on grounds that any civic organization requiring vow-taking as a condition for membership was a violation of Christ's plain words in the Sermon on the Mount to "let your yes be yes and your no be no." I do not think those Radical brothers were correct in their application of Christ's words—if they were then there are examples from the lives of the apostles that we would have to regard as sinful even though we have no textual merit in Scripture for doing so.

And yet I cannot help respecting the sobriety and seriousness with which those radical Christians read the Scriptures. There is a gravity about their faith and a sobriety that is moving and powerful and admirable—and that sobriety drove them toward a conspicuous sort of generosity and love of neighbor that still inspires many 500 years later. That is a million miles from the glib and blasphemous place in which a non-trivial portion of the American church now finds itself, when politics have caused them to become blind to the significance of prayer, of gathered worship, and the terrifying danger of blaspheming a holy God through irreverent mockery. 

Ross Douthat [said it best](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/14/opinion/trump-pope.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) recently when he wrote the following after President Trump's recent posting of an AI image depicting himself as Jesus,

> But the core issue from a religious perspective isn’t whether Muslims or Catholics or evangelicals should be personally offended by the specifics of any given presidential foray. It’s that there’s a consistent thread linking profane Easter Sunday threats, a rant against the world’s most famous Christian leader and the depiction of yourself as the Second Person of the Trinity. The compounding offense isn’t against religious identity or papal dignity. It’s a violation of the first and second commandments, where the offended party is Almighty God.  
>  
> If you are a secular observer who assumes that blasphemy is a sin without a real object, that escalation matters mostly as a window into the president’s second-term state of mind.  
>  
> If you’re a believer, though, then Mr. Trump’s entire political career — his catalyzing role in liberalism’s crisis, his movement from power to exile to power once again — exists under providential power. In which case a turn to presidential blasphemy is a warning for his religious supporters about potential conclusions to the story, and the spiritual peril of simply sticking with him till the end.

The things which both President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have done in recent weeks are things that send a person to Hell. They are things that, when done by men in the Bible, sometimes led to their instant death at the hand of a righteous and wrathful God who will not see his name mocked. If you doubt me, you can take it up with [Uzzah](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20samuel%206&version=NIV&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and with [King Herod](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts%2012&version=NIV&ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

We should see these things clearly for what they are, not only so that we can warn others in our attempt to care for the souls of our brothers and sisters, but so that we too can keep watch over our own souls. For what is happening now is not dark humor or out of context speech or ironic joking. What is happening now is the normalization amongst conservative Christians of grave offenses against almighty God.
### Keep the Christian Calendar, but Keep It Under the Word
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/keep-the-christian-calendar-but-keep-it-under-the-word/
Last updated: 2026-06-01T16:04:08.000Z
Growing up as a Southern Baptist, I had little experience with the church calendar. My hometown church certainly celebrated the major holidays. We had candlelight services every Christmas Eve and a choir concert on Good Friday. But my pastors didn’t wear colorful stoles that changed with the seasons, and we never had special services on Ash Wednesday or Maundy Thursday. Those practices were for the Lutherans and Methodists, not for Baptists.

This division I intuited from my upbringing is normative historically. Celebrating the Christian calendar—not just Christmas and Easter, but whole seasons like Epiphany, Lent, and Pentecost—has separated believers since the Reformation. Yet over the last several decades, this has begun to change.

In the 1970s and ’80s, the pragmatic and revivalist emphases of the church-growth and seeker movements began to influence evangelical churches. Then, in the 2000s, authors such as [Robert E. Webber](https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Future-Time-Forming-Spirituality-Christian/dp/0801091756/?tag=thegospcoal-20&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and [James K. A. Smith](https://www.amazon.com/Desiring-Kingdom-Worldview-Formation-Liturgies/dp/0801035775/?tag=thegospcoal-2&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) wrote against these trends. They promoted liturgical worship and the church calendar as historically rooted alternatives to entertainment-driven services. Their thinking caught on.

Today, even low-church congregations might [use seasonal prayer books](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1433587904/?tag=thegospcoal-20&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) or host Ash Wednesday services and Epiphany feasts. Is this a positive development? Are we reclaiming Christian history, or in our desire to put off pragmatism, have we inadvertently adopted practices contrary to God’s Word? Do we understand the theology behind the calendar or what led our Reformed forebears to reject it?

To answer these questions, let’s explore the roots of the Christian calendar and the history that’s made its observance so divisive.

## Rhythms for Rehearsing

When the Lord told Israel to pass down his story to their children, he framed the retelling with annual celebrations. God gave instructions for the Passover before the people left Egypt (Ex. 12:1–28). Then in Leviticus 23, he established a series of festivals—from Unleavened Bread to the Feast of Booths—that helped God’s people rehearse their journey from the Red Sea to Sinai each year. When the Christian calendar was developed in the church’s earliest centuries, it was meant as a similar teaching tool.

Christians first observed holy week and Lent in the third and fourth centuries. For believers in the West, Easter’s date was formalized at Nicea in AD 325\. Christmas and Epiphany came next, followed by Advent in the sixth century.

For the early Christian pastors who developed these holidays, the seasons of the Christian year taught the milestones of Jesus's earthly ministry—from the promise of his coming at Advent through his resurrection at Easter and the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost.

As Mike Cosper [writes](https://www.amazon.com/Rhythms-Grace-Churchs-Worship-Gospel/dp/1433533421/?tag=thegospcoal-20&ref=mereorthodoxy.com),

> To many Protestants, the church calendar may seem like an arbitrary regulation, a testimony to authority and micromanagement from Rome, but for its authors, it was designed pastorally. The church calendar was designed to walk believers through the story of the gospel every year, from the incarnation to the ascension.

Yet the Christian calendar is more than a tool for catechesis. It’s also built on the conviction that “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19:1)—that the sun’s daily course, the moon’s monthly circuit, and the changing seasons are all imbued with the gospel story. Summarizing Martin Luther’s thoughts, editor Elizabeth Rundle Charles [wrote](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Watchwords%5Ffor%5Fthe%5FWarfare%5Fof%5FLife/OR1OAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), “Our Lord has written the promise of the resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in spring-time.”

Congregations that follow the calendar worship in a way that reflects this creational vision. Their longing in the dark days of Advent erupts into the lights and [joyful songs of Christmastide](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/martin-luther-sing-christmas/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Their [penitent collects](http://penitential/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) during winter’s Lenten fast give way to Easter’s flower-filled sanctuaries and shouts of “Alleluia!” With full hearts at Pentecost, they can sing like David at harvest: “You crown the year with your bounty” (Ps. 65:11).

## From Altar to Pulpit

Hebrews reminds us that Israel’s earthly tent was modeled after the greater tabernacle Moses saw in the heavenlies (Heb. 8:5). As worship developed in the Western churches during the Middle Ages, it attempted to follow the same heavenly pattern. The colorful vestments and majestic cathedrals were meant to lift congregants’ eyes away from earth to the skies.

But sadly, the tabernacle pattern—replete with an altar for the Eucharistic sacrifice and a priestly class whose traditions came to hold authority equal to Scripture—instead hid the gospel behind religious trappings. It transformed worship from a means of grace to a way of achieving salvation.

In this context, the church calendar was also transformed from a tool for discipleship to an elaborate and binding regulation. In addition to the rhythms that taught Christ’s life, the church added seven major feasts to the Virgin Mary, days commemorating each of the 12 apostles, and numerous saints’ days that elevated patrons above everyday believers.

The Reformation confronted these errors by recentering worship around God’s Word. In Germany, Luther translated the Scriptures and gave the Bible back to the people. Reformed churches on the European continent (and later the Puritans and free church nonconformists in Great Britain) went further. They ceased using vestments and images in worship. Unlike the cathedrals, their churches were plain and austere.

Wanting to make clear that [holiness isn’t found in holidays](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/calvin-lords-day-christmas/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), they simply prioritized Sunday, the Lord’s Day. Reformed pastors removed the altar and instead put the pulpit front and center in their sanctuaries. The point, as Ligon Duncan [writes](https://www.amazon.com/Give-Praise-God-Celebrating-Montgomery-ebook/dp/B0749PBPDV/?tag=thegospcoal-20&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), was that “true Christian worship is by the book. It is according to Scripture. The Bible alone ultimately directs \[its\] form and content.”

## By the Word Your Servant is Warned

Scripture repeatedly says we don’t only commit idolatry when we worship false gods. We also commit idolatry when we worship the true God in the wrong way, because doing so puts erroneous ideas about who God is into our heads.

We hear this warning in the commandments (Ex. 20:1–6) and in narratives such as the golden calves (Ex. 32; 1 Kings 12:25–33), Nadab and Abihu’s “strange fire” (Lev. 10), and Ananias and Saphira’s lie to the Holy Spirit (Acts 5:1–11).

Appealing to such warnings, Reformed theologians have emphasized the necessity of having scriptural warrant for all we do in corporate worship. This conviction that worship practices should be founded on Scripture’s positive instructions has come to be known as the *regulative principle*. Duncan says, “It is an extension of the Reformational axiom of sola scriptura. As the Bible is the final authority in faith and life, so it is also the final authority in how we corporately worship.”

Following this principle, Reformed worship is simple. It doesn’t require elaborate rituals, prayer books, or regalia. Instead, it’s rooted, as Duncan goes on to write, in “the unadorned and unpretentious principles of order found in the Bible.” Believing that “the law of the Lord is perfect . . . the testimony of the Lord is sure . . . \[and\] the precepts of the Lord are right” (Ps. 19:7–8), Reformed churches sing the Word, pray the Word, read the Word, preach the Word, and as it’s enacted in the sacrament, even eat the Word.

## Matter of Freedom

At times in history, the regulative principle has been applied too stridently. As R. Kent Hughes [comments](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0310216257/?tag=thegospcoal-20&ref=mereorthodoxy.com),

> Certainly there was some regrettable iconoclasm \[by the non-conformist churches\], and sometimes they went too far and abused their freedoms. Who today can read the *1662 Book of Common Prayer* and not appreciate its excellencies? Who with Bible in hand can defend the radical Separatists’ extremes?

In their pursuit of a simple spirituality shorn of all extra-biblical accretions, Reformed churches sometimes constrained free Christian consciences unnecessarily. This was particularly the case when it came to the church calendar. Lacking any assurance that the calendar is apostolic in origin, some Puritans wanted to ban Christmas. But in Scripture, we discover that when Paul wrote about Christian freedom, he explicitly mentioned observing days (Rom. 14:15).

Because of this apostolic teaching, I sympathize with the Anglo-Lutheran impulse to reject Catholicism’s clearly unbiblical practices but nevertheless plunder from them what’s edifying. Recovering the calendar reminds us we’re part of a global church that’s broader than our denominational traditions. It roots us in history and reminds us we aren’t the first to love and rehearse the redemption story. But even if we retrieve what’s good in early Christian history, we must ensure the Word remains our priority.

## Yes, But...

Calendar-keepers are right in their conviction that the seasons tell Christ’s glorious story. But because of sin, we don’t naturally hear creation proclaim the gospel. We must first be taught the Bible’s story before we can sense it in nature’s rhythms. As the second half of Psalm 19 makes clear, we can only see what the heavens declare when God’s Word revives our souls.

The calendar’s rhythms can also help church leaders [teach their people disciplines of fasting](https://www.amazon.com/Fasting-Disciplines-Devotion-Cassie-Achermann/dp/B0FBR43F78/?tag=thegospcoal-20&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and feasting. But if we use the calendar this way, we should also teach Christ’s warnings against publicly practicing righteousness to be seen by others (Matt. 6:16–18). Corporate fasts can be good, but there’s no need to post what you’re giving up on social media. After all, God sees what is done in secret. For him, outward rituals are nothing. What counts is faith and love that keeps God’s commands (Gal. 5:6; 1 Cor. 7:19).

Yes, Paul says observing days is a matter of freedom (Rom. 14:15), but we shouldn’t use our freedom as an opportunity for the flesh (Gal. 5:13). Elsewhere, Paul tells the Colossians not to make observing days and festivals a mandate (Col. 2:16–17). As Cosper writes, “The church calendar, as a pastoral and contextual concept for teaching people to live in the gospel story, is a great idea. As a binding regulation ordered with absolute authority, it distorts the purity of worship.”

Today’s secular culture isn’t all that concerned with vestments and ritual. Instead, we fill each month with amusements, more focused on changing the seasonal candy aisle than the colors in the sanctuary. For this reason, I’m thankful for the church of my adult years, which has taught me to follow the calendar more intentionally.

As Sarah Irving-Stonebraker [writes](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0310160901/?tag=thegospcoal-20&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), “Stewarding our time using the historical rhythms and seasons of the church underlines the rich distinctiveness of the Christian life. . . \[a life that’s\] markedly different from how the secular world compels us to spend our time.” That’s the calendar at its best, and if your conscience permits, there’s freedom to keep it. Only be sure to keep it under the Word.
### No Eulogy Virtues Without Repentance: A Meditation from Belfast
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/no-eulogy-virtues-without-repentance-a-meditation-from-belfast/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:29:52.000Z
The grandfatherly man who bent over me, smiling tenderly and gripping my shoulder to welcome me to Belfast, was, in fact, a killer.

I recognized him from a documentary I had watched in preparation for a trip to Ireland. Though he was not an official speaker for the group I travelled with, I knew that he had taken the lives of his neighbors. He had been part of a paramilitary group that fought during the Irish Troubles. Whether what he did should be called military defense or cold blooded murder, remains one of the central questions of that conflict.

I’ve found myself wondering what story he tells his grandchildren about his role in the fighting.

Recently, myself and twenty other ministry leaders travelled from Phoenix, AZ to the wet spring of Northern Ireland with the purpose of studying peacemaking. (The trip was funded by the Lilly Endowment.) We went to the heart of Belfast to hear stories and reflections on what the British obliquely–sometimes condescendingly– refer to as “The Troubles,” but what is known locally in Belfast as “The Conflict.”

Our group stayed in the Europa Hotel, which has the distinction of being the most bombed hotel in the world (38 times), though, as I told one of my sons over the phone from my 4th floor room, it’s perfectly safe now.

For those, like myself a few months ago, who are unfamiliar with the history of Northern Ireland from the late 1960s to 1998, the sobering reality is this: there were tens of thousands of injuries and maimings, and around 3700 deaths, mostly civilian, and largely neighbor-to-neighbor killings.

By military standards, this number can appear almost insignificant until it is remembered that Northern Ireland is a small place. A rough American equivalent would be hundreds of thousands, perhaps even up to half a million, of radicalized civilians brutally killing one another–not on a battlefield, but by stabbing their neighbors in the streets, or setting off bombs in local shops.

What was the conflict about? On the surface, the dividing lines were split along Protestant and Catholic –but this was not about theology. In fact one of our presenters joked, “When you come to Northern Ireland everyone asks: ‘Are you Catholic or Protestant?’ If you say, ‘I’m an atheist,’ then they’ll ask: ‘Well, are you a Protestant Atheist or a Catholic Atheist?’”

The conflict was not doctrinal but really about identity, politics, and land. It involved a long and complex history of English and Scottish (Protestant) settlers who came to Northern Ireland and shaped the culture for generations. It is about the nature of what it means to be Irish, how independent Ireland should be from her historically English colonizer, and who should have access to positions of influence and power.

The peace brought by the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 mostly put a stop to the killing, but produced an unhappy stalemate. The language used was flexible enough that both sides could read into it their own version of victory.

To this day, Northern Ireland remains essentially segregated, with Catholics and Protestants largely going to their own separate schools, gyms, and work places. Hundreds of murals are spread throughout Belfast, some with simple memorials for the lives lost, but most with overt messages of condemnation for the other side. Some murals even have messages of support or hatred for other world conflicts (like Israel and Palestine) mapped onto Northern Ireland’s own local divisions.

Physical barriers still separate some of the neighborhoods in Belfast. While no one is overly worried about violence anymore, the old barriers are considered a “security blanket”--a physical reminder that neighbors are still not ready to let go and trust completely.

I claim no expertise in this area of historical understanding of The Troubles or the process of peacemaking for that matter, but I came home from the trip with a burden about the way we Christians think about memory and, specifically, how we want others to remember our own lives.

In his book *The Road To Character* David Brookspopularized the term *Eulogy Virtues* to refer to living for the things that you would want said at your funeral. *Eulogy Virtues*, as opposed to *Resume Virtues* (accomplishment, success and achievement), refer to things like kindness and faithfulness and your capacity for love. It is about the overall impact and direction of your life.

After spending nine days in an area still visibly marked with reminders of violence and hatred, I found myself wondering: what must one morally do to reckon with the past in a way that truly heals and brings honor to Christ? Is it enough to simply stop doing wrong things and begin the path toward the eulogy virtues? Can one just start doing the right thing and let time heal, or is there a middle step needed as a bridge? And if a middle step is required, what would it be?

One of the themes of our training was that, wherever violence and pain have been experienced, there must be acknowledgement through repentance and lament. There must be a place to come together and for those involved to admit, “What we did was wrong.” There must be places of recognition that are free from intentional barbs and stirrings of past grievance. There must be honest memory, but without ill-intent.

We heard from many voices on the trip. We listened to the narratives of the Republicans (or Nationalists, largely Catholic) and the narratives of the Unionists (or Loyalists, largely Protestant). Everyone seemed sober about what happened. No one glorified the violence. All seemed grateful that the killing had ceased.

But beyond that, something was missing. To speak broadly, the narratives largely took this shape: “This is why we were angry, and I’m glad the violence is over.” What I did not hear, on either side, were things like “We were wrong” or “Our suffering was real, but our actions were unjustified” or even “We were misguided.”

Yet many involved in the conflict are now trying to shift to those *Eulogy Virtue* perspectives. Some of the men who spoke seem increasingly aware that the next generation cannot understand their anger. As they near the end of their lives, they seem to be aware that their violence will not be remembered well. So they frame their narratives exclusively in terms of military necessity or the defense of rights, rather than admitting any wrongdoing or prejudice.

Our guide for the trip, a retired minister himself, shook his head at one point and said, “When you come toward the end of your life, you want to be able to be remembered well. I understand why you wouldn’t want to tell your grandchildren what happened. No one wants to be remembered as a murderer.”

As a Presbyterian minister myself, I also found it difficult to wrestle with the legacy of Pastor Ian Paisley. Paisley, the founder of the fundamentalist leaning Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, was known as a firebrand of the Unionist cause, not necessarily pursuing violence himself but inspiring thousands of young Protestant men to take up arms against Catholics. His view that the pope was the Anti-Christ meant this conflict had not just moral, but apocalyptic dimensions. So peaceful compromise was akin to giving into spiritual darkness.

Yet later in life, Paisley softened to be more receptive to peace, more willing to compromise with his opponents, and more gentle in his communication. This turn in his leadership greatly helped the peace process. But, though Paisley changed his tactics, he never publicly said, “What we were doing in the beginning was wrong.”

There was no middle step. Could this missing middle step of repentance be the reason that many of our speakers used different versions of the same thematic phrase: “We have peace in Ireland, but we do not have reconciliation”? Or, said another way, is it possible to have *eulogy virtue* without full acknowledgement of past wrong? The brutal murals, the segregated gathering places, and the physical barriers between neighborhoods that remain even after several attempts to have them removed, suggests that we cannot.

Near the end of the trip, we did experience something different. In what was generally acknowledged as the most powerful moment of the training, we heard the recollections of two victims of the violence. We listened to the stories of a Protestant husband who lost his wife to a bomb and a Catholic mother who lost her son to a random stabbing in the street. They both sat next to each other, lovingly acknowledging each other’s grief, now decades old but still tender. It was clear that what they were modeling was both rare and necessary for true reconciliation to spread.

As we returned to Phoenix, our group naturally began to reflect on the possible parallels here in the United States. What are the places where Americans have come close to this type of unrest? Having spent time in a place as outwardly calm and courteous as Belfast, one does come away with a disquieting conclusion: this kind of violent outbreak could happen anywhere.

But we were encouraged by our guides to not rush to organize anything specific in our own context. Instead, we were challenged to wrestle individually and as a group to see what comes of extended reflection.

What this reflection has called to mind for me is my own family legacy and the necessity of repentance. I feel burdened to say *I’m sorry* even more. It makes me want to give more than surface level apologies, and to dig deeper and contemplate patterns that need to be named and forsaken.

There can be no eulogy virtues without the middle step of repentance. As Proverbs 28:13 says: Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.
### To Live Well: Alan Noble
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/to-live-well-alan-noble/
Last updated: 2026-05-21T18:31:09.000Z
**An event for building the character that can move through chaotic times.**

Alan Noble, author and professor, guides readers through the seven virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, wisdom, faith, hope, and love as ways to grow in character, Christlikeness, and resilience to live a life of meaning in a world of chaos and confusion.

> **"What a book! Each chapter brims with wisdom—drawn from Scripture, steeped in deep reading, and refined through life experience. I found myself not only nourished personally but also earmarking pages to send to family and friends wrestling with major decisions or simply trying to make faithful daily choices. Truly one of the year's best."**

**— Trevin Wax**, vice president for resources and marketing at the North American Mission Board and author of *The Gospel Way Catechism*, *The Thrill of Orthodoxy*, and *Rethink Your Self*

### Details

- Online
- April 29, 2026
- 11:30 am CST
- Free to attend

### Features

- Keynote
- Interview with Jake Meador
- Live Q&A
### Why Religious Freedom Matters
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-religious-freedom-matters/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:29:58.000Z
*The following excerpt from Allen D. Hertzke,* [Why Religious Freedom Matters: Human Rights and Human Flourishing](https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268211066/why-religious-freedom-matters/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), *is published with permission of Notre Dame Press.*

One of the central findings of this book concerns the fraught relationship between religion and the state. Like a law of physics, the fusion of religion and government is bad for both governance and religion.

For governance, the political melding of faith with nation, regime, or tribe contributes to corruption, repression, autocracy, and even violence. Across the world, we see movements by religious nationalists to link the dominant faith with national identity. With Islamist movements in the Middle East, Hindu nationalists in India, Christian nationalists in the United States, and Buddhist chauvinists in Asia, we see this trend. The impulse is understandable when once- dominant religious communities see their cultural influence eroded by growing religious pluralism or aggressive secular ideologies. But often, the attempt to reassert cultural prominence by capturing state organs sparks repression against religious minorities and stifles dissent. In turn, would-be autocrats cunningly co-opt majority faith leaders for their own ends, undermining democracy and rule of law.

Consequently, while government persecution against all religions represents an obvious threat to religious communities, as we see in North Korea and China, so does majority favoritism, which contributes to minority discrimination in far more countries.

The broader dynamic at play in the melding of religion and state is captured by the idea of the “paradox of privilege,” a rich concept with profound implications for politics, peaceful societies, economics, and religion itself.

A vast majority of religious violence in the world today is generated not by repressed religious minorities but by religious majorities emboldened and radicalized by the privileges they enjoy from governments. Perhaps the most vivid illustration of this phenomenon is the case of Buddhist monks “behaving badly,” participating in violent attacks against religious others. In other words, even Buddhism, a faith deeply associated with peace and compassion, can be drawn into violence when fused with the state.

Majority privilege usually goes hand in hand with discrimination against religious minorities and repression of dissenters, which Jonathan Fox shows is the dominant pattern across the globe. In turn, religious independence and equality in law, for majorities and minorities alike, is the antidote to religious strife and an underpinning of democratic ethos. When the Catholic Church officially renounced state privilege and endorsed religious liberty at Vatican II, it became the engine of the last great wave of democratization on Earth.

So the paradox is clearly political, that when governments grant privileges to dominant religions, thinking that will stabilize society, they make majorities more aggressive and less civil. Privileged religious majorities tend to engage in intimidation or even violence against religious minorities, often with impunity. Majority privilege undermines flourishing civil society, civil liberties, and democratic norms. Moreover, even though governments patronize religions to gain greater legitimacy, recent research shows that state support for religion is associated with lower levels of public confidence in government.

The paradox of privilege also extends to economics. The ulama-state alliance that emerged in Muslim empires and the subsequent enforcement of rigid sharia law stunted economic enterprise in Mideast societies. In a telling example of the paradox, Muslim businessmen in the Ottoman Empire were charged higher interest on loans than Christians and Jews, because their preferential treatment in credit courts made them high-risk borrowers. This redounded over the generations to inhibit the development of modern economic institutions in Muslim majority countries. Moreover, majority privilege reinforces economic straitjackets that prevent uplift for the poor and empowerment for women.

But perhaps the most profound implication is that privilege can undermine the religious essence itself. All great religious traditions contain wellsprings of moral guidance and ethical teachings that can contribute to healthy families, communities, and flourishing societies. A wide array of scholarship in sociology, political science, religious studies, and even theology suggests that state sponsorship can compromise or warp those religious principles. Over time, the fusion of faith with political power traduces the credibility of co-opted religious leaders and saps the vitality of religious commitments. Evidence comes from modern Iran, where repressive and corrupt clerical rule has dramatically weakened allegiance to Shia Islam and increased the nonreligious population. Shockingly, in one survey more Iranian respondents claimed no religion than pledged fealty to Shia Islam.

On the other hand, when majorities renounce privilege and agree to enjoy equal liberty under law—accepting pluralism—they tend to flourish more authentically.

The most systematic and global examination of the paradox of privilege is provided by Nilay Saiya in his landmark work, *The Global Politics of Jesus: A Christian Case for Church- State Separation*. In this book and subsequent analysis, Saiya marshals global data and case studies to document the impact on Christianity, the world’s largest religion, when it becomes enmeshed with the state. To the degree that Christianity is backed by political power or granted privileges by governments, it becomes fundamentally unchristian and loses its vitality.

As a political scientist, Saiya provides an unusual theological analysis to make this case. Distinct among religious traditions, he argues, Christian doctrine sharply distinguishes the kingdom of God, or what Saiya calls “The Kingdom of the Cross,” from the kingdom of the world—of principalities and powers. The kingdom of the world tends to be tribal, exclusivist, coercive, and violent. On the other hand, the Kingdom of God as proclaimed by Jesus entails uncompromising love instead of coercion, universal dignity instead of exclusion, forgiveness instead of retribution, and peace instead of violence. As Saiya argues, deploying the sword of the state to promote the faith inevitably contradicts these essential teachings. Or, as one author underscored the point, “The best way to get people to lay down the cross is to hand them the sword of the state.”

On the other hand, Christianity is most authentic when it depends on the voluntary support of its followers, not the state. Obviously, this occurs in religiously free and pluralist societies. But it can even function where the faith confronts political repression, just not where it is privileged.

Remarkably, Saiya demonstrates that state favoritism represents the greatest threat to the growth of Christianity in the world today. Based on a decade of demographic trends (2010–2020), Saiya and his co-author trace patterns of growth or decline of Christianity in a large sample of nations. Employing measurable indicators, such as church attendance, participation in youth programs, and faith- based charities, they show that when Christianity is privileged by the state, it tends to lose its vitality and membership.

In fact, statistical tests demonstrate that as Christian privilege goes up, its percentage of the national population declines over time. Thus, Christian privilege leads to the secularization of societies—a statistical confirmation of sociological theories. On the other hand, in places where Christianity operates on equal terms with other faiths, or even under some conditions of persecution, it tends to grow. In other words, political patronage undermines evangelization, the great commission of spreading the gospel, of making disciples.

A vivid illustration of this pattern concerns the Catholic Church, the largest Christian denomination in the world. Even though religious restrictions are low overall for Catholic majority nations, enough variation exists to measure the impact of state privilege. Saiya found that Catholic majority countries where privilege is highest saw Catholic membership decrease as a share of the population over the recent decade, while Catholic majority countries where privilege is lowest saw Catholic membership increase. Projecting into 2050, none of the ten countries expected to see the largest gains in Catholic population have high levels of privilege.

Perhaps the “curse of privilege” is a more accurate depiction of the phenomenon than the paradox of privilege.

This curse of privilege extends to religious communities that receive support from political movements or parties. In the United States, recent studies suggest that the association of evangelical Christianity with the Christian Right and the Republican Party has helped propel the growth in the percentage of Americans who express no religious affiliation. In other words, the politicization of the evangelical church has undermined its growth and spurred secularization.

This finding should offer a cautionary note for the American Catholic Church, the next largest religious community in the nation. While Catholic leaders welcomed GOP support for the pro- life cause and their institutional autonomy, the nativism of the Republican MAGA movement clearly violates Catholic social teaching, as Pope Leo XIV has intimated. In spite of this, prominent Republican Catholics seek an unprecedented privileging of their conservative brand of Catholicism by the state. One aim is to gain public tax support for Catholic parochial schools, an outcome that would propel deeper entanglement of the Catholic Church with government and tempt Church leaders to mute their prophetic voices for potential tax dollars. The “curse of privilege” suggests that church leaders would be wise to resist succumbing to the temptation of state privilege, lest they risk undermining church credibility and vitality, as happened with their evangelical counterparts.

A crucial challenge facing the world is the rise of Christian nationalism, a global ideology that seeks to integrate national identity with Christianity. Saiya shows that this ideology is a distortion—theologians might say heresy—of authentic Christianity and the teachings of Jesus. Because Christian nationalism rests on exclusivity and jettisons the principle of citizen equality, it is fundamentally anti- democratic and tends to fuel strife and even violence.

In the United States, Christian nationalists have emerged as a growing threat to democracy, civil tolerance, and religious equality. Skeptics wonder if the term is merely a construct of scholars hostile to policies Christians might support. After all, what is wrong with Christians engaging in politics to back policies that reflect their values? Nothing, of course! But as voluminous empirical research shows, Christian nationalists depart from this kind of advocacy and embrace autocratic aims. Spearheaded by a growing movement that strives to seize power over all sectors of society, Christian nationalists overwhelmingly backed Donald Trump in his 2024 election and provided the strongest support for his autocratic moves to gain unchecked presidential power. Because of their aggressive posture, some Christian nationalists even criticize the Christian virtue of empathy.

While ostensibly defending religious liberty, this movement represents a threat to that cause, not only domestically but on the global stage, because it undermines America’s enlightened international leadership. Born of its constitutional heritage on religious liberty, the United States has played a leading role in promoting international religious freedom, both by its example and its global leadership.41 Indeed, some eighteen nations have developed or strengthened international religious freedom initiatives, often following the lead of the United States. This legacy may be in peril. The “American First” agenda of the MAGA movement, its assaults on democratic norms and institutions, and nativist cruelty toward refugees threaten to undermine the nation’s credibility, goodwill, and capacity to play its leadership role going forward. If this trend continues, it would represent a tragedy for the cause of global religious freedom.

In contrast to this picture, a formidable scholarship demonstrates that authentic Christianity, fueled by voluntary support, strongly promotes democracy, human rights, civil society, and uplift for the poor around the world. Christian human rights champions have become global “Holy Humanitarians” and “militants for peace and justice.” They can only perform this role if they resist the siren’s song of privileged Christian nationalism.

[*(featured image)*](https://www.flickr.com/photos/americanlifeleague/6863537622?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)
### How the Word of Easter Kills and Raises Up
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-the-word-of-easter-kills-and-raises-up/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:29:59.000Z
On the first Easter morning, St. Mary Magdalene stood weeping outside a tomb. Mark confides: “when the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him” (16:1). They clearly loved Jesus. But they were in no way expecting, or looking for, the resurrection of the dead. It appears they desired to prepare the body of Christ in such a way as to create a memorial of his death. In this profoundly moving scene in John ch. 20, Mary is devastated. Not only has the one whom she called “Lord” died, but his precious corpse is missing.

The drama of the moment is palpable. We hear the voice of a stranger addressing her personally, by name — “*Mary*.” To borrow the phrasing of [Elizabeth Bruenig](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/faith-god-science/686534/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), Mary knew her soul was exposed to something indescribably majestic and bracing—something that overwhelmed her: the unmistakable sensation of eye contact. The one whom she saw, saw her. She was shaken to the core: she had not so much perceived as she had been perceived by the risen Lord whom she had stood near when he had been crucified.

Another text commonly read after Easter similarly depicts how the word of God disrupts and remakes us. Those who hear Peter’s sermon in Acts ch. 2 are cut to the quick by the word of God. To encounter God is to have one’s world shattered — but a close counterpart is that God wills for us life and peace in the risen Lord of heaven and earth. Why does the word of God cut their hearts? Peter indicates twice the crowd was complicit in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The unsparing language is stark: “…this Jesus, whom you crucified.” Though Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God,” simultaneously, Peter preaches, Jesus was “killed by the hands of lawless men.” If we contemplate that it was for our trespasses, for the forgiveness of our sins that Christ suffered, we similarly should be cut to the heart. Yet, the good news of Easter is that “God raised him \[Jesus\] up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be bound by it.” Such is the power and majesty of Jesus, that death could not hold him. As the church sings at Easter: “*Vain* the stone, the watch, the seal.”

But Peter then adds something astounding: by raising Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, God has enthroned him as the promised one who would reign as king on the throne of David forever, and after his resurrection Christ ascended into heaven, so that “being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he \[Christ\] has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing.” Crucially, Luke and Acts form a two part story, and Luke’s gospel concludes as follows: “And Jesus led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshipped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple blessing God” (Lk 24:50–53).

The risen Christ *blesses* his people, who in turn bless God. Ponder that magnificent image — the risen Christ lifting his hands and bestowing a benediction upon his people. A benediction differs from intercessory prayer, which is an expression of desire that this or that might happen, if it be God’s will. But a benediction is a declaration of a state of affairs that actually exists. It is a bestowing of that reality on those to whom it belongs. Jesus has none of the uncertainty or hesitation in blessing his people, which we have in our intercessions for others.

The priestly benediction of the risen and ascended Christ grants us everything we need for salvation both in this life and in what follows; in it he guards, protects, and nourishes his church & governs the world. Robert Letham explains:

> as our forerunner, Christ has gone before, we follow; we follow because he has gone before; in going before he brings us there by the Holy Spirit, whom he has sent. Indeed, all that occurs after the sending of the Spirit — his blessing of his church, his ministry to its members, his witness to the world—is entailed in this.

Christ, having obtained salvation by his death and resurrection, lifts up his hands, and bestows its blessings upon his people.

In Acts 2, Peter concludes by quoting from Psalm 110, that ‘‘The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.’ And adds “Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:33–36). Initially, it might sound like Jesus was not previously ‘Lord’ and ‘Christ,’ but was only ‘made’ both at his resurrection; this was a favorite text of adoptionist heretics. But this text is not denying the eternal Son of God had always been Lord. Peter already had rightly identified Jesus as ‘Christ’ at a previous, key turning point in Luke’s narrative (9:20).

The eternal Son of God is one person in whom are united two natures, truly divine and truly human. But the incarnate Christ also has two states within time: a state of humiliation, and a state of exaltation. Christ lowered himself to the point of death on a cross, and then was exalted above all by rising and ascending. Thus, in Acts 3, when Peter preaches the gospel, the word he uses to describe the resurrection is that Jesus was “glorified.” So, when Peter says Christ was ‘made’ Lord and Christ, he is not referring to the *being* of Christ; he already was Lord and Christ. But with respect to the *office* he holds, Jesus only now had been enthroned. He has assumed his triumphant place at the right hand of God to reign as eternal king, to speak as prophet, and to intercede for and pronounce blessing upon his people as our heavenly high priest.

At this, the crowd are stunned — as are we. In a state of crisis, they ask the apostles, “brothers, what shall we do?” Peter’s answer is the key not only to initial conversion and initiation, but to the whole of the Christian life—for growth into maturity, for endurance in the greatest trials, for the worst temptations, and for enduring hope amidst the most heartbreaking suffering: “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself” (Acts 2:38–39).

Notice how Peter speaks similarly in Acts 3, and the hope it gives us amidst the darkness of this present age: “Repent therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus, whom heaven must receive *until the time for restoring all the things about which God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets long ago*.” Peter’s listeners, then and now, are not only summoned to a continual repentance throughout the whole of the Christian life, but are given the precious gift of baptism as a sign and seal of Christ’s love, that he washes away our sin and gives us the gift of himself, who in time will return and restore all things.

Mercifully, in the sacrament of the Eucharist, our Lord Jesus gives us what St. Mary Magdalene had come seeking on the first Easter morning. In the words of the service for Holy Communion from the 1662 *Book of Common Prayer*, our Lord Jesus Christ himself “did institute, and in his holy Gospel command us to continue, a perpetual memory of his precious death, until his coming again.” But rather than a grave, it is the living, risen, and ascended Christ who continually gives us his body from heaven as the Holy Spirit unites us with him, whenever we feed on him in our hearts by faith, with thanksgiving.
### The Heidelberg Catechism's Lesson for Foster Parents
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-heidelberg-catechisms-lesson-for-foster-parents/
Last updated: 2026-06-01T16:04:37.000Z
I’ve never cried harder than when they came to take away “our” little girl. My family and I wept as they walked out the door with a baby we had been caring for over the previous two weeks. The love we had for her outweighed the time we had with her. It was a stark reminder that in foster care these children are not our own.

Before we became a foster family, we were adoptive parents. When our adopted daughter turned six, we opened our home as a foster care family. During that time we had a handful of kids come and go. Receiving each with the motto: “We will love them as long as we have them.” After the first little girl came and went, my daughter, my wife, and I would do our imperfect best to open our hearts in vulnerable love to each child. Knowing that in foster care the goal is reunification with the birth family. We attempted to love unconditionally, with no expectations.

We recently adopted our second daughter, a child who initially came into our home as a foster care placement. By way of a winding path, our home has now become her home. Permanently.

We are a transracial family. My wife and I are white, but our two adopted daughters are beautiful brown skinned girls. Tight curls, natural hair. One with skin the color of a chai latte and the other milk chocolate. They don’t look like my wife or I. Our family is multi-hued and lovely.

Throughout our foster care journey, I often found peace and strength in a centuries old catechism. A portion of it hangs above the bed in my daughter’s bedroom. We memorized it together over the past few years.

The first question of the Heidelberg Catechism asks: “What is our only comfort in life and death?” The answer? “That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven; in fact, all things must work together for my salvation. Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.”

Those foster care kiddos that came and went didn’t belong to me, but neither do my adopted daughters. Because I am a steward, not an owner. A steward cares for what is entrusted to him. They receive everything as a gift, they receive responsibilities, they exercise provisional authority. Parents, pastors, poets, prophets are all stewards. No person is an owner, all people are stewards.

The Psalmist proclaims, “The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein, for he has founded it upon the seas and established upon the rivers.” (Ps. 24:1-2) Everything belongs to God and He is gracious to allot portions to people(s) in order that they might image Him through faithful stewardship and care. In light of this, it’s best to understand “mine” as a word that signals what has been given to us in light of God’s provision and generosity, rather than something we have earned, are entitled to, or possess by right.

This doesn’t just apply to objects or places, but extends to people as well. Even our very selves. The answer to the question doesn’t belong out there, but right here at the self: “I am not my own, but belong to…my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.” I don’t belong to myself - and this is good. My children are not mine by entitlement - and this is good. They have been entrusted to my care, but they belong to God. This is true of all children. If you gave birth to the child in your home, are fostering them, or have adopted them - your children are entrusted to you, but you do not own them. They belong to you by grace, but they belong to God by right. They are His own, even as they are under your stewarding care.

This reality, at first blush, can appear harsh and calloused, but it is a path towards freedom. Surrendering the illusion of self ownership and autonomy requires us to believe big things about God and counter-intuitive things about self. As a parent, I have found that it is just as costly to surrender the notion that I can dictate how my family receives and directs the gift of children.

The Heidelberg Catechism might be centuries old, but the truth of its first line still cuts to the quick. Has there ever been a time since the tree in the garden when we haven’t yearned to own ourselves and the world? The illusions have become quite captivating, but they remain as hollow as ever. My daughters aren’t “mine.” I am not my own. I belong to God and so do they.

Every child we received before our last was a child we were told was likely headed towards permanent placement in our home. All of them left within three months. Each departure was joy coupled with grief. They were not ours, they did not belong to us, and we surrendered them with sweet sorrow. Our hearts grew tired of saying goodbye.

We were just about ready to close our home as a foster family when we got the call for a little girl who needed a transitional home for a few weeks. The case worker told us that she knew we were close to the end of our journey, but as we prayed, my wife felt the Lord’s confirmation that we should provide care to this baby as our last act as a foster family in this season. At this point, we had already provided transitional care to a handful of kids, and our hearts were exhausted with saying goodbye.

The next day we welcomed a baby girl into our home. Her body was weak and malnourished. She came to our home straight from the NICU and we are the only home she has ever known. After a year of serving as her foster family, we were given the unexpected opportunity to adopt her as our daughter. She is our daughter, as if she was born to us by blood, and we love her.

But even now, after the paperwork has been approved, the judge’s declaration made, and the celebration with family and friends; yes, even now, my daughter isn’t “mine.” I seek to steward what has been entrusted to my care. I do not own her, no man or woman ever will, for she belongs to God. And this is good.
### The Foolish Divine Order of the Church
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-foolish-divine-order-of-the-church/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:30:05.000Z
In 1984 Apple ran a Super Bowl [ad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErwS24cBZPc&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) ushering in a new era. The commercial featured a dystopian panopticon (a central observation tower occupied by the ever-watchful “Big Brother”) enforcing discipline and conformity to prisoners under its gaze. This surveillance screen was shattered by a rebel woman in a red tracksuit, hurling a hammer into the giant face projected on the screen. “1984 won’t be like *1984*” was the closing line––a nod to Orwell’s famous dystopian novel *1984*. Apple was unveiling their first personal computer and the message was simple: *now* we are truly free.

The irony, though, is teased out in Byung-Chul Han’s work *Psychopolitics*. Han argues that while the looming gaze of Big Brother has been smashed, we have merely replaced it with the even more present scrutiny of self-surveillance. Technology has equipped us with the tools of endless communication and optimization. Big Brother has no need to discipline us into production; we awake every morning with the frenetic buzz of guilt propelling us to engage, consume, and produce in order to justify ourselves to the world. To this end, technology no longer *prohibits*, but endlessly *permits*––all resources are at our disposal for our project of self-magnificence.

This freedom, however, comes at a cost. Once exploited by the surveillance of Big Brother, we now voluntarily and ruthlessly exploit *ourselves*. While our bodies are free from harsh prohibitions and restrictions, they are enslaved to production by means of consumption and optimization. It is the very habitat of our technological freedom that dictates *how* we optimize ourselves: we are served endless enhanced images of beauty, narratives of sexualization, and visions of lucrative hustle culture—all possible if we just get this procedure, use this product, or subscribe to this influencer’s workshop.

These techniques, however, do not stay within our private lives and present unique challenges when individuals obsessed with body-optimization join the spiritual body of Christ. The same methods we employ to optimize our physical bodies in light of various standards of beauty lead us to relate within the spiritual body of Christ, the church, in ways that are contrary to the vision of Scripture.

## **From Bio- to Psycho-politics**

In the 1970s, French philosophical historian Michel Foucault traced the shift from a society under Sovereign Power to one under Disciplinary Power. The mark of Sovereign Power was conscription––one had little choice over how they were to function within society, rather, they were forced to participate and behave at threat of public punishment and shame. This system was simple: disobey the King and go to the stocks or gallows. Cultural change brought about through industrialization, however, moved us into being ruled not primarily through public punishment but through systems that regulated bodies—schools, factories, hospitals, and prisons. Here, Foucault developed the concept of “biopolitics”––the idea that the human body is the primary tool used to control production. Foucault noted how physical demographics such as reproductive cycles, birth and death rates, levels of general health, and life expectancy were exploited to regulate and subjugate individuals.

Han argues that Foucault’s biopolitics has extended into what he calls psychopolitics. The goal is still bodily control, but the means is no longer *allo*\-exploitation (exploited by another) but *auto-*exploitation (exploited by self).

No longer *subjects* under disciplinary power, Han says, we are now *projects* encouraged to maximize consumption in order to optimize ourselves so the world can see our magnificence. Han teases out the difference between *subjects* and *projects* with the shift from “Should” to “Can”:

> The freedom of Can generates even more coercion than the disciplinarian Should, which issues commandments and prohibitions. Should has a limit. In contrast, Can has none. Thus, the compulsion entailed by Can is unlimited. And so we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation. Technically, freedom means the opposite of coercion and compulsion. Being free means being free from constraint. But now freedom itself, which is supposed to be the opposite of constraint, is producing coercion. Psychic maladies such as depression and burnout express a profound crisis of freedom. They represent pathological signs that freedom is now switching over into manifold forms of compulsion.

The irony of Apple’s announcement of freedom is that it in many ways paved the way for *the* tool of self-exploitation: *social media*. These platforms in their various forms enable us to both perfect our magnificence *and* project that persona to the masses. We curate, craft, filter, and even sexualize ourselves, marketing our bodies and gifts for monetary and societal capital. However, our newfound “freedom” to curate and craft the project of self is bound by a certain vision of bodily perfection and thus has led to a profound dissatisfaction with our physical bodies.

Nicholas Carr describes our media-driven identity as a “mirrorball self”––a whirl of fragmented reflections from a myriad of overlapping sources. The result is a self that feels constantly exposed, fractured, and less than compared to the endless competition. Jonathan Haidt reports that [Meta’s own research](https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Instagram-Teen-Annotated-Research-Deck-1.pdf?utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=email) found one in three teenage girls said Instagram worsened their body-image issues. And this fractured self-image is not partial to one gender. [Freya India notes](https://substack.com/home/post/p-190375424?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) how as a result of social media use,

> boys and men are struggling too, as teenage girls typically do, with eating disorders, body dysmorphia, anxiety about aging, thinking they cannot be loved if they are not the perfect product.

Few deny this reality of increased social media exposure leading to depression, burnout, and poorer body image. However, less emphasized is how this auto-exploiting of our physical bodies has profound effects on how we view and interact with the spiritual body of the church.

The church as an institution within culture can fall prey to the same cultural visions of beauty, success, and flourishing, and we––as members of its body––bring our techniques of optimization into its body.

## **From Physical to Spiritual Body**

In 1 Corinthians 12 when Paul instructs the church on what it means to be the body of Christ, he makes specific claims about the inherent diversity of a healthy body:

> \[14\] For the body does not consist of one member but of many. \[15\] If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. \[16\] And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. \[17\] If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? \[18\] But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. \[19\] If all were a single member, where would the body be? \[20\] As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.  
>  
> \[21\] The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” \[22\] On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, \[23\] and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, \[24\] which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, \[25\] that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another.

Paul’s imagery is beautifully clear: *every* member is *indispensable*. Even––or dare we say, *especially––*those that seem weaker and less-optimized. Indeed, there *is* no body without all of its parts. But we have been trained in anti-Pauline ways: to bestow honor and glory on what is already beautiful, impressive, or magnificent (in our eyes).

In Paul’s context, to adorn a part of the body with clothing was to show it a special honor. Understood this way, the impressive gifts were left to shine with the honor inherent to them, but the unpresentable gifts were shown *more* honor, covered with honor they lack on their own. This is precisely the opposite of how we function with our own bodies, and the body of Christ by extension. Our hyper-visual, online existence trains us to adorn the already impressive “gifts” of a beautiful face or a certain body type, and then to continue poking, filling, stretching, and injecting in order to *emphasize* these gifts while filtering out, airbrushing over, or detoxing away unimpressive members.

Recall Han’s Should-Can distinction. Scripture isan external authority with legitimate and inspired prohibitions. The problem is that we smashed the “Shoulds” of authoritative texts along with Big Brother and adopted the unlimited compulsions of “Can”. We now operate as though we are free to endlessly optimize the body of Christ toward our same warped standards of bodily beauty.

The result of such optimization, however, are phenomena like “copy-paste face”––a beauty trend marked by celebrity and influencer faces being beautifully bland and lacking distinction. Essentially, everyone looks the same because we have been sold the same vision of beauty and resourced with the same tools to achieve it.

This same phenomenon plays out in Christ’s body too: we platform teachers with similar communication styles. We promote leaders with certain management approaches. We organize around particular charismatic talents. We overly emphasize certain gifts, while subconsciously covering and cropping out those gifts that are less impressive or that don’t serve our overall image of ecclesial magnificence. For example, gifts of encouragement, generosity, or administration do not optimize well visually. And, because we have learned to equate “impressive” with what can be leveraged visually (and liked, shared, etc.), those gifts are relegated to a position of hidden necessity.

This “copy-paste” approach in the worshiping community results in shallow religious entertainment that attempts to replicate successful church (or business!) models, regardless of the unique gifts in their actual community. The outcome is a bland, uniform “beauty” unbecoming of the body of Christ.

## **A Way Forward**

In another passage on the body of Christ, Paul says the goal of the various gifts of the church is *maturity—*attaining the unity of the fullness of Christ (Eph. 4). Healthy bodies are ones in which all its members are simultaneously and equally matured. Over-optimization of one body part does not lead to health, but a system stressed by underfunctioning and overcompensation. Maturity*,* not optimization, is the metric of health in a body. Optimization presupposes an end––namely, efficiency––and exploits to that end. Maturity, in contrast, *is* the end––*completion––*and seeks to esteem all parts as indispensable as essential to that completion.

The path toward such maturity is guided by the context of 1 Corinthians 12\. Paul’s letter––where he will deal with issues like division and unity––begins with a treatment on the wisdom of God. Basically, Paul lets the church know if they apply the wisdom of his letter, they will look like *utter fools* to the world.

Han lands close to this in his own work. The one who stands outside of this self-exploitive system is, Han calls him, an *idiot* (in the sense of idiosyncratic; i.e. distinct). Han’s *idiot* is the only one who preserves the magic of the outsider––not enslaved within the system of self-exploitation. He is a figure of resistance opposing the violence of consensus, much like [Wendell Berry’s Mad Farmer](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-mad-farmer-on-claude-ai-and-the-church). Such resistance reflects the foolishness Paul prescribes in 1 Corinthians 1\. The source of Paul’s foolishness, however, is not rogue nonconformity but the message of the cross. The cross was an *idiosyncratic* spectacle––the distinctive power of God displayed through the death of his Son.

What does a life lived in the power of such an idiosyncratic spectacle look like?

In his small work *Life Together* Dietrich Bonhoeffer warns against the danger of an idealized vision of community, what he calls a “dream world.” Such idealism is the result of optimization. Our attempts to optimize the body of Christ are futile attempts to manifest a dream world. Any such dream injected into the body is a hindrance to genuine community. Bonhoeffer ensures, however, that by sheer grace God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He goes on:

> Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it.

The body of Christ is only the body God intended when *all* its members—impressive and unimpressive alike—are present, honored, and share in the unhappy and ugly aspects of their union. Such is the mark of true maturity.

Freya India, writing on the [unique challenges facing girls and young women](https://www.freyaindia.co.uk/p/most-relationship-advice-is-useless?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in a digital culture, shares Bonhoeffer’s rejection of wish-dream optimization when it comes to maturity in relationships:

> Because the truth is you will not learn about love from YouTube Shorts or TikTok experts or Reddit threads, and I seriously doubt the answers are one more self-improvement podcast away. You will only learn about love in the presence of real people, in late night conversations talking until your eyes turn red, in getting things wrong and trying to put them right again, in your beating chest when you bet your life on someone else, in the joy and rejection and hope and sting that comes from trying and from living. You will learn about heartbreak from the wounded eyes of your mother and the shaking shoulders of a friend, from the broken and brilliant lives you see all around you. That’s life, and that’s where advice lives, where it comes from, chiselled out of regrets and mistakes, chiselled out of the pain of people you know and love. The rest is useless.

India is touching on the disconnect between platforms that seek optimization over maturity. Maturity is not achieved through amassing information from various platforms, or copy-pasting images of beauty seen on them––it is chiselled out of regrets and mistakes and pain.

However, maturity like this, Bonhoeffer says, requires *confession*. Confession provides the context for speaking truth in love, which Paul says grows us into the head, into Christ. This is, then, one practical step toward embodying Han’s *idiot* and the foolishness of the gospel.

Specifically in the context of church relationships, confession should take a central role. What could be more idiotic––more *foolish––*in an age of self-optimization than to pull back the curtain, to remove the filter, and lay our regrets, mistakes, and pain bare? Bonhoeffer says such confession obliterates the last stronghold of self-justification. And what is self-optimization but a way to visually justify our worth to the world?

Confession levels the spiritual playing field––it grinds the self-exploitive endeavor to a halt, as it invites other members to exercise their priesthood on our behalf, regardless of their impressiveness. The body functions as one when we make our failures known to others, who in turn point us to our forgiveness in Christ, and offer assurance of pardon rather than assurance of our magnificence. This requires vulnerable commitment to relationships with a broad cross section of members in the body.

\*\*\*

Confession, Bonhoeffer says, is the key to “break through.” He shows how confession breaks through to both community and to the cross. As we expose our projects of self optimization, we open up the genuine possibility of real relationships, letting others see the mistakes and pains under our facade of magnificence.

Likewise, when we confess the inability of our self-optimizing pursuits to justify us, we open up the possibility to receive the foolish message of the cross: that the perfect head of our body––Jesus Christ––has accomplished justification *for us* through his death and resurrection. Indeed, he gave his body so that we could be covered as its honored members.

When we cease optimizing the physical and spiritual body, we embrace the true freedom of “Can.” Freed from bondage to self, our “Can” receives godly redirection––away from self-optimization to other-honoring. Ours is a body with aches and pains, strains and breaks; confession like this will painfully set our bones. Such is the foolish divine order of the body of Christ.
### The Insufficiency of Reenchantment
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-insufficiency-of-reenchantment/
Last updated: 2026-06-01T16:04:43.000Z
What do you think of when you hear the word “enchantment?” Perhaps magic, or a mystic gloss that covers reality with a transient veneer of the divine. Whatever that means. According to Max Weber, disenchantment (*Entzauberung*) means the “rationalization and intellectualization” of the world. So we could say the opposite is to enchant — to be non-rational, and not purely intellectual.

For C.S. Lewis, enchantment takes the form of *Sehnsucht*, or longing. It happens when we experience beauty that points beyond itself to something else. Robert Nisbet uses the term “the Sacred” — a binding force, something beyond the ordinary, that brings community together. Nisbet develops this by tracing how the Enlightenment eroded the sacred, a theme Durkheim had explored before him.

According to Charles Taylor, enchantment is the sense that our lives have a certain moral or spiritual shape — an experience that breaks through the mundane sense of the world. To quote Sugarland, “there’s gotta be something more.” [Rod Dreher](https://open.substack.com/users/2630901-rod-dreher?utm%5Fsource=mentions), in *Living in Wonder*, comments that enchantment is “simply living within the confident belief that there is deep meaning to life, meaning that exists in the world independent of ourselves.” He goes further, adding that enchantment is “learning how to live as if what we profess to believe is true.”

This is a lot to take in, but it is important for our discussion. Enchantment has taken many forms — and yet something is still missing. In a culture that prides itself on unmooring from clarity and truth, we need to be as precise as ever.

## The Limits of “Enchantment”

### I’ve written quite extensively on Gen Z, and one thing I’ve found — being a borderline Gen Z/Millennial myself — is that when people throw around the word “enchantment,” it’s usually to audiences who already know what it means.

I’m not particularly sold on it as a method to fix modern ailments. For starters, I’m not sure life is disenchanted to the degree that’s been claimed. Just look at the Occult Revival: Theosophy (Blavatsky, Annie Besant) and Anthroposophy (Rudolf Steiner) draw enormous followings. The séance — explored in modern horror films — is likewise a popular endeavor for those seeking transcendence outside of institutional Christianity.

There’s also the case of Wagner, who through his Romantic nationalist mythology fused folk myth with operatic epic. He drew from Norse and Germanic mythology because he believed it carried a primordial truth that pure drama could not. Wagner even constructed a quasi-religious temple to his endeavor — the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. The auditorium would darken to heighten the religious mood, and the orchestra pit was hidden so the music could permeate the atmosphere as if descending from heaven. Wagner’s enchantment was a horizontal enchantment. The German people — and Hitler especially — were drawn to it because it re-animated a people in despair.

We can also see glimpses of enchantment in Freud’s unconscious and Jung’s archetypes. Psychoanalysis was an attempt to find something beyond the mundane: the mind contained depths that explained the self beyond the pure materiality of the body.

While I’m not sure the desire for enchantment is new, I do think something particular is happening now. When I was in high school, during the heyday of the *Twilight* saga, I recall a pervasive obsession with horoscopes — young people in my Catholic school were seeking the transcendent through their birth month. This was the era of “I was born this way” and “I define my truth.” Within these claims was a reaching for the transcendent — but from within. Transcendence did not disappear; it merely became enveloped in narcissism.

Christopher Lasch highlighted this dynamic in *The Culture of Narcissism* (a must-read for anyone interested in the modern cultural milieu). The transcendent, he argued, has been overtaken by the narcissistic desires of the self — nowhere more evidently than in the glamour of celebrity. Lasch observed that the mass media, through their cult of celebrity, have made Americans a nation of fans, encouraging ordinary people to identify with stars, to resent the anonymous “herd,” and to find the banality of everyday existence increasingly unbearable. In other words, we have become worshippers at the altar of celebrity. Our cultural gods are no longer Zeus and Athena but Timothée Chalamet and Sydney Sweeney.

These enchanted dreams of fame and glory, coupled with the relentless promulgation of the self, have co-opted religious fervor and replaced it with influencer culture and the cult of celebrity. Along with this, the triumph of the therapeutic, or the cathartic prioritization of the self over all else has become the sacred order. And as Philip Rieff has noted, “culture and sacred order are inseparable...No culture has ever preserved itself where there is not a registration of sacred order.”

All of this to say, enchantment did not vanish. It merely adapted to a culture saturated with the self and celebrity. Christian responses must address this, and I’m not sure vague (though Dreher’s definition is far superior to most) claims of re-enchantment will cut it.

\*\*

Last year, I made my yearly pilgrimage to Touchstone, an ecumenical conference on culture and theology (if you attend, let me know so we can meet up). One of the talks was on “the machine,” given by Paul Kingsnorth — an up-and-coming voice on technology and culture. I was eager to hear him. But as he spoke, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of disenchantment at his diagnosis. Not only was it grim, but it felt disconnected from the social pressures that pervade American life in particular. In other words, he talked about the issues of culture but seemed to deal with them in pure materialist rhetoric, while critiquing materialism. This is a common pitfall of neo-Marxist analysis, or to put it in another way, when we equate all aspects of “the machine” with capitalism. Without a clear-cut Christian vision and ethic, it can stumble after critique into some of the same negative pitfalls of “the machine” it so powerfully condemns.

It was during this time that I came to believe that enchantment, for all the highfalutin talk about its being the cure to society’s ills, was actually just another mystical veil that doesn’t give *particular* answers. Gen Z is a generation marked by a desire for authenticity, and the language of “enchantment” sounds stodgy to them — let alone when you try to define it. At this point, after reading dozens of books on the topic, my eyes glaze over when I see the word. Magic, myth, and fantasy certainly sell well in book form, but Gen Z is searching for moral order, not just new ways to tell narratives — though that matters too.

## From Disenchantment to Desecration

My friend Carl Trueman’s latest book, [*The Desecration of Man*](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/729796/the-desecration-of-man-by-carl-r-trueman/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), addresses precisely this disconnection. According to Trueman, the problem we are facing is not a lack of enchantment but a destruction of meaning. To desecrate something is to treat what is sacred in a sacrilegious way — or, as Trueman puts it, to obliterate sacred boundaries and profane all that is holy. This is something enchantment cannot fully capture:

> “This is why the notion of disenchantment does not go far enough in describing what has happened in modernity. Certainly, disenchantment speaks to that loss of a sense of the depth and mystery of the world that modernity brought in its wake. But there is something more going on in modern culture. The sheer delight taken by many in toppling the moral codes of the past cannot be explained simply by the loss of an enchanted world.”

There is a subtle irony in the act of desecration. Modern man seeks to transcend his boundaries, viewing them as limiting. But by transcending them, he desecrates God — and in doing so, desecrates himself. The issue of gender is one example: the feeling that we are something other than what we were born as leads to the belief that we can simply morph ourselves into something else, something that will make us “happy.” Enchantment struggles to address this adequately. Trueman helpfully reframes it: this is not merely a matter of disenchantment but a sacrilegious act of desecrating something God has made.

Modern desecration is not purely an act of disdain — it is an act of excitement. The one who desecrates enjoys it. He feels a sense of godlike power. Trueman observes that “smashing old standards of decency and kindness rooted in the Christian ethic is fun, even compulsory, in order to appear authentic.” The keyword is *authentic*. Our culture loves desecration — it worships it. Whether through pornography-on-demand, the lie of transgenderism, or the normalization of sexual anarchy, each of these acts seeks to desecrate the Christian ethic. I know — you’re thinking, “But those are political talking points.” So we’ve been led to believe. But no: these are Christian ethical issues.

Ideological transgression is rising on both left and right. The left seeks to deconstruct Christianity at every level of society — marriage, family, church, and more. The right, in reaction, sometimes desecrates in the opposite direction, trafficking in historical denial and the rehabilitation of figures history has rightly condemned. Desecration, it turns out, is not merely a vertical phenomenon — between man and God — but a horizontal one, between man and his neighbor.

## The Insufficiency of Cultural Christianity

Cultural Christianity isn’t going to cut it — though I’m not sure it’s a net negative. There are benefits to cultural Christianity. But Trueman is onto something when he identifies its lack of staying power. Here is his critique. It is worth quoting at length:

> “While the revival of interest in religion among cultural elites is welcome, I believe it will prove as ephemeral as that of the mid-twentieth century unless it grapples not simply with the perceived cultural benefits of Christianity but also with its truth claims. It may be a captivating aesthetic experience to attend a Latin Mass where the choir sings the words to the polyphonic compositions of Palestrina. The Book of Common Prayer might give a certain pleasure on a Sunday morning. The great architecture and art that Christianity inspired might enrich one’s life. But if one does not believe that the religious dogmas that are the basis of these things are true and not merely inspiring fictions, then that is not a faith that will prove durable as the wider culture exhausts itself. Indeed, it merely perpetuates one of the most distinctive and problematic aspects of modern culture: the confusion of taste for truth.”

That last line — “the confusion of taste for truth” — captures Trueman’s essential point. Enchantment without a clearly delineated ethical standard merely amounts to vibes and feelings — “I feel like there’s more to this life.” Certainly. But what is the “more”? This is where consecration comes in. Christianity is more than feeling; it is a comprehensive worldview which makes truth claims about the individual and society. “Nebulous re-enchantment,” as Trueman calls it, cannot directly confront the assault on the holy perpetuated by secular culture.

This is not to say the enchantment vibe is unhelpful — [James Wood's recent *First Things* piece](https://firstthings.com/in-defense-of-cultural-christianity/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) "In Defense of Cultural Christianity" makes the case that cultural Christianity has some benefits — but Trueman is right that it is not enough. Hear Wood’s conclusion here: “External conformity can restain evil, inculcate virtue, and render the gospel intelligible within a common moral world.” The greater danger than hypocrisy, notes James, is “a culture that no longer expects even public allegiance to the true, the good, and the beautiful.” I’m not sure Trueman would disagree — I certainly wouldn’t.

What Wood is writing about is clearly seen today with such figures as Richard Dawkins and Elon Musk who call themselves “cultural Christians.” They’ve rejected the Christian underlying foundation while enjoying its social benefits. Trueman warns against “the use of Christian ideas without a robust commitment to the truth of the Christian faith. If the problem of modern culture is man’s desecration, then the answer is his consecration.”

I agree. Part of my desire in my own writing is to speak to Gen Z’s hunger for meaningful and direct moral standards. They have been unmoored from the tethers of Christian ethics, and many are trying to clamber back. If we throw them vague “enchantment,” I’m not sure they will make it. Gen Z seeks authenticity and truth — part of their drive toward tradition is that the Christian faith has historically offered this. But I’m weary that if one goes to a church for feeling tradition, but rejects the ethical principles that the tradition teaches, it won’t last.

We need something more. Our culture needs it. Young people need it. Even the global body of Nicene believers needs it.

## What Is Man?

We need to offer something more — beginning with the question of what it means to be human. Trueman captures something I’ve often pondered: man is the only being on earth who can ask, “What am I?” Monkeys, dogs, cats — no animal meditates on the meaning of its own existence. To answer this we must turn to the beginning of the biblical story: man as divine image bearer. God made man in his image, to bear that image before the creatures of Eden. It is fitting, perhaps, that the animals cannot self-reflect as we can.

Trueman draws on the Catholic Church’s *Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church*, which defines man as (1) an exceptional creature, (2) a person and not a thing, (3) one given God-granted abilities and responsibilities, and (4) an embodied being.

Desecration began in the garden when the serpent tempted Eve to be “like God” — the very God whose image she already bore. There is a painful irony there: tempted to become what she already was. The story after the Fall only deepens the pattern — Cain murders Abel in cold blood.

But the desecration of man is not limited to murder. It is most evident in sexual immorality and misbehavior. How a society views sex reveals its moral condition. Trueman’s notion of desecration carries with it the recognition that limits are not merely discarded but joyfully trampled. The erotic dominates modern culture, and yet it was meant to be sacred — two humans, male and female, coming together in a union that is unmatched in human intimacy. There is no greater way for two people to be known and to know than in this act, which is precisely why it is the act most prone to disgrace. Sitcoms mock it and trivialize it with jokes. But the danger of desecration is that the thing being desecrated does not lose its power. The power is instead twisted and distorted.

Abortion is another act of desecration. It destroys the human body in the womb. And there is a reason abortion proponents are proud — carrying signs touting liberation and choice. Desecration confers a counterfeit godlike status, one we were never meant to hold. Sadly, both political parties are now shifting on the issue: the left has done so for decades, and the right is increasingly abandoning its pro-life commitments. The desecration has taken hold across the spectrum.

## Consecration as the Answer

If modernity has pushed desecration, then what we need is consecration — to hold as sacred the things that are. Intellectuals seeking religion are certainly moving in the right direction. But they need more than vibes.

This is where the Nicene Creed speaks to our cultural moment. Formulated in 381, it articulates objective truth about God and the destiny of humanity. We profess the ancient faith together across the world, and in doing so, we participate in an act of consecration. The Creed is, I’m convinced, the baseline necessity. From it we build out the Christian ethic — proclaiming Jesus as the God-man, we take his words, and the words of his followers, seriously. When Scripture speaks to questions of gender, marriage, and sexuality, we must listen. We cannot reason or contextualize away the reality that God is a God of order who calls us to follow him accordingly.

Trueman argues that it is the church as a worshipping community — gathered under the Creed, aligned in moral code — where consecration actually happens. This, I believe, is the key. The church is an ancient community spanning the globe, linked to an ancient faith. Its truths permeate time. We do not stand above them; they stand above us. Only then can we answer the question “What is man?” with the only sufficient answer: man is a consecrated being, made in the image of God.
### The Wall
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-wall/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:30:09.000Z
The coast itself is called Hormuz, for Horomazes, Ahura Mazda, the lord of wisdom, God of the Achaemenid Zoroastrians. But the *Encyclopedia Britannica* says this is a mistake. The name is more likely derived from hur-muz, the “place of dates,” “for the meaning of Moghistan,” as it is called when the *Encyclopedia* was published in 1911, “means the region of date-palms.” *Mogh* is a Persian surname, perhaps derived from “magus”, wiseman, the title of a Zoroastrian priest. The confusion is easy to explain. The land of God, or of his priests, or of a small and wrinkled desert fruit that grows in clusters on a palm. The words are similar. Stone tools found in dig sites suggest that the region has been populated for a quarter of a million years.

I read in the works of Iranian scholars that the city of Minab took its name from *Qal'a-ye Minā*, one of seven castles in the Hormuz region. But the locals insist that there were only ever two. Tradition holds that the sisters Bibi Nazanin and Bibi Mino built twin castles on hills above the river. A city grew on the slopes between them: *Mian-ab*, ‘between the waters’, or *Mina-ab,* ‘the crystal water’, for the clarity of the river delta flowing into the strait. Whether seven castles or just two, only one remains today. The castle of Bibi Nazanin— نازنین, ‘graceful’ or ‘beloved’—“is no more,” a local tourism board explains. The Castle of Bibi Mino stands alone now, walls perched above the east end of the city. Mino, minu, مینو – the Persian word for “paradise” or “heaven.”

\*\*

Around the year 325 B.C., Nearchus, son of Andromitus, an admiral in the employ of Alexander the Great, set sail from Patala, a port near the mouth of the Indus River, and traveled down the Hydaspes to the sea. He went along the coasts of Makran and Carmania; after eighty days, he reached an inlet at the north point of a narrow strait between the Persian and the Oman gulfs: the mouth of the Minab River. Nearchus’ account of the journey is lost. But in the first century AD, the *Geographica* of Stabo quotes Nearchus complaining that he is unable to find a harbor for his ships, or any local willing to tell him about the land or city. Still, he said, the place was “kindly”, and “rich in every product but the olive.”

It is only in the *Indica* of Arrian, composed a century after Strabo, that we are told that Nearchus did eventually locate a guide: a Gedrosian pilot called Hydraces, who journeyed with the Macedonians up the river. From there, Arrian writes, Hormuz was *increasingly onomazomena*. The meaning of this term–onomazomena—is unclear. It is the passive participle of *onomazo*, to name, and has two interpretations: the first, that Hydraces told Nearchus the name of the region: Hormazes, hor-muz, Hormuz, the land of God or priests or dates. But the second is more likely. Arrian means that Nearchus, unable to go ashore, simply pointed from his boat and began naming. *This is Harmozia,* from the Greek *ormos*: inlet, haven, bay. In his *Natural History,* Pliny the Elder complained that for all the names Neachus provides, his account did not include the names of staging posts, trade ports, or “the distances between them.”

The classical Islamic geographers called Iran *Iraq al-Ajam*, “the Iraq of the foreigners.” Even this included only the Jebal, the mountains at the heart of the Iranian plateau. The warm southern coast where Minab sits was not even of the foreigners. It was nowhere.

To the courts of China, the whole of Arabia was only a small part of “the western oceans.” In 97 AD, the emissary Gan Ying traveled overland through central Asia, arriving on the coast of the Persian Gulf some 1,500 miles from Minab. He was greeted by the Parthians, who lied and told him that there was no naval shortcut to the Romans in the Levant; to reach them would require an arduous trip around the whole Arabian Peninsula. Fearful of the expense and of such a long period of homesickness, Gan Ying turned back.

It was 1,400 years before the admiral Zheng He, with three hundred ships and 28,000 men, made landfall on Hormuz Island to trade in pearls and precious stones. His expedition did not visit the coast, but in Bengal they procured an east African giraffe. The philosophers of the Ming court identified it as *qilin*, a unicorn. Archaeological digs around Minab have unearthed Chinese porcelain, South Asian wares, and East Asian ceramics—all fallen, as it were, off the back of the truck.

In the eleventh century, Muhammed Diramku crossed the strait from Oman to the Iranian coast and founded the Kingdom of Hormuz there. The capital, at the delta of the Minab river, had been there a long time. The kingdom became fabulously rich from trade. An Arab saying*: If all the world were a golden ring, Ormus would be the jewel.*

Marco Polo visited Minab twice, in 1272 and 1293, and claimed the town was rich in spices, pearls, and silk, gold and elephant tusks. He claimed the people are not Persian, but black; that they grieved excess, mourning their dead daily for four years. He claimed that it is so hot in Minab that when the Kerman sent a thousand men to take Hormuz, the hot winds killed them all before they reached the city. Polo planned to sail from Minab across the sea to China. But despite the city’s opulence, he found their boats inadequate. They were little more than sticks, “stitched together with twine made from the husk of the Indian nut.” He traveled overland instead.

In 1301, Chaghatai Mongol armies came south over the plateau, conquering Hormuza and Fars. King Baha ud-Din Ayaz and his wife Bibi Maryam fled, removing the court and all its riches to the island of Jarun. In the great history of Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi, *The Book of Victory*, and the great history of Mirkhvand, the *Garden of Purity*, Minab receives only a single, passing line: in 1397, the city fell to Sultan-Mohammed, the son of Tamerlane.

The Portuguese seized Hormuz Island in 1507\. Afonso de Albuquerque, little caesar of the east, met with Safavid officials in Minab, mistakenly believing that the Shi’ites were followers of Ali, rather than the Prophet. When Shah Ismail’s envoys demanded the customary tribute for the passage of commerce through the strait, Albuquerque sent them cannonballs and arrows.

In 1515, “Minao” appeared on Portuguese revenue ledgers as one of three “external territories” administered by a vizier. In 1552, the strait fell to the Ottomans. Persian and Portuguese alike fled from Hormuz Island to Minab, taking refuge where they knew they were invisible.

In 1602, the Safavids reclaimed the coast, then leased it with the island to the British East India Company. In 1622, the British expelled the Portuguese in exchange for “anticipated spoils.” They ignored the coast. Shah Abbas, distrustful of the locals, constructed a new city from which to rule Hormuz, Bandar Abbas and ignored Minab entirely.

In 1727, Afghans took Minab in the name of their new Empire. In 1729, Amir Mehr-Ali took Minab in the name of Kerman. In 1744, Mohammed-Baquer Beg Lari despoiled Minab, bringing local trade and agriculture to a halt. Nader Shah, who expelled the Afghans and reforged Iran and ruled an empire from the Caucasus to India, cannot be bothered. He never visited the city. He granted the Dutch authority to rule Hormuz in his name; the Dutch, it is reported, “incurred a significant debt at Minab for their trouble, which they found difficult to get repaid.”

In 1794, Oman conquered Hormuz and ruled the region from across the sea. Minab paid taxes to the Imam of Muscat. In 1856, a treaty formalized the arrangement: for all of Hormuz, Oman pays 16,000 tomans per annum to the Shah. The date harvest is sufficient to cover the cost. A further 13,000 tomans were raised by subletting “the revenue and customs of these districts to a British Indian subject of the Khoja caste for about 25,000 tomans per annum.” Iran leases Minab to Oman, who sublease it to a British merchant prince from India. In 1867, the region passed to the governor of Larestan, in Fars, two hundred miles northwest and inland. The treaty calls the city “Minao.”

A Dutch colonial report claimed that the Persian coast begins in “Minauw.” The German cartographer Castren Niebuhr called it “Minau.” Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, Thomas Bakewell, Isaak Tirion, and Robert Morden all placed “Mina” at the northeast inlet of the strait. Turan Shah records that an unspecified King of Hormuz took refuge “in the fortress of Minab.” The name, he writes, means ‘the Blue Fort’.” “Perhaps from some blue-tiled building” or “the water, therein or thereabouts.”

Writing from Fars, in 1888, Mohammed Ebrahim Kazaruni called Minab a district, then a village, then a port. Mohammed-Ja’far Hosayni Khormuji, in his *Asar-e Ja’Fari*, listed Minab under the heading “Bandar Abbas and its dependencies.” In the 1870s, Ernest Floyer claimed that the city was a quiet manufacturer of gunpowder.

The Italian traveler Pietro della Valle, en route from Isfahan to Hormuz Island, mentions Minab in a footnote: his wife, Ma’ani, fell ill and died there.

“The country for forty-five miles around Minab is covered with villages, abounds in dates, and supplies all the neighboring country with grain,” John Macdonald Kinneir wrote in 1810, “Forage is so plentiful that the cattle of adjoining districts are sent in great numbers to feed there during the hot season.” In 1821, a British naval dispatch reported that the fort walls in Minab were strong. The castle has "round towers at the corners, in which there are a few old guns, bearing inscriptions in Portuguese and Dutch.” It was garrisoned by “about one hundred men, well appointed, who are obliged to be constantly on alert, in consequence of the numerous marauding bands who rob and plunder the country.”

It was not until 1928, during the rule of Reza Shah, that Minab once again fell under Tehran’s control. By the 21st century, it is only 47 percent urbanized. The World Bank estimates that the poverty rate is 52 percent. The population includes Africans descended from the slave trade on the Indian Ocean, Baloch Sunnis disenfranchised in a Shia state, and the children of many others who have had, at some time in the past one thousand years, cause to disappear. "With 1,000 kilometers of coastline and 14 islands in the Persian Gulf, the Iranian province of Hormozgan sits on top of one of the most strategic waterways in the world,” IranWire reports. “Every day, more than 17 million barrels of oil pass through the Strait of Hormuz. And yet, to the north of the coastline, there is poverty and despair as far as the eye can see.”

\*\*

In Tolkien, the palantíri are seeing stones created by the elves of Valinor. Their name means those that watch from afar. Whoever gazes into one can see across great distances; a sufficiently powerful watcher can control what lesser watchers see. They cannot invent the visions in the stone, but they can distort them, strip context, and conceal. It was in this way that Sauron corrupted Saruman and drove Denethor, Steward of Gondor, to madness and despair. In 2003, Peter Thiel called his surveillance corporation Palantir Technologies because he, like other men in Tolkien, believed he would use his power for good, if only he could have some more.

During the Obama administration, Pentagon officials had a problem: a single predator drone could generate nine hundred hours of full-motion video per mission. No team of human analysts could keep up. Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work proposed what he called the “Third Offset Strategy”, the pursuit of an American technological edge in Artificial Intelligence for the purposes of operational tempo and intelligence analysis. In 2017, Work signed a memo establishing the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, called Project Maven. The Pentagon contracted Google to develop the relevant TensorFlow image-classification technology, but after a staff revolt in 2018, Palantir stepped in.

Under their guidance, Maven grew from a computer vision tool into a full command-and-control platform, the Maven Smart System, integrating satellite imagery, drone footage, sensor data, and intelligence into a single interface. An operator can type a question in natural language and the system searches the whole American panopticon in seconds. In 2020, the “Scarlet Dragon” exercises at Fort Bragg bring proof of concept. A pentagon AI identified a tank in satellite imagery. A human operator approved the strike. The system signaled an M142 HIMARS launcher: the first AI-enabled artillery strike in US Army History.

In 2024, the Pentagon contracts Anthropic to integrate Claude as Maven’s language-reason layering. The system can now not only see but interpret. It has an "AI Asset Tasking Recommender" that can propose which bombers and munitions should be assigned to targets. These recommendations may be approved without review. It’s just a button, or a few keystrokes. Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg sends a letter to senior Pentagon leaders directing that the Maven Smart System be made a permanent program across the armed forces. The goal, he says, is to give soldiers “the latest tools necessary to detect, deter, and dominate our adversaries in all domains.”

On February 28, 2026, it is the first day of the school week in Iran. Enabled by Maven’s recommendation system, the United States fires tomahawks missiles at more than 1,000 targets in twenty-four hours. Among the targets recommended by Maven is an IRGC naval compound on the eastern side of Minab, by the water, near where Bibi Mino’s castle stands.

In 2013 satellite imagery available to Maven, the compound appears to be a military target. Later, the mayor of Minab will say that the naval base has been closed for fifteen years. The only operational facility left is a girl’s school, Shajareh Tayyebeh, the Blessed Tree, separated from the rest of the compound by a wall. Satellite images from 2016 show three separate entrances from the street, unlocked and unguarded. There is a soccer pitch in the courtyard and no checkpoints. In another set of images, taken in December 2025, a dozen small figures are visible in the courtyard, “apparently playing in what appears to be a court for ballgames.”

Perhaps because the later images never entered Maven’s dataset or perhaps because the system is unable to interpret those new images and certainly because no person double-checked the system’s helpful recommendations– what, after all, is the point of tempo if you have to make sure the computer has correctly identified a wall?—the school was “triple-tapped” by American missiles searching for a naval base. After the first strike, Shajareh Tayyebeh’s principal moved students into a prayer room and called their parents, asking them to hurry and get their children. The prayer room was hit by the second strike. After the third, one hundred and sixty-five people were dead, mainly girls, aged seven to twelve. Minab’s morgues could not handle them. Bodies were kept in refrigerators on trucks in the ruined streets.

The next day, President Trump blamed Iran for the attack. They are “very inaccurate,” he said; they “have no accuracy whatsoever.” They certainly had no sense of Hormuz. Minab is very far from Tehran. A week later, once again confronted by evidence that the United States could not see Minab, that it did not know what was there, or who was there, that it could not even tell a fortress from a schoolyard from a wall, the President gave up. Minab. Well: “I just don’t know enough about it.”
### Is a Classical Education 'Useful'?
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/is-a-classical-education-useful/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:30:16.000Z
A perennial topic among classical educators is what to make of its ambivalent usefulness. When a school announces that it will introduce Latin to its curriculum, the approving comments from parents and the reassurances of headmasters often converge onto similar themes:

- "It's shown that the study of Latin will improve one's scores on standardized testing."
- "They will know what a cognate is, and will understand english more."
- "I've heard that many accountants and bankers studied Latin, for the mathematical and puzzle-solving skills it develops."
- "Learning a language helps develop critical analysis of language itself."
- "It will make them smarter."

Perhaps these remarks rub some teachers the wrong way, having been exposed to the offensively useless category of things studied "for their own sake." To suggest during a parent-teacher meeting the possibility that Latin is something to learn for its own delight and wonder -- to blush at the shocking myths of Ovid, to be stirred by the glory of Aeneas, to appreciate the periodic coherence of a Ciceronian oration -- might strike the alert teacher as potentially incomprehensible, inappropriate, even indecent to a parent's ear. It seems to offend the parent's very understandable, even noble, goal of securing for their children a bright future, a good chance of employment, even the outside chance of a comfortable existence. That learning Latin is something one might do for its own sake seems to mock what the parents would do for the sake of their children. How, then, should classical educators reflect on usefulness? How should we prepare our students to go out and live in the world, or challenge the world, perhaps even to change it?

Today I want to explore two theses. The first is that classical education will *not* prepare students for the real world; the second is that *only* classical education will prepare students for the Real world. I am fully aware that these two claims stand in blatant contradiction to each other. I do not intend a Chestertonian paradox, nor some exasperating contentment with the irrational. I promise to unravel this. But for the time being, I ask that we sit together in a state of irresolution.

## A Brief History of the University

To probe deeper into the uneasy relationship between usefulness and classical education, we must turn to the history of the university. I realize that we are not concerned with teaching at the university level. Our interest is broader. We want to understand education oriented toward our children, from their earliest years leading up to their decision to enter into some guild or corporation or factory or office or homestead where they will spend their days earning bread. It is true that education continues well past this period in their lives, but as a field of cultural & political attention, these earlier, and especially the earliest, years are our focus. As a point of definitions, when I say classical education, I mean at least the tradition of education influenced by the medieval university system. I am aware that classical education applies to something larger. But it is also more elusive, for reasons that the following may help somewhat to illuminate.

Once we look into the origins of the university, however, we will quickly realize that the establishment of ivory towers was also to shape our conception of education as such.

The beginnings of the university is a shadowy land, full of more speculations and conjectures. We do not, for instance, know precisely which was the first university to be founded, and what the exact date of its institution was. The University of Bologna claims to have been founded in 1088, yet when scholars have looked through the archives, substantiating evidence is wanting and myths are plentiful.

It is true, there were free schools cropping up. Many scholars gathered together to teach on the subjects of law or theology in something like semi-organized book clubs or conferences. Similar accounts overshadow the birth of the University of Paris, the University of Salerno, and Oxford. It is a bone of contention best left undisturbed if you want to keep your friends in high places, but we all know that Oxford is the oldest university, being merely the formally recognized continuation of the work of ancient philosophers who, expanding upon Geoffrey of Monmouth's account, accompanied their fellow expatriates as they travelled by ship from their homeland, the burning ruins of Ilium, eventually to conquer and settle down in Albion. Oxford was founded by scholars from Troy.

Turning to an especially relevant aspect of the university's origins involves us stepping into an even thornier debate than the university's pedigree. It is this question: why should it have occurred to anyone to establish the institution of the university in the first place? Since the efforts of Alcuin in the court of Charlemagne, European civilization was given the equipment and the conviction with which to educate effectively and deeply. (Alcuin also provided the University of Paris with its own founding myth.) Europe in the 12th or 13th century was not a yawning chasm of idiocy, stupidly unable to educate an elite class, incapable of teaching without the official sanction which institutionalization alone can grant.

There were guilds, cathedral schools, monastic houses, royal courts, innumerable *ad hoc* meetings between scholar and pupil. Patronage, room and board, quill and parchment were provided to the student and the teacher alike within a largely undocumented association between village parents and motivated teachers. True, it was often local, improvised, unreflectively observing custom, subject to the chance availability of manuscripts, responsive to elastic prices, a history of the famous and the nomadic teacher and to the promising and the lazy novice, and as always, the disgruntled parent. Yet in the main, this compact worked. What would formality, official recognition, or ecclesiastical sanction introduce which was not already understood at the level of convention?

A few answers dominate the scholarship on this topic. One camp has argued that the university was responding to a felt need among the elite. As one scholar puts it,

> The thesis, so often and so variously reiterated by bourgeois and imperialistic historiography, that there is a pure idea of learning and of universities which has no relationship to classes and to class struggle ... has been shown by history to be an error and a falsification ... Schools and higher educational institutions are founded in order to train the persons who are needed to maintain the ruling class domination.

Universities, on this view, were and are still fundamentally the effect of utilitarian political pressures to maintain strata and power, a demand for functionaries and apparatchiks, bureaucrats and managers. This view is largely dismissed by scholars of the medieval period. For one thing, at a very practical level, the university was not well-designed to fill the halls of the court, since graduation from a university granted to the graduate the sole privilege of teaching within the university itself, a *licentia docendi*. Yet the marxist historians cannot be rejected without concession.

To cut a complicated story short, the clear and earnest desire expressed by many scholars leading up to the 12th century and well into the early centuries of the university's existence was concentrated into the idea of *amor sciendi*, a love of knowing. Knowing something was its own goal, and though its needs were earthly -- leisure time and ample money, book and quill -- its orientation was heavenly.

This orientation, however, did not preclude what we might call secondary effects. We might see these effects in better relief if we pause to consider the curriculum of early universities. After a short period of flux, the curriculum of study settled into what would recognize as the well-known and ill-understood trivium -- grammar, rhetoric, and logic -- and quadrivium -- music, arithmetic, geometry, and astrology. These have their own history, itself nothing straightforward, and I will pass it over for now. They became the foundational training for university students, a common *elementa*, the essentials of a *studium generale*, something analogous to today's common core. In addition to these courses, the university, from very early on, possessed what would recognize today as different faculties or departments. These were the *artes*, the predecessor to our humanities departments, medicine, law, and theology.

The inclusion of law and theology, and especially medicine, should raise some questions. Intuitive as their inclusion might be to us, we might ask what, for instance, medicine is doing in a university, if the university's goal is heaven oriented and not practically driven? The theologian and the humanities professor might spend his time endlessly *thinking* about things, offering little in the way of practical usefulness to curia and crown. With a bit of luck, the lawyer might even spend his time in a state of sedentary and benevolent insignificance in the affairs of the world. But what is the point of medicine, if it is not practically to heal the body, to be preeminently useful in our lives? The physician may spend a great deal of time reading and writing, contemplating the heavenly home of the soul and enjoying and loving his knowledge of the physical -- but the knowledge of the body has never been for the mere sake of that knowledge. Medicine must hold its subject matter in contempt or else be *irreducibly* useful in the world. And if it is useful, how does its presence in the catalogue of faculties square with the idea of love of knowledge for its own sake?

Noting all this, we are led to a wider question: how is it that medicine was welcomed in and not any number of other fields of study whose love of its own sort of knowledge implies obvious social benefit? Why was architecture not a faculty? What about agriculture? Why not ship building? Or textiles?

To answer that such faculties were widely understood to be *artes mechanicae* or *artes serviles* or *artes lucrativae* will not serve. These and the *artes liberales* were not always seen, as they sometimes are today, as exclusionary. According to some theologians and philosophers before and at the period, medicine is considered a non-liberal art. Yet when Thomas Aquinas argued that medicine, like the other servile arts, belonged to activities of the unfree man, he was not expressing a settled view, but proposing his own to contend with others. To wit, according to Varro's arrangement, medicine *is* considered a liberal art, but so is architecture.

For another view, we find in Hugh of St. Victor's *Didascalion*, a list of *artes mechanicae*, including medicine, that served the body, alongside the cultivation of soil, hunting & cooking, and the theatrical arts. Further, he and Kilwarby considered the *artes mechanicae* as constitutive elements of philosophy, for they represent human action and must therefore be studied in order to understand human nature. St. Bonaventure paints a similar picture in his *Reduction of the Arts to Theology*, where the mechanical arts are reflections of their superior source, theology. Yet another philosopher, Dominicus Gundissalinus, argued in the 12th century that *all* the *artes* could be divided into their theoretical and their practical expressions.

Even if medicine might be permitted as a faculty, this does not resolve the riddle that *only* medicine was included, and not others. As Walter Rüegg observes, "On the basis of this way of looking at the various kinds of knowledge, the university could have incorporated into itself from the very beginning not only the technological sciences but also the economic and empirical sciences as well as other practical specialities such as are not unusual in contemporary universities. As it turned out, only one *ars mechanica*, namely medicine, became a university subject."

There is no neat solution on offer. One has either to reject medicine as a liberal art, and puzzle over its addition -- one has also to ponder why, at least, architecture is *not* included -- or one must admit that medicine is a servile art, and wrestle with the significance of a servile art set alongside the other, contemplative faculties of the university.

For my part, Rüegg's assessment points us the right direction. He writes,

> The persistence of the patterns of four faculties of the medieval university into the nineteenth century cannot be explained by the scholastic classification of types of knowledge or by the distinction between 'free' and 'mechanical' sciences or between 'speculative' and 'mechanical' philosophy. Rather, the adherence to the scheme of the four faculties is a result of the fundamental significance of the *amor sciendi*.

Rüegg's point is instructive for how we understand the end of education. An object of one's love may be bounded, but the effluent, superabundant nature of that love is not. A love of knowledge, of whatever object, even divine, superlunary things, brings about inevitable effects within the sublunary world below. Love of knowledge *for its own sake* is not the same as love of knowledge *out of spite for other things*. The contemplative life is not that of the ascetic or the hermetic.

In a sense, it should not surprise us that love of knowledge should turn out to be a powerful force to shape the world. Thus, the worldly usefulness of university education, in the medieval period, was seen as a beneficent declension of attention paid to higher things, something like the opposite of what the economist calls an externality. Odd as it is to say: giving one's attention beyond the world cannot help but in-form the world.

Encouraging as this account may be, the history of the university does not comfort us for long. It does not take a great deal of time for the secondary utility of *amor sciendi* to become its own goal and the love of knowledge to transform from a generous catalyst into an onerous accident. Apart from my primary motivation for offering this brief history—that the love of knowledge and usefulness admit of a proper mutual relationship—we should also observe that the question of usefulness for the world is the opposite of a new problem for education in the west. If we take the university system as the dominant model influencing education at every level in western schools, we should find, if not comfort at least wisdom, in the knowledge that the usefulness of education is worse than perennial. It is constitutive.

## The World on Offer & the Contradiction of Usefulness

The above history was perhaps encouraging to us, and may have even suggested ways by which to solve the riddle of our two, seemingly contradictory theses. What we turn to next may not have the same effect, I'm afraid.

Recall the approving parent praising the study of Latin for its usefulness in terms of college applications and career opportunities. Drawing on the history of the medieval university, one might be inclined to explain to the parent that, yes, the study of Latin is useful *in a sense*. However, this would be a lie, and for reasons entirely unrelated to our previous tour of the middle ages.

There is a strong case to be made that the study of Latin, in *any* sense of usefulness, is an utterly useless exercise. The same applies to the whole of the quadrivium, and to the trivium. But we ought not stop with the subject near and dear to us. We must broaden our horizons if we are to appreciate the point I now wish to make.

Imagine three hypothetical programs of education, proposed by three very different characters. It does not matter if they are proposing for a k-12 school or a university program. In this situation, money is no object; the administration is completely and enthusiastically behind their every decision. The first character is a headmaster or principal. The parents and prospective students, our two other characters, have been gathered together to hear the headmaster’s educational vision. (Meaning: How the headmaster plans to spend their money.)

Each proposal is, in fact, a rough sketch of what kind of pedagogy we might encounter across history: Proposal 1 comes to us from 13th century Europe. Proposal 2 represents England in the 1940s. Proposal 3 hails from the first decade of the twenty-first century.

## Proposal 1

The students will begin by learning memory techniques on the models described by Hugh of St. Victor, with no bias against those of Bradwardine and John of Garland. If they wish, they may choose to adopt the model outlined by Albert the Great, whose herrenian techniques are indebted to Aristotle. Having equipped themselves with these skills, they dedicate themselves to memorizing the psalter, in addition to a series of *florilegia* and commentaries, and to incorporating into their memories the summa of Thomas Aquinas. For music, they will study Boethius' *De Musica*. For astrology, they will read Sacrobosco's *De Sphaera*. For arithmetic, they will proceed through the riddles of Alcuin. For geometry, Euclid's *Elements*. All texts will be studied in translation.

Conferring of degree will consist in oral exams wherein the instructors will ask the student to supply definitions, solve questions, complete quotations, and compose their own *florilegium* upon any of the well-known *loci communes—*all from memory, without notes. By the end of the study, students will have in their memory all the standard texts of the trivium and the quadrivium, among other additional studies.

Aftermath: The headmaster later reports to a baffled school board and absolutely flummoxed donor base that, not only did no one raise a protesting hand in preference for Ptolemy's *Almagest*, but not a single parent committed their promising child's future to his tutelage. He leaves dumbfounded, but not disheartened. He is confident of a better reception when he makes the same pitch later that month in Austin, TX.

## Proposal 2

Students will read from only the finest scholars, from Ierne Plunket to W. H. D. Rouse. Teachers are all trained in one of Charlotte Mason's schools for teachers. Subjects will include grammar, logic, Latin & Greek, history, and maths. A great deal of rote memorization of Dryden's *Aeneid* and Samuel Butler's *Odyssey*. Evolution will be considered and dismissed with prejudice.

Students are asked to bring with them their own, mechanical typewriter. The school will provide ink ribbons. Students must also equip themselves with their own fountain pens and pencils. The school will *not* provide spare nibs, and asks that all ink used by students for writing be of the black or blue variety and pH neutral. Students must also bring their own circular slide rule calculator for maths class. An abacus is encouraged for advanced courses.

Aftermath: More or less the same as what the first proposal received. One parent is overheard as they leave explaining to their child what they think a circular slide calculator is. Better prospects undoubtedly lie elsewhere.

## Proposal 3

Studies will focus on Science, Engineering, Technology, and Mathematics. Some attention will be given to the softer sciences -- anthropology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. Individual courses in theology available in conversation with a professor at no more than two credit's worth. Students may bring their own computers, of the following vintage: iMac (ca. 1997), Dell PC (ca. 2000), or any running Windows '98\. Classes in assembly and compiling languages are required for all students wishing to study engineering and technology. Interpretative languages (mostly C++) are optional. The students will have access to the web 1.0, i.e., static, text-based webpages with minimal .png and zero .mp4 content, available through our library desktops via dial-up at a maximum speed of 56 Kbps.

Aftermath: Mostly the same reaction as in the first two proposals. A few parents actually do sign up their children. These parents all work (remotely) for silicon valley technology companies, and whisper grimly about specialization and a retrograde skill advantage.

To focus on one common element of the proposals—and there aremany things going on—one reason why parents all but universally reject those proposals is that they offer nothing by way of usefulness, employability, or career readiness whatsoever. One might make a quibbling defense for one or another detail. But overall they are decidedly, comically impractical.

It might strike us as nothing surprising that a curriculum from the 13th century is more relic than realistic. It is perhaps only a little less surprising to us that a curriculum from roughly 1940 is outdated, nearly a century out from our time. Proposal 3, however, represents education only a few decades in the past and yet feels… outdated.

Today, the question on the mind of many educators might be put this way: will the curriculum of courses and skills and opportunities on offer *this very semester* be relevant to our world by the time the fall semester begins? Will technological progress in areas of information-processing, token-generation, probabilistic algorithms, virtual reality, and, God save us, robotics effectively compromise every domain of human labor (not to mention human art and leisurely pursuits)?

As pressing as this dilemma is to us right now, the principle beneath the progress is centuries old. We live in a time of technological revolution, the principle of which is that advancement must be granted a sacred privilege: that of being the metric of success. To move on is to live. To upend is the end. To replace is the point.

However things turn out in the years to come, this much will be true: a world of revolution is antithetical to education. Classical education cannot prepare students for this sort of world because *nothing* worthy of the name education can. It is impossible for a world of revolution to teach others even towards itself. Teach students to use the tools, navigate the systems, and manipulate the levers of today, and tomorrow they will, they must, change. They all are meant to be replaced. The bandwidth of relevance shortens to quarters of the business cycle. The computing demands require a new laptop every few years. The trends of scholarship might change while one's article is under review. The textbook you assign in one year will celebrate its 22nd edition in the year to come. Any curriculum of exquisite, eminent usefulness is always already soon to be out of date. Methods and tools and vocations are adopted and disposed of according to the lucrative and enervating will of planned obsolescence. This is what a 20th century philosopher meant when he wrote, "the machine has no tradition." There is no conservation, merely continuation.

## Conclusion

I promised I would acquit the two theses of the charge of contradiction. In closing, I will attempt to do so. I remind us that both theses refer to something called "the real world." Whenever something is qualified with being "real," I at least grow deeply suspicious. I might be relieved if someone says, not to worry, this is real food. But in the back of my head, something panics and shouts, “compared to what?”

There are at least two senses to the word “real,” distinguished in modern French by the two terms, *réel* and *actuel*. *Réel* means the true thing, *la vraie chose* in French. The thing as opposed to its counterfeit. *Actuel* on the other hand, denotes our present moment, our contemporary condition. Now as opposed to then. Were I to clarify the English terms with their French counterparts, our theses would run thus: classical education will *not* prepare students for the real world, *le monde actuel*; the second is that *only* classical education will prepare students for the Real world, *le monde réel*.

The cheeky wordplay might annoy us, if this solution does not annoy us even more forcefully. Is this a roundabout way of *emphasizing* the essential uselessness and irrelevance of classical education? Cold comfort that it leads our students to a Real world if we must remind parents that, in terms of the world we live in now, there is no usefulness worth paying for.

I would, however, caution us from surrendering too much to the real-as-in-current world. It was built by hands, and it is more feeble than most want to admit. Recalling the medieval conception of *amor sciendi* I would suggest that, if anything, classical education should remember the ways in which the program of the medieval university built the world as it lived within it and contemplated beyond it.

Our students must be builders. The geometry of the modern world will strike them as all wrong, and as their love of what they come to understand matures, the earthly effects of that love must be encouraged. They must become builders on earth, with their hearts in heaven.
### Why Avocations Matter
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-avocations-matter/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:30:18.000Z
On a sunny afternoon in 2005, Steve Jobs exchanged his signature black turtleneck for a gown and red stole. Standing before the anxious crowd of Stanford graduates, he [delivered](https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2005/06/youve-got-find-love-jobs-says?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) the words that encapsulated the philosophy of the modern workforce: “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” Jobs wasn’t the first to coin the idea “do what you love,” and he wouldn’t be the last. Sociologist Lindsey J. DePalma [noted](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/socf.1266?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that the sentiment had already been growing for decades before Jobs took the commencement stage. Over twenty years later, the popular saying shows no signs of disappearing. A brief internet search brings up multiple books and even a dedicated website of [courses](https://dowhatyouloveforlife.com/courses?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that promise to “help you discover what makes you happy, monetise your passion and do what you love, for life.”

Today, thanks to the creation of job titles of Influencer and Content Creator, the idea that we can do what we love feels even more possible. We open up YouTube and wonder if we, too, could make a living out of building Legos, picking locks, or exploding stuff. That’s not to say that this belief only affects those looking to hit it viral on the internet. The rise of e-commerce has opened up the possibility of business careers involving any number of your favorite pastimes from embroidery to sticker-making. The push to turn passion into vocation affects seasoned workers as well as the young students standing at the start line of their future careers.

In his recent [article](https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-to-have-a-day-job-and-an-intellectual-life), “How to Have a Day Job and an Intellectual Life,” John Ehrett touches on the consequences of this in young adults who felt forced to turn their intellectual passions into a career. Ehrett explains, “Somewhere along the way, smart young people seriously interested in relatively unmarketable ideas—in theology, philosophy, political theory, or what have you—have gotten the message that the only viable career path for them is academia.” The widespread counsel of “do what you love” served not only as an innocent encouragement, but as blinders that kept these students from imagining other possibilities.

Though finding delight and joy in your career isn’t a bad idea, it becomes problematic when we believe it is the only suitable option. In the same article Ehrett offers a few compelling reasons as to why one might not want to make their passion their primary profession, particularly in academia. What Ehrett diagnoses and seeks to alleviate stems from a broader problem that affects workers of all kinds. We have unknowingly accepted a diminished understanding of our labors. By buying into the utilitarian script of finding passion in our vocation, we have disregarded the existence of an immensely important category of life: avocation.

## Turning Towards Utility

You probably can’t remember the last time you used or heard the word avocation. Usage has been in steady decline since the 1930s, yet for centuries it stood coupled alongside the more familiar and weighty word: vocation. In a time when work wasn’t primarily connected to passionate feeling but instead to necessity, the category of avocation provided an important opportunity. The [word](https://www.etymonline.com/word/avocation?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) itself can be translated as “a calling away from one's occupation” into secondary interests. Farmers might make their living in the fields, yet enjoy carving wooden pieces of art in their spare time. Women might labor in their vocation as a mother or a teacher, yet enjoy rendering beautiful images with needle and thread by the fire. Avocation allowed room not only for a job that put food on the table, but for the opportunity to explore each individual’s God-given passions. Instead of competing, vocation and avocation moved together in a dance of two needed partners.

Eventually avocation fell out of favor and the word “hobby” rose in its place. Yet along with the exchange of words, we lost the fullness of avocation’s purpose. We began not to call away from vocations towards something meaningful, but instead turned our avocations back into labor. People became more interested in what they could produce, instead of the joy and delight of the process. Around the mid-20th century, German philosopher Josef Pieper [warned](https://www.amazon.com/Leisure-Basis-Culture-Josef-Pieper/dp/1586172565?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) about this “total work world” in which every action turned towards a utilitarian end. We’ve hardly heeded Pieper’s warnings, as contemporary writer Alan Noble has spent considerable time tracking the way this utilitarian perspective has pushed us to value efficiency in all kinds of avenues from [Artificial Intelligence](https://newsletter.oalannoble.com/p/ai-will-make-learning-virtuous-or?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to [mental health](https://newsletter.oalannoble.com/p/technique-and-resonance-in-mental?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

Today, this utilitarian way of life explodes within the realm of hobbies. We’ve not become content to only do what we love, but we have turned everything we love into something that must *do*—whether that’s providing money, subscriptions, or quantifiable change in our lives. We don’t only want to run, we need to complete a marathon and earn Strava points. We don’t merely want to decorate cakes, we want to earn some side money and potentially create a business. Traveling across the globe isn’t enough, we need to create a YouTube following on top of it.

It’s not that each of these decisions is always misguided. Goals, rewards, and additional income may be very helpful and even necessary depending upon your circumstances, yet beneath so many of these examples lies the erasure of avocation. There is no calling away from work, but a consistent calling towards further work and ultimately a utilitarian existence. Yet we weren’t ever made for such a life.

Our very creation from the dust of the ground was made out of superfluity (Acts 17:25). The beauty of golden-hour sun atop the grass and the detailed wings of a butterfly display to us each day that utility is not the only mark of value in this world. God has molded a world that upholds more than the efficient. Shouldn’t we follow suit and recognize, as Pieper [implores](https://www.amazon.com/Leisure-Basis-Culture-Josef-Pieper/dp/1586172565?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), the common good of all people requires space for that which isn’t “useful work?”

## Restoring the Meaning of Avocation

Restoring avocation to its proper place forces us to adjust our distaste of it, for our utilitarian perspective has done a good job of degrading it. We brandish the word hobbyist on those who aren’t professionals. A hobbyist is often one who hasn’t given enough effort or enough time in order to be serious enough to be paid for it. In doing so we accept a dwarfed [definition](https://www.etymonline.com/word/hobby?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), that takes on its namesake—a hobbyhorse— and the idea that avocation is merely an “activity that doesn’t go anywhere.”

Yet this perspective veils the real potential in our avocations. True, they might not be our primary calling or earn us a paycheck, but they don’t need those requirements to form us in deeply meaningful ways. The times we call away from our vocation into classic literature expands our mind and schools us towards virtue. Our turning away into the dirt of the garden brings us opportunity for patience and worship of the God who made the tomatoes burst from a tiny seed. Our RC airplanes, furniture restorations, and weekly board games give us a chance to step out of doing, and into the humble act of receiving.

These activities may live in the margins of our lives, but it doesn’t make that passion any less important. Scripture continually reminds us of the value of faithfulness over grandeur and instructs us to not despise small beginnings (Zec. 4:10). All small steps add up. Imagine the growth you might see after spending just a short amount of time with watercolors every week? How much could you learn about woodworking by spending some weekends faithfully with the craft? How many academic books can you pour over during the stretches of time when you let yourself be called away from your primary occupation? These answers still involve some kind of measurement, yet to our utilitarian world, they will likely remain fairly insignificant. We should let them.

Steve Jobs’s commencement address may have held some truth about the nature of vocation, but it forgot to remind the listening graduates that many opportunities for great work exist outside of our 9-5\. It rings out from the piano keys in a living room or in a sketch pad stuffed in the closet. It hides in the poem scribbled on a notepad, a novel on the nightstand, or in a tray of croissants. These great works were used by God to shape and build the person who called away from their vocation to another passion. To call such things “hobbies” is too small.

true
### Both Virtue and Policy: How Should Christians Fight Tech Addictions?
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/both-virtue-and-policy-how-should-christians-fight-tech-addictions/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:30:23.000Z
Last month, Meta and Google were [found guilty of negligence](https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5746125/meta-youtube-social-media-trial-verdict?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in a lawsuit arguing that social media has helped fuel a generation’s mental health crisis. The plaintiff was a young woman who began using Instagram and YouTube compulsively in elementary school, and who began to experience acute depression and anxiety shortly thereafter. She argued that Meta and Google intentionally designed their products to be addictive and exploitative of human vulnerabilities, then failed to inform people about the dangers. She won.

Responses to this verdict have been varied. Some are celebrating the fact that big tech is finally being held accountable for its actions. Some are bemoaning the “victim mentality” and lack of personal responsibility they see in our litigious culture. In Christian circles, some are asking, “Where were this child’s parents?” Is a generation’s addiction and mental health problems the result of exploitative technologies or personal and familial failures? Or to frame the question in positive terms: how do we recover a healthier relationship with technology— through making different personal choices or by pursuing systemic change?

This question has already been debated in other contexts (racism, sexism, and wealth disparity, to name a few). The answer is never a simple binary. As Christians, we can’t lay personal responsibility and moral agency at the feet of big tech or any other societal superpower. Nor can we deny our embeddedness in social systems that shape the nature of the struggle. When it comes to technology, the church has a unique voice to speak to parents of individual families and on behalf of the vulnerable in the broader culture.

Children need protection from those who seek to profit from their insecurities and fears. Those children are in our homes but also our schools and neighborhoods. My elementary age sons have almost no access to technology at home but my nine-year-old came home from school the other day saying, “I have a friend who is AI.” (He somehow managed to ask Google Gemini a question in computer lab and got into a dialogue with it.) He, along with other impressionable young children, are growing up in a world that confuses chat-bots with people and social media likes with friendship. To be concerned about this is not stodgy, old-fashioned, resistant to change, or fearful. It is to insist that image bearers of God are created by God to be embodied, interpersonal, and covenantal, and that we can’t let our children settle for less.

As a pastor, I want parents to be empowered to [prayerfully, creatively](https://www.christianitytoday.com/2026/03/low-tech-parenting-big-tent-judgmentalism-tech-grace/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) steward the use of technology in their homes and lead their children in conversations about why this matters. As a mom, I also want parents—and educators and administrators and public librarians and good neighbors—to engage in broader cultural conversations about technology’s limits in our lives. First Lady Melania Trump introduced [Humanoid Robots](https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/25/politics/melania-trump-ai-robot?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) as potential child educators on the same day as the California jury ruled against Meta and Google, revealing how ambivalent our country remains about who should be leading who here. Who will shape and form our children—technology companies (who’ve already been found negligent and exploitative) and their bots, or human adults who can know and love them?

Individual parents may choose not to obtain Humanoids as nannies or home educators, but they may not be able to afford private schools or other opt-out education models if public education goes in that direction. They may limit social media or personal devices for their kids, but they can’t control social pressure or school policies about online learning. When it comes to technology, parents can and should embrace their God-given stewardship of their homes; but they alone cannot change a generational climate. We all must work together to do that.

Christians have always believed that formation happens in families. We claim unique theological categories (and spiritual resources) to equip parents in their calling to shepherd children. Christians also have a long history of advocating for societal change on behalf of others, who may or may not be children in our own households but whose lives can be saved or improved through goods like [public hospitals](https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/from-poorhouse-to-hospital?ref=mereorthodoxy.com#:~:text=THE%20MODERN%20WEST%20owes%20much,xenones%20%28hospices%20or%20hostels%29.), [freedom from slavery](https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/resources/profiles-in-faith-william-wilberforce/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), and [orphan care](https://theweek.com/articles/551027/how-christianity-invented-children?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

But Christians can also enact change in smaller, quieter ways by being good neighbors and friends to the vulnerable children and overtired parents among us. As I listened to the White House promise that Humanoid Bots will be “always patient, always available,” I felt exploited in my own weakness as a flawed and oft distracted parent. I thought of many parents I know who are struggling to pay the bills, cook dinner, schedule doctor’s visits, and be present with their kids. In this way, parents are vulnerable too. In their vulnerability, they need something better than Humanoids. They need human friends who are willing to step into the complexity of relationship with them and their kids.

We can’t all lead movements for societal reform, and we aren’t all parents. But we can all prayerfully notice those in our neighborhoods or churches who might benefit from some free babysitting or homework help. Growing up, [my own family](https://www.christianitytoday.com/2022/12/family-nuclear-nontraditional-christmas-advent-god-grafts/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) was upheld by a network of honorary aunts and uncles and grandparents who came alongside my single mother struggling to raise six kids. We were less at risk of becoming addicted to social media or chatbots when I was a teenager, but the involvement of a small village did keep me from harming myself in other substantial ways. The specific dangers may have changed, but the stakes are the same. The world has always been full of vulnerable people. Into this world, the church still speaks.
### A Tale of Two Grandfathers: On Being Civil in an Uncivil Age
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-tale-of-two-grandfathers-on-being-civil-in-an-uncivil-age/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:30:27.000Z
Today civil political discourse seems like a Tasmanian Tiger or Passenger Pigeon: a fascinating thing of the past but gone for good. Political turbulence marks us, and with it an “in your face, no holds barred” verbal warfare that abounds on social media, podcasts, and elsewhere. I don’t want to describe its causes or measure its reach. Nor do I want to argue that strong rhetoric in the face of social problems is necessarily wrong. One need only think of the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in fighting against racism to see the value of a determined advocate in leading a cause. And many causes there have been in the past fifty years. Indeed, our age has been dominated by what has been called the culture wars.

There is much social ferment today, with some issues moving to resolution and, increasingly, other issues that serve to reveal deep social divisions. And the ferment is no longer just out there, but in our lives too, and within the church of Jesus Christ. In my immediate family, for example, we have different points of view on more than one issue. And these differences, though amicable, have resulted in parting of the ways in terms of church affiliation. We’ve simply agreed to disagree and to love one another in the process. I suspect all of us, in one way or another, face differences within our families, and perhaps within ourselves, over what to believe, and how to talk constructively about disagreements.

As believers, what does it mean to do justly, love mercy and walk humbly before God in an age of ferment? As I prepared this piece, it occurred to me that my convictions about such matters are rooted not in current debates, but in my past. For me, these stories are cautionary tales that lead me to believe that glib solutions to our nation’s social problems, and to problems within the church, will very likely be wrong-headed. Securing a just social and political order requires careful thought and the commitment to listen to others with whom we might disagree.

So, here aretwo stories about my grandfathers:

In some ways, they had much in common. They were both Christians, one a Mennonite and the other a Methodist, and they were both from Indiana, one from the farm country in the northern part of the state, and the other from the coal country of southern Indiana.

Grandpa Kaufmann was a Mennonite and a farmer (back then nearly all Mennonites were farmers). In some ways my grandfather was self-sufficient. . . working the soil, raising livestock for food, repairing his own farm implements (two of his sons became engineers as a consequence, one of whom became my father). But he was part of a community sharing a common faith and lifestyle. He had a strong sense of being bonded together with his fellow Mennonites in both faith and in life. He knew he could count on others during times of need.

Politically, Grandpa Kaufmann was a conservative. He believed that government which governs least governs best. In his view the government should build roads, punish criminals, provide for the common defense, and, most of all, give him the freedom to fulfill his responsibilities as a farmer, a husband and father, a church member, and a community member.

My Grandpa Auten was a coal-mining Methodist. At twelve years old in 1908, he saw his father struck and killed by lightning as they were bailing hay together in the fields. Within a week he began what was to be fifty-three years of labor in the strip mines of southwestern Indiana, working his way up from water boy to ultimately operating a coal shovel. When he began working in the mines, his wage was barely enough to sustain a hand to mouth existence. Coal miners in those days were the poorest of the poor, and worked in conditions where accidents and fatalities were not uncommon.

All of that began to change when the government legalized collective bargaining in the coal mines, and Grandpa Auten became a leader in the movement to unionize the miners in his area. Through his efforts and the efforts of others, the miners won a contract with the coal company that eventually brought the miners out of poverty and into the middle class.

Grandpa Auten never forgot that it was the government that played a key role in making possible his escape from poverty. And he was particularly good at pointing out that it was the Democrats and not the Republicans who were on the side of the working man. In his view, the Republicans were the party of the bosses and the Democrats were the party of the common man. I wish I had a nickel for every time he told me that when I was a kid.

Grandpa Auten definitely did not want a handout from the government, but he was thankful for the helping hand the government provided. Although he would not have used this language, the give and take of the marketplace in the coal industry had not brought plenty to all, but served to benefit the owners and impoverish the workers. (Today we might point to the one percent with its wealth and the problem of the shrinking middle class.)

The intervention of the state helped to rectify the imbalance and enabled the owners to continue on in the enterprise of mining coal, and the workers to have enough economic clout through collective bargaining to make a comfortable wage. To my grandpa A., the result was simply fair play. And that's what politics should be all about, he thought . . . the government stepping in to help the common person against the powerful and the wealthy.

So, who was right about the role of the state vis-a-vis the economic and political issues of their day? My farmer grandfather or my coal miner grandfather? In a sense they both were right—at least partially.

As I said before, my Mennonite grandfather lived in a settled world, little different from that of his ancestors. He needed little from the state, other than to give him the freedom to live his life according to Mennonite ways. He saw no need for unions and government intrusions such as the minimum wage laws (also an issue today). They both served only to take money out of his pockets by creating higher prices.

Grandpa Auten, on the other hand, keenly felt the strictures of what he believed to be unjust working conditions. To use biblical language, he was confronted with fallen economic structures that needed to be reformed before he could enjoy a living wage and safe working conditions. And, in his judgment, the government was a necessary force to bring justice and fair play to labor-management relations in the coal industry.

So for one grandfather, the essential goodness of the created order was realized in his daily life without much government intervention. For the other, structural evil had to be overcome before he could provide for his family and give to his church in the way he deemed best. And so, I lived in a divided house, so to speak, one grandfather was a Republican and the other a Democrat. One a conservative and the other a liberal as defined by the issues of the 1950s.

What, then, is the moral of the tale of the two grandfathers? They did not agree with one another about some pretty key issues. But I think from the vantage point of over a half century later there is an important lesson to learn from them. You see, their political views were based on only part of the picture. They understood what they experienced and perhaps dismissed too easily the viewpoint of those whose experience was different.

To generalize from their experience, it seems that pitfalls are there for both conservatives and liberals to fall into. Conservatives, in their appreciation of the past and their reluctance to make progressive changes are in danger of what one writer calls "accepting the fallen in the name of creation." Liberals, with their focus on change, may fall prey to advocating unwarranted, and even pernicious, change.

My particular point is not merely to speak to the fallibility of our political convictions. It is also to critique our disposition to think that the light of truth only shines on what we happen to believe is true. It's too easy, isn't it, for us to believe that the other guy has the bad ideas, that all the sinners are on the other side of the issue. And one of the negative legacies of the culture wars is demonizing the opposition. We can dismiss an idea, not on the merits of the idea, but based on the source of the idea. If the wrong guy said it, it must be a bad idea.

In my view, the ongoing task of speaking as Christians to the issues of our day will be made easier if we admit that conservatives and liberals alike, whatever the issue, have insights (howbeit different ones) into the nature of justice. But when conservatives want us to conserve conditions that are rooted in the fall, I want to stand with my coal miner grandfather. And when liberals want to liberate us from normative practices rooted in creation structures, which I presume the culture wars is partially about, then I side with my farmer grandfather.

Rather than claiming the label of “liberal” or “conservative,” we should seek the goal of public justice, with ample social space for all peoples to live according to their life visions, without bringing harm either to social structures or to other individuals. Then let us rally to those liberal ideas and those conservative ideas that help us to reach that goal. Such an approach will enable us to glean what is best from both political traditions, and reduce our inclination to automatically reject those whose position is different from our own. It may also result in lowering the temperature of our rhetoric and inserting a measure of civility into our discussions.

Martin Marty said that one of the real problems of modern life is that people who are good at being civil often lack strong convictions and people who have strong convictions often lack civility. One of the lessons of our times is that both are important. We should know what we believe and hold those beliefs with real conviction, but let’s be civil with one another as we speak together of our convictions. Isn't that what the writer of Hebrews meant when he said in 12:14,15: “Make every effort to live in peace with all men and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one misses the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and to defile many.”

These are words to make us pause and reflect. We are to be holy, and we are to make every effort to live in peace with all men. Clearly there is a tension here. We know of many people in the scriptures and elsewhere whose holy living led not to peace but to conflict and even death, our Lord being the most notable example. There is a battle raging between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of the Devil. Yet in the midst of this battle, we are called to be holy and to be peaceable. Not an easy task, to be sure. In I Peter 2:17 we are told to honor everyone, and later in his letter, Peter tells us to “always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence.”

The issues that dominated the fifties and sixties are long past, replaced by new ones. But holiness, peaceableness, the honoring of others, gentle and reverent defense never go out of style. These are the tools with which we ought to engage others in the social issues of our day. Not reckless posturing, not demonizing the opposition. May the Lord be pleased to make us skilled users of these biblical tools as we speak to one another.

And may we keep reading and listening, and asking for guidance from the Holy Spirit, and developing our own voices on these things. May they be gentle and reverent voices. And in our own voices, may we speak with conviction about issues that matter deeply to us, our family and friends, and the watching world.
### The Artist’s Pen Bodying Forth the Poet’s Imagination
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-artists-pen-bodying-forth-the-poets-imagination/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:30:30.000Z
Julian Peters. [*Nature Poems to See By: A Comic Artist Interprets More Great Poetry*](https://www.plough.com/en/topics/culture/poetry/nature-poems-to-see-by?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Plough Books, 2026\. $29.95\. 152 pp.

Julian Peters is a devotee of poetry and aspires to share its wonders with a culture that has largely turned its attention to other art forms. Like any good evangelist, Peters recognizes the necessity of communicating in a way that is attractive and understandable to a given society, without distorting or diluting the message itself. And as a gifted artist with a passion for poetry, Peters is uniquely positioned to adapt poems into a format that is engaging for our highly visual culture.

The comic or graphic novel is inviting and familiar, especially to younger readers, and has grown in popularity over the last decade, at least judging by the ballooning size of this section in my local public library. My elementary-age kids enjoy reading a variety of books, including text-only “chapter books,” but are particularly drawn to the graphic novel format. Adventure? History? Science? When presented in comics, it becomes instantly more appealing. When I opened Peters’s book to read with my children, they needed no introduction or coaxing to follow along eagerly, which might have been necessary for a collection of the same poems without artwork.

To be clear, this is not a book aimed primarily at young children, nor does it compromise or trivialize the poetry it portrays. Rather, it offers a welcoming entry point for readers of any age who might be daunted by the plain presentation of words on a page, as well as those who have been scared off by bad experiences in classrooms or exposure to the bland and obscure varieties of contemporary poetry. Peters’s wide-ranging selections are, on the whole, quite commendable. The accompanying artwork is superb.

This is Peters’s second book adapting poetry to comics (the first, [*Poems to See By*](https://www.plough.com/en/topics/culture/poetry/poems-to-see-by?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), was also released by Plough Books in 2020). The present volume, structured in groups corresponding to the four seasons, focuses on poems about nature—or more precisely, about the “natural environment as a means of touching upon some aspect of our own human condition.”

Like the best poems, Peters’s comics work on multiple levels. The reader can quickly move through the panels, taking in the words and images for an immediate sense of what the piece is communicating. This provides an accessible on-ramp for someone encountering the poem for the first time, or even a novice to the poetic art form. At the same time, there is much to explore and appreciate for aficionados who are intimately familiar with a particular poem, such as crafty visual details adding context, allusion, or interpretation. As an example, several comics incorporate representations of the poet within the panels—a dapper Langston Hughes sitting at a piano, a uniformed Edward Thomas in the trenches, a pensive Robbie Burns in his field, a starry-eyed manga Christina Rossetti, a psychedelic Wordsworth wandering lonely as a cloud.

The visual delights also extend to the dazzling array of styles Peters employs, intentionally matching the range of poetic voices and modes in the anthology. The techniques span across classic and modern comics, from playful to realistic, from spare line drawings to bold and intricate scenes. There are many references to art history for the well-informed, such as the inventive repurposing of William Blake’s distinctive style, the twist on Matisse’s “Dance” in e. e. cummings’s “i thank you God for most this amazing,” or the homage to Beatrix Potter in the portrayals of the domestic affairs of Burns’s titular mouse.

More significantly, these panels surpass mere illustrations, presenting a sort of commentary or creative exploration of the source material. Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” are transported to modern oil rigs and busy highway interchanges, culminating in a futuristic vision of a renewed, “green” cityscape. Shakespeare’s indelible Sonnet 18 begins with a depiction of the beloved’s silhouette filled in by the “summer’s day” to which she is compared, but ends with the same shape filled instead by the words of the final sestet, through which the dedicatee is immortalized.

Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms” uses a mixed-media collage with mid-century photographs of stereotypically gendered scenarios to elucidate the social undertones in the foreboding fungal imagery. The concluding existential ruminations in “To a Mouse” are marked with an arresting image of Burns standing at his plow, unaware of the subtle, gigantic blade that looms behind him. In these and many other instances, the comics strikingly illuminate the poem’s themes, particularly via resonant revelations in the closing panels—Peters has learned how to make his comics click shut like a box ([to paraphrase Yeats](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetry-news/73838/resisting-closure-the-nations-ange-mlinko-reflects-on-jorie-graham?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)) in the way great poems often do.

Most of the 24 poems are classics from the 19th and 20th centuries, with some from earlier eras. But there are a couple from the 21st century as well, showing that Peters has a pulse on the living and active poetic tradition. While the top selection criterion seems to be quality, there appears to be an admirable attempt at representational balance, by including a good number of female poets (three for every five men, surely above the historical publishing average) and writers from cultures beyond the white British and American, which have predominated in English poetry.

And so, the book features some gestures toward non-English work, with translations of the classical Chinese poet Li Po (also transliterated as Li Bai) and a group of three haiku (slightly marred by the incorrect plural “haikus”). Each haiku occupies a single page and effectively encapsulates a distinct mood or scene. The division into three panels matches the way haiku are typically translated into English, though the original Japanese form is traditionally presented as a single line. Perhaps the more essential aspect is the joining of two disparate images or ideas with the use of a *kireji* or “cutting word,” which might also be conveyed by a two-panel layout. Still, these haiku comics do a nice job capturing the duality of perspective or shift in focus within a singular moment.

Dominican-American living legend Rhina Espaillat is represented with a vivid illumination of “Butchering,” a sonnet which offers a restrained but moving portrait of a stalwart matriarch. Joy Harjo is noteworthy as the first Native American U.S. Poet Laureate, though her short and spare “This Land Is a Poem” was for this reader a less satisfying choice from contemporary Native American poetry, compared to terse, nature-oriented works such as N. Scott Momaday’s “The Bear” or “Angle of Geese.”

Peters is justly troubled by humanity’s ongoing evisceration of our shared Earth, and a few of the comics contain overt nods to present-day environmental concerns. While well-meaning and often compelling, these elements have the potential to feel dated within what is otherwise a broad and timeless collection. In rare instances the art might seem too playful or goofy, like the jolly daffodils with “noses” (à la Disney’s *Alice in Wonderland*), which are delightful but possibly undercut the seriousness of Wordsworth’s reminiscence. On the other hand, the cute fog-cat that creeps past the Chicago skyline seems more appropriate, considering the straightforward brevity of Sandburg’s famous poem.

The collection aims to honor and elevate the original poems, even as Peters creates vibrant visual art to accompany them. The text is also provided separately following the comic, so that the reader can encounter each poem in its conventional print format. Stanza and line breaks are thoughtfully handled in the comics, often with one line per panel and one stanza per page, but always accounting for the poem’s pacing and tone. The comic lettering is in all caps, but the beginnings of lines are represented by bold capitals in place of traditional line-initial capitals, so that the poetic line is still upheld when there is not a strict correspondence between lines and panels. Peters demonstrates attention to finer points of poetic technique—for example, in “God’s Grandeur” the text is dramatically divided within one large panel to highlight Hopkins’s strong enjambment (“It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil / Crushed”).

Peters adeptly tackles well-known classics such as Frost’s “Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening” as well as less familiar but powerful pieces like Stevie Smith’s haunting “Not Waving But Drowning,” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sandpiper.” The latter features a plethora of gorgeous shoreline imagery and ends with another artful closing panel, in which fascinating and surprising details in the art draw out deeper layers of the poem. Although Peters hails from Montreal, his soft, impressionistic depiction of “red clay after rain” in Langston Hughes’s “Daybreak In Alabama” was thoroughly convincing for this lifelong southerner. I could go on, but the only way to do justice to Peters’ work is to experience it. A sampling is available on [Plough’s website](https://www.plough.com/en/authors/p/julian-peters?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), including a few comics from the latest collection.

Shakespeare describes the magic of poetry in lines from *A Midsummer Night’s Dream* (Act V, Scene 1):

> *…as imagination bodies forthThe forms of things unknown, the poet's penTurns them to shapes and gives to airy nothingA local habitation and a name*.

Peters similarly plies his artist’s pen to “body forth” the poet’s imaginative words in skillful and rewarding visual adaptations which celebrate and enrich the great literature that he admires. This book (as well as the first volume) ought to be in every public library, with hopes that readers of many ages and persuasions will discover a winsome introduction to poetry or find a lost delight rekindled. Poetry has been called [“a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.”](https://danagioia.com/essays/american-poetry/poetry-as-enchantment/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) By creatively stewarding and advancing the bounty of poetic tradition, *Nature Poems To See By* has the power to help our forgetful world remember the art of poetry. Peters’s comics illustrate (both figuratively and literally) what it means to see everything around us with a poetic vision—full of attention, wonder, and gratitude.
### A Day in the Life of a Screen-Free Child
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-screen-free-child/
Last updated: 2026-06-01T16:05:08.000Z
Two years ago, I wrote a piece for *Mere Orthodoxy*, “[Homeschooling, Luddite Style](https://mereorthodoxy.com/homeschooling-luddite-style).” At the time, screens in schools were only beginning to make alarmed headlines, and many parents seemed either to be in denial about the seriousness of it all, or perhaps just resigned to it. Indeed, one classical educator who criticized my piece at the time said that I was overly naïve and idealistic in condemning the use of technology in education.

Since then, however, the use of screens in education—even among homeschoolers—has only increased, as journalist [Carrie McKean has documented](https://www.christianitytoday.com/writers/carrie-mckean/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in a downright apocalyptic recent series of articles for *Christianity Today*. In public schools, screen use has become axiomatic, and private schools are not exempt either. “My students don’t know what a notebook is; they think I mean a screen,” a friend who is a long-time teacher in a public elementary school remarked recently. All this screen learning has set the stage perfectly for replacement of teachers by AI. Indeed, the new and growing [network of Alpha Schools](https://alpha.school/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) offers education provided solely by AI—although there are humans on hand to keep the kids alive. Not to worry. Those humans too can soon be presumably replaced by robots—as soon as school insurance allows.

And so, in light of these developments, I want to revisit my argument from two years ago and double down: Yes, screen-free education is possible. Indeed, screen-free childhood is possible—and very much desirable. Freya India’s new book [*Girls: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything*](https://www.amazon.com/GIRLS%C2%AE-Generation-Z-Commodification-Everything/dp/1250442222?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)is a must-read for those who remain unconvinced, as she offers a dystopian vision of what a screen-saturated childhood does, especially for girls. Meanwhile Clare Morell’s recent book [*The Tech Exit*](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/771065/the-tech-exit-by-clare-morell/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) offers essential guidance for those who have found themselves and their kids sucked in by the endless onslaught of technology.

But in what follows, I want to offer something much simpler: just a glimpse into the life of a screen-free child. What might it even look like?

\*\*\*

As she wakes up, she reaches for the comic book that she set on the floor by her bed last night as she was falling asleep. Drowsily, she finds her spot in the book and reads for a few minutes before she hears other sounds in the house and realizes that her brother is awake. Excitedly, she then jumps out of bed and sprints downstairs to join him. Little feet they may be, but they still sound like elephants on a stampede in this old house.

Together they find a quick game to play together—maybe a few rounds of “Taco, Cat, Goat, Cheese, Pizza” or “Bingo” or even checkers. Other days they just sit on the couch downstairs side by side, still waking up slowly, each one absorbed in a different book, but longing for this quiet time together. A couple of hours later, mom serves breakfast. Then seeing them bouncing around so much, their energetic bodies seemingly humming in the chairs around the breakfast table, mom sends them outside for playtime before beginning the day’s schoolwork. Their brains just seem to work better when their active bodies are just a little bit tired. Who wants to sit when they could run? So out they go to walk around the block or maybe do some laps on the scooter or on their bikes. They get out the sidewalk chalk and make a fresh masterpiece on the driveway to replace the one the most recent rain had washed away to their chagrin (*sic transit gloria mundi*).

On snow days, abundant during some of these Midwestern winters, outside time might begin earlier—upon waking, essentially. So on they pile their layers of snow gear, then go to play for hours until the cold, inexorably seeping in through all the layers of clothing, and the smell of baking hashbrowns and breakfast sausages drives them inside. In the hottest days of summer, outside time comes early as well—for the opposite reason. Quickly they rush outside to play before it gets too hot.

At last, after breakfast and play time, the day’s lessons can begin. So each one works through a math lesson (with a book, a paper notebook, and pencil), then Latin and Greek for the older one (yet more books and paper notebooks), and the continued slow journey through the trusty McGuffey’s Reader for the younger one. Mom helps as needed, especially working one-on-one with the younger reader, who still needs significant assistance, but is eager to do more and more on her own as well. And then we read aloud—or maybe we did it before everything else, depending on the day and the mood.

We read aloud some more after, always with paper books, whether our own or those borrowed from the public library. Then after the structured lesson time, more reading yet, alone or together, and time for piano practice, and time for making art. Crayons, markers, stamp-makers, and many other paraphernalia are scattered all over the house, following the youngest artist as a cloud of detritus as she moves through her day. Sometimes new art is taped on the walls by the end of the day. Old art is never removed, and undecorated wall space is growing sparse, but such too is life without screens.

On nice days, they set out the hammock on a stand in the shade of some trees in the back yard, then read there for hours more or peacefully color. But we live in an already-but-not-yet, so some time for fighting must be set apart as well, for sure. For while the hammock packaging promised that two can comfortable sit inside, the reality for two siblings is more complicated. Still, peace is always achieved at the end, somehow, even if some vociferous fighting must precede it. And even if mom must offer bribery to encourage a peace treaty (“if you stop fighting, everyone gets a cookie”).

Some days, activities outside the home intersperse these other simple and joyful routines. Debate club for the older brother, ballet for his sister, play dates for both (some scheduled and others impromptu), library forays, and near-daily walks to the park and around town. Endless hours at the splash pad during the summer, and day trips to the botanical garden or the zoo year-round. Chores too, of course—sweeping the floors, vacuuming, dusting, resisting laundry’s unrelenting onslaught, and picking up toys and all those art paraphernalia around the nooks and crannies of the house. So it all goes, on and on.

It is remarkable how quickly the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years get filled up. All of it a gift, a joy, even the daily fighting too—and as these moments rush by, the children grow, ever taller, more pensive, less prone to climb every tree they see just because it is there. Isn’t this the stuff of childhood—what children were meant to do and be? Why rush their growing up, when there is such simple joy yet to savor for a child. Behold, if you sit quietly on the back stoop in the evening, you may see fireflies in the summer, or see the neighborhood bunnies come out of hiding and hop around unafraid.

As evening grows late, dinner together, then bath and bedtime routine with dad—who used to read books to all the kids together, but now the oldest is a grown-up, and the other two no longer fit on dad’s lap both at once for reading time. Besides, the next brother can read much faster for himself now. And so, many nights now, it is the seven-year-old sister who gets a bedtime story on her own from dad. For months now, they have been on a J.R.R. Tolkien kick. After completing *The Hobbit*, on they went to “A Leaf by Niggle,” and now more Tolkien short stories. Unable to read such books on her own yet, she understands and absorbs what she hears with wide-eyed delight—much as residents of oral cultures of times past could retain vast swaths of poetry in their minds, and many stories too.

Prayers and bedtime conclude the day, and it grows quiet in the house. They sleep well, worn out from their full days of being kids—playing, learning, reading, reflecting, running to the park and back home again, and reading some more. Their time is remarkably full—and it is filled with other people. Fully present, they live their days together—with each other, with mom and dad, with friends, and others all around.

Is such a life still possible? Of course, it is—and not for homeschoolers alone, if one can find a school that is screen-free. But the above story is no mere hypothetical scenario, no fiction this. Such is my family’s life, chaotic and filled with activities, work and play, books and books and yet more books. And people, God’s image-bearers, dwelling with each other in community and conversation, and sometimes even in harmony.
### The Liberalism of George Smiley
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-liberalism-of-george-smiley/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:30:35.000Z
Spy fiction is not ordinarily the place one goes to find moral wisdom. It tends to be a sordid place where bad people are opposed by slightly less bad people, where “there is as little of worth on your side as there is mine,” to slightly paraphrase the greatest spy protagonist of them all, John le Carré’s George Smiley. And yet in a moment when the illiberal and totalitarian is ascendant in the west, it may be that spy fiction has a unique sort of wisdom to offer us.

I first began to find wisdom in Le Carré several years ago. A group of what some have since called [“the woke right”](https://www.thefp.com/p/rod-dreher-the-woke-right-is-coming?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) sought to infiltrate and take over an organization I served as a board member. Specifically, I was frustrated by the ways in which conventional liberal forms of engagement did not seem to work with the ‘woke right’ individuals in the way I had hoped. I needed to find other ways of responding which preserved the health of the community I valued, but I didn’t know what those might be.

This was the problem: Small-l American liberals are used to conducting themselves in a certain way within civic life. We trust each other. When we have a decision to make, we give our reasons and make our claims and allow others to do the same, listening with patience and weighing the merits of their argument. Through all of this, we trust that all the involved parties are sincere in their desire and relatively transparent in communication. These are the building blocks of liberal society, of course–a commitment to making arguments, seeking persuasion, and finding ways of patiently enduring with one another amidst differences.

The trouble is that when illiberal people enter liberal society or even just smaller liberal institutions, those same liberal virtues become weaknesses to be exploited. If two parties are in conflict and one party is sincere, transparent, and pursuing persuasion while the other is cynical and purely concerned with acquiring power, the former’s liberal virtues are precisely what will make them an easy mark for the illiberal cynic. If the former is presuppositionally committed to forthrightness and honesty while the latter has [explicitly announced](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/how-the-internet-fringe-infiltrated-republican-politics?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that [lying and deception are acceptable political strategies](https://americanreformer.org/2024/06/good-deceit/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), it is not hard to anticipate how that conflict will go. This is how liberal institutions are colonized and transformed into skinsuits to be worn by their illiberal colonizers. The trust of liberal stakeholders is abused by the illiberal insurgents and, quite often, by the time the liberal stakeholders realize what is happening to them, it is too late to make the changes needed to save the organization. In the end, illiberal insurgents take over the organization, often leveraging the stated values of the other side in order to weaken and discredit them.

This creates a problem for those of us who value reason, persuasion, and tolerance. It suggests that in any fight between liberals and illiberals, the liberal is fighting with one hand tied behind their back. So how can institutions and broader liberal society be preserved in a time when so many have lost all interest in making claims, hearing arguments, and pursuing truth together within the bonds of reason and the common good?

The place I found help, in an unlikely form, is the unimpressive figure of George Smiley.. Smiley’s genius rests simply in this: Over the course of the many novels in which he is featured we can see how one can intelligently and shrewdly resist illiberalism without simply becoming the thing one is fighting.

Before saying more, a bit of background on Smiley might be helpful for those who have not read le Carré: George Smiley was created by le Carré as a sort of bizarro James Bond–where Bond is flashy, sexy, and loud, Smiley is patient, utterly unremarkable, and quiet. Bond always gets the girl. Smiley can’t even keep the attention of his notoriously unfaithful wife Anne.

One never associates the word “meditative” with James Bond. But it is the essence of what makes Smiley compelling–the sense that he is always a step ahead of everyone else in understanding the latest plot against the western world, and discerning the motivations and desires of all the parties he is studying at any given time. The most consequential thing Smiley does in any of the novels written about him is sit quietly and think. Le Carré’s genius is in his ability to make such a character so compelling.

Smiley appears in nine novels by le Carré as well as a tenth novel written by le Carré’s son. His first appearance is in le Carré’s first novel, *Call for the Dead*, published in 1961\. His final appearance comes in the closing pages of *A Legacy of Spies*, published in 2017 in which le Carré gives the man a final monologue in which he essentially explains what it was all for, why he lived the life he lived. The most famous Smiley novel, of course, is *Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy*, which was turned into a film starring Gary Oldman, John Hurt, and Colin Furth in 2011\. In an earlier era, the BBC also produced a miniseries based on the novel, starring Alec Guinness as Smiley with Patrick Stewart [making a brief and utterly silent appearance as Karla](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPlNM-SZ1QQ&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), Smiley’s archnemesis and the head of Soviet intelligence during the Cold War. (Readers will need to be somewhat credulous about the timeline of Smiley’s life, in a way not unlike the credulity needed while reading the Aubrey-Maturin novels: If one simply accepted all the dates le Carré gives for Smiley’s life, he would be over 100 years old by the time of the events in *A Legacy of Spies*.)

So what marks Smiley’s genius and makes him such an adept opponent of illiberal ideologies? It begins with this, I think: He is able to recognize and name the methods used by his opponents.

Illiberal ideologies operate in a certain sequence: They begin with recognizing social problems which usually are quite real and even devastating. In our own day we have seen this in ways that can be both left- and right-coded.

The problems facing Afro-Americans in the United States, for example, are quite real. To take but one example, [the Department of Justice report](https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson%5Fpolice%5Fdepartment%5Freport.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) on the Ferguson police department contains many quite alarming details regarding the treatment of Black people in Ferguson in the days leading up to the death of Michael Brown. And Ferguson is not the only place where Black Americans [have encountered gross injustice due to their race](https://projects.newsday.com/long-island/real-estate-agents-investigation/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

Likewise, the obstacles to flourishing for many young men in America today [are significant](https://www.theringer.com/2024/10/11/politics/united-states-young-men-women-political-divide-richard-reeves?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Attaining [economic stability](https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/young-men-struggling-slowing-job-market-college-degree-rcna224482?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), [securing good work](https://www.businessinsider.com/why-young-men-are-leaving-labor-force-how-to-fix-2025-8?op=1&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), and [family formation](https://ifstudies.org/blog/young-men-need-encouragement-to-get-married?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) are all far harder for many young men today than they were even for me, an older millennial who graduated college in the aftermath of the sub-prime market crash.

Once the problem has been defined, liberals turn to our normal methods of addressing them: relying upon conversation, persuasion, and, when necessary, democratic organizing in order to promote reform. The democratic liberal critique focuses on a specific injustice and it regards neighbors as actual partners in a common civic project and possible partners in specific projects of reform and repair. A liberal can have enemies, of course, but also a good liberal always retains hope that enemies can be persuaded to join in pursuing the good, as they understand it, and that former enemies can become friends in the good with one another.

Illiberal ideologies go in a different direction. They work by identifying a class of people who serve as a villain, as the group responsible for creating those conditions. Both the far right and far left have sometimes been willing to ascribe this fault to Jews, of course, but other culprits have likewise been identified and blamed: “the basket of deplorables,” in one case, and “woke” HR departments in another.

Once the enemy is named, the illiberal project becomes quite straightforward. If the real problems evident in society can be laid at the feet of a single enemy, then if you can destroy that enemy your social problems will be solved. The promised utopia is never quite named in explicit terms, but the implication is often quite clear.

Once the promise of utopia is implied, politics almost inevitably come to be seen as a matter of existential survival. When the stakes are so high, it becomes easy to excuse virtually any means imaginable of securing survival. Thus the illiberal ideology offers two choices to people: You can become a true believer in the ultimate cause of the movement and fight for it with revolutionary zeal. Or, if you lack belief in the possibility of utopia, the implied offer is that you become a pervasive cynic who rejects all political visions as equally corrupt while seeking to make the best life one can for oneself in an unhappy and miserable world.

Le Carré’s fiction is pervaded with people of both types. Karla is the most notable example of the first type. But the fanatics are a minority. Most are not so high-minded. They instead leverage the uncertainty and amoral nature of the Cold War world to pursue whatever pleasures they most value–usually violence or sex, but sometimes power or money. These types are probably more familiar to us now than any of us would prefer. The unhappy characteristic they all share, of course, is not just an indifference to civic life, but a blithe dismissal that a civic life founded on liberal virtues is even possible. In both cases, the possibility of rapprochement is simply excluded from the beginning: there is only struggle between irreconcilable factions and the only outcome is that one side will vanquish the other.

And it is precisely this point that makes Smiley compelling. Smiley refuses the binary choice that illiberal ideologies attempt to force on people. He is not a perfect character, at times he is not even particularly sympathetic. By his own admission, he is sometimes heartless. And yet he remains neither a fanatic, nor a cynic. How does he do it? One part of the answer comes in the final words he ever spoke in a le Carré novel:

> So was it all for England, then?’ he resumed. ‘There was a time, of course there was. But whose England? Which England? England all alone, a citizen of nowhere? I’m a European, Peter. If I had a mission – if I was ever aware of one beyond our business with the enemy, it was to Europe. If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe. If I had an unattainable ideal, it was of leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still.

One need not be a Europhile in the way of le Carré to benefit from this wisdom. The point is not to define Europe as a kind of heroic figure in political life, free from ambiguity or darkness. Rather, the point is that Europe for le Carré stood as a symbol for a society devoted to reason and persuasion, not power and domination. Smiley’s espionage work was done in service to higher goods, not the mere naked acquisition of power for his arbitrarily selected team. And that commitment to liberal virtues necessarily constrained what he could and could not do in their service.

Such a commitment does constrain what politics can be, of course, but that is a feature rather than a bug. To demand generalized uniformity on questions of ultimate meaning and purpose in our technological and cultural environment is a political pipe dream that will only ever be achieved in farce and through terror. If you recognize that, then you inherently recognize that our politics are not about ultimate meaning, but about preserving a space for healthy civic life and neighborly care amidst the evil chances of the world and the struggles and uncertainties that beset us all. If we can have trust in one another, if we can reason with one another when we disagree, respecting the claims of one another even as we endure in difference, then we preserve a space where the things we still share in common—desires for the kind of place we might live in, for the virtues we wish to characterize that place, and so on—can be meaningfully pursued. Smiley devoted himself to proximal goods in political life as a real counterweight to the attempts of illiberals to attain ultimate goods in political life. Smiley was not utopian or perfectionist, but in repudiating perfectionism he did not yield to an amoral hedonism. He remained principled, a man who sought to do the right thing, even if the attempts often took place in impossible circumstances. He found a way of being neither a fanatic nor a cynic. The name we have for that way is something like "democratic liberalism."

Critics will reply, of course, that proximal goods, like reason and persuasion and tolerance, are thin gruel set next to the thicker goods promised (and never delivered, I might add) by [strong gods and their illiberal ideologies](https://mereorthodoxy.com/return-of-the-strong-gods-reno-book-review). One reply to that, of course, is to note precisely the point that illiberal ideologies promise the world but have a proven record [of delivering mayhem and bloodshed](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-communist-century-1509726265?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). That alone should be reason enough to find the value in a political life aimed at proximal goods.

Yet Smiley’s own example also suggests that this critique undervalues the pleasures of proximal goods. In seeking to oppose the totalitarian while remaining personally decent, Smiley is forced toward a certain way of life–and one that is not without its pleasures.

There is a joy to be had in understanding something deeply, after all, and taking the time to understand your enemies not simply as monsters, but as humans, even if humans fallen into great evil. It is a joy to be able to perceive the heart of the matter and then to set forth the whole story of a person or problem to others for their own good and prosperity.

In order to do that, one must be defined by a certain patience of thought as well as calm internal spirit, to say nothing of immense self-mastery. In one of his more famous scenes, Smiley says to a colleague that one ought to lay out all the facts in a case and then try the stories on like clothes. It’s an arresting metaphor and one I have returned to many times. But the ability to even do such a thing presupposes a measure of quiet reflection and careful thought that is quite foreign to many of us today, captive as we are to anxiety, paranoia, and rage. The characteristics that make one illiberal are also the characteristics that usually make one an ineffective political mover. As Tolkien taught us long ago, “oft evil will shall evil mar.”

Yet if we step back, this question is worth asking: What person doesn’t want to be defined by self-mastery, by a calm internal spirit, by an ability to patiently discern the world and one’s neighbor? Some might find such qualities unattractive, I suppose. But most of us do not. Many of us find such qualities deeply compelling and desire that they would be more characteristic of us. Smiley, the great liberal, has these traits in spades. That he does is precisely because he rejects the illiberal and the totalitarian and, in doing so, discovers the pleasures of liberal life. And in the sordid world of espionage fiction, a world which sometimes resembles our own in depressing ways, to have obtained such virtue is no small thing.
### Meditation and the Giver of Things
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/meditation-and-the-giver-of-things/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:30:39.000Z
How can I feel less anxious? If you take your question to the internet, then your first layer answer (probably from Google or ChatGPT) will be some kind of mindfulness practice.

Try deep breathing.

Observe your surroundings.

Do a 5-4-3-2-1: five things you see, four you touch, three you hear, two you smell, one you taste.

This seems to be the consensus spiritual answer of twenty-first century secularism, a mix of fro-yo Christianity and Buddhism. It works because it draws on God’s truth. One of the overlapping practical solutions for wellbeing is meditation. But how do Christianity and what we might call “secular-Buddhism” differ in how they understand that practice?

## **Why is meditation so popular?**

The internet has not unlocked a new dimension of human development. What we struggle with today is in many ways what our ancestors struggled with too. People have always faced anxiety, restlessness, and discontent. The French came up with a word for this in the 19th century: *ennui*. The word originated alongside the rise of a certain sort of human experience—one which has exploded since the internet. *Ennui* is “a listlessness and dissatisfaction arising from *a lack of occupation or excitement.*”

What has changed is that the devices we now use constantly nudge us toward that listless dissatisfaction. What has endless scrolling done to us, if not numbed our tolerance for boredom? You feel *ennui* sitting at a desk, standing in line, even using the bathroom. As passive entertainment streams have multiplied, our acceptance of the ordinary has plummeted.

Especially in younger generations, people feel what you could call “existential ennui.” I have a restlessness and dissatisfaction in *who I am*, because I can conceive of many ways of being *so much more*—but I’m not living those. Stepping into this realm of discontent, meditation has proven worth. It grounds us in a truth we need to recover: most of the world—most of you for that matter—is not fungible.

**What is Secular-Buddhist Meditation?**

I use the term “Secular-Buddhist” because what I am attempting to describe here is a Western, lay-level, minimally spiritual, and inoffensive form of meditation. The kind skimmed off the top by a Midwestern yoga teacher or TikTok life coach, not the one you’d find in a Himalayan monastery.

Jonathan Haidt’s *The Happiness Hypothesis* synthesizes America’s acceptable version—meditation ladled from a melting pot of Buddha, Plato, Jesus, and modern psychology. In order to find happiness, you need to do less seething and more accepting. Instead of worrying, you need to detach, zoom out, and be grateful. It’s groundwork for the [*Let Them*](https://www.amazon.com/Let-Them-Theory-Life-Changing-Millions/dp/1401971369?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) theory.

In this version of meditation, the goal is to get outside of yourself and tap into the world around you. It grounds you in a truth opposite from your screen. You are small; the world is big; and it’s not in your control. Secular-Buddhist nirvana is a matter of living fully in the present and being at peace. Instead of fighting back, you become one with the universe and its force. If this sounds like Star Wars, it’s because George Lucas tried to straddle [Christianity and Buddhism](https://www.patheos.com/blogs/tmatt/1997/01/george-lucas-the-force-and-god/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com#:~:text=The%20faith%20in%20%E2%80%9CStar%20Wars,Get%20out.%E2%80%9D). But what’s lacking is anything personal.

**What is Christian Meditation?**

Christian meditation moves toward many of the same goals—getting outside of yourself, and connecting with and accepting the givenness of the present. The difference lies in that word, “givenness.” Givenness implies a Giver, not just an impersonal universal force. The goal of Christian meditation, therefore, is personal connection with God, not merely disconnecting from the insatiable self. It is not merely emptying your mind, but subsequently filling your mind with God.

There are two mediums God gives us to do this: general and special revelation.

**Meditating on General Revelation**

General revelation is the world around you. Every day and every circumstance is given to you by the Giver: This is the day the Lord has made and I will rejoice in it (Psalm 118:24). Earlier saints called this “practicing the presence of God.” This is the closest Christian sibling to secular mindfulness.

C. S. Lewis describes how he learned joyful resilience through celebrating quiddity—the “thatness” of something. “On a dismal day find the most dismal and dripping wood, on a windy day seek the windiest ridge.” The quiddity, or givenness of grass, is that it’s green. Its greenness is a gift. In this way, you can enjoy a mud puddle as long as you’re not grumpy at it for not being a rainbow. God wants us to consider the works of his hands (Psalm 8:3-4; Isaiah 40:26). You live in a given world where every stone is fodder for meditating on its Giver.

This acceptance can work wonders in how you view your self (as self-help gurus have latched onto, but cut God out of). The path to identity contentment comes as you perceive your givenness from God and respond in gratitude. It’s not as if you say something like, “God thank you for this flat tire and shoulder of the road where you have deigned for me to now finish my days.” Rather, it’s a matter of accepting the “thatness” of your life.

In your flat tire moment, the change will likely not be a 180 revolution of rejoicing on the roadside. But if you turn your mind to the relational givenness of that time and place from God, it will perhaps open up a chink of light in the dark skies of your reality. You perceive something more, a greater purpose still running on where you are not forgotten, where God actually wants to use even this for your good. You see that this given hour of inconvenience is loaded with just as much of God’s presence as an hour reclining by the beach.

Givenness is the answer to the endless barrage of whys—“Why these parents, this jawline, this meal…and not another? Why am I Justin and not Elon Musk or Patrick Mahomes?” It doesn’t give you all the details, but it gives you something greater than Buddhist detachment—there’s a Giver who planned and delights in you specifically, even at this specific moment.

You have ownership of some circumstances more than others, but all of us have ceilings and walls by creational design and God’s command. Christian mediation is a desire to live the life God has assigned you (I Corinthians 7:17).

## **Meditating on Special Revelation**

Special revelation (God’s Word) provides tools to help you enjoy the givenness of general revelation. Instead of some mind-flattening “ohm,” try a mantra like “God is light” (1 John 1:5). There’s an endless array of daily beauty in those three words. Anyone can enjoy a sunrise, but Christian meditation will take you higher and deeper. A magical moment becomes an opportunity to commune with a personal and present God without whom we live in darkness.

God tells us to hide his word in our hearts and meditate on his precepts (Psalm 119:11, 14). In other words, He commands meditation. Psalms and Proverbs are a great starting place. They’re densely packed with bite-sized morsels of meditation you can chew on all day. “The memory of the righteous is a blessing, but the name of the wicked will rot” (Proverbs 10:7). How can you be righteous when you’re a sinner? What kind of memory of yourself are you leaving with others? How can a *memory* bless someone? What’s the connection between memory and name? What does it look like for someone’s name to rot—to decompose and become putrid? Each one of those questions, as you turn it around and savor it in your mind, can open up three or four more. That’s meditation.

Christian meditation is what you do every time you listen to a sermon. The pastor took a passage you’ve heard before, that takes a minute at most to read, and spends thirty-five minutes talking about it. You can do most of the same work your pastor does with a text if you sit, read, reread, journal, and noodle on a passage for several hours. What has God given us to know about himself, this world, and our lives? We’re grateful for preachers because most of us don’t have that time, and they bring a finished meditation as a result of their time, attentiveness, and wisdom.

What we can forget, however, especially with AI, is that the *process* of meditating on Scripture yields a delight of relational discovery. You made time for God to express himself to you more fully. You received more. You made eye contact and listened. It’s similar to when you chat with a friend for a couple hours over coffee versus exchanging texts.

Meditation has gained popularity because of the relevance of its solution—being present and accepting givenness. Christian meditation takes you higher because it’s about being present *with* God and accepting the goodness of hisgivens. This is how Paul learned the secret of contentment—how we can learn to abound and be brought low—through meditating on your relationship with Christ, who gives you strength (Phil 4:11-13).
### From Libertarian to Authoritarian: The Devolution of Evangelical Politics
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/from-libertarian-to-authoritarian-the-devolution-of-evangelical-politics/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:30:42.000Z
Since the 1930s, American evangelical elites have embraced successively two different and flawed political creeds. Both positions reflected their American identity more than their Christian faith. In this respect, the movement’s leadership failed to serve well the rank and file. When mainstream conservative political leaders didn’t provide astute, biblically informed analysis, white evangelicals had little such reflection of their own to draw upon, ultimately making illiberal authoritarianism an attractive option.

In the mid-thirties, libertarian-minded conservatives began to organize in opposition to the New Deal. Disgruntled conservative Democrats and some prominent Republican businessmen formed the American Liberty League in 1934\. Its leaders included former New York Governor and 1928 Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith, General Motors executives, and J. Howard Pew, president of Sun Oil (an evangelical Presbyterian who later bankrolled *Christianity Today*). The group received substantial financial support from the Du Pont family. Although invited, former President Herbert Hoover declined to join the League, wary of former political opponents whom he accused of being spokesmen for “the Wall Street model of human liberty.” Although the organization eventually claimed 125,000 members and produced roughly five million booklets and tracts, it failed to persuade the general public that it did not primarily represent the privileged few.

In addition to Pew, other evangelical Protestant leaders soon lent their voices to the chorus of attacks on New Deal policies. By 1940, a more defined political movement of evangelicals began to coalesce. One popular evangelical author, Dan Gilbert, began to articulate this new Fundamentalist political theory in the pages of the *Moody Monthly* and in popular books. Following some earlier evangelicals, Gilbert devised an odd but very influential ideological mixture that joined the limited government classical liberalism of the Liberty League with dispensationalist apocalypticism. Dismayed by the direction of recent political and economic changes, Gilbert warned that “recent American history shows that the initial steps toward this antichrist system have already been taken in this country.” State activism and the consolidation of federal power both prefigured the emergence of the strong government that Fundamentalists feared would persecute Christians at the end of human history.

The individualistic side of evangelicalism thus helped forge closer links with more secular forms of conservatism. Having embraced the market as a sphere of individual moral responsibility enabled evangelicals to accept a minimalist model of the state. The formation of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in 1942 played a key part in evangelicals’ embrace of limited government conservatism. The organization brought together Fundamentalist churches and leaders who had cooperated little since the Scopes Trial, and these efforts signaled a movement toward greater political engagement. Harold J. Ockenga, longtime pastor of Boston’s Park Street Church, was named the NAE’s first president. His appointment “reflected,” in historian Matthew Sutton’s words, “the decade-long cross-fertilization of conservative political ideology with fundamentalist theology, \[that\] helped give modern American evangelicalism its identity.”

The NAE now tellingly identified “political liberalism” as one of the main challenges to preserving Christian America. Ockenga’s language was typically alarmist: “Already a revolution has taken place in our nation. Whenever the major part of the business of the nation is being done by the government rather than by private interest, capitalism ceases its functioning . . . . The crisis is greater than any of us realize.” Capitalism and biblical Christianity, which Ockenga and other evangelicals now explicitly linked, were, according to these evangelical leaders, both threatened by an activist state. Their concurrent struggle against the fascist Axis powers naturally shaped their concerns.

This informal alliance between a more secular conservatism and white evangelicals grew stronger in the wake of World War II, a product of Cold War concerns about the global expansion of communism and genuine threats from Soviet espionage. As historian Darren Dochuk and others have shown, this coalition solidified during the presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

Like Pew, Goldwater identified the expanding state as the chief culprit threatening individual liberty and believed that the United States was moving “down the well-travelled road to absolutism.” Goldwater’s decentralist, states’ rights position resonated with southern white conservatives and Californians who were part of the southern diaspora. Goldwater censured the Democratic Party’s “abandonment of States’ Rights” and went as far as criticizing the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 *Brown* decision that mandated the desegregation of public schools.

These views, combined with Goldwater’s aggressive rhetorical style and populist anticommunism, attracted many evangelicals. Goldwater’s campaign team quickly recognized the pivotal role of conservative Protestant churches and evangelical parachurch organizations in the 1964 election. Central Baptist Church in Anaheim, for example, became a hotbed for Goldwater workers during the summer 1964 Republican primary in California. The congregation had been founded by transplanted Southerners and was connected with ultra-Fundamentalist J. Frank Norris’s Baptist Bible Fellowship. Goldwater’s candidacy was also promoted by the Campus Crusade for Christ staff and students at Pepperdine College. Tim LaHaye, a San Diego pastor who had been a popular speaker at Central Baptist, urged Christians to support Goldwater.

During the sixties, Paul Weyrich (who was active in the Goldwater campaign) first made effective use of direct-mail campaigns and other techniques that many candidates would employ successfully during the 1980s and 1990s. Although a traditionalist Catholic, Weyrich was instrumental in creating an essential building block of the Religious Right in 1978, the Moral Majority, led by Fundamentalist Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell. Ronald Reagan’s landslide election victory in 1980 was built upon the energy these varied elements generated. Reagan drew upon the grassroots conservatism gaining ground since the Goldwater candidacy and received support from antiregulation probusiness groups and secular neoconservative intellectuals. Finally, Reagan’s nostalgic invocations of a simpler American past and criticism of the cultural legacy of the 1960s appealed to many Protestant conservatives.

Thus, during the 1970s, the previously disparate collection of politically conservative evangelicals became a well-organized movement and received significant media attention. Indeed, the broader impact evangelicals came to enjoy prompted George Gallup to label 1976 “the year of the evangelical.” Yet, as evangelicals moved closer to the forefront of the public square, few of them grounded their political activism in careful biblical study or historically informed theological reflection.

The Reagan administration, however, failed to deliver major victories on culture war issues such as abortion, prayer in schools, and censorship. More fundamentally, the unfettered free market it promoted proved incompatible with traditional family values. As Christopher Lasch notes, neoliberal policies that both secular and religious conservatives had supported (such as business deregulation and free trade) had a corrosive effect on local communities and failed to protect domestic manufacturing that had supported stable single-income families.

Meanwhile, those same policies tended to benefit disproportionately high income and college educated Americans. By the late 1990s, the expanding opioid crisis ravaged rural communities and small towns. These developments combined to foment discontent among blue-collar Americans, some of whom were white evangelicals. Having become susceptible to the rhetoric of demagogues, many were easily manipulated by one-sided talk radio and cable news (enabled by the FCC’s 1987 repeal of the ‘fairness doctrine’ that had previously mandated equal time for competing political views on the public airways).

By the early 2000s, the failed invasion of Iraq and the Great Recession further alienated many evangelicals and working-class voters from the Republican party establishment. Rural areas and small towns suffered high casualties in Iraq; analysts label this the ‘working-class burden,’ noting the war’s disproportionate impact on parts of the country characterized by low incomes. The Tea Party movement that emerged in 2009 in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis and subsequent recession represented both the last gasp of a libertarian Christian Right and a preview of coming attractions.

While Tea Partiers criticized government debt and deficits, they also vilified President Barack Obama as a closet Muslim and portrayed him as an alien ‘other,’ anticipating the nativist xenophobia of MAGA. Increasingly marginalized economically and alienated from mainstream politics, many evangelicals discarded what remained of their limited government principles and were drawn to an amoral strongman. Ever the opportunist, Donald Trump vowed to fight for their interests with ‘no holds barred,’ though his populist posturing proved as phony as the character he had portrayed on reality television.

White evangelicals’ embrace of authoritarian politics reflected their sometimes understandable desperation and demonstrated the extent of their alienation from mainstream democratic and constitutional norms and institutions. Evangelical leaders failed to articulate an attractive alternative to a free-market fundamentalism that truly served working class economic interests and protected their traditional social vision. Consequently, the pendulum swung from an out-of-date small government ideal to an autocratic Caesarism that stressed the acquisition and exercise of power on behalf of one’s tribe unrestrained by principles.

The shift to an authoritarian politics highlights the increasingly circumscribed and privatized place Christian belief holds in evangelicals’ perspective on the public square. It also illuminates how marginal to their thinking any kind of consistent conservative ideology has become, apart from a more tribal concern to protect their community from threats real or imagined. One major feature of populist evangelicalism may have contributed to this. Religious conservatives have long valued hierarchy and stressed deference to authority.

Although important egalitarian streams have also flowed historically within American evangelicalism, its congregations have often adopted an authoritarian leadership model and indulged in a cult of personality centered on celebrity preachers. Studies have indicated a tendency among both conservatives and evangelicals to value obedience to authority more than other groups do. Revering a celebrity candidate with a highly rated television show and an autocratic style, along with manifold personal foibles (including marital infidelity), was not uncommon among evangelicals who had previously followed disgraced evangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart.

The foregoing analysis of this political transition echoes some of Aaron Renn’s broader explanation of how several post-1960 “changes… produced a society without key cultural bulwarks supporting Christianity.” Specifically, Renn identifies the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the WASP establishment, the decline of intermediate institutions, and other changes. These developments, he maintains, gradually transformed how “official American culture viewed Christianity” from initially positive, to neutral, to now mostly negative. No doubt, these changes contributed to white evangelicals’ sense of being strangers in a culture where they had once been at home.

The lack of careful, historically informed Christian reflection regarding faithful civic engagement has had harmful consequences. Many white evangelicals moved from simply baptizing a limited government libertarianism to embracing a hard-boiled authoritarian model that they assumed would deliver the goods for their tribe and punish their opponents. Instead, they might have benefited from drawing upon the rich reflection on Christian citizenship within their own Protestant tradition.

They could have found critical insights in the writings of neo-orthodox theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr and neo-Calvinists such as Herman Bavinck and Abraham Kuyper. All three Protestant thinkers wrestled in a far more consistent, constructive and faithful way with the role of Christians in pluralist liberal democracies. Beginning in the 1970s, some did seek to tap this rich Reformed vein and address a wider evangelical audience on these topics. But books by James Skillen, Richard Mouw, and Paul Marshall (to name only a few) were never bestsellers, and they were easily drowned out in the public square by shriller, more partisan voices. The fallout from this failure has proved destructive of democratic norms.
### Of Holy Indolence, the End of All Life
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/of-holy-indolence-the-end-of-all-life/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:30:45.000Z
There is the plum tree snowing on the grass.  
There is the road that leads up to the pass.  
Now I will brightly think, and take my rest.  
I will turn pink and sink into the West.

There is the bridge that spans the little creek.  
There is the coffee mug I dropped last week.  
I will give names to the marauding snail.  
I will let spiders nest upon the mail.

There is a hymn within the thrush’s moan.  
There is a worm that curled and died alone.  
I will try not to be a thing that kills.  
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills.

There is a prophet curled below the rose.  
There is the Devil with his hunting nose.  
I will open my hands, and not ask why.  
I will turn bright and sink into the sky.
### A Hollow Crown: AI and the Formation of Students
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-hollow-crown-ai-and-the-formation-of-students/
Last updated: 2026-07-01T14:37:48.000Z
The day after we showed our students *Forevergreen*, an Academy Award–nominated short film, something happened that I can't shake.

The film did what good art is meant to do: it quieted the room, even a room of K–8 students. It made them lean forward, their attention held by a sudden, rare gravity. Through the seamless marriage of image, music, and plot, it bypassed social static to reach their minds and hearts, holding them, if only for a moment, in awe.

Later, in conversation with seventh- and eighth-grade boys, I told them that the piece had been created by more than two hundred artists over five years. Their response came quickly, not as flippant dismissal but as baffled practicality: *Why?* One student said what the others were thinking: "AI could have done it in five minutes."

In those two small moments, the educational dilemma of our age revealed itself. Students have acquired more than a new tool. The technology is quietly remaking what they believe human work is, and what they believe a human being is for.

In the weeks since, I've heard a companion phrase everywhere. Show a new image, a new paragraph, or a new idea—something that once would have invited curiosity or debate—and someone will shrug: "That's AI." Not as a moral alarm, but as a conversational stop sign. A way to end the encounter before it begins.

Before going further, the tension deserves to be named.

AI is a threat to meaning. It is also a tool for redeeming time. Teachers use it to clear administrative undergrowth that crowds out actual teaching. Students use it to organize research, test an argument's weak points, and move past the blank page into the harder work of thinking. These are not trivial gains. Time is finite. Attention is precious. If a machine can shoulder the scaffolding, more of both can go toward what matters.

The question, then, is not whether to use these tools. If we want to understand the role of generative AI in education, we must first understand the ends these tools serve. And that, in turn, forces a deeper, more uncomfortable question: What is education actually for? We must answer this not in the language of outputs and metrics, but in an older, more demanding sense: What kind of person is a school trying to form, and what practices form that person?

To answer that, it helps to return to something older than our panic: the nature of signs.

Augustine of Hippo makes a deceptively simple distinction. There are things, and there are signs. A thing is what it is. A sign points beyond itself. Words are signs. So are gestures. So are sacraments. In a classroom, student work functions the same way. An essay is not valuable as ink on a page; it is a sign that points to a student's mind: his grasp of an argument, his habits of attention, his ability to name what is true and discard what is not. A lab report is not the point. It is a sign of whether a student can submit to reality, whether he can observe, revise, and be corrected by what is. The artifact is never the telos. It is evidence that something has happened in a person.

For a long time, that semiotic economy held because the sign was tethered to time. Work took time. Time left traces. Those traces could be read, imperfectly but meaningfully, by a teacher and a community. Even a mediocre essay carried a certain dignity. It bore the marks of limitation and struggle—the marks of a human being learning.

Generative AI breaks that tether. It manufactures signs without the slow formation those signs once implied. It delivers the look and tone of thinking without the ordeal of thinking. The change is more than the fact that the tool can produce an answer. It can produce a trace, and it can do so at scale. The very kind of object teachers have historically read as evidence of becoming is now cheap to generate.

Signs have always been detachable from their makers. A sentence can survive its author. It can be quoted, recopied, and recontextualized. The power of a sign is that it can travel, repeated in contexts the original speaker never intended. A signature can be reproduced. A text can be lifted out of its life. If a sign could not be repeated, if it were bound to one private moment of presence, it would not function as a sign at all. Meaning depends, in part, on this portability. Language works because it can outlive us.

So what, then, is new?

Not absence. Not detachment. Not even imitation.

What is new is the industrialization of detachment. Signs are produced at conversational speed, tailored to the user, and clothed in the social costume of personhood. The machine does not publish; it answers back. It adjusts. It apologizes. It seems to take responsibility while having no continuous self to bear the costs of its own words. It produces the kind of speech that, in ordinary human life, is bound up with vulnerability and obligation, yet it is structurally incapable of either.

Put differently, what is a permanent feature of signification—repeatability without the guarantee of presence—AI turns into an atmosphere. The classroom does not contain detached signs; it is saturated with them. And once detached signs become normal, students become unsure which, if any, sign can be trusted.

They may respond in two predictable ways: contempt and suspicion. One drains the work of dignity. The other drains the world of wonder.

This is not entirely new. Even Shakespeare saw what happens when the sign floats free of the substance. In *Richard II*, the deposed king stares into the nature of authority and discovers, too late, that he has confused the symbol with the thing:

> *For within the hollow crown* 
> *That rounds the mortal temples of a king* 
> *Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,* 
> *Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp.*

The crown is hollow not because it is fake, but because Richard wore the signs of sovereignty without the inner formation, character—even virtue—that would have made them durable. When the ceremony and pageantry are stripped away, nothing remains that can stand.

That is the risk we are running in education. The danger is not that students will use AI to cheat, though they will, but that we will gradually accept a world in which the signs of learning circulate without the formation that once made them trustworthy. Essays without writers. Voices without owners. Credentials without the slow ordeal of becoming.

The hollow crown is not the AI-generated paper. It is the graduate whose diploma no longer points to anything real.

For most of history, personal effort was the visible cost of meaning. A poem mattered because you could feel a person behind it: spontaneous insights, false starts, and long struggle, the refusal to let a line go until form and function united. The words were a kind of signature, more than ink: the trace of a life and a way of seeing. A painting mattered for the same reason. You could sense the time inside it, the hours and disciplines that leave their mark. Even when you could not name the technique, you could recognize the ordeal of seeing and making: an artist submitting to reality or rebelling against it, accepting limits or rejecting them, and then inviting others to see what he sees.

Schooling rests on the same premise. An essay is not valuable because it fills a page. It is valuable because it is a record of a mind learning to think, a heart wrestling with the other, a person who is real. The artifact is a sign. It gestures beyond itself.

But here is what we rarely say plainly: the crown being earned is not a credential. It is a self.

A student who has wrestled with a hard text, revised an argument under pressure, and failed and tried again is more than informed. He is more solid. He has learned, however imperfectly, to be answerable to reality rather than expressive of preference.

That solidity is the telos of education. Not information transfer. Not skill acquisition. Not even "critical thinking" in the thin sense the phrase has come to mean. The end of education, rightly understood, is the formation of a person who can stand somewhere: someone with a voice, convictions, and a relationship to truth that has been tested and is therefore owned.

Generative AI does not threaten that telos by being wrong. It threatens it by being easy. It offers the appearance of having thought without the ordeal of thinking. And the ordeal is not an obstacle to formation; it is the mechanism.

"AI could have done it in five minutes" is not finally about speed. It is a moral revaluation. It assumes that what matters is the output, not the ordeal; the image, not the seeing; the product, not the person becoming capable of making it.

Live in that assumption long enough and time itself begins to look like a mistake.

When time becomes suspect, education becomes vulnerable at its root. Schools have always insisted that the young endure what is not immediately gratifying: the resistance of a hard book, the humility of a wrong answer, the slow dignity of revision. They teach, often against every adolescent instinct, that truth is not produced by desire. It is discovered through attention, patience, question, critique, and resolution—a continuous, embodied encounter with what is real.

The AI environment trains the opposite instincts. It offers competence without apprenticeship. Fluency without understanding. It makes it possible to generate signs without the patience required to become the kind of person those signs once implied. A student who internalizes that pattern does not become lazier; he becomes less formed, less present, less able to bear the weight of difficulty without reaching for a prompt.

This is where C. S. Lewis offers an image that is difficult to shake. In *The Great Divorce*, the souls who arrive from hell are not monsters. They are shades—thin, translucent, barely there. They have spent so long avoiding the weight of reality, so long choosing the frictionless comfort of their own preferences over the hard country of what is, that they have become insubstantial. They cannot bear the grass of heaven; it is too solid for them.

The danger AI poses to students is not primarily moral in the narrow sense. It is ontological. A student who consistently outsources the struggle, who prompts rather than thinks, generates rather than wrestles, or accepts fluency as a substitute for understanding, is choosing the path of the shade. He is becoming less solid, less capable of conviction, less present to himself and to others.

And the tragedy is that he may not notice. The signs will still be there. The essays will be produced. The grades will be earned. The diploma will be conferred. The hollow crown will be placed on a head that was never formed to wear it.

This is why the question of when and how to use AI is not a policy question. It is a semiotic and pedagogical one. If the artifact no longer reliably signifies formation, schools must move closer to forms of learning that cannot be reduced to a generated trace.

That shift is practical. It looks like more in-class writing and problem-solving where the mind is visible in real time. It looks like drafts submitted with commentary on what changed and why. It looks like oral defenses in which a student must explain the choices behind his claims. It looks like lab notebooks that record failure, revision, and the stubborn confrontation with what is. It looks like teachers who assess not only a product but a trail.

The honest answer to when AI is useful for students is only after the productive struggle — when it serves their formation rather than replacing it. AI is useful when it clears away the mechanical after the student already understands the mechanics; when it helps a student see the gaps in her own argument rather than filling them for her; and when it accelerates the path to deep work because the student has already done the hard labor of finding her way.

But that answer only makes sense if we know what the hard work is for.

A school must be able to say, without embarrassment, that its purpose is not to produce graduates minimally trained for the economic and political order. Its purpose is to form people who can bear the weight of reality: people who can read with care, speak with honesty, revise under correction, and stand behind their words.

That is not a mystical claim. It is physical. Formation shows up in flesh and habit. It shows up in whether a student can sit still with a difficult paragraph without reaching for escape. It shows up in whether he can name what he believes and why. It shows up in whether he can endure the small humiliations of being wrong without collapsing into cynicism or defensiveness. It shows up in whether he can apologize without theatrics and repair without resentment. These are not "soft skills." They are the contours of a person who can be trusted.

When a school succeeds in forming that kind of person, it produces something AI cannot replicate: a voice. Not a tone, not a brand, not a borrowed style. A voice in the deeper sense—the sense in which a person has something to say because he has become someone. His words carry weight because they point back to a self shaped by attention, constraint, failure, and love of what is true.

A student formed that way can use AI freely and wisely. He can delegate the scaffolding without surrendering the substance. He can move faster when speed is warranted, and slow down when slowness is the price of depth. He can use the tool without becoming its product.

*Forevergreen* gave my students a brief taste of that older gravity. Beauty felt costly, and therefore meaningful. The film reminded them, before they had language for it, that labor is not inefficient. It is dignified. The making of a thing is part of its meaning.

Then the room brought that gravity into contact with the new regime. Five years. Two hundred artists. *Why?*

Why read slowly? Why memorize? Why draft? Why become something when you can generate the sign of having become it?

The unsettling part wasn't the question. It was how normal it felt.

That is the mark of a regime change: not when a technology appears, but when its values start to feel like common sense. When time feels like waste. When effort feels like error. When simulation feels sufficient.

Richard's hollow crown is a warning, not a metaphor for despair. He lost his kingdom because he mistook the ceremony for the substance. We are in danger of making the same mistake, accepting the signs of education while quietly abandoning the formation that once gave them weight.

If schools forget that, they will still have essays. They will still have grades. They will still have endless, fluent signs. But those signs will no longer reliably point to a person. And once that link breaks, we will not only be unsure what student work means; we will begin to lose confidence in what words, promises, and judgments mean at all.
### Man and Machine
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/man-and-machine/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:30:48.000Z
Joel J. Miller. *The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future* **. Prometheus Books, 2025\. $34.95\. 344 pp.**

People who write books spend a remarkable amount of time writing about, well, books. Fictional characters from Woolf’s Orlando to Tolstoy’s Pierre Bezukhov to Austen’s Dashwood sisters to Cervantes’ Don Quixote to Wu’s Sun Wukong reveal themselves through their relationship to reading and writing. Non-fiction books exploring our relationship to books make up a tidy genre of their own. Biographies of writers abound. It’s all a little self-referential, a little *meta*, but it makes sense: Writers and readers enjoy books and think they’re important. But what’s so special about these little bundles of words that have captured our attention for so long?

While many books-about-books tilt their focus toward things like content, effect on character, or just sheer enjoyment of reading, Joel J. Miller’s *The Idea Machine* stands out in its consideration of *the book* primarily as an apparatus for facilitating thought. At its most fundamental, Miller writes, “The book is a portable collection of written ideas, designed to elevate the human mind beyond its natural limits of experience, memory, distance, and time.” The centrality of a book in Augustine’s conversion story—“take and read!”—provides a springboard for demonstrating this thesis.

Miller divides his project into four parts: Basics, Developments, Applications, and Reflections. The first two sections offer a fresh and often humorous review of the evolution of the book from its beginnings as cuneiform-on-clay accounting records through wax, papyrus, parchment, and paper, scrolls and codices, the invention of the printing press, and so on. The regular illustrations supporting the text—manuscripts, carvings, paintings, mosaics, and, eventually, photographs—add to the enjoyment. And Miller’s paying attention to not just the *how* of the changing book. The *why* and the *then what* provide even readers who know the basics of the tale with new insights and further food for thought.

## **Manuscript Evidence**

*The Idea Machine* shows us a world where books begin as capital, inaccessible to most and accumulated by a few. They are expensive to produce and slow to read, but for those happy few they augment memory, facilitate the honing and comparison of ideas, and offer ways to “explain the world, even the human heart” across space and time. These advantages far outweigh the concerns of the change-hesitant about whether reliance on books will weaken human memory or delude people into thinking possession of facts equals wisdom. Those who can compile libraries, then create tools to keep track of—and search for—what’s in them.

As the centuries pass, the use of books spreads—sometimes quietly, like ripples in a pond, and sometimes with the intensity of a wildfire—in a self-perpetuating cycle with ingredients including the Pax Romana, the Christian Church, cheaper materials, and more accessible formatting. So does the quantity of books, both in number of volumes and in individual titles. Techniques for finding what one wants in this growing body of information grow right along with books and readers. Concerned attempts to curb undesirable elements of the booksplosion become more widespread as well (though no more effective).

In “Applications,” Miller explores how these aspects of book *qua* book (portability, durability through time, extension of memory, refinement of thought, access to the ideas of others, ease of reference, affordability, etc.) continue to shape and be shaped by the modern era. “The history of science,” he writes, “is the history of books in various states of dress (loose notes, first drafts, second editions).” This could describe each of the overlapping categories he examines: science, government, abolition, social conscience, and the rise of the Information Age.

This section contains some of the most beautiful writing of the book. Miller chooses vivid cases in point for each category. Ground-breaking scientists record observations over time, then share them widely in books, leading to major advances and changes in thinking. Revolutionary politicians read books “of and about the past to orient themselves in the present,” then write books of their own on their way to creating new forms of government. Enslavers grasp at power by restricting literacy while enslaved people “force a reckoning” with dehumanization through their reading and writing. Novelists open readers’ eyes to the interiority of people very different from themselves, challenging barriers between sexes, classes, and races. It becomes clear that, even for the most inveterate non-reader, it is impossible to overstate the importance of the book in every aspect of life.

## **Machines to Think With**

Precisely because of this importance, those of us who love books tend to worry about the much-documented decline in the percentage of people reading them—and this certainly includes Miller himself. Many of us also tend to think of books in opposition to digital tech, particularly given the possible role of the PC, the smartphone, and social media in said decline. This is an uneasy position, since we’ve been using computers to facilitate the world of books for some time now. I’m typing up this review on a laptop, and you may well be reading it on a screen. Even Wendell Berry (may his shadow never grow less) has publishers who use computers to get his writing into the hands of readers.

But one of Miller’s main points is that even when we’re reading a bound, printed book (or a papyrus scroll, or a wax tablet, etc.) we’re using technology. Books are tools we have developed to extend our capabilities. He sees the digital revolution as merely one more stage in a process that stretches back to ancient Sumer. From the title page on, *The Idea Machine* makes deliberate use of language that emphasizes the blurred lines between print and pixel. Books are “information technology,” “hardware as well as software,” an “external hard drive of the mind, cloud storage for your head.” They are, to quote I. A. Richards, “machines to think with.”

And as Miller points out, once there are more than a few of them, books are much more useful if there’s a way to look for things in them without having to read all of every tome. An index lets us search an individual book. Catalogs let us search libraries. But even in the first half of the 20th century, readers were lamenting the way the “growing mountain” of pertinent material that needed to be digested to stay abreast of their field was miring their work. The Internet made searching faster and easier. But it also, in a continuation of the cycle that has repeated throughout the history of the book, increased the amount of material to be searched. So what comes next as we cope with this “information overload”? Miller suggests it’s generative AI.

## **Extending the Book?**

If the book is an extension of the mind’s ability “to preserve information and expand access to it, to organize and utilize data and analysis, to build on what we know and broaden what we can learn,” then the search capacity and data analysis offered by AI can be seen as “an extension of \[the book’s\] affordances.” By “atomizing books down to discrete blocks of information,” AI offers the possibility that readers could spend less of their time looking for existing data and more of their time making new connections and discoveries in that data. He offers such recent examples as researchers from Israel and from the University of Chicago making breakthroughs in the translation of cuneiform tablets, University of Notre Dame scholars transcribing and search-enabling medieval manuscripts, and a team accessing carbonized scrolls from Vesuvius without damaging them, all with the use of AI. Both the theory and the practice here seem heavily weighted toward researchers and historians. What is lacking is a consideration of how this or other aspects of AI might affect poets and novelists.

Of course, while the “atomization” of books through AI could provide a way to deal with the sea of information, it also disrupts some of the benefits previous changes in technology brought us, whether the organizational gains that came with the codex, or the advantages of “scholars referencing the same texts” that came with printing. As Miller notes, “progress is a story we tell retrospectively,” and the aspects of a world shaped by books that we now see as positive weren’t necessarily a given. Nothing here excludes the possibility that, as Gabriel Rossman writes for *Compact,* reliance on AI in the first 16 years of education may mean “we run out of people with motivation and background to learn, know, and do” even the basics of books, let alone exciting things at higher levels. In the introduction to *The Idea Machine*, Miller describes the book as “a victim of its own success.” He thinks the importance of the book is underappreciated. Only time will tell if the digital revolution will prove his words more broadly true.

But *The Idea Machine* reminds us that “the way things were before” is no guarantee of goodness. (Think Renaissance humanists reviving ancient wisdom with the goal of ushering in a new Golden Age, only to revive its flaws and errors as well in a sort of keeping-the-bathwater-along-with-the-baby moment.) Technological change—and fear of technological change—in the realm of the book has been disruptive again and again over the centuries, and again and again we’ve adapted and found new benefits in new technology. After more than two decades of involvement with books as a salesman, writer, editor, and publisher, Miller remains optimistic about their future.

## **Shaping the World and Our Own Hearts**

Perhaps the best reason for both optimism and pessimism about technology of any kind is the fact that human beings are behind its invention and use. Despite massive cultural and technological differences across time and space, human beings seem to keep drawing from the same common pool of affections and temptations, flaws and gifts, down through millennia. It’s this that makes classic books *classic*. We’re still reading about Gilgamesh and Sappho and Beowulf and the gang because all these thousands of years later, they still speak to us. From a Christian perspective, human beings are warped because we are part of a damaged world—and beautiful because we are made in the image of a loving, creative God. We leave the fingerprints of both aspects of our nature on our work.

AI-interested readers may find *The Idea Machine* reinforcing their readiness to experiment while also offering food for thought for protecting the aspects of the book they value. AI-concerned readers may see continued cause for caution while also finding encouragement in reminders of human and bookish resilience. But perhaps the most important take-away is that we consider what *makes* what Miller calls in his conclusion “humane applications” for tech of any stripe—and how we get there.

The history of the book shows us that human frailty and cruelty have led to horrors, and that human goodness and strength have created powerful change for the better. We can and do use our creativity to harm and to help ourselves, each other, the plants and animals, and even the dirt that sustains us. Our technologies have certain leanings that tend to shape us as we use them—“they suggest some uses more than others”—but the ways we use any technology also shape the direction it leans. Which of our human impulses is most formative for a given technology? Is a particular technology influencing us more for good or for ill? How can we tell when we see behind us such a long train of unintended consequences?

Fittingly, books can help us wrestle with these questions, allowing us to join in thousands of years of conversation about what makes a good human life. So can conversations in real-time—whether face-to-face or via tools like apps—with fellow questioners. But as we make our pilgrimage through the ever-changing world, as we ponder the implications of our technologies and choose which to use and how to use them, the most important tool at our disposal remains unchanged: the pursuit of wholeness—of integrity, all-of-a-piece-ness, lovingkindness.
### Creating Membership
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/creating-membership/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:30:55.000Z
Wendell Berry. *Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story*. Counterpoint, 2025\. $26.00\. 176 pp.

In the days leading up to the Blitz in England during World War II, British politicians did what I think we would expect them to do: They braced for the breakdown of society as the stress of Germany’s bombing campaigns on London destroyed the structures that make day-to-day life stable and tolerable. What they found, instead, was that severe mental illness seemed to decline significantly during the Blitz. And though surprising, this is far from the only example of this phenomenon. When population groups respond to disaster by displaying greater cohesion and willingness to sacrifice, diminished rates of despair and withdrawal are the natural result.

Journalist Sebastian Junger has written *Tribe* to explain why that happens. Junger suggests that this is because human communities become stronger and more coherent when they face a collective threat that forces them to mobilize together in order to survive. *Tribe* is full of arguments and supporting evidence for this thesis.

The work of Wendell Berry intersects with Junger in odd and interesting ways. One line of thought that Junger flirts with but that is taken up more fully by figures like Daniel Quinn in his *Ishmael* books and James C. Scott in *Against the Grain* is that the specific erosion of communal life tends to coincide with the adoption of agriculture by a society.

Though he doesn’t make this *exact* claim, you could see a very similar argument in parts of Willie James Jennings’s book *The Christian Imagination* in his discussion of how pre-modern societies in certain parts of the world enjoy a knowledge of their local place that is unimaginable to anyone living in modern society. According to these authors, hunter-gatherer societies, due to their extreme precarity, tend to have remarkably thick social connection amongst members along with deep knowledge of their place, all of which contribute to a deep feeling of being at home within one’s life.

This is what makes Berry’s work such an interesting conversation partner for these thinkers, particularly his latest novel *Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story*. As other reviewers have already noted, the “novel” in this case is semi-autobiographical since Andy Catlett is the obvious stand-in for Berry in the fictional world of Port William and Marce is Andy’s grandfather, who himself has a striking resemblance to Berry’s own grandfather. (Wheeler Catlett, Marce’s son and Andy’s father, also has many resemblances to Berry’s father, John Berry.) *Marce Catlett* is also the least plot-driven of any of Berry’s novels, focusing much more on largely forgotten social norms that Marce gave his life to building and that Andy was able to observe in his early years. The primary concern of *Marce Catlett* is the Burley tobacco program that operated in Kentucky for many decades, creating a stable system that insured farmers received a fair rate for their harvest each year, making it easier for families to stay in farming and for small farming communities to maintain their life.

The existence of that program suggests something interesting that directly challenges the arguments of Junger and others like him. For Junger, social cohesion is found in the forced precarity of pre-modern life. The challenge for us today is how to find ways of enduring and mitigating the inevitable damage to common life brought about by our abandonment of tribal life, which is the effect of certain technological changes, starting with agriculture. Politics, then, is basically the art of damage control: How do we structure our life together to mitigate the irreparable social damage caused by technological innovation? Politics might be thought of as a defensive framework for holding back dystopia and despair. In this understanding, the cost of material comfort and technological innovation is eventual social collapse, and the task of politics is to reduce the scale of that breakdown.

Berry dissents from this view in a way that is distinctly Christian, even if Berry himself doesn’t take this line of thought as far as he might. Beneath Junger’s line of thought is an implicit claim that humans will not form thick communal bonds unless material circumstance forces it upon us. This is the human tragedy: The things that make individual life more secure and stable tend to tear down communal life. Thus there is an inverse relationship between healthy communal bonds and private material security. This is where Berry–and many in the Christian tradition–dissent.

To get to the point most directly, consider the work of the 17th-century political theorist Johannes Althusius. In the opening pages of his primary political treatise, Althusius makes the claim that political society exists for the sake of making the social relations that cannot be avoided into something mutually beneficial and delightful.

The argument is something like this: There is no way for individual people to subsist in the world entirely through the strength of their own work. We eat food we did not grow, wear clothing made from materials we did not harvest or process, and live in homes we did not build. Americans, perhaps, should be especially understanding of this argument, given our nation’s own attempts to refute Althusius: One need only read something like *O Pioneers* to recognize that Althusius is correct, as seen in the collapses into madness or economic failure that were so common on the American frontier when people genuinely did try to live entirely from their own labor. We can’t live without each other.

And yet often these unavoidable relationships are also unjust–one side of the relationship finds a way to exploit or abuse the other, thereby profiting from their neighbor’s suffering. This is the problem politics attempts to solve, according to Althusius. Because all members of political society are bound by the natural law, which is summarized most neatly in the command to love God and love neighbor, all members of a society should seek to order their relationships together to be beneficial to one another rather than being parasitic or exploitative.

For Christians, then, human beings are inherently social creatures, which means there is no such thing as a non-political life or a life where we do not need politics. Politics is simply what we do. Christian politics are politics that recognize this fact and discern how to structure our social relationships to make them mutually beneficial.

The Burley tobacco program so beloved by Berry and central to the story of *Marce Catlett* is best understood, then, as a model of Christian political wisdom. It was a synthetic project designed and sustained by human endeavor that ensured that all parties in a given relationship benefitted from the work produced by that relationship. In other words, it demonstrates that social cohesion is not *exclusively* a product of material precarity that *forces* people together. Social cohesion can also be created when people determine to pursue each other’s good in common and structure their relationships in ways that are mutually uplifting. (We will have to set aside the fact that in this particular case the consumers of the crop actually did not benefit due to the dangers of smoking. That point matters, but it is incidental to the argument, since one could just as well construct a program like the tobacco program that supported other, healthier crops.)

Though that argument might seem trivial to people steeped in centuries of democratic life in which this idea can be so taken for granted that its distinctiveness is almost forgotten, it is actually quite profound. At the heart of democratic liberalism is a willingness to live with imperfect political outcomes, provided we are able to (likewise imperfectly) structure our relationships to be mutually beneficial to a certain degree. Democratic systems by their very nature accept that lifting up every voice means that some political goods cannot be pursued since they would come at the cost of justice by depriving some people of what they are due in order to give others more than they need.

It is for this reason, of course, that the bonds of democratic liberalism must be renewed in each generation. For the agreements and norms and institutions that sustain our life together are under constant threat. Sometimes it takes tragedy to remind us that we need one another and to force us to act accordingly. Acknowledging this should not turn us into a kind of Jungerian fatalist about the possibilities for common life, however. Rather, it should turn us into civically engaged Christians who see the possibilities for common life, if we are willing to pursue it and think with wisdom and discretion about how to best realize the possible goods set before us. *Marce Catlett* shows us that such endeavors are possible, if only we will allow ourselves to be captured by the force of good stories that show us the way.
### A Passage Through the Dark
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-passage-through-the-dark/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:30:56.000Z
Wendell Berry. *Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story*. Counterpoint, 2025\. $26.00\. 176 pp.

The acknowledgment of failure is the fertile ground of humility from which new growth may spring. That acknowledgment lies at the heart of Wendell Berry’s most recent and possibly final Port William novel, *Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story*. Failure must also be a major preoccupation of this essay, which is more meditation than review—*Marce Catlett* and with it the whole Port William oeuvre being the kind of text that evaluates you rather than the other way around. Much that might otherwise have been obscure becomes clear under the gentle but unyielding gaze of Berry’s newest tale, this tale that, it ought to be said, more fluently unites Berry the fictionist and Berry the essayist than perhaps any of his works that have come before it.

At the heart of Berry’s well-known agrarian ethic dwells the same question meditating upon which had led John Crowe Ransom to renounce a once-thoroughgoing agrarianism by 1945: “the unhappy human condition that has arisen under the modern economy, and whether art and religion can do anything about it.” Ransom turned from believing that renewal was only possible within a revival of rural life to an embrace of the goods only towns and cities can generate and sustain.

Berry begs to differ, holding fast to the conviction that only a closer relationship with the land can possibly revive a vital creativity and generativity in human culture. Berry also advocates an insistence on the practice of not just conservation of resources—not just the platitudes of reduction, reuse, and recycling—but a specific type of active cultivation of the earth and its fruits that most urban dwellers will never have the background, skills, experience, or opportunity to practice.

This agrarian ideal is so demanding, so rigorous, so all-consuming, that even those who give the entirety of their lives and attention to it are likely to fall short of its desirable completion. Dilettantes cannot hope to succeed here; weekend warriors need not apply. This may be one of the major reasons why, though the ethos is commonplace, the practice has failed to take root. As John Crowe Ransom also wrote, in an observation to which my own exurban existence can’t help but consent:

> without consenting to division of labor, and hence modern society, we should have not only no effective science, invention, and scholarship, but nothing to speak of in art … The arts are the expiations \[of science’s unintended consequences\], but they are beautiful. … They seem worth the vile welter through which homeless spirits must wade between times, with sensibilities subject to ravage as they are. On these terms the generic human economy can operate, and they are the only terms practicable now.

Most Americans, living on these terms—in debt or in thrall to market forces, in suburbs or in high-rises, dashing from here to there on the dubious vapors of fossil fuel—will never be the kinds of localist or the kinds of cultivator that Berry’s ethic considers most admirable.

The near-total absence of the city, *any* city, in the good life of Berry’s imagination is notable. Only one major Port William denizen, Wheeler Catlett, seems to have any place or meaningful relation within the human city as such, the *polis* (it is perhaps not part of this ideal, or idyll, to recognize that the city is also a natural form of human social organization). Whatever happens in urbanity is, in this ideal, ordered only toward Wheeler’s ability to escape once again into fields of bluegrass and tobacco and help those fields flourish. The specter of a management job in Chicago is raised as though it were the serpent’s offer of the apple to Eve, and as briskly and summarily rejected as we might wish Eve had done the apple.

But in order for Berry’s vision to be anything like realized, even one-tenth realized, there will have to be many, many more people who admit the influence, even, yes, the force of Marce Catlett’s story yet who do not closely recapitulate the conditions of Marce’s life: not only a veritable army of Wheeler Catletts, but many hundreds of Thomas Franklins, that is principled and ethical lawmakers in public office; many thousands, too, of high-minded and principled staffers to keep the work of that army of Thomas Franklins going; many, many more who are decently resourced and honored for the good work of *oikonomoi* that silently underlies anyone’s capacity to live any kind of human life, whether in city, town, or country: in short, many more denizens who by their ways of life and their commitments do not devalue but rather honor the Marce Catletts of the world on whose dedication their own capacity for dedication reciprocally depends. There will even have to be many who take on those oh so tempting and apparently so fraught management jobs, who buy and sell the commodities the abundant fields produce, who are able to consider and receive their work not as temptation but as blessing; many who look out their windows not at bluegrass but at steel and concrete, and yet who keep something of the garden alive in mind and in practice, even if only on a rooftop or a balcony.

While “apple” language may be perfectly apt as a metaphor to explore the undeniable evils of modernity, this more concrete presentation of diminished goods in the city, Berry’s implicit weighting of urbanity as the more deprived and more circumscribed of two possible modes of life, will and should trouble the thoughts of even the most committed city dweller. Before this novel’s candid face the reader becomes keenly aware of both the limitations and the urgent necessity of all human prudence. If we are hesitant in the face of such passionate and convicted statements about the ethical as Berry finds necessary, perhaps it is often because we are too conscious (defensive? afraid of deep self-examination?) when it comes to the contradictions inherent in our own habits and practices. Both the healthy rural and the healthy urban are, if not declining, at least shifting shape dramatically under our eyes and hands daily.

Berry’s narrator and authorial scout Andy Catlett, an experienced observer of these shifts as they have played out under his own eyes and hands over the course of many decades, is as trustworthy a fictional voice as we are likely to find, so closely does his experience recapitulate what we may surmise to have been Berry’s own. In this story more urgently than anywhere before, he is as candid as can be with his children and grandchildren, who are the implicit listeners to his tale: The hope of having a home place rooted in the land, sustainable, independent, beholden only to its own people and its own standards without needing or wanting to turn elsewhere, is an ideal that has largely failed so far in America. We could look at history and argue that the ideal has also failed, to some extent, in some ways, as long as humans have farmed. That human success and human failure are somehow joined at the root. That all our successes seem to involve and include failures, sometimes catastrophic ones. That, most important, to succeed at some things might be to fail at others.

Please understand that this is anything but glib language play: it is an attempt to dig in deeper to the unavoidable ethical question, *How should we commit our lives?* And perhaps, to some extent, even: *What must we do to be saved?*

Part of the force of Marce Catlett’s story is a championing of precisely the specialist’s value to any socioeconomic fabric. His tobacco farmers of the recent past are specialists *par excellence*, even artists of a kind. What, then, seems to be missing from the picture? It is certainly not tenderness for those workers who nourish and nurture the world, nor gratitude for the gifts of abundance that flow through their hands. It may be, again, a sensibility about the value of the city itself. What end, after all, were all those beautifully grown and layered hands of tobacco, packed so delicately into hogshead barrels, destined *for*? Is it really such a horror and a harm that town and country should be interdependent, ultimately all part of the same irreducible membership of the human? “Though you deal in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business,” wrote Thoreau: and the “curse of trade” with which *Marce Catlett* is preoccupied seems to describe, also, a curse *upon* those who trade and upon those who consume without proportionately producing.

In turn, this observation lives too close for comfort to a feeling awfully common in capitalist societies (whatever else you may think about such societies): the feeling that what one merits is exactly and only what one *earns*, in the strictest and basest terms, where the arbiters of who earns what are judging value by an obscure calculus that is never articulated and seems to be constantly shifting. I am surprised by how rarely anyone seems to connect the dots between these rotten roots and their psychological bad fruits. And while self-esteem is radically overrated, healthy self-regard is not, and one striking thing about Berry’s characters is how they never seem to lack that regard, which has its roots in the quality of their work.

What Berry, through Catlett, grieves is that the beloved community, Port William, has failed “to value itself at the rate of its affection for itself.” This rate was once rooted in the inherent dignity of each person and the inherent quality and satisfaction of good work done for its own sake. Now, instead, American rural places at scale seem to have adopted the devalued self-perception, imposed by a cursed monetary economy, of the small town as “a ‘nowhere place,’ a place at the end of the wrong direction.” This move the poet Patrick Kavanagh would identify as “provincialism,” or self-definition through the eyes of the nearby metropolis, as opposed to Kavanagh’s positive sense of “parochialism,” or an affirmation of the validity of local perception. (The curse of the monetary valuation may also underpin Allen Tate’s devil’s-dictionary definition of globalism as “world provincialism,” meaning, almost surely, “provincial” in Kavanagh’s salty sense.) Berry’s Port William, in the history told in its earlier iterations, appears as parochial in the best possible, Kavanaghian sense. This is one of the Port William cycle’s most compelling aspects for any reader who would like to love his or her place, be that place rural or urban, and to think and act more clearly from the foundation of what the flourishing of *that* place requires.

There is also a gift here for any reader who has given decades to the development and flowering of a humane art some say is dying. This is the novel’s portrayal of farming as craft, tragically overtaken by machine, which serves as a subtle analogy for literature as craft, which is now likewise under threat of being overtaken by machine. Berry celebrates farming as not mere formula—nitrogen in, calories or health benefits out, as swiftly and mechanically as possible, impatient even of the sun’s rise and fall—but as a beautiful and cooperative human practice with goods both intrinsic and extrinsic that generate and sustain community around the practice itself.

The analogy packs all the more power because Berry’s narrator does not call overt attention to the likeness between the tobacco farming of the early twentieth century and the literary practice of the late twentieth, both of which Berry experienced but only one of which he finds himself in his last years rhapsodizing about. The analogy nevertheless becomes obvious in the painstaking account of the long labor involved in each crop, a labor like that which underlies the making of any good novel (or any other work of art). The closest Berry comes to spelling it out is in telling us that “No painter could have had a more schooled and unresting eye for detail than the farmer who had earned the rank of ‘tobacco man,’ a title not easily earned and always spoken with respect.” There is an artistry in doing this work well, a command of many interlocking skills and a coordination of many individuals’ gifts and abilities, whose mastery is little short of prudence itself.

In the age of machine “learning,” we desperately need to find a way to preserve and pass on the skills of literate culture. We need to realize that if we do not do so, these skills are as much at risk of being lost as the arts of tobacco growing, harvesting, drying, stripping, and packing—but at much greater cost, and at much greater loss. The devastation of local economies after the end of tobacco farming only faintly presages what stands to be destroyed if we forget ourselves so far as to stop reading, writing, thinking, speaking, and questioning well. This bears more than a little further thinking about; it is a need worthy of spending one’s entire life trying to meet.

How might societies better make room for the humane practices that educate, form, and unite? How might we concern ourselves less with quantity and more with quality in our economies and communities, so as to make room for those goods that both encompass and go beyond the merely productive? How might we care equally about the things we make and about the kinds of people we become in and through the making of them? The risk of failure at this life-defining task lies heavy on so many hearts. We may be tempted to say, with Houston ground control during the Apollo missions, that “failure is not an option.” But the conditions of the future may not be in our control. If, then, we must not reckon without the reversals of history, how much more must we not reckon without the goodness of Providence?

The total effect of this novel’s ethos, implied by the choice of the word *force* (not something violent but something gravitational, almost impersonal), is to give us strength for our own no doubt imminent passages through the dark. It speaks the language of Rilke’s archaic torso: *You must change your life*. It resonates with an observation already made by W.P. Southard in a meditation on Robert Penn Warren’s poetry:

> … maybe the best thing we could do is try to get a seed or two planted, to be available when the world is old enough to want it. It might be enough of piety, enough of love of God, to use your blood up slowly, at an unheroic enterprise, without much confidence. Somewhere between the furious abstract life and the furious classical structures—just a little concrete life, to attach your ‘ontological fury’ to.

But in what that perennial planting, that concrete life can consist, when so many of us are already mired in so many and such heavy forces that may feel as if they suppress our ability to withstand them, will be the burning question with which most readers will come away, this reader not excepted.

Most of all we must ask: Can the force of a story, transformed by human will from sentiment to action, outdo money, power, and the presence or absence, equally spectral, of enough resources to fuel our needs and desires? Can story outdo wrongheaded calculation, outdo political machination, outdo ideological influence, all to awaken and regenerate the human capacity to choose the good? We have little choice but to hope that it may, though we have considered (or have we?) all the facts.
### Keeping Kids Christian: Bonus Q and A
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/keeping-kids-christian-bonus-q-and-a/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:31:00.000Z
*Editorial note: On March 31, Mere Orthodoxy hosted* [*a webinar*](https://mereorthodoxy.com/keeping-kids-christian-replay) *with Cameron Shaffer, author of* [*Keeping Kids Christian: Recovering a Biblical Vision for Lifelong Discipleship*](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781540905055%5Fkeeping-kids-christian?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*. Shaffer kindly agreed to answer in writing a few more of the questions that webinar attendees had submitted, but that for reasons of time, he was unable to get to during the webinar. We think these questions, submitted anonymously during the webinar, may be of interest to other readers and are grateful to publish this Q&A as a resource. The questions and answers have been minimally edited for clarity.*

\*\*\*

**Q1:** I'm a pastor, and we have many singles in our church, whether college students or young professionals. How could singles help with this vision of children's discipleship?

**Cameron Shaffer:** Don’t silo young adults from the life of the church. Invite them into your homes and include them in your events and volunteer opportunities. Young adults are often eager to serve, but it’s better for them and for the kids if older adults are the ones taking the lead in programs and classes. The organic connection to the church community happens when young adults are around children and families and have the opportunity to speak into their lives. That is one of the best ways for them to influence the discipleship of children.

**Q2:** We have recently changed our youth group to family time, trying to keep a more intergenerational community bringing families into the youth's lives and instilling the importance of mentorship and discipleship. Would you see this as a deeper extension of the family itself living out faith together?

**Cameron Shaffer:** Absolutely! This sounds wonderful

**Q3:** Any advice on class size? At what point should classes be split up?

**Cameron Shaffer:** It’s never one-size-or-format-fits-all, but when the adults can’t control the kids or when the group gets so big that it’s unrealistic to learn in it or the teachers cannot know all the kids’ names—at that point it is time to split.

**Q4:** Is there anything in your research that affirms welcoming children to the Communion table earlier than the “age of reason”?

**Cameron Shaffer:** Leaving aside the biblical and theological discussions on this topic (which I do engage in my book), the answer is that if confirmation/admittance to the Lord’s Supper is treated as an “you’ve arrived” moment, that is counterproductive for fostering a child’s faith. If it’s treated as a “you’ve been initiated into the community” moment, it reinforces faith retention.

**Q5:** Your book talks about parental hypocrisy killing their kids' faith. How can a parent raise kids well after a public moral failure?

**Cameron Shaffer:** Own it. Acknowledge that the moral failure in question was wrong, that the parent is the wrongdoer and not the victim, that there is a “splash effect” of shame hitting the family, that you fell short of God’s standard, and that you need grace like everyone else. Say these things not as a way to cop out of responsibility, but to state plainly that you need something only God can give. Apologize and ask for forgiveness, don’t resent when the forgiveness is withheld or is slow in coming (again, the parent is the wrongdoer here, not a victim). In the meanwhile, accept the consequences without protest, and do the slow, patient work of making things right.

**Q6:** Speaking as a grandparent, what are some practical things we can do to keep our grands in the faith?

**Cameron Shaffer:** A lot depends on the relationship with your kids, but in general, here are a few things you can do:

1. Live a godly and faithful Christian life
2. Have your grandkids in your life, and they’ll see that
3. Strive for a healthy and reconciled (if necessary) relationship with your kids
4. Invite your kids and grandkids to church events (choir, youth group, men’s breakfasts, etc).

**Q7:** I’m a youth pastor. How might I facilitate the right home/church scheduling balance for the families under my care? What I mean by that is: How can I schedule youth events enough to actually have a spiritual influence on students, while also leaving enough empty room in the church calendar so that parents actually have room in \*their\* calendars to train their children in the Lord? To get specific, how many youth events per week would you encourage youth pastors to host to be able to make disciples without making the church a replacement for a godly home?

**Cameron Shaffer:** 1 regular event per week, 1-2 irregular events per month, max. The calendar squeeze is a real thing, but one of the advantages of having a scheduled time for youth group is that it gives parents a slot on the calendar to breath. It’s also important to ask how youth events fit into the life of the rest of the church. It’s less effective to have youth game night instead of including teen girls in a women’s event. You want to encourage as much intergenerational community as possible, so minimizing the competition between calendar dates and church “departments” is essential.

**Q8:** For youth ministry directors interested in starting to invest energy into a family-centric youth ministry model—What counsel would you give them if their church’s current youth ministry places significant emphasis and spends large amounts of energy on programmatic youth ministry (youth group, Sunday school, retreats, mission trips, etc.)? How could such a youth director begin steering the youth program in a family-centered-ministry direction?

**Cameron Shaffer:** Be intentional about recruiting parents and other adults to volunteer and lead. Aim to recruit adults who are able to invest in the lives of the kids and their families and host people. Look for adults whose home is a good gathering place for teens. Let programs die and replace them with efforts for intergenerational connection. Increase cooperation with other spheres of the church (men’s and women’s ministry in particular) for events and gathering. Spend more time with the parents of teens to exhort them in faithfulness and to equip them to raise their kids. Push them towards other godly adults, and recruit volunteers who can engage with parents in this way. You also need to work with the rest of the pastoral staff and church leaders; this can’t be something driven by a single staff member without buy-in from the rest of the leadership.

**Q9:** What would you say to situations where the parent wants nothing to do with the faith but the student comes to youth group? The only time they are getting fed is really at youth. What would you say about a situation like that?

**Cameron Shaffer:** Feed the ones God brings to you! What a terrible situation and what a wonderful privilege. That kid also needs godly fathers and mothers in the faith around him or her, so ensuring that the youth group is connected to the fuller life of the church is key.
### George Scialabba’s Utopian Hopes
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/george-scialabbas-utopian-hopes/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:31:02.000Z
George Scialabba. [*The Sealed Envelope: Toward an Intelligent Utopia*](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300289633/the-sealed-envelope/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Yale University Press, 2026\. $32.50\. 288 pp.

George Scialabba’s new collection of book reviews and essays, *The Sealed Envelope: Toward an Intelligent Utopia*, asks and answers three questions. First, is there anything to hope for beyond our current predicament—and if so, what is it? Second, in what is this hope rooted, if anything at all? And third, what can we do to realize it? Christians who pick up this book will therefore find in Scialabba someone who asks the right questions, even if his answers ultimately fall short. After all, Christians are supposed to be a people of hope.

With a career not tied to the academy or a think tank, Scialabba is a well-read thinker whose day job was as a building manager in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As a public intellectual, he also wrote essays and book reviews, and this new volume assembles about two dozen of these, going back over four decades. From commentary on friendly left-wing writers like Barbara Ehrenreich and Seymour Hersh, to more scathing criticisms of less sympathetic conservatives like William F. Buckley, Jr. and Irving Kristol, Scialabba takes his reader on a journey through the fertile mind of a true member of the contemporary American Left—and one who is relentlessly in pursuit of hope.

## **Is there anything to hope for?**

What is the substance of Scialabba’s hope? As the title suggests, it is an “intelligent utopia,” a world—and an America—that resides in a future that offers more democracy and equality in all areas of life, in politics and in the economy alike. It’s a world of solidarity, benevolence, and sympathy toward all people, especially the poor and the suffering. And, perhaps most important, it’s a world full of people who possess the virtues necessary to sustain these ideals, especially when the temptations toward self-interest and self-reliance are strong. A tall task, Scialabba admits, but such is the substance of things unseen, as it were.

We get the clearest picture of this in his 2012 homage to Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas.” If democracy and solidarity are the goals, the love of money is our greatest obstacle to achieving those goals. This means that any political or social reform must overcome that basic problem. Money dominates American politics, mostly through virtually unlimited campaign contributions from the wealthy elite. Voters and politicians are stuck in a system over which they have little control and agency, so American “democracy” is one in name only. Perhaps a better name for the American political system would be plutocracy.

So what’s the solution? Besides health care and meaningful work for all (to cite just two of Scialabba’s standard social democratic aspirations), he offers a surprisingly specific one: election in the House of Representatives by lot. Because campaigns and elections require so much financing, only the wealthy can play the game with any success. Instead, what we need is an election of 435 House members (the Senate and Presidential elections will have to stay put for now) done completely at random. This will hopefully prevent the rigging of elections by the rich and provide a true representation of the teachers, nurses, and welders in our communities.

Scialabba rightly admits that the prospects for such a reform are grim, since any change like this would only happen “over Money’s dead body.” Still, this is the right place to start for any kind of meaningful political and social reform. So many of our demands for justice can only happen if some more basic structural reform is accomplished first, paving the path for the necessary conditions for the change we really desire. For example, those who have long called for an end to abortion in America faced the obvious problem for decades that the Supreme Court had constitutionalized it as a right in *Roe v. Wade*. While the overruling of *Roe* and *Casey* in *Dobbs* did not bring an end to abortion, at least it made it possible for anti-abortion laws to be enforced at the state level.

Scialabba’s larger calls for democracy, solidarity, benevolence, and sympathy are worth taking a moment to review as well. For one, the language of solidarity should strike a chord with the Christian reader. Anyone familiar with Catholic social teaching will particularly resonate with Scialabba’s rhetoric. Consider the parable of the Good Samaritan and its teaching that even our greatest enemies demand our love and compassion. Or consider the language driving the pro-life movement over the last 40-50 years. At its best, it’s the language of solidarity with those within the human community who literally cannot speak for themselves. Or take a tour through the encyclicals of popes going back to Leo XIII in the 19th century, and you’ll find consistent references to solidarity and the idea that we all belong to a single human family.

Racial, ethnic, national, and religious differences can never eliminate the most basic bond we have as image bearers of God. And while Catholics and others will quickly add that subsidiarity–the notion that decisions should be made at the lowest level possible and that nonstate institutions have a vital role to play in a flourishing community–must complement solidarity lest we descend into state collectivism, Scialabba’s call for greater solidarity may be the one we need today in a world of seemingly intractable division and strife.

## **Is this hope rooted in anything?**

Scialabba’s hope for greater democracy and solidarity should push the Christian reader to question whether or not we have lost a sense of the human bond we all share. But perhaps the more intriguing contributions he offers are in his answers to the other two questions about hope: Is it grounded in anything, and what can we do to realize it?

To the question of grounding, he begins the book by citing one of his intellectual heroes Richard Rorty, who rejects both reason and revelation as proper foundations for common morality. Revelation belongs only to a few, Rorty contends. Reason, while necessary to work out the details of hope’s substance, is not sufficient either.

In his reflection on Charles Taylor entitled, “Can We Be Good Without God?” Scialabba follows Taylor’s critique of modernity as “scientific rationality,” which transforms morality into mere preference and its evil cousins, relativism and subjectivism. If morality can be reduced to taste and preference, then it does seem to follow that our communities will struggle to find shared ways to name not just what is right and wrong but even who we are as human beings in the world. Could God therefore be the answer, Taylor wonders?

While Scialabba honors the ambition and scope of Taylor’s project, he shows his cards by admitting that he is himself a kind of “pragmatic naturalist.” While not wanting to reduce everything to its most basic material bits, Scialabba prefers a naturalistic explanation of reality to something more metaphysical, when it is adequate to perform the task of explanation in a particular case. If, for example, a community wanted to explain the existence of human rights, why not just ground those rights in a Hobbesian view that human beings are just “matter in motion,” and that our basic material desire is to preserve our existence? Is this not easier than an elusive and controversial theological or philosophical foundation? More than that—and probably more at the center of his worldview—is Scialabba’s pragmatism. Human rights just seem to work for us, as one of his moral heroes John Stuart Mill argued. Who needs metaphysics, or a shared telos, Scialabba wonders, when we seem to muddle through without them?

So not only can we be good without God, but we probably don’t need to explain why we should strive for justice at all. That ancient question Glaucon and Adeimantus asked Socrates in the *Republic—*why is a just life worth pursuing, when the unjust seem to do just fine in their own pursuits?—turns out to be impossible, unnecessary, and irrelevant to answer. Instead of carrying on for ten books in the dialogue trying to answer the question, Plato through Socrates would have been better off patting the earnest young Athenians on their heads. He shouldn’t have discouraged a life of justice in the process, but should have insisted that worrying about such a foundation is likely a waste of time.

But even this is not the fulness of what Scialabba has in mind, even though he is indeed a kind of pragmatist. His answer to the question for the basis of our solidarity is that it is found in our moral imagination. More specifically, it is the act of imaginatively identifying with people who are not you, especially those who are suffering. Compassion, or a “suffering with,” is really what he has in mind—where we learn to walk in the shoes of America's kindergarten teachers who collectively earn less money than the top 25 hedge fund managers in the same country. Or when we imagine what it is like to live without clean water, malaria-protecting mosquito nets, or access to life-sustaining nutrition and food. Scialabba’s basis for hope, therefore, is found in the moral imaginative faculty that is common to all of us, if only we would recognize and use it.

Certainly the Christian reader can appreciate this move by Scialabba, even if we are not finally satisfied with a non-theological grounding. When Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan, is it not to get us to imagine what it’s like to be beaten and on the side of the road? Or consider Paul’s experience of Jesus on the road to Damascus. What does Jesus say to Saul who becomes Paul, except to ask him why he is persecuting Jesus, because to persecute God’s people is to persecute God himself? Identification with the suffering of the world is surely at the heart of God and what it means to follow Him. Can this not be a shared basis for our hope?

## **Why is it so hard to realize this hope?**

If solidarity is the substance of our hope, grounded in our collective capacity to imagine the suffering of others, why is this so hard to realize and fulfill? What do we need to do to make this happen?

In short, “you must change your life.” It is worth remembering that the love of money is the chief obstacle to realizing the hope that we have. Scialabba further develops this idea when he argues that the moral imagination of contemporary America has been and continues to be captured by a passion for self-reliance and economic self-interest. Instead of imagining ourselves in the shoes of others, we can only imagine what it’s like to be us. It is the water we swim in. Thus the more accurate description is not that we have the wrong moral imagination, but that we have none at all.

But “you must change your life.” The answer is not superficial or mechanical. It is not a simple call to more activism, lobbying, or political action. We must first work on ourselves before we can realize the hope that we really have. We must recover the “impulse of sympathy,” which is the “origin of moral imagination.” The solution is not to be found out there, but within. Plato believed that we all possess an internal truth but have forgotten it because of the darkness of the Athenian sophists. Anamnesis, or the act of remembering the truth we have always possessed but forgotten, is the only way forward. So it is with Scialabba, who shares with Percy Shelley the need to find again the love for others we all have within us, a love that transcends reason and serves as the basis for a life of moral imagination.

Practically speaking, it is not clear what Scialabba has in mind to restore this inclination toward benevolence. He mentions a program of “democratic pedagogy,” but it is not clear what that entails. However, he is at his most profound and most resonant with Christian teaching when he suggests the following in his penultimate chapter, “More Than Human?” He says, “Only rootedness makes sustained resistance to the modern Leviathan–state, corporations, and media–possible. And an important form of rootedness is our internalization of the Word in one form or another: sacred scripture or poetic tradition or civic mythology or family lore.”

Could it be, then, that the way we realize the hope within is to go back to the basics, remove ourselves from the distractions of money and consumerism, and to open ourselves to a revelation from beyond? Not really to look within, therefore, but to wait and look and hope for the One who can save us from our contemporary troubles. In the end, I wonder if this is the truest aspiration of Scialabba’s compelling book.
### Lucky to be Grateful
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/lucky-to-be-grateful/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:31:03.000Z
Wendell Berry. *Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story*. Counterpoint, 2025\. $26.00\. 176 pp.

*We are the lucky ones.* One can only imagine the near-infinity of invocations of this thought over human history. How many people are even saying or thinking it in the very moment in which I write this thought—or you read it? Whether for those uttering the sentiment or those hearing it expressed, an inevitable addendum follows: Why? Lucky. . . how so? Lucky. . .for what?

The outpouring of thoughts we have from Wendell Berry—in the form of poetry, essays, and fiction—is nothing if not a sustained answer to this question. This sometimes surfaces subtly when he launches his most trenchant criticism of the industrialization, mechanization, and environmental destruction wrought by modern economic, technological, and demographic developments, for instance in his now classic work, *Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture*. But in many of his poems and fiction, it hits the reader over the head—in a good way. In *Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story*, the latest in his series of Port William novels, the answer comes, true to its title, in the form of a story.

The story at the heart of the novel takes place long before the life of its protagonist, Andy Catlett. Readers learn the story in question through the gripping first 31 pages titled simply “The Past.” In 1906, after the year of hard work to bring their tobacco crop from seed to harvest, Andy’s grandfather and a neighbor friend rode their horses in the dark to catch the train to Louisville to sell it, only to find it was worth not just nothing, but even less. A single wealthy buyer caused prices to fall so low that the price offered was less than it took to produce the crop and transport it to market.

So the story follows Marce (short for Marcellus) back home with nothing to show for his labor, and nothing to add to a household economy already stretched to the breaking point, riven with debt since the 1890s. His wife had said to him the night before the midnight ride, that whatever amount of money they received, “we’ll be glad of it, because we *need* it.” When her husband told her upon returning from Louisville that they had not received a cent, “she was silent.” Told from the point of view of their youngest son, old enough to feel his mother’s pain if too young to grasp its cause, “Wheeler would remember the fear in his mother’s silence. He would remember it as the silence of justice outraged and hopeless. But on that night he was able to know only that she meant her silence to conceal her suffering.”

This novel, centering on one of the families that appear frequently in the Port William novels, the Catletts, goes on to detail story after story that spins off from that momentous ride through the darkness of the wee hours of night. If one were to read chronologically for plot alone, Wheeler’s participation, once grown, in founding “an organization of farmers that for the six decades of its political life gave them an asking price for their tobacco crops,” the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association, would stand out. So would what we encounter as Andy’s “homecoming,” when he left the “good living” he had achieved for himself, his wife Flora, and two children, by writing for a farming magazine in Chicago, to move his family back to the Catlett family’s neighborhood in Port William.

This is because, in addition to these and the other stories relayed in the book is an overarching story all its own, of the larger historical change of which their lives were a part. This latter story casts a kind of shadow over the stories of the individuals and families, a story of that very way of life that Wheeler defended and to which Andy intended to return but which he found changing beyond recognition as machines and agricultural consolidation displaced small farmers, their communities, and customs. The book joins Berry’s other works in comprising an elegy for such a life gone by.

Yet to see Berry mainly an elegist would be to miss the unruly way he tells his stories, whether of Marce, Wheeler, Andy and the other Catletts, the other individuals and families in their neighborhood, or the world they were born into and saw vanishing. After the careful narration of each step in order of Marce’s disastrous trek to market and back in the past comes a longer portion of the book, “The Future.” It is as if, in the playing out of the original story, all sense of linear time is let go.

It is true we find out what happened to main characters such as Wheeler and Andy, but embarking on each of the fifteen brief chapters and the even smaller episodes into which they are divided, it is never clear where we will find ourselves in time. In Chapter I, we find that “Andy Catlett has grown now into the old age of a grandson, son, father, and grandfather.” We then hear the story of Andy’s father as a young and middle-aged man, of Wheeler’s wild brother, Andrew, who died young in a fight he provoked, and by chapter VI, we are back in Andy’s childhood, encountering a different side of Marce’s wife Dorie, Andy’s grandmother, “who often made a companion of him.”

Faded by her silent worry into the background of Marce’s original tale, she now comes to life in vivid detail. Andy accompanies her as she hoes in the garden, tends chickens and turkeys, and more: “She could milk a cow if she needed to, as Andy discovered to his shame when he neglected his chores. When the milk came to the house from the barn, she strained it into crocks, set the crocks in the cellar to cool, skimmed off the cream when it rose, churned the cream into butter, and shaped the butter into pats of about a pound apiece, which she ornamented by crisscrossing their tops with the edge of the butter paddle.” Although Andy grasped that his grandparents did not get along and that “his grandma was not a happy woman,” after Marce dies Andy discovers that she has kept a corsage from their 50th wedding anniversary the year before. Andy felt his grandmother’s grief at the loss of her son “as something dreadful and permanent” and her sorrow at the loss of her husband. In Chapter VII we find Marce alive again, as we see him, in turn, through Andy’s eyes.

And so the story proceeds, each step forward necessitating yet another leap backward, jumping back up to the present then edging forward into a future unforeseen, perhaps, but not entirely unexpected. As the stories unfold, then fold back upon themselves, then fold forward at an angle, the trajectory is toward inevitable loss. When Andy feels—or rather, lives—the mourning of his grandmother, “he learned of grief by signs that he would understand only later, as his own years and griefs accumulated.” He moves his family back to rural Kentucky only to find the culture of small farms vanishing. On the larger scale of change, “the traditional subsistence economies of households and neighborhoods were supplanted by the global economy of extraction, consumption, and waste,” while on the smaller scale, people left the countryside to earn for “purchasing power” in the consumer economy in place the skill and self-sufficiency of “homemade goods” and “handwork.”

Berry makes it clear through this fictional account of real-world developments that he believes this was a change of epic proportions: a clear and unmitigated tragedy. Not only that, he makes it clear that for Andy, as well as his father and grandfather, it was experienced as a personal failure not to see their lives of stewardship result in a continuation of these locally rooted manners and mores: “Andy has come at last to see his grandfather Catlett, his father, and himself as three aged brothers made so by their shared vision of a life permanently settled in a place chosen and beloved, but made brothers also by their failure: their discovery that the vision, as each one of them in his own time has seen it, could not live beyond them, so hard upon them has been the force of the changing times.”

In passages of synthesis, it becomes clear what the organizing principle of the novel really is. It clearly follows the pathways of memory, as Andy reflects, very late in life by the time the narrative begins, on his entire life history, the people in it, and its ultimate significance. Yet even more than that, it follows the path of a certain kind of memory. It is not stream-of-consciousness, even though it has Proustian elements, with exquisite details such as the smell of an old, dried carnation, whose color had faded, still able to flood young Andy’s senses upon opening the drawer. It is the path of a well-exercised muscle of memory always reaching for understanding.

This memory-for-understanding—a very different faculty from idle meanderings or ransackings for fleeting entertainment—explains the capaciousness of the narrative, which runs back and forth over a huge swath of time, breaking beyond the bounds of a single human life include both those who came before and those yet to come. As Andy’s strength fades in old age, and he could not work the land anymore, “he began to waken into his memory and the memory of his elders.” Berry’s stirring prose then evokes that most momentous of reasons Andy has for this awakening in his heightened awareness of death. He continues, “It was as if his soul had learned so to speak, to stand outside his own life in the great opening in which time comes and goes, in the company and council of fellow souls.” Now the linear narration and episodic skipping of stones over the rippling surface of time past, present, and future both seem to give way to a soaring timelessness as Andy pulls away from the historical particulars: “In reveries and dreams he makes his way among loved ones lost to one another in this world’s great sundering, as if again in their presence and present to them, as if in some hereafter already here.”

So Berry’s answer to the question of why we are the lucky ones—why in his rendering, Andy still comes across as believing himself one of the lucky ones, despite the very real disasters he recounts with such poignancy—is found here near the end. It is not in spite of the devastation of the land and the folkways it sustained that Andy finds solace, or in spite of the losses and injuries sustained in the course of his life. It is through them. Wave upon wave of understanding over the course of remembering a life and a particular story as it played out in multiple lives ended not in bitterness—though it had a share of that, too—but in a breathless invocation of a devastated country, “continuing by the spirit and the breath of God toward whatever in God’s time it is coming to.”

In a final image, Andy describes in loving detail the unexpected beauty of the sunken cellar that “provided Grandma Catlett a place to store her canned goods, and in the warm months to set her crocks of fresh milk, morning and evening, to wait for the cream to rise.” Even in the sorrow of the razing of the dome of this storage room that so enchanted Andy as a boy, we learn that its beauty—though “not as evident as that of a vault or dome in a church”—inspires reverence. No matter our suffering, we are lucky to know such people and the reverence-worthy places—these everyday cathedrals—they construct and inhabit.

We usually hear the phrasing that we are grateful to be lucky in some way. But Berry turns this thought around in this book as in his work overall: we are lucky to be grateful. “As he has come to know, Andy’s grief for the things that are lost affirms his love for them, as even the loss of them affirms the bounty by which they once existed, for in this world grief goes hand in hand with gratitude.” If we lose—somethings, someplace, someone—we love with all the passion that is humanly possible. We are the lucky ones. Even our agony, if we cultivate, as few have taught us to do as well as Berry, our memory-for-understanding, we enter the realm of love, which knows everything of pain but nothing of change.
### A Psalm for Easter
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-psalm-for-easter/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:31:07.000Z
Rejoice, frail sons of Adam’s blood  
For God, the Just and True  
Is ever seeking wretched souls  
In mercy, to renew  
For I my body bound in swaths  
Of filth from hope misplaced  
Lay reeking in the dark of sin  
Despairing of His grace

There in the pit with blistered hands  
From laboring to hide  
In umbrous clefts of heaping guilt  
Exhausted by my pride  
His piercing light broke through the depths  
My shame-cast shadows waned  
And all that I had buried there  
Lay gruesome and profane

Then I, the sin-sick leper, cried  
“O Lord, I am unclean!”  
Keen of ear He heard and spoke  
“Arise, you are set free!  
For by the cross of Christ my Son  
Your sins were crucified  
And by His righteousness, your hope  
You have been justified!”

So sing, you ransomed sons of men  
The God who stoops to save  
In endless mercy called you forth  
From your deserved grave  
Now lift up hands that once were drenched  
With blood from murderous deeds  
And shout for joy in all the earth  
For you have been redeemed!
### Embracing the God Who Bleeds
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/embracing-the-god-who-bleeds/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:31:10.000Z
*\[38\] After these things Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews, asked Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus, and Pilate gave him permission. So he came and took away his body. \[39\] Nicodemus also, who earlier had come to Jesus by night, came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds in weight. \[40\] So they took the body of Jesus and bound it in linen cloths with the spices, as is the burial custom of the Jews. \[41\] Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb in which no one had yet been laid. \[42\] So because of the Jewish day of Preparation, since the tomb was close at hand, they laid Jesus there.*

On Good Friday the Christian church pauses to commemorate the death of Jesus on the cross. In this brief burial scene from John’s gospel, we see not only the reality of Jesus’ death but also that his death elicits a profound response in two men.

## **The Reality of Death**

These five verses from John solidify the reality of Jesus of Nazareth’s earthly death. Three times, John refers to Jesus’ *body––*each time in the Greek singular accusative case, used to indicate a direct object being acted upon. This body is then *taken* and *bound*––verbs showing action done *to* the direct object. Thus far in John’s gospel Jesus has been the primary actor: teaching, healing, traveling. Now, he is being *acted upon*. John wants his readers to know that this once living man from Nazareth is now a passive, lifeless corpse.

And it is this corpse that is taken *from* Pontius Pilate. It’s worth remembering that Pilate was a Roman governor under the authority of the current Caesar, Tiberius Caesar. Tiberius was known to be ruthless and paranoid, with a zero tolerance policy for insubordination. Earlier in John’s account, the Jews twist Pilate’s arm by reminding him that anyone who makes himself king (as Jesus had done) is *no friend of Caesar’s*. Their point was clear: let this man live, and you are aiding and abetting an insurrectionist against Caesar.

Thus, Pilate desperately needed Jesus to be dead. In simplest terms, Jesus’ life would almost certainly have cost Pilate his own. Therefore, Pilate would never have let Jesus’ body go if there was even the slightest chance of remaining life. This would have ruined him––he would have solidified his legacy as an incompetent governor, unable to carry out the quintessential Roman punishment of crucifixion.

Pilate, however, could rest easy in the certainty of Jesus’ death. Rome was a highly calibrated, efficient society. Rome was good at what they did; they were military experts and their expertise included execution. Rome simply did not “miss” on crucifixions. Ancient Rome was a shame-honor society. This is why in Acts we see the Roman guard pull his sword on himself when he believes Peter to have escaped prison under his watch––better to die than to fail one’s duty. Indeed, either way death was sure to follow in cases of such incompetence. To have “missed” on the crucifixion would have meant the death of all involved. Rome was simply too advanced and too proud; Tiberius, Pilate, and the Roman soldiers too professional to let this happen.

And that was just Rome! The Jews, likewise, had equally efficient rituals around death. These two Jewish authorities––Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus––prepared Jesus’ body with linen cloths and spices “as is the burial custom of the Jews.” This was a highly significant and sacred process. To do this with a living body would have been a gross violation of this sacred burial rite. These devoutly Jewish men would never have done this if Jesus were alive, and they would have *known* if he was alive because of the time and attention it took to wrap yards and yards of spice-soaked linen around Jesus’ body.

Thus, the actual, physical death of Jesus of Nazareth is one of the most historically reliable events of antiquity. Virtually all scholars––past and present, Christian and secular alike agree. Even the second century Roman historian Tacitus wrote:

> Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most pernicious superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out.

Like a good historian, Tacitus gives us both geographical and temporal markers as footnotes for authenticity and reliability. Tiberius and Pilate were serious players; no one came back from a cross alive.

And it is precisely this undeniable death of Jesus that seemed to have contradicted his claims. After all, Jesus had claimed to be the Son of God––a claim that now seemed to have been refuted by his death.

A college professor of mine, while teaching on the history of Christianity, ended a lecture with what he must have thought was the ultimate death blow to the Christian faith. After leading us in a discussion on the reliability of the death of Jesus, his claim to be God, and his shed blood on the Roman cross the professor concluded… “but gods don’t bleed, do they?”

This professor believed the historical reliability of Jesus’ death contradicted his claims of divinity. However, it is Jesus’ shed blood that actually *fulfilled* his claims of divinity. Throughout John’s gospel we have heard things like: “This was to fulfill the word that Jesus had spoken to show by what *kind* of death he was going to die.” Isaiah had prophesied the kind of death God’s Suffering Servant would die; namely, an *atoning* one. The power of Jesus’ divinity was confirmed by his death as the Suffering Servant––the power of one who suffers for *and* with God’s people. We see this power reflected in the responses of Joseph and Nicodemus.

## **The Response to Death**

The apparent contradiction of a God who bleeds gave birth to new contradictions. Joseph of Arimathea, a disciple of Jesus *but secretly for fear of the Jews* now comes forth in boldness demanding the blasphemer’s body from Pilate. Such a request could have not only outed him to the very Jews he feared, but it could have also rendered him guilty of sedition by association!

Likewise Nicodemus––who once sought out Jesus under the cover of night––now comes in the light of day. His stealth has turned to the clamor of carrying 75 pounds of spices fit for a royal burial.

These two men are walking contradictions: high ranking members of the Sanhedrin, fear turning to boldness, anonymity turning to openness, both relinquishing the riches of costly caves and expensive ointments to bury a blasphemer!

What can account for such responses?

Remember what Jesus had told Nicodemus earlier in John: to enter the kingdom of God will require a contradiction––*you must be born again*. And such a new birth necessitates a death. Newness of life, Paul argues in Romans 6, requires a burial. Thus, Jesus’ burial scene serves as a kind of burial for Joseph and Nicodemus’ old selves. They have died to the power of wealth, of status, of good standing in their societal systems of influence.

Thus, the historical death of Jesus is not *merely* a historical event––it accomplished something. It was the power of the Son of God to atone for sin, and therefore an invitation for any who believe in Jesus to be transformed by that power. The God-man’s blood was a payment for sin, covering the heart-level contradictions of loving wealth, status, comfort more than God. He bore the wrath due such sin in his body. But it was also a payment for pardon––to release those in bondage to the darkness of the old self to a life in the light. Such freedom is possible because through faith in the God who bled on the cross, we die too––we are united with him in a death like his (Rom. 6:5). This is the goodness of Good Friday––everything that keeps us from God goes to the grave.

This dying with Christ is beginning to be reflected in the lives of Joseph and Nicodemus. As they carefully wrap Jesus’ lifeless body in linen and spices, their actions reveal hearts already moved by God’s grace. Their old selves, once bound by fear, secrecy, and worldly attachments, are now dying with him. Only dying with Christ through union with him can account for this profoundly transformative response.

But such a death is not a hopeless one.

Paul continues: if we are united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. It is interesting that only John’s gospel mentions that this tomb is in the middle of a garden. A garden is the place where death gives way to life. My wife planted flowers last Fall in preparation for this Spring, and they have since been lying dormant under an icy graveyard. But now there are signs of life sprouting. The graveyard of death is giving way to a garden of life.

This is the hope of Easter.

The resurrection is coming, and all who are planted with Jesus through faith will raise to new life with him. But such planting means death. Our old lives must be laid to rest along with Jesus, covered by his blood. It is on Good Friday that we remember that God bled not only *for* us––to atone for sin––but also *with* us, as one who knows our suffering. And as we wait for Easter morning, in our suffering and dying, we do so with the hope of life beginning to stir in the tomb.

So this Good Friday, embrace the contradiction of the God who bleeds. For Jesus’ body buried in the garden holds the promise of new life.
### Aquinas, AI, and the Pursuit of Learning
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/aquinas-ai-and-the-pursuit-of-learning/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:31:12.000Z
My eight-year-old daughter recently invoked my fatherly duty to help her do research for a presentation about a figure from the Middle Ages; Thomas Aquinas, in her case. My wife and I bought a few books, checked one out from the library, and found some relevant material in reference works we already owned. Notably, we did not search for random articles or videos off the Internet or try using generative AI as a personal tutor; yet this was not enough to entirely avoid *AI slop*.

Among our stack of works on this historic figure, two stand in stark contrast – G.K. Chesterton’s *St. Thomas Aquinas* and a cute looking, illustrated children’s book. One, a well-respected ode to a man whose intellectual contributions can hardly be matched; a poetic sketch of a humble saint. The other, a simulacrum of a fun biography about Aquinas full of duplicate pages, dubious content, emoji bullet points, and enough six-fingered people to send Inigo Montoya into a frenzy. The tell-tale signs of AI-generated content were on full display in this children’s book. These distortions of reality ended up being a rather ironic tribute to the brilliant mind that wrote disputations on truth and knowledge.

There was an ongoing joke while I was taking an Artificial Intelligence course in college – make sure your AI algorithm can’t produce Skynet. James Cameron’s *Terminator* has not left the popular imagination, but it is not the sole source for imagined future battles or dystopias. One of the struggles in *The Matrix*, to know what is real, makes an indefatigable T-800, or a T-1000 composed of mimetic polyalloy seem only mildly challenging by comparison. The rapid advance of generative AI has caused people to reconsider what would constitute science fiction (emphasis on fiction) in the next ten years.

It is that similarity with the challenges of *The Matrix* that, I think, causes anxiety about the future with respect to learning. There are real challenges in the pursuit of learning that are compounded by the wide-spread ability to quickly produce shoddy AI-generated content. It is easy to see how this evokes the question, “What is even real anymore?” or “Will people be able to separate fact from fiction?” While some will certainly be misled by it, this content does not fundamentally impair our God-given capacity to learn about His creation, to pursue the truth.

## Eggs are Eggs

Even before generative AI became popular, learning without the benefit of a trusted instructor or instructor-selected materials could be intimidating. For many subjects, there are an overwhelming number of sources to choose from. Different authors can come from different schools of thought or emphasize a different set of facts, while some are just clearer than others. Not all works are equally trustworthy, either. Some have exaggerated or unsubstantiated claims, faulty logic, or even a valid argument based on a false premise. For example, how much credibility should be given to the claims of miracles after Aquinas’ death? Does the fact that something so extraordinary was only mentioned by one of my daughter’s sources reflect differently on the author who included it versus those who excluded it?

Another layer of complexity is context. People, events, and ideas do not generally appear *ex nihilo*. Knowing about King David’s time as a shepherd when he was young shows where he draws the imagery for the beloved Psalm 23\. Grasping the early trinitarian controversies requires knowing about the Arians, Nicenes, and debates about “*homoiousios*” vs “*homoousios*”. Understanding some differences between the Franciscan and Dominican orders colors Thomas’s family’s reaction to his choice to join the Dominicans.

The piles of books one needs to read to understand an argument and its historical significance can quickly become overwhelming. Yet we needn’t cry out, “What is truth?” or “Who will rescue me from this corpus of death?” Truth is knowable, even for non-academics. You can trust me, I’ve read people who have read Aquinas. As Chesterton wrote in his biography on Aquinas, “the philosophy of St. Thomas stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs.” This is as it must be for the Christian who believes that God has spoken to His people through His word, which was recorded for all time in the Holy Scriptures. God would not have given His word to His people and made them a pillar and buttress of the truth (1 Tim 3:15) if it was not knowable, even if all matters are not alike plain.

In the Psalms David compared God to a rock (Ps 18:2; Ps 62:6-7). He used his real knowledge of the world – rocks are hard, rocks are good for building – acquired through his senses and experience, to proclaim divine truth – the Lord is a fortress, a deliverer – acquired through his experience of salvation. Jesus taught about the kingdom of heaven through many comparisons (Matt 13:24–50; Mark 4:26–29; Luke 13:18–21). The objects (e.g., mustard seed) and experiences (e.g., finding a pearl of great value) he used for comparison would have been understandable to His hearers, even if they were blind to the truth of the kingdom. The apostle Paul opens his letter to the Romans with a bold declaration that creation itself makes it evident that there is a Creator, and, therefore, all are responsible for knowing it (Rom 1:18-20). So, even if some deny it, we can know that eggs are eggs and there is a good God who made them.

## AI Slop Enters the Chat

While we can explore, learn, and know a great many things, that doesn’t make all things equally easy to learn. Given the many challenges to learning that existed prior to generative AI, does the presence of AI slop make the challenge of pursuing truth insurmountable? Or, to rephrase the question, does the existence of content that is noticeably low quality, produced with presumably low effort, so completely hinder our ability, individually or collectively, to learn that it will cause a crisis? I don’t think so.

Feed-driven social media, those platforms that are designed to keep you scrolling their feed (e.g., Facebook, X, YouTube, etc.), are probably where this content flows most freely, and I am not original in saying that it would do most people good to stay off it entirely. Given that many choose to stay on it, though, it would be to our great benefit to not treat it as a valid source of information. The effort to sift through what’s found there will likely outweigh the benefit of searching there to begin with. After all, not all AI-generated content is noticeable instantly, and the remaining content is rarely known for its virtue or truthfulness.

Anecdotally, books are not even a guaranteed safe haven from AI slop. The relative ease to self-publish, while good for genuine writers, also facilitates these less desirable products. Even though retailers like Amazon make returns and refunds easy, encountering enough lackluster books will create issues of trust. Reviews, while not completely unhelpful, have their own [trust problems](https://tech.yahoo.com/general/articles/fake-amazon-reviews-everywhere-tips-110000039.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) as anyone who has bought a previously-unknown-brand item can likely attest. Like feed-driven social media, review-driven retailers might not be the right place to start a search when looking to learn.

While it is good for some people to know about looking for vanishing points from converging parallels or feeding visual noise through Fourier transformations to analyze images as [Hany Farid demonstrates](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5%5FPrTvNypY&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), this will not be accessible to everyone. The detection techniques are not likely to stay the same over time, either. Some are working on techniques that might be helpful for websites more broadly. [One such proposal](https://codeberg.org/robida/human.json?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) looks to create networks of sites that have been vouched to be human content. It doesn’t hurt to hope that one of these solutions could become as ubiquitous as [CAPTCHA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) systems in separating the wheat from the chaff. Adoption is always a struggle, though, and these solutions could find themselves with similar trust problems as reviews.

While it might be tempting to just disregard all articles, books, and videos published after 2022, when ChatGPT was released, this will not solve our learning problems. Time will go on, new topics will arise, advances will occur, and not all subjects will have the benefit of decades or centuries of publications. Eventually, content from the AI era will need to be consumed, and that will be sooner rather than later for some fields, like medicine. It is doubtful, for example, that the broader population will advocate for doctors to not read any research on new strains of viruses simply because it was written in the AI-era.

Fortunately, AI slop is not necessarily introducing new problems so much as adding to old ones. From a learning perspective, the main problems with slop are that it is low quality and of dubious trustworthiness. These are real challenges, but they are not insurmountable. Further technology might play some role in overcoming it, but it seems more likely to me that cultivating learning practices whose first step is not “search the Internet” will fare better.

## Truth, Trust, and Telos

For all learners, but especially for those who are self-directed, we should diligently seek the truth, think humbly in community, and remember our purpose for learning. The seriousness of the topic or level of interest might determine the rigor with which these practices are applied, but they can apply broadly, whether it is a hobby, career skill-up, or Bible study. Over time we can cultivate trust in different spheres – individuals, communities, publishers, etc. – that will help us avoid or mitigate the woes of the AI slop slough.

- *Diligently seeking the truth* is a commitment to live in and understand the reality God has given to us, not the one we would rather have. Asking questions, reading broadly, and validating what we learn (as much as we are able) are helpful ways to approach this.
- *Thinking humbly in community* is an acknowledgement that our own perspective can be limited and that there are many things we can learn from others. Soliciting recommendations and engaging others by articulating ideas and receiving feedback assume that we can learn from others. Humility, a shared goal or interest, and an appropriate level of openness will be the key to building trust.
- *Remembering our purpose for learning* is, hopefully, a freeing reminder that only God is infinite and omniscient. We do not have to go down the infinite rabbit holes we come across to say that we know, or know about, a topic or to be able to accomplish a particular task. Further, what is the “why” behind our “why”? For any pursuit, once going back enough levels, we should remember that our chief end is “to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.” (WSC 1). If the journey is at odds with that chief end, it is off track and needs to be righted.

These practices are not linear, mutually exclusive, all encompassing, or even equally applicable to all pursuits, but they are generally important to learning and building trust. Part of the problem of the pursuit of truth is lacking trust in the sources. Trust is predicated on dependability. Generally, the more often a person, group, or organization provides useful input (sources, feedback, ideas) that points us towards truth, the more we trust. AI slop is bad for the economy of trust not only when it contains false information, but especially if the recipients discover that the content is AI slop without a previous disclosure.

Given this relationship between trust and the pursuit of truth, it might feel like it is a chicken-and-egg problem. How can one learn without first having trust, and how can one validate a source if they don't yet have knowledge? It is important to realize, though, that we have not lost our tie to reality and our God-given capacities. There are certain things we can verify through our senses, trial and error, and reason. Deriving everything from first principles would be quite a task, one that most are not up to; but we aren’t left to derive everything from first principles.

We started with a daughter looking to her parents for guidance. Children learn to trust their parents because they are (hopefully) consistently there to provide for them. We ought to be good stewards of that trust and teach them good things – truth about the world, the God who made the world, and how to live in it. As part of this, it is our privilege and duty to equip them for being in community and learning, for pursuing the true, the good, and the beautiful.

Lifelong learning is good, and I commend it to all, but there is an important caveat in this whole matter – there is a real need and place for experts, and, by definition, amateurs are not experts. My point is that one does not need total knowledge with absolute certainty on every point to say that they have knowledge. There are many endeavors we can undertake that do not require us to be experts, simply more knowledge than we currently have; ones that help us to better love God and neighbor, or be better stewards of what we’ve been given, or otherwise seeking to glorify God and enjoy Him. These endeavors are worth pursuing.

A Christian perspective should give us confidence in persevering in pursuit of learning, because it is not a fruitless endeavor. AI Slop is not an impenetrable barrier between us and God’s creation; it is noise that can be overcome through diligence and community. Joining or forming communities that value the truth can be powerful for building trust, not because they do or don’t use generative AI, but because they are tethered to reality. Welcoming requests for recommendations or questions that could have been a Google search might feel inconvenient at times, but it is more dignifying and constructive than the alternative, even when no one has all the answers.
### Deconstructing Pessimism
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/deconstructing-pessimism/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:31:15.000Z
David Bather Woods. *Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist*. University of Chicago Press, 2025\. $29.99\. 296 pp.

Arthur Schopenhauer would have done pretty well on Twitter. He spent his life filling notebooks with his observations and doubtlessly would have broadcast them far and wide had he been given the chance. His caustic wit, his penchant for aphorisms, his enigmatic mixture of views progressive and retrograde, his deep insight, his self-aggrandizing spirit, his anti-Christian tirades, and above all his misanthropy gave him what we might call today Main Character Energy.

In his new biography of Schopenhauer, scholar David Bather Woods refrains for the most part from such present-oriented judgments, but it’s hard to avoid the comparisons as one looks at our social media landscape and sees a crowd of people convinced of their own greatness, turning strife and pessimism into profit. Schopenhauer’s legacy was broad, but the philosophers who could be identified most closely with him today are the anti-natalists like David Benatar, who generally agree with Schopenhauer that life is a misfortune and that we are better off not being born. To counter these sorts of claims, Christians must understand the seductive power of philosophical pessimism and offer a different story in return.

## **Schopenhauer’s Life and Philosophy**

Arthur Schopenhauer was born in 1788 in Danzig, Germany, to well-to-do parents. His mother Johanna, a writer and artist, was far more famous and well-regarded than he was during her lifetime, and his grating personality led to a twelve-year estrangement at one point. She wrote to him in 1807: “You are not an evil human \[...\] but you are nevertheless irritating and unbearable, and I consider it most difficult to live with you.” Johanna wrote these words, Woods argues, out of genuine concern for her son's well-being—she foresaw that his disposition and attitude would condemn him to a lonely life of suffering.

His father Heinrich Floris long envisioned that his son would become a merchant and worked diligently to set him up for such a career, even luring young Arthur away from his Latin studies with the promise of a grand family tour of Europe. He might have gone through with his father’s wishes had Heinrich Floris not died when Arthur was seventeen, removing a great deal of pressure to pursue a more lucrative career and leaving an inheritance that allowed Arthur to muddle along for years without engaging in especially remunerative work.

Heinrich Floris’s death was especially tragic—and meaningful for Arthur Schopenhauer’s later work—because his entire family suspected that he committed suicide. While Woods is careful to not overread the implications of this incident in Schopenhauer’s philosophical work, there are hints (in particular Schopenhauer’s insistence that a parent’s duty to their child overrules any right they may have to kill themselves) suggesting that his father’s death was momentous not only in shaping the course of his life but the content of his thought.

“Death,” wrote Schopenhauer, “is the great opportunity not to be I any longer.” Schopenhauer drew on both Western philosophers (especially Plato and Kant) as well as Eastern religious texts to formulate his thoughts on the suffering that life entails and was one of the first Western philosophers to explicitly integrate Hindu and Buddhist beliefs into his writings. He explicitly saw death as something to be embraced with gratitude, since it frees the dead person from the indignities of life. His sister Adele wrote to him once that she would be grateful to cholera if it killed her and implied that he had shared similar thoughts with her. Schopenhauer had two children as the result of affairs, but neither survived infancy; Woods suggests that he “may have regarded the brevity of his own daughter’s life as a kind of mercy or even a sign of nascent wisdom.” He argued that while no aspect of a person’s consciousness or self-aware existence would continue after death, their “will to live” would endure as it was subsumed into the vast darkness of the universe whence it came.

Recognizing that his deeply pessimistic philosophy might lead someone to conclude that suicide was logical, Schopenhauer nonetheless argued against such a choice. The stigma and taboo around suicide was offensive to him and (drawing heavily from Hume) he spared no opportunity in bashing Christians for heaping shame upon the families of those who killed themselves. (He had a particular distaste, it seems, for Anglicans; Woods traces this to a miserable few months he spent at an English boarding school during his family’s grand tour of Europe.) For Schopenhauer, while the despair that leads one to contemplate suicide is in fact a necessary insight, following through with the act is “like a sick person who, having started undergoing a painful operation that could cure him completely, does not allow it to be completed and would rather stay sick.”

He did not have to worry about inspiring a massive wave of self-harm across Germany, however, because hardly anyone read his initial works. His mother’s travelogues outsold the first edition of his masterpiece *The World as Will and Representation*, leading to no small amount of consternation on his part. When he sought a teaching position in Berlin, he arrogantly attempted to upstage no lesser personality than Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (whom Schopenhauer considered an intellectual lightweight) by requesting that his lectures be scheduled at the same time as Hegel’s. Schopenhauer only had five students attend his lectures. He dropped out of teaching, spending the rest of his life wandering and writing.

It was only late in life that he began to find the acclaim that he thought he deserved all along, primarily through a core group of “disciples” who began to publicize his work and respond to it. He submitted essays to both the Norwegian Royal Society of Sciences and the Danish Royal Society of Sciences; he won the former competition but was denied the prize in the latter despite being the only entrant. He later published both essays as *The Two Foundational Problems of Ethics* and was petty enough to note in the title page of his book that the second essay was *not* awarded a prize.

In addition to his lack of personal charm, Schopenhauer’s writing was about what you might expect from a man who wrote a book called *The Art of Being Right*. Despite his opinion that Africans were less intelligent than other races, he found the Atlantic slave trade a damning indictment against Christianity. He held that women were inferior to men in just about every way and suggested a bizarre system of “tetragamy” that involved two men jointly marrying two women (one older, one younger.) He was a passionate advocate for animal rights but believed that widespread animal cruelty was a result of malign Jewish influence in European culture. It is easy to walk away from *The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist* and conclude that Schopenhauer preferred the company of dogs (in particular, his two poodles) to that of people.

The one drawback of Woods’s book is that he does not ever mention Schopenhauer’s interest in “animal magnetism” or other aspects of parapsychology that were wildly popular in the nineteenth century. Schopenhauer seemed to believe that magical phenomena were explainable as manifestations of a person’s will. In his essay “Animal Magnetism and Magic” he found the Church’s opposition to magic another sign of Christianity’s foolishness.

## **Schopenhauer’s Legacy**

Schopenhauer influenced philosophers, artists, and physicists alike, but in our time “this misanthropic sage of Frankfort,” as one of his admirers described him, lives on through pessimism both lowbrow and high. While formally antinatalist philosophers are relatively few, at least one terrorist attack has been linked to antinatalism. More important, a growing number of young people are reporting in polls that they are reluctant to have children because of climate change.

The philosopher most closely linked to Schopenhauer, Freidrich Nietzsche, certainly seems to be the inspiration for what feels like a massive army of internet trolls broadcasting their own versions of Schopenhauer’s views on women and other racial groups. In the nineteenth century, you had to be a genius to get away with extreme pessimism; nowadays all you need is an internet connection and a big enough chip on your shoulder.

The ease with which people slide into pessimism on social media is in many ways a function of the technologies to which we have access; in a more just world the people espousing a love for Hitler or Stalin solely for the transgressive vibes would be scribbling in notebooks for decades on end with only a poodle for a companion, like Schopenhauer. The perverse way the attention economy rewards the worst of human behavior suggests that there are ways to keep people from outright nihilism.

Woods gives us plenty of reason to doubt that Schopenhauer ever lived up to the conclusions of his philosophy, and we should find hope in the fact that it is actually quite difficult to truly embrace pessimism. Like flowers growing towards the sun, we cannot help but long for the light no matter what direction it is coming from. Schopenhauer’s comment likening suicide to abandoning a lifesaving surgery halfway through the case points towards the universal truth that after perceiving the emptiness of a world without God’s love and the horror of our own sin, we can be awakened to a new purposefulness when we realize that no amount of philosophical speculation can wrench away our desire to live forever.

In a world where an endless array of pleasures is constantly trying to pull us in—and one of the most tempting is a world where we might think ourselves authorities on the Art of Being Right dozens of times a day—the Bible’s answer to pessimism is simple. Job’s cry of anguish leads us all to say, if we’re being honest, that sometimes it feels like it would be better to die like Schopenhauer’s children than to live a life full of suffering. Yet that suffering can be meaningful to the degree that it is bound up in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The goodness of God is available to us every moment of every day, and we can cooperate with God’s grace to help advance His kingdom through actions large and small.

Arthur Schopenhauer said that simply being transported to a better world would not make us happy: “We would also need to be fundamentally altered so that we would no longer be what we are and would instead become what we are not.” In 1 Corinthians 15:51, Paul says: “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.” The mystery of our transformation is that those of us who die in Christ will all be fundamentally altered, but we will still each be ourselves in some wonderful continuity that can only be analogized as a tiny seed transforming into a full-grown tree. Our rejection of the fear of death is not based on a monistic will to live, but a power working in us that brings life out of death.
### To Dabble or Not to Dabble
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/to-dabble-or-not-to-dabble/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:31:18.000Z
Karen Walrond. *In Defense of Dabbling: The Brilliance of Being a Total Amateur*. Broadleaf Books, 2025\. $27.99\. 211 pp.

I have lived a strange and wonderful life.

In some ways it has been quite normal. I had a warm Southern California childhood with happy memories of a loving family and playing in the park, long days spent at Disneyland and the beach and grandma’s house—or as my mother called it during summer break, “Grandma Camp.”

And yet this vanilla exterior hides a complex, flavorful filling that has been slowly injected over the course of my life. Soccer and basketball and figure skating and cheerleading; piano and cello and clarinet and beatboxing; Mandarin and watercolor painting and theology and plumbing; chiropterology (the study of bats—think winged mammal, not baseball) and philosophy and raising chickens and knitting; acting and gardening and writing and dancing.

You could say that I’ve been a bit of a dabbler. A chronic amateur.

This made Karen Walrond’s new book, *In Defense of Dabbling: The Brilliance of Being a Total Amateur*, of immediate interest to me. The American milieu has given rise to “workaholism” and “perfectionism” and “hustle culture,” against whose backdrop Walrond’s call to something different strikes a refreshingly radical tone. Drawing on the etymology of the word “amateur”—which denotes “lover” with the connotation of “a lover of something” or “doing something for pleasure or interest”—Walrond encourages her reader to let hobbies remain hobbies, to resist the cultural and market pressures that expect and reward making every hobby into a profitable hustle, to cast off the crushing weight of perfectionist tendencies, to counter the narrative that “the acquisition of money, power, and mastery is the only way to live a successful life.” She wants us to do things “simply for the joy of doing them,” for the love of the proverbial game.

Why is this a worthy goal? To what end is amateurism ordered? Walrond’s goal aligns with humanistic psychology: we should rid ourselves of all that would frustrate the attainment of self-actualization and transcendence. For Walrond, this can happen through sustained practices in which one has rejected the allure of expertise. Practicing amateurism is ultimately a form of wholistic self-care. But as much as I love this basic idea of doing things for their own sake and agree that this enriches one’s life, I am not satisfied with this justification, for reasons I will explain in due course. But first, an overview of the way of the amateur.

## **The Gist of Amateurism**

In order to delineate pressure-laden expertise from amateurism—which, as the book’s title indicates, is practiced by “dabbling” or “trying an activity for a short period”—Walrond spends the first chapter enumerating the “Seven Attributes of Intentional Amateurism.” They are *curiosity*, *mindfulness*, *self-compassion*, *play*, *stretch zone*, *connection*, and *wonder and awe*.

You’ll notice that together these sketch the shape not of a particular practice but of an internal disposition. Assembled well, these hedge in a space where amateurism can grow and bear its fruit while keeping out capitalist critters and the wild beast of perfectionism. Walrond spends the first chapter defining each of the Seven Attributes, then from the third to the penultimate chapter provides anecdotes that illustrate her journey of learning each one, before finally arriving at the pinnacle of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: transcendence—or, as she explains it, “the evolution from our individual bests to our *collective* bests.”

Before diving into her Seven Attributes, Walrond takes the second chapter to do some framing to point a way forward. First of all, these Attributes must be internally habituated by practices. One must dabble. Dabble with what? Which practices? It’s left up to the reader, although she recommends looking in five places to find options: activities you loved as a child, those you would do if you were ten years younger or older, talents you wish you had, activities done on your most playful vacation, and the types of social media content you follow. From these veins can be mined the raw activity-materials for amateur praxis. And if that exercise isn’t helpful, in an appendix she gives a list of over two-hundred practices to help get the juices flowing. Secondly (and smartly, I think), she reminds us that bound up in this project of amateurism as self-care is our *spirit*—meaning, one’s chosen practices must carry in them the promise of metaphysical benefit if one dabbles aright. Finally, she anchors the possibility of thriving to rest and leisure, the context in which dabbling is meant to occur.

In the end, the author understands intentional amateurism to be an act of rebellion in line with Wendell Berry’s *Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front*: “…every day do something that doesn’t compute… Work for nothing.” She wants her reader to thrive, “detaching from perceptions, being expansive, \[and\] feeling connected to self and universe.”

The question remains: if we follow the path she has mapped out, will we arrive at the summit of transcendence? To quote the hobbit Merry Brandybuck, “I wouldn’t count on it.”

## **My Thoughts**

If my review section seemed short and rather lacking in substance, you understand my first gripe. There wasn’t much more for me to review. In fairness to the author, her book is meant as a work of practical guidance rather than a work of theory. And yet I couldn’t avoid disappointment when each of the chapters on the Seven Attributes merely supplied personal anecdotes and litanies of experts telling me what that Attribute would produce without deeper exploration of the dynamic interplay between mind, morals, body, and spirit. It felt very “Source: trust me bro.” Initially I thought that the definitions and descriptions of the Attributes in chapter one were summaries and further development would come with each Attribute’s respective chapter. Alas, my record of perfect predictions has been marred.

The fundamental problem with the book runs deeper than my disappointment, though: The solution it proposes can’t escape its own diagnosis, and this results in some rather serious contradictions. Let’s look again at Walrond’s main argument. She suggests that leisurely amateurism combats the twin ill effects of the chronic pursuit of expertise: the burnout of never-ending production on the one hand and psychologically suffocating perfectionism on the other. We will look at each part of the problem in turn.

The chronic pursuit of expertise—a high level of skill or knowledge in a particular area—is bad in Walrond’s view because it is pregnant with capitalist meaning and driven by perfectionist motivations. Or if “bad” is too strong, then at least “undesirable.” Is this always the case? Well… almost always. An exception? *Being an intentional amateur*. The very act of defining amateurism with criteria by which it is best accomplished invites the possibility of becoming an *expert* amateur. And the invitation is not left implied: She wants you to master this! She wrote a whole book on it! But if one is an expert, then, by definition, one is no longer an amateur. Amateurism, then, is defeated by the expertise it seeks to displace.

Reducing the human to no more than a producer is one outcome of expertise, we are warned. To say it another way, our human nature is put in service to outcomes. By taking up intentional amateurism and avoiding expertise, by engaging in practices simply for the love of doing them, do we thereby avoid becoming factories with feet?

Perhaps in a material or economic sense, sure, but there is an invisible outcome towards which Walrond points us from the beginning and it lies beyond the practices themselves: self-care, self-actualization, transcendence. These are not mere byproducts; they are the goal. By definition, then, one does not do these practices simply for the love of doing them (even if one happens to love doing them!). Rather, people instrumentalize the practices in order to produce some other desired end. So then, amateurism as an antidote for production doesn’t have legs.

Expertise has a mutually reinforcing relationship with perfectionism. Walrond quotes researcher Brené Brown who writes, “Perfectionism is the belief that if we live perfect, look perfect, and act perfect, we can minimize or avoid the pain of blame, judgment, and shame.” Blame, judgment, and shame all imply a social ecology in which what one does is viewed by others. The fuel of perfectionism is appearance.

Curiously, Walrond introduces a minor theme early in the text worth noting: “how to be interesting.” Whether she means to or not, she has replaced one kind of appearance with another; she has swapped perfection with interest, both of which depend on the value judgment of others. “Being interesting” is just “being perfect” by another name, and the pressure of “being perceived as” has not been removed. Amateurism once again fails to solve the core problem, and rather shows itself to be part of it.

Some of my other issues include: her squishy use of “spirituality” which is always in reference to therapeutic or psychological ideas; calling the enterprise “spiritual” but then putting distance between the practitioner and the “mystical or woo-woo”; calling God “She”; using Jesus’ Name as a phrase of exasperation; her desire to “lift the soul” but a failure to say to where or to whom it is being lifted; and her desire to “transform \[hobbies\] from being responsibilities that *require our attention*, to activities that energize us,” yet, paradoxically, speaking positively of paying attention at multiple points.

Despite Walrond’s longing to transcend beyond the forces that flatten us—a good and worthy goal—she can’t seem to escape the immanent frame. She sees the value in doing something for its own sake yet cannot help but instrumentalize it. Why?

## **Escaping Total Work**

In his essay *Leisure: The Basis of Culture*, Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper asks with annoyance, “Is there a sphere of human activity, one might even say of human existence, that does not need to be justified by inclusion in a five-year plan and its technical organization?” Walrond and Pieper share many of the same concerns (which we might collectively label “dehumanization”) and perhaps a starting point (that humans are defined by their productive activity) in common. Pieper would recognize in Walrond’s book a reaction to the very thing that repulsed him, what he calls “total work.” Total work is a “vast utilitarian process in which our needs are satisfied, and…tied to such an extent that the life of the working man is wholly consumed by it.”

Total work reduces our human existence, and therefore all our activity, to the useful, the productive, or what Byung-Chul Han, in his *Vita Contemplativa*, has likewise called the “in-order-to.” It’s not that work is wrong or bad. Quite the opposite! But there is more to our humanity than what we produce to supply common need. Hunting for food, for example, is different from an English country dance; the end of hunting is beyond itself, but the end of dancing is in itself. Hunting is useful; dancing is useless. Both are truly human. Total work logic expands the domain of use to cover that of the useless, thereby subjugating it to use. Leisure is bound within activity. Rest becomes impossible because even rest is a sort of work, and ultimately answers to it.

It seems to me that Walrond has been captured unawares by total work logic, resting “in order to,” which makes her ultimate aim unattainable. She intuits many of the right things but does not have a worldview that allows them to fruitfully cohere. In fact, Pieper predicted this impossibility when he asked whether Humanism is up to the task of combatting total work, concluding that no, it was not. Why? Because it is not rooted in *divine worship*. “Cut off from the worship of the divine, leisure becomes laziness and work inhuman.”

Walrond is anxious to avoid the accusation of laziness (when understood as “unproductive”) and the inhumanity of work, and sees dabbling as the means, aimed at self-care. And yet this is precisely why it won’t work: It binds rest iron-clad to the world of activity, impenetrable by the transcendent, whereas leisure instead comes as a gift from the divinity she gestures towards but never names—the God who made Sabbath for man and celebrates it with him.

A true amateur must first be a lover of God. From that well-ordered love alone can the brilliance of amateurism begin to shine forth.
### Marilynne Robinson's Simple Wisdom
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/marilynne-robinsons-simple-wisdom/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:31:20.000Z
We are bombarded each day with the world’s seemingly intractable problems and with differing guidance on how we should respond to those problems. According to some, the world’s complex problems should be left to those with complex answers. According to others, we need to spend less time mucking about in nuance and instead identify the clear rights and wrongs contributing to the world’s problems. Marilynne Robinson’s *Gilead* provides a path between these incomplete solutions for addressing the world’s problems.

The book is not short on complex problems. The narrator, Pastor John Ames, confronts intellectual and societal problems throughout the book—mostly encountered through his prodigal godson Jack—including racism, pacifism, predestination, providence, and apostasy. By his own estimation, through weekly sermons delivered to his local congregation, John Ames had written roughly as much as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in addressing these issues. From all appearances, complex problems require complex solutions.

At another level, the book is about small acts. Delivering meals, sitting on a porch talking with friends (and enemies), and the laying on of hands all take on eternal significance.

One of the core themes of *Gilead* is that when Christian are confronted with complex problems, those problems require simple acts.

We live in an age of complex problems. The background noise of our lives thrums with a dull drone of intractable legal, economic, social, and technological problems. Polarization, isolation, globalization, exploitation and the like are our daily bread.

Scrolling through news sites would lead one to believe that there are only two prescriptions for such complex problems.

## The Problem with Complex Solutions

***First***, some tell us that the problems are so complex that they can only be addressed by complex solutions. On this telling, only experts are equipped to handle complex problems and the rest of us either need to get on board or get out of the way. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn noted in his [Nobel lecture from 1970](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1970/solzhenitsyn/lecture/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), “\[i\]t would seem that the appearance of the contemporary world rests solely in the hands of the scientists; all mankind’s technical steps are determined by them.”

What form do these complex solutions actually take? It might mean that we need experts to try to get more data about the problem. For many, there are few problems that a well-organized spreadsheet can’t solve. Or it may mean that we need experts who try to regulate the problem away—coming up with complex governance schemes to get humans to act (or not act) in a preferred way. Or perhaps we need experts to come up with new technology to solve the problem. And when all of those strategies fall short, we need experts who can litigate the complex problems away. If we can’t agree on a solution to a problem, we can at least find a way to send it to the courts.

My own experience suggests such complex solutions are often incomplete. I am a lawyer. I practice one of the professions that helps solve complex problems. But while I am equipped with a technical vocabulary and a procedural toolkit to help navigate their problems, my work can—at best—provide incomplete solutions. I can help create temporary (state-enforced) peace, but I can’t actually solve the problem for both parties. The other “expert” professions may face similar struggles in being unable to craft complete solutions. Scientists may be able to develop a technology that simplifies or eases lives.

But, even if people are willing to adopt the solution (which is not a given), those solutions themselves may have unintended consequences—creating new complex problems. Life prolonging medicines can increase the quality of life for many humans. But they can create real difficulties for society, from the depletion of Social Security to the allure of euthanasia when someone’s life is judged to be “not worth living.” Complex problems may require complex solutions, but complex solutions often beget new complex problems. As Wendell Berry has [aptly summarized](https://eighthdayinstitute.org/the-joy-of-sales-resistance?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), “The smartest and most educated people are the scientists, for they have already found solutions to all our problems and will soon find solutions to all the problems resulting from their solutions to all the problems we used to have.”

In addition, my experience suggests that the “expert” professions that provide complex solutions to complex problems are not simply altruistic problem solvers. Again, take my profession of lawyering. The profession as a whole benefits from complexity. Lawyers rely on people having intractable problems that they cannot solve themselves. We have professionalized legal complexity (and often charge a high hourly rate for that service). We may help you solve one problem while, at the same time, identifying ten more problems. Unfortunately, lawyers are far from alone in benefiting from the increased complexity of problems. The incentives of the various “expert” industries are not always aligned with simply solving the problem.

To be sure, complex problems do often call for complex solutions. It is worthwhile to gather data to understand trends about our consumption patterns and our maladies, about our immigration policies and our economic well being, about our investment in foreign conflicts and loss of life, and about our use of technology and our loneliness. It is worthwhile to try out policies in an attempt to solve the social problems we face. The development of new technologies can better our lives. And, yes, there are even instances when it is helpful to have lawyers and courts step into the gap of apparently irresolvable problems.

The problem comes when we completely outsource concern about the world’s complex problems to experts to come up with the solution. We do damage to ourselves and our neighbors when we abdicate responsibility for society’s problems to the “experts.” Such abdication can quickly lead to apathy (the problems are simply beyond me), naivety (I don’t need to try to understand this because someone else will), or paranoia (if I don’t understand or trust the solutions, perhaps I’m being manipulated by the experts).

In short, yes, complex problems require complex solutions, but we should not use that complexity as an excuse to simply step away from the problems.

## The Problem with Simple Answers

***Second***, others claim that complex problems actually have simple answers. Rather than telling us that experts need to save us, we are told that the complexity is a lie and the real solution is to just find easy labels for the world around us. On this account, there are white hats and black hats; good guys and bad guys. Getting too bogged down in all the shades of gray renders you complicit in the wrongdoing of the “other side.”

The impulse here is understandable. Particularly in times where there are as many opinions as there are facts about any given situation, we need heuristics to operate by. No one of us can thoughtfully assess every controversy in the news. I can no more be an expert on South American economic policy, Middle East foreign policy, as well as the domestic policy debates on immigration, artificial intelligence regulation, and childhood vaccines, than I can track all of the surnames in a Russian novel.

Confronted with so much information about so many issues, it is no surprise that we are inclined to find mental shortcuts to help us make quick judgments in the face of complexity. We can simplify and sort each new controversy based on preconceptions, tribal affiliations, or our preferred new source.

The reality is, each of us does this. None of us can take in and understand all of the information presented to us about all the problems we are confronted with in our daily lives. We, implicitly or explicitly, identify others that we trust to help us process the world’s complexity. To not use such heuristics is not an option. Either it would leave us either hopelessly overwhelmed by trying to analyze each problem from first principles or so adrift that we would have to disengage from the world’s problems altogether.

The real issue arises when we do not acknowledge the complexity of the problems around us; the party line simply becomes orthodoxy. We have fallen prey to a concern expressed by Solzhenitsyn in that same Nobel lecture, that “\[t\]he primeval refusal to accept a compromise has been turned into a theoretical principle and is considered the virtue of orthodoxy.” If we become so entrenched within our tribes, our positions, and our shortcuts that we mentally swipe left or right on each newly encountered problem, we have lost the battle. Over-emphasizing the need for complex solutions can cause us to distance ourselves from the world’s problems, but over-emphasizing the need for simple answers ends up doing the same thing.

What then? The path through complex problems does not run through complex solutions or simple answers. Instead, the path through is often inglorious: complex problems must be addressed through simple acts.

## The Necessity of Simple Acts

What do I mean by a simple act? I mean an act taken with no expectation that the act will solve the problem in its entirety. I will cite just a few examples from the lives around me:

- Picking up elderly congregants to bring them to church.
- Delivering meals to families that have just added members and to those who have just lost them.
- Sitting up late with a friend who is struggling.
- Picking up the phone to put a human voice to a complicated legal situation.

Such small acts will not “solve” polarization, climate change, the loneliness epidemic, the demographic cliff, Social Security, or any number of society’s other complex problems. But performing small acts isn’t just spitting into the wind. In performing these small acts in the context of communities, we create a tapestry that strengthens our ties to one another while we work out the hard problems together over the long haul. This is liturgy—the work of the people.

Indeed, simple acts do something more profound than changing the world. They change us. They serve as a medicine to our ills. They restore agency that complex solutions take away. And they reintroduce nuance that has been stripped away from complex situations by simple answers.

Small acts can make us the kind of people who recognize (and appreciate) complex problems and solutions when they come, yet live with conviction and humility in the face of it all.

*Gilead* does not end with solutions to the complex problems that plagued John Ames throughout his life. He does not reach any resolution about predestination and whether his best friend’s son can be saved. He does not find a satisfactory answer for why, in God’s providence, his first wife and child were allowed to prematurely die.

Nor does *Gilead* end with simple answers. John Ames doesn’t label his prodigal godson as an irredeemable sinner or as a misunderstood saint. He doesn’t label his parochial Iowa home as the best of a fading American dream or as a social and intellectual backwater. He doesn’t reject the God who allowed tragedy to strike or paper over the pain felt from those tragedies to save God from the world’s difficulties.

*Gilead*, instead, ends with a simple act. As his prodigal godson Jack prepares to leave town, John Ames lays a hand on him and blesses him. This act does not solve his or Jack’s existential problems. This act does not solve the societal problems on the horizon for his soon to be widowed wife and fatherless son. But all the same, John Ames concludes that “it was an honor to bless him” and that he would “have gone through seminary and ordination and all the years intervening for that one moment.”

A simple act in the face of complex problem—the only path forward.
### Keeping Kids Christian with Cameron Shaffer
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/keeping-kids-christian-with-cameron-shaffer/
Last updated: 2026-05-21T18:32:21.000Z
_No content available._
### Why Evangelical Gender Discourse Is Unserious
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-evangelical-gender-discourse-is-unserious/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:31:23.000Z
The release of Preston Sprinkle’s new book *From Genesis to Junia* has, I think, broken something in me. I’m tired of complementarians protecting harmful systems and abusive leaders. I am also tired of egalitarian abuse survivor advocates preaching to the choir, and I’m tired of gate-keeping and double-standards on both sides.

Whether it is complementarian websites releasing one more boiler-plate complementarian [review](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/from-genesis-junia/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of an egalitarian scholar’s work, or prominent egalitarian voices subjecting anyone who speaks out to purity tests or [casual sexism](https://www.instagram.com/p/DVcVp4EjiYv/?img%5Findex=1&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), I find myself deeply convinced that the entire evangelical discourse about these issues is hopelessly broken.

Why should I write about it? Because I have my experiences with *both* communities to give me insight into their distortions. I have the receipts—literally. EMDR therapy receipts from the spiritual abuse I experienced when I advocated for change and repair in a complementarian context, and the internet record of being on the receiving end of a pile-on led by prominent voices in the abuse survivor advocacy movement when [my praise for *Jesus & John Wayne*](https://mereorthodoxy.com/accusations-arent-evidence-responding-jesus-john-wayne) was not whole-hearted enough. I have been through the wringer of recovery for the last five years, and there is plenty of blame to go around.

Over the past five years I have watched as the conversation has continued, and I’m convinced that the situation has not improved in part because so many of those invested in it publicly work from a place of anxiety and fear. The tragedy is that this leaves many women unsupported as they work out their vocational callings because leaders seem unable to give the aid and guidance that requires calm and deliberation.

Why are they anxious? Because both have dramatically escalated the stakes of the debate: For complementarians, the debate about this issue has become a proxy for one’s relationship to orthodoxy. To deviate from “complementarianism” is regarded as drifting from the Christian faith itself. Similarly, egalitarians, in many cases, use devotion to egalitarianism as a proxy for one’s commitment to justice.

The outcome of these twin errors is that the question becomes either “do you agree with us or are you on the road to apostasy?” or “do you agree with us or are you a bigot?” And who is left behind by these framings? The many women in pews who simply are trying to follow Jesus faithfully in the reality of their daily life and are instead finding that the complementarians don’t know how to help or support them (or do not want to) and the egalitarians only want activists who reliably repeat the party line.

The benefit of all of this is that I see things like the response to Sprinkle’s new book from two perspectives—and do you know what seeing from two perspectives gives you? Depth perception. My hope is that my situation can be a benefit to all of us who are impacted by this issue.

My experiences in complementarian spaces are well documented. I was an employee at Bethlehem College & Seminary for six years—the “unnamed former employee” that *Christianity Today* [referenced](https://www.christianitytoday.com/2021/08/bethlehem-bcs-minneapolis-resign-meyer-empathy-rigney/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in their reporting on the claims of spiritual abuse at the church, and attended Bethlehem Baptist for fifteen years. I do not call myself a complementarian (neither do I call myself an egalitarian).

In my own personal study I have recently revisited the arguments made by prominent complementarian scholars. What I have found is that their own arguments almost certainly lead them into heretical claims about the doctrine of God.

Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware, for example, have each argued at length that the Father and Son exist in *eternal* relationships of authority and submission, such that the Father can will one thing, the Son could will another, and when the two are in conflict the Father’s will wins. Grudem made this argument in his bestselling *Systematic Theology* while Ware made similar claims in a 2006 Evangelical Theological Society lecture and in his 2005 book, *Father, Son, & Holy Spirit: Relationships, Roles, and Relevance.* Ware has gone so far as to suggest that the Father is capable of acting “unilaterally” apart from the Son and Spirit. It is hard to see how such claims avoid ending up in some form of tritheism, which the church has always rejected. To hear self-anointed guardians of orthodoxy departing from the church’s teachings on something as core to the faith as the doctrine of God is striking.

This point is especially infuriating when one recognizes that Ware and Grudem make this argument in order to anchor relationships of headship and submission within marriage in the eternal relationship of headship and submission that they claim exists within the Trinity. But if that is not actually what the church has confessed for nearly 2000 years in its teachings on the Trinity, then Ware and Grudem not only are rejecting the historic teaching of theologians like Augustine and Athanasius, but also they’ve built their teachings on gender relations on unorthodox foundations. The complementarianism of Ware and Grudem, at least, rises and falls with a view of God that is probably heretical, if one accepts historic Christian teachings about God. I find this sort of scholarship not just incredibly hard to defend, but offensive.

On the other hand, it has been bewildering to see the response to *From Genesis to Junia* in egalitarian advocacy spaces. Many social media posts have been quick to put Sprinkle in his place: “Why read a man, when there are women to read?” [Some](https://substack.com/@baremarriage/p-190823915?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) insinuate that his acknowledging his privilege as he comes to the argument is actually a statement about his opinions about the reliability of the women who engage in the discussion. Others are more generous, welcoming his theological shift but critiquing his sources and asking that he perform penance to repair the damage he caused by holding different convictions previously. I sympathize with several of these responses—women’s scholarship *is* often overlooked, and a change of mind *ought* to be accompanied with action. But even so, I find these responses frustrating and unsatisfying.

Several years ago, in the midst of my church life falling apart, I wrote a review of *Jesus & John Wayne* that praised the book’s thesis but raised some issues with methodology. In fact, my review was quite similar to some of the reviews of Sprinkle’s book. But, in contrast to the response to *these* reviews, people in those same communities piled on—swarming my Twitter account (that had maybe 50 followers at the time, compared to their thousands) with anger and dismissal.

The hoard was led by the very people I had looked up to as I walked through fire at Bethlehem. I was not out of the flames yet when they turned on me, and it felt like they had doused my already burning body with lighter fluid. What was most startling was the way that their responses mirrored the abuse I was experiencing at church. It was institutional protectionism. I was told by one prominent scholar that, given my experience with spiritual abuse, I should have kept my critiques to myself because they would lessen the reach and impact of *Jesus & John Wayne*. This sounded, to my ears, *exactly* like what I had been told of my criticisms of Bethlehem. Now, seeing the responses to Sprinkle, it seems like it only really matters *who* makes the critique and which side of the debate they are perceived to be on.

Here is where this is particularly complex for me: Just as I have been hurt in both spaces, I have also benefitted from them. So much of what I learned at Bethlehem helped me cling to my faith when its leadership turned on me and my friends. Likewise, so much of what these advocates teach helped me, even when *they* turned on me.

Despite the alienation I have felt from both sides in recent years, I do not think I am altogether alone. I believe that there are likely many of us who do not fit neatly into either category—struggling with the sexism or even abuse in complementarian circles *as well as* the hostility and suspicion in egalitarian spaces. We have been left on our own to sort through these issues while walking on eggshells *everywhere*. The stakes are high for us, as well, because the only thing worse than being rejected and abused by one group is being rejected and abused by two.

So, today I am wondering: Can we do better? Can we have conversations about gender, vocation, and the life of the church without it being beset by suspicion, anxiety, and anger? I really hope so. And while I lack the knowledge or planning or creativity to propose a complete solution to all the problems, I do have ideas for how to improve the conversation about women and the life of the church.

First, there seems to be a general lack of self-awareness in how people in this discussion fall into the same patterns as the people with the viewpoints they oppose.

- Are there things that *you* have done that you need to account for? Are there errors you have made in your strategy, in your scholarship, in your tone, or in your online presence that you need to correct, apologize for, or make right?
- Are you actually *considering* what others have to say, or are you making assumptions about their argument on the basis of your own past experience or, perhaps, your misreading of their claim?
- Have you made enemies of friends by being too quick to speak? Are you allowing people time to change before questioning their genuineness? Are you assuming authority that is not yours to take by using your platform to set standards for acceptance and conformity? Are you considering the impact of your words on the people you are critiquing? Are you requiring the same sort of restoration for harm done for yourself that you ask of others?
- How tolerant of disagreement are you within your own movement? Do you have enough humility to let others disagree with you without feeling the need to set yourself apart over small points of difference? Can you disagree well?

Secondly, I would encourage all of us to let go of some of our desire to control. When we believe we can actually change others if we just make the right argument or say the right thing we end up condemning ourselves to an endless quest for the *right* strategy to win over our neighbor. One of the lessons I learned through my experiences at Bethlehem was that nothing I could say would change people’s minds or hearts. There was no proof that was convincing enough, there was no tone that was winsome enough, and there was no argument that would, ultimately, make a difference. To use familiar language, I could plant the seeds, but it was God who would make them grow.

Both sides of this conversation seem to suffer from an anxiety about the urgency and importance of this issue. The issue is urgent, of course, but it is wrong for one side to act as if disagreement with them is tantamount to heresy (especially when one considers how their own theology differs from historic Christianity!) and for the other to act as if the only way one could disagree with them is by being a bigot.

I do not think the way we act when we operate out of fear or woundedness leads to health for either ourselves *or* the people we would hope to correct or persuade. So practically, I think this is something that can help our conversations about gender in evangelicalism. Perhaps coming at the conversation from a place of rest and confidence in God’s work would help us stop beating each other over the head with our words. We can only do what we can do, and if people do not respond as we would wish, well—that’s not our problem. There is peace to be had if we can only hold on to that truth.

Finally, I want to share [this](https://italoamericano.org/francis-of-assisi-the-hard-work-of-peace/?fbclid=IwY2xjawQr7RVleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEedL7L42-QQYZBIONkrEElq7HXo01tLl5J92QG4ueVgH-GHthrNXTolR%5FOzhE%5Faem%5F6aaH2K7w4J-avZi9imjy9A&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) beautiful reflection on the legacy of St. Francis of Assisi—I think it has something to offer us here. The author focuses on the peace that St. Francis is known for. She says, “His life was not a mood, and certainly not a slogan. It was a discipline: chosen, trained, and sometimes costly…”

She continues,

> He dismantled his life. What made him secure went first, then what made him respectable. And last, what made him powerful. He did not replace those structures with better ones, he just kept walking without them. And this is precisely when his ‘peace’ was born: not as a temperament, not as softness, but as subtraction, because something remained once he stopped defending himself at every turn…He learned not to react automatically to insult, to threat, and perhaps most importantly, to fear. He did not answer humiliation with humiliation. He did not turn fear into aggression. He did not pretend the world was harmless, but he refused to copy it.

This is what I want for us. In this conversation—a conversation that *must* be had—can we reject power broking and believe instead that we can organize our conversation “around something other than fear” and prove that “gentleness is not weakness when it is chosen, trained, and defended by discipline”? Can we do that, even when others do not? I want to be like St. Francis. Would you join me in the effort?
### Attending to 'Paradise Lost'
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/attending-to-paradise-lost/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:31:26.000Z
Alan Jacobs. *Paradise Lost: A Biography*. Princeton University Press, 2025\. $24.95\. 224 pp.

In 1667, the poet John Milton published *Paradise Lost*, an epic poem about the fall of man. Milton’s dogmatic emphases in this poem “helped make him one of the most despised writers in history, and *Paradise Lost* one of the most despised poems, though also one of the most admired,” reflects Alan Jacobs in his new volume, part of the Princeton University Press series, Lives of Great Religious Books. Jacobs makes it his task to understand these radically opposing reactions.

Jacobs was a good choice to write this volume. He is, first, a careful and experienced reader of the poem, which he has taught many times. But second, he is not a Milton specialist. This is an advantage for this project since he writes as a generalist and for a general literate audience. Finally, as he explains, his feelings for Milton and the poem are mixed; the benefit is that this “biography,” though it appreciates the excellences of *Paradise Lost*, never declines into hagiography.

Jacobs begins, properly, by questioning whether *Paradise Lost* ought to be regarded as a great religious book. Distinguishing between a “*functional* definition of religion” and a “*dogmatic* definition,” he acknowledges (along with C. S. Lewis) that *Paradise Lost* is not functional, not devotionally enriching in the way that, for example, George Herbert’s poetry has been for many readers. Milton’s poem fits, rather, under the dogmatic definition of religion, since “in it Milton is passionately concerned to identify certain central beliefs of the Christian faith.”

Readers’ perceptions of Milton the man have frequently influenced their reception of *Paradise Lost* (and vice versa), a fact that justifies Jacobs’s survey of Milton’s life in his first chapter. Milton knew that he wanted to write an epic early in his career as a poet. Why was this poetic ambition delayed? Jacobs surveys the circumstances of Milton’s early life in London and then Cambridge, explaining that “*his* concerns were not economic, or even, at first, strictly political. He was a learned man, one inclined first to the service of poetry and second to the service of the church.” Although his family expected that he eventually would take orders in the Church of England, by the time he had completed the necessary training, he found himself conscience-bound to resist Archbishop William Laud’s emphases on liturgical ceremonialism and clerical hierarchy. He felt compelled, in political as well as ecclesial respects, to “the defense of liberty.”

In his second chapter Jacobs provides an overview of the poem, but only after dealing with two preliminary considerations. The first few pages of the chapter sketch the significance of documents collected in the Trinity manuscript. These include drafts of poems and Milton’s ideas for writing a biblical epic in English. By means of a few references to the manuscript, Jacobs establishes that Milton had been planning his epic for a long time and that the poem he finally wrote turned out to be different from what he had initially planned. Jacobs also considers briefly how best to characterize Milton’s beliefs, concluding (rightly, I think) that Milton cannot be adequately characterized as a Quaker or a Puritan or a Calvinist. He walked his own path. Along the way, Jacobs mentions the heterodox *De Doctrina Christiana*, which he accepts as Milton’s own, but decides not to “attempt to use” it “to elucidate the theology of *Paradise Lost*,” since “The poem is its own project of theological inquiry and should be allowed to speak for itself.”

The rest of chapter two reviews the poem, foregrounding “three major themes…that would dominate the post-Milton future: government, sexual politics, and theology proper.” This selection, Jacobs is careful to remind us, produces a “simplified and distorted account, distorted to reflect the future life of the poem.” Given his purposes, he presents “the poem as a series of musical movements.” Books I-III lay out the governing concern of the poem: “the ways of God require justification” because “when God the Father could have destroyed Satan and the other rebel angels, he chose not to, and instead allowed Satan to come to this newly created earth” to tempt Adam and Eve. Jacobs comments that “it would be hard to deny that such behavior requires justification. But this is a nettle Milton boldly grasps.”

Books IV-VIII introduce the beauty of the created order, including Adam and Eve, and Raphael warns them concerning their enemy. Book IX provides controversial backstory for the temptation and fall as well as describing the fall itself; Jacobs is most expansive here, introducing additional details from Milton’s life as context for his representation of Eve (a lightning-rod drawing critical dispute almost since the poem’s first publication). The final books of the poem (X-XII) deal with the aftereffects of the fall, including especially anticipations of God’s gracious response to human sin in the future sending of the Son.

The book’s remaining chapters offer a highly selective—but judicious and illuminating—series of episodes in the reception of the poem. Chapter three traces responses to the poem in its first hundred years. After the restoration of the monarchy, John Dryden (who had worked with Milton for a time in Cromwell’s government) sought Milton’s permission to develop “a dramatic adaptation of *Paradise Lost* in heroic couplets.” Jacobs wonders whether Dryden’s adaptation ought to be regarded as praising Milton or correcting him. Elsewhere Dryden is the first to suggest that Milton’s poem represents Satan heroically, but he also compares Milton’s greatness with the greatness of Homer and Virgil.

A generation after Dryden, Joseph Addison praised the excellence of *Paradise Lost* while rejecting Milton’s polemics in support of regicide. Addison recognizes that neither Adam nor Satan is the hero of the poem; as Jacobs explains, “in Milton’s poem Messiah is the protagonist, Satan the antagonist, and Adam and Eve the field of battle.” Samuel Johnson disliked Milton as a man but praised Milton’s poem. In contrast with Addison, for whom Milton’s treatment of Adam and Eve made the poem humanly interesting, Johnson thought the uniqueness of their unfallen condition a barrier to understanding for ordinary sinners like the rest of us. At the end of the poem’s first century, William Cowper reverenced Milton’s stature as a poet.

Jacobs tells the story of Milton’s fortunes among the Romantics in chapter four. Blake’s *Milton* imagines a “Purgatorial correction…directed at Milton’s perverted theology and his cruelty to the women in his life.” In Blake’s imagination, Milton would now recognize that his poem made an idol of God by patterning God on earthly kings. Most famously, Blake claimed that “Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Variations on this claim shape the responses of other Romantic writers, particularly “four members of the most extraordinary English family of that era: the Godwins and the Shelleys.” Mary Wollstonecraft attacks Milton’s representation of Eve. Though she admires “Milton’s pleasing picture of paradisaical happiness” (her words), she is more impressed by the sublimity of Milton’s Satan. William Godwin “follows Dryden in naming Satan as the hero of *Paradise Lost.*” Percy Shelley compared his hero Prometheus with Milton’s Satan, and Mary Shelley’s *Frankenstein* represents Victor Frankenstein as a creator who has abandoned his creation—implying, by means of her allusions to *Paradise Lost*, that God similarly abandoned Adam and Eve.

The opening pages of chapter five survey responses to Milton during the Victorian period. Several of these are entertaining (such as Mark Twain’s assertion that “it meets \[the\] definition of a classic—something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read”), but in Jacobs’s assessment, “Generally speaking, the Victorian era proved to be one that domesticated or marginalized *Paradise Lost.*” By the beginning of the twentieth century, the poem had become canonical, admired (by Virginia Woolf, for example) as impressive poetry, but somewhat baffling for secular readers because of its serious treatment of religious belief. “So far,” Jacobs says after mentioning comments by Woolf and J. Middleton Murray and Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, “the twentieth-century responses to *Paradise Lost* are what one might expect of responses to assured classics: a chorus of respect interspersed with arias of protest. But in the middle third of the twentieth century a greater debate about Milton began.” This “greater debate” moves beyond considering the merits or demerits of Milton’s poetry to consider his belief.

The greater debate begins with Charles Williams, a relative outsider to the academic orthodoxy and a close friend of C. S. Lewis. In an introduction to Milton’s poetry, “Williams took the contemporary questions about the qualities of Milton’s verse as an opportunity to affirm his wholehearted agreement with Milton’s theology; and in so doing, he set the readerly cat among the scholarly pigeons.” Lewis’s landmark *Preface to Paradise Lost* followed Williams, insisting on taking seriously Milton’s Christianity. In *Preface* Lewis thus combines literary criticism with theological apologetics. In *Milton’s God* William Empson accepts Lewis’s claim that Milton’s theology matters, but on Empson’s reading the tensions in *Paradise Lost* expose the moral inadequacies of Christian orthodoxy.

The third great landmark in this controversy is Stanley Fish’s book *Surprised by Sin*, “a witty and brilliant attempt to explain, and to transcend, the argument between Lewis and Empson by declaring that both were right—and wrong.” Fish insists that the moral ambiguities of *Paradise Lost* function as traps for the reader, effectively tempting the reader into faulty responses to Satan and sin in order to then correct the reader’s understanding. Milton’s poem requires a choice between “absolute faith and equally absolute unbelief, neither of which we ever want to accept *as* absolute.”

Jacobs’s final chapter traces echoes of *Paradise Lost* in popular culture. Several of these are intriguing: allusions in films, in novels, and in video games, as well as adaptations and translations. (I’ve added to my reading list Christopher Fry’s libretto for Krzysztof Penderecki’s operatic adaptation of *Paradise Lost*.) Perhaps the most interesting portion of this chapter is an account of Philip Pullman’s *His Dark Materials*. Like Blake, Pullman regards Satan as heroically defiant; like Empson, Pullman despises Christianity. Jacobs is fair but clear: “*His Dark Materials* is not a wholly successful work—the first book is utterly brilliant, but the subsequent volumes succumb to didacticism and a Manichaean sensibility” (Jacobs does not mention Pullman’s particular antipathy for Lewis). Jacobs rightly recognizes that Pullman’s description of Christianity “is cringe-inducingly simplistic.” In an “Afterword,” however, Jacobs agrees with Pullman’s sense that *Paradise Lost* “will not go away.”

Jacobs’s biography of *Paradise Lost* will not shift the focus of Milton studies, though it might remind Milton specialists why they were attracted to Milton to begin with. For general readers, the book is an accessible, thought-provoking review of key moments from the history of the epic’s reception. Jacobs makes rich use of well-chosen anecdotal material (don’t neglect his footnotes), framed by his own clear prose.

In his conclusion, Jacobs quotes Milton to invite readers to “give \[it\] due audience, and attend” this poem. I second this invitation—and add to it my commendation of Jacobs’s own book.
### The State of the Internet: 2026
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-state-of-the-internet-2026/
Last updated: 2026-07-01T14:37:54.000Z
The year is 1943, and change is in the air. After years of enduring a seemingly unstoppable Blitzkrieg, the message of British leaders was beginning to take a different tune. Victory–total, inevitable, unmistakable victory against Germany and the Axis powers–was right around the corner. The war was still raging at full force, with the battles of Normandy, the Bulge, and Berlin yet on the horizon, but an Allied victory over Germany was now a question of *when*, not *if*, and the tone and tenor of British leadership and civic life began to adjust accordingly. Life beyond the war was no longer something to wistfully long for in a bomb shelter; it was something already, but not yet fully, here.

The year is 2025, and towards the end of the year, change entered the air. After three years of breathless proclamations by AI advocates about how AI will radically reshape the world, *something* seems to have given way. What exactly that *something* is, whether it is one *something* or many, or even if there is *something* there at all, is hotly debated–but the tone and tenor has adjusted, just as in 1943, as has the *scope* of the proclamations and expectations. Whatever this *something* is, it is not just concerned with AI, but with the Internet as a whole. A tipping point has been reached, and the fallout is only a matter of time.

But unlike 1943, the fallout of 2025 remains uncertain. The Allies saw their expectations for victory realized on May 8, 1945 with the unconditional surrender of the German army. The expectations for 2025 and beyond remain nebulous. The radical claims of AI advocates remain yet to be seen, but a more modest claim–that the Internet is undergoing a substantial transformation because of AI–is harder to refute. And if this claim is true, it inevitably means aftershocks of change will follow from the epicenter. The Internet as we have taken for granted for the past thirty years is fading away, and it is a question of *when*, not *if*, this becomes undeniable.

The challenge before us is not unlike what Alan Jacobs describes in his introduction to *The Year of Our Lord 1943*. Following the defeat of Germany and the Axis powers:

> There would be much remaking and reshaping to do: who would do it, and what principles would govern them? Such thoughts were on the minds of many, and some of the more ambitious and provocative ideas emerged from a small group of Christian intellectuals. This was a time—it seems so long ago now, a very different age, and one that is unlikely to return—when prominent Christian thinkers in the West believed that they had a responsibility to set a direction not just for churches but for the whole of society. And, stranger still, in that time, many of their fellow citizens were willing to grant them that authority—or at least to listen when they asserted it. (pg. xi)

Indeed, that time is not returning any time soon. Neither the technology nor the cultural milieu afford us the conditions C. S. Lewis, T. S. Elliot, Simone Weil, and the other thinkers Jacobs surveys were working under. And yet the need for Christian thinkers to speak to the remaking and reshaping yet to be seen, to those most likely to do it and the principles that govern them, is just as urgent. A window of change affords Christian thinkers to be proactive, rather than reactive, in setting direction for Christians on how to make sense of the changes yet to come, even if their final shape remains to be seen.

To do this, we need categories to help us make sense of the past state of the Internet that can help us anticipate the future state of the Internet to come. These categories need to be simple enough to clearly organize and summarize a tremendous amount of information, and durable enough that they can be used for years to come to track these changes over time.

For this inaugural State of the Internet report for Mere Orthodoxy, I am going to introduce the categories of Event, Empire, and Epoch as I've developed them over the past several years in my own Digital Babylon framework.

In order to not overcomplicate a report that is already long and dense, I will save the background of my framework–which I've described as "the climax of the Old Testament meets Neil Postman's *Technopoly”*–for elsewhere, borrowing only what is necessary for making this report possible (see my [original outline](https://substack.com/@digitalbabylon/p-48475454?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and [hermeneutic sketch](https://substack.com/@digitalbabylon/p-101639586?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of the framework for more).

However, my hope with this report is to engender a similar response that I hope with my framework. “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction,” the Apostle Paul writes in Romans, “that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” And for whatever changes a changing Internet brings to a society intimately dependent on the Internet and all it makes possible, the hope of Christians–in the face of how a changing Internet changes ministry, family life, civic life, and more–is one thing that ought never change.

## **Event: 2025 Was a Turning Point for the Internet**

Digital Babylon refers to two things:

- First, the rapid and meteoric rise of immensely powerful tech, media, and telecommunications companies
- Second, the moment society reached the point of no return relative to the world that existed previously

Like the Babylon of the 6th century BC, Digital Babylon emerged over time, transforming the world gradually yet radically. One can think of the release of the iPhone in 2007, the launch of the first true Facebook smartphone app in 2012 (replacing the slower, clunkier HTML version that released in 2008), the debut of TikTok in 2019, and most recently, the release of ChatGPT in 2022.

While it was not immediately obvious at the time, these events fundamentally changed the world in ways we are still trying to come to terms with. As with the destruction of the walls of Jerusalem at the hands of Babylon in 587 BC, we cannot rewind the world back to a pre-smartphone, pre-social media, pre-LLM state.

When I speak of events within this framework, then, I am speaking of those specific moments in the story where some decisive next step was taken in the entrenchment of Digital Babylon.

2025 we saw the latest such event as the infrastructure of the Internet began to shift in unprecedented ways. By "infrastructure", I am referring to both the physical and technical components that make the Internet work as well as the services running atop all those servers, fiber optic cables, and routers that we more colloquially refer to as "the Internet", which used to go by the name "World Wide Web."

While I acknowledge some overlap, I will distinguish "infrastructure" from "content." The latter refers to the propositional information communicated via the Internet in text, images, video, audio, and peer-to-peer media; this is what "media literacy" most often refers to. The former refers to the necessary scaffolding that makes the hosting, accessing, creating, and sharing that information possible; this is what "media ecology" addresses. Said another way, the infrastructure of the Internet is the house, the content of the Internet is what makes the Internet a home. And after years of an unfathomable amount of people moving in and out of the home, the house itself is being gutted and rebuilt.

This distinction is vital because the way society has grown accustomed to talking about "the Internet" is unsuitable for comprehending what is now taking place. Just as "the Internet" eventually came to mean "World Wide Web" in popular use (even though the two are substantially different things), so certain aspects of "the Internet"–social media, streaming, Internet culture, gaming, pornography, among others–have come to function as practical synonyms for "the Internet."

In other words: the majority of our conversations around the Internet concern the *content* of the Internet. This is perfectly understandable, given that the biggest story of the Internet since the dawn of the smartphone-empowered social media era has been the unfathomable increase in content created in ways that were previously unimaginable. But those categories I mentioned are now, for the most part, largely "solved."

As product categories, nearly every option and combination of options that could exist now does. The supply and demand for new social media content, more bingeable Netflix shows, new games to play and porn to watch and everything else that we think of as "Internet content" may ebb and flow, but the total volume of content flowing will be far more than any one person can possibly keep up with.

What is *not* solved as a product category, however, is AI. This report is not about AI, but it is impossible to discuss the changes to the infrastructure of the Internet without talking about it. The two primary culprits–LLMs and agentic AI–are each reshaping the structure of the Internet in mutually reinforcing ways. “The internet” as we usually think of it was once a set of commonly accessible websites that users could all access in equivalent ways and where they would have roughly equivalent experiences.

However, in recent years as the web has become customized and personalized that has begun to shift, such that each user of the internet comes to possess their own personalized internet, customized to their desires, needs, and actions. LLMs are now accelerating that trend at an unimaginable rate. They are taking the content of the Internet and re-arranging it in a new layer atop the World Wide Web, one that is atomized and personalized to the individual user.

Meanwhile, according to MIT's 2025 [AI Agent Index](https://aiagentindex.mit.edu/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), there were at least 30 prominent AI agents for chat, web browser, and enterprise use by the end of the 2025\. (Agents are specific individualized AI-powered actors that can do something very like decision making, which makes them a kind of tailored personal assistant to the owner of the agent. If LLMs are a kind of super-powered search engine, AI agents are something more like Tony Stark’s J.A.R.V.I.S. from the *Iron Man* movies.) Open Claw, which took the Internet by storm in January 2026 with its AI-agent social network "Moltbook", didn't even make the list– although given that [OpenAI hired Open Claw creator Peter Steinberger shortly thereafter Open Claw went viral](https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronschmelzer/2026/02/16/openai-hires-openclaw-creator-peter-steinberger-and-sets-up-foundation/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), it's only a matter of time before the widely-praised accessibility of Open Claw appears in OpenAI's array of AI offerings. While LLMs and other AI chatbots may simply continue to iterate and improve over time, MIT’s report is clear that the development of agentic AI that began in 2025 shows no sign of slowing down:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/04/ghost-upload-1776705392937-109648-undefined-Mar-24-2026-09-45-41-7227-PM.png)

Whatever your opinions may be of the promise or pitfalls of AI, all of this development is having a measurable impact on the Internet. [Cloudflare’s 2025 Year in Review](https://radar.cloudflare.com/year-in-review/2025?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) reported that global internet traffic grew a whopping 19% in 2025, and that most of this growth can be traced to AI crawlers and agents. [Over 30% of global web traffic is now bot traffic](https://blog.cloudflare.com/from-googlebot-to-gptbot-whos-crawling-your-site-in-2025/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), with GPTBot and ClaudeBot in an arms race to take second place to Google’s dominance.

AI also empowers bad actors to assault others on the Internet through cyberattacks so severe that ”[it can disrupt or degrade Internet service for adjacent (non-botted) customers of the ISPs](https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/10/aisuru-botnet-shifts-from-ddos-to-residential-proxies/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).” In other words, if your next door-neighbor gets a strong enough direct-denial-of-service attack, you’ll lose your Internet access too. All of this amounts to [“\[a\] busier, more brittle, more hostile network”](https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/internet-review-2025-bigger-fragile-hostile-ai-influence-cloudflare/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com); as Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince remarked, ["The internet isn't just changing, it's being fundamentally rewired. From AI to more creative and sophisticated threat actors, every day is different."](https://www.cloudflare.com/press/press-releases/2025/cloudflare-publishes-top-internet-trends-for-2025/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

*“So what?”,* you may think. *“I’m not an Internet technician. I’m not a fan of AI. I’m not planning to change how I use the Internet. Why does any of this matter to me?”*

One of the most striking quotes of Neil Postman’s *Amusing Ourselves to Death* is not from Postman himself, but from Annenberg School of Communications Dean George Gerbner:

> “Liberation cannot be accomplished by turning \[television\] off. Television is for most people the most attractive thing going any time of the day or night. We live in a world in which the vast majority will not turn off. If we don’t get the message from the tube, we get it through other people.”

If there is anything the major “events” of the past near-two decades have in common, it is that the Internet has been “for most people the most attractive thing going on any time of the day or night.” But unlike television, the Internet is more than just entertainment. The Internet may preserve the “old paths” of use, but it is the infrastructure of the Internet and *how* we use the Internet that shapes *what* influence the Internet has on our social, political, and economic imaginations. And unlike new content to consume, a change in the infrastructure of the Internet threatens aspects of the Internet that we have long taken for granted, such as the Internet’s role in banking, housing, employment, medical care, education, criminal justice, transportation and other vital industries and institutions already feeling unprecedented challenges by industry-specific AI in ways that rarely make the headlines.

What LLMs have already done to the content of the Internet, agentic AI has yet to do to the infrastructure of the Internet. With the launch of ChatGPT and the rapid development of generative AI, it was not long before you began to wonder if the article, social media post, school essay, or email was made by AI. With the explosive growth of agentic AI in 2025, it will not be long before the question shifts from “was this made by AI?” to “was this action taken by a human?”

How long will it be before “[sorry, my AI agent went haywire](https://www.fastcompany.com/91497841/meta-superintelligence-lab-ai-safety-alignment-director-lost-control-of-agent-deleted-her-emails?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)” becomes the first line of defense for actions and behavior that could’ve only previously been done by a human actor–and says something that cannot be unsaid through a social media account, breaks something that cannot easily be repaired that countless people rely on to work or travel, or upends the careers and callings of people you know and love because the Internet laptop-class jobs that let them spend more time at home with their kids or move back home to be close to their parents just aren’t needed anymore?

To put it bluntly: you are naive if you think these disruptions won’t directly affect you, or indirectly affect you through the effect they will have on others. If the iPhone, social media, and AI have taught us anything, it is that you are impacted by these events regardless of whether you participate in them or not. A changing Internet will change you. It will change you in ways you can see and in ways you can’t. It will change those you live with, work with, play with, build with, and fight with. It will change what is possible, probable, permissible, and prohibited in your life, your vocation, your church, your neighborhood, and any other physical space the Internet touches.

The glue that holds together all our computers, smartphones, servers, algorithms, routers, streams, databases, digital wallets, cloud backups, and countless other points of contact in between cannot give way without causing all that the glue holds together to move with it. At some point or another, you will feel it move, whether you want it to or not.

But this is where this State of the Internet project comes in. We must train ourselves to see a longer time horizon in a season of nonstop back-to-back breakthroughs and developments.

Real-time updates are important, but Christians cannot solely depend on them if we want to live well in this moment.

The number of small-scale “events” that will happen in 2026 will be far more than anyone can keep up with. The only way to meaningfully understand the Internet will be to begin tracking big-picture changes of the Internet, namely as infrastructure, over a longer period of time. The category of “event” helps us classify which developments are worth remembering because of their consequence for years to come, and which ones ought to be forgotten in the dustbins of hype and hubris.

## **Empire: From FAANG to the Magnificent Seven and Beyond**

The “empire” of Digital Babylon refers to the key companies, industries, and innovators that exert economical, cultural, political, and spiritual pressure on us individually and collectively with their products, tools, and services.

Of the three categories of this report, “Empire” is the most straightforward: firms and technologists like Amazon, Meta, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and many others are household names alongside any celebrity or public official. These individuals and organizations wield an unfathomable amount of power over nearly every sphere of life and society, rivaling the power of the governments of the nations they are based in. As with a typological understanding of Babylon in Scripture, the empires of Digital Babylon refer both to individual entities (the historic Babylonian empire) and a collection of entity-types, which conglomerate into the real-time economic form of Babylon the Great.

2025 was the year that any remaining vestiges of FAANG were finally swept away for good. FAANG, an acronym referring to Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google, arose around 2013 to label the five key economic juggernauts of the new era. The acronym would remain a reliable rubric for the “gold standard” of modern tech companies until 2023, when it became clear that OpenAI’s groundbreaking innovation would inevitably lead to a shakeup. By 2025, the “Magnificent Seven” was widely adopted as an updated label for a new group of companies: Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Nvidia, and Tesla. But unlike FAANG, the “Magnificent Seven” is a more flexible moniker. [Though the stocks of these companies constituted a whopping 1/3rd of the S&P 500 in 2024, ](https://www.wealthspire.com/financial-dictionary/magnificent-7-stocks/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)the term is flexible enough to adjust the companies included in this designation–[an eventual possibility given the relative underperformance of some of the companies in this grouping.](https://www.ainvest.com/news/decoding-magnificent-2025-returns-concentration-competition-2026-outlook-2601/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

The changes from FAANG to the Magnificent Seven are instructive for the future of the Internet. In FAANG, the emphasis is content: Facebook, Netflix, and Google (YouTube) make up the majority, while Apple focused mostly on infrastructure and Amazon was saddled somewhere in between (Amazon Instant Video first launched in 2011 and was later rebranded “Prime Video” in 2018). With the Magnificent Seven, the emphasis has shifted to infrastructure: Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla make up the majority, and even Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta have made significant inroads with hardware and software developments of their own.

Future contenders for the Magnificent Seven or a subsequent group are all companies that build infrastructure for interfacing with and extending the Internet: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (chipsets/processors), Micron (memory), Visa/Mastercard (finance), Symbiotic (robotics), Intuitive Surgical and Tempus AI (med-tech). Both OpenAI and Anthropic may reach this threshold after they go public later this year if their IPOs perform as well as expected.

If the 2010s were dominated by the content of FAANG in the glory days of a cheap Netflix subscription and Facebook back when it was cool, the late 2020s-early 2030s are shaping up to be dominated by the unprecedented expansion of the Internet thanks to new infrastructure provided by the Magnificent Seven - to say nothing of your regional ISP and companies like Cloudflare that keep the Internet humming along as best they can.

New to the picture are the physical colonies of Digital Babylon in the form of AI data centers. By the end of 2024, [there were 1240 known data centers in construction](https://www.businessinsider.com/data-center-locations-us-map-ai-boom-2025-9?ref=mereorthodoxy.com); by the end of 2025, [that number had soared to an estimated 3000 planned or in construction.](https://www.axios.com/2025/12/18/data-center-growth-map-states?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) Though the grassroots resistance to these data centers has been significant at the local, state, and national level, that hasn’t stopped data centers from surpassing the number of [Home Depot,](https://www.scrapehero.com/location-reports/Homedepot-USA/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) [Costco](https://www.mmcginvest.com/post/costco-wholesale-s-u-s-operations-in-2025-footprint-and-performance?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), and [Target stores](https://www.scrapehero.com/location-reports/Target-USA/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in the USA in a matter of years.

But the truth is much bleaker: getting a precise count of just how many AI data centers there are in operation or under construction is almost impossible because AI data centers, strictly speaking, are not a singular “thing.” Rather, i[t is a popular term that refers to a facility that is likely multi-purpose, being used for AI and non-AI related data work.](https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/ai-data-centers/how-ai-data-centers-redefined-the-industry-in-2025?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) Once a data center is built and operational, it will not just support the company who owns it, but numerous other companies, products, and services that rent out functionality of that data center for their own use–all of which, of course, requires a strong and stable connection to the Internet to make use of.

This leads to a very important point about the “AI Bubble”: even if this gold rush of data center construction is being spurned on by advances in AI, their integration into the infrastructure of the Internet will ensure that [even if the AI bubble pops](https://stratechery.com/2025/the-benefits-of-bubbles/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), the Internet’s expansive reach will not recede to previous levels. A certain level of gains have already been locked in, and even if AI’s gains plateaued in 2025, it would still be more than enough to ensure that AI remains a part of the Internet, a part of any aspect of life that relies on the Internet, and for the physical landscape of America to be permanently reshaped by new egresses of the Internet into the physical world. Whether those data centers are being used for AI or non-AI related work, *they will be in use for something*. And as long as this infrastructure exists, the Internet will continue to gain new territory. A market correction may happen, but just as the [dot.com](http://dot.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) bubble of the 90s taught us, a burst bubble does not mean the end of the story.

All this, of course, is just for America and the West. The impact of these Empires are not equally distributed: if you cannot access the Internet, these companies, products, and services are less influential. [Starlink, the satellite Internet service from SpaceX, doubled its traffic in 2025 and brought the Internet to 20 countries for the first time.](https://blog.cloudflare.com/radar-2025-year-in-review/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) Even in countries and regions where Starlink was already operating, adoption skyrocketed: 51x growth in Benin, 19x in Timor-Leste, and 16x in Botswana. Where the Internet is a reality we take for granted in the West, [more than a quarter of the global population lacks Internet access](https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2025/10/15/ff25-internet-use/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), especially those in least-developed and landlocked-developing countries (LDCs and LLDCs, respectively), which tend to be rural and lacking in infrastructure stability for basic needs such as food and water.

There remains territory yet to conquer, and the number of satellite Internet options is increasing–including services from Amazon and China. The Empires that rely on the Internet to exist have every incentive to throw as much money as they can towards expanding their presence where their names aren’t preached. [What happened with Myanmar in 2016](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) when then-Facebook bankrolled the country’s ISP development and saw Facebook become the country’s de-facto Internet may happen yet again, [as will the expansion of crypto-scamming operations that function as a growing form of modern day, Internet-enabled slavery](https://www.wired.com/story/he-leaked-the-secrets-southeast-asian-scam-compound-then-had-to-get-out-alive/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in places like the Golden Triangle (Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos).

The point is this: if we still cannot fully comprehend the depth to which the economic titans have used the Internet to fundamentally reshape modern life, we are even less prepared to comprehend an Internet that is both changing and expanding throughout the world. And to refer back to the infrastructure vs content distinction: it is the infrastructure of the Internet that allows for the Empires that rely on the Internet to reshape the world far beyond the content of the Internet itself.

Just this week (as I write), the Attorney General of California filed [a preliminary injunction against Amazon to halt a price-fixing scheme so pervasive it has likely increased prices–at the rate of twice the rate of inflation–for the entire American economy.](https://substack.com/home/post/p-189053872?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) If traditional price-fixing schemes, such as the recent [Pepsi-Walmart scheme](https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/secret-documents-show-pepsi-and-walmart?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), can have a measurable impact on the quality of life of millions of individuals, how much more so one for an Internet company used by people in places that do not even have a Walmart? The questions that could be raised for Amazon and the things we know about them can be multiplied for each of the companies of the Magnificent Seven and for numerous other companies that are still tremendously influential even if they’re not as lucrative. Our worldviews may be deeply influenced by the content of the Internet, but it is the infrastructure of the Internet that governs the social imaginary of where we will shop, where we can get jobs, where we can socialize, who we will get medical care from, and increasingly what cars we can drive or what AI and (eventual) robotic agents we can deploy for our vocations and convenience. And as the Internet changes, that social imaginary will change once again.

Where the State of the Internet Project comes in is to give increased attention to the Empires that shape the infrastructure of the Internet. The content of the Internet will always be important, but in a moment where the countless Internet writers and social media content creators are settling into a fixed playing state, understanding the infrastructures of the Internet as developed and used by economic juggernauts of unfathomable size and power will be more important than ever.

To give language to this change, we must take the best of Christian thinking regarding the social and political imaginary and apply it to the economic imaginary of life under the glowing shores of Digital Babylon, and that kind of work cannot be done with quick hot takes. It will take slow, deep, and thoughtful meditation to apply the riches of Christian thought to making sense of the companies that got us here and where they are taking us.

## **Epoch: The Need for the One Body with Many Parts to Form a Shared Reality of the Internet**

The “Epoch” of Digital Babylon is a period where individuals, families, churches, and communities must pursue faithfulness to the Lord relative to their placements and callings throughout Digital Babylon as they endure God-ordained technological opposition and oppression.

Where “Event” seeks to make sense of “what has happened?” and “Empire” seeks to make sense of “who is responsible?”, “Epoch” seeks to make sense of “how then shall we live?” And before we can answer that question relative to the State of the Internet, I need to import some additional background context from my Digital Babylon framework first.

The Babylonian exile, much like the coming kingdom of God, started off as an already-but-not-yet-fully-realized epoch of time. By the time Jerusalem was destroyed in 587 BC, there had already been two prior deportations of Judeans to Babylon, the first in 605 BC and the second in 597 BC. While the exile technically began in 605 BC, including for key biblical figures such as the prophet Daniel, the exile would not become a uniform reality for another 18 years.

But even after the final deportation, it was already established that the question of “how then shall we live?” would *not* be uniform for every person. The earliest seeds of Paul’s teaching of “one body with many members” from 1 Corinthians 12 are found in the distribution map of the exiles in response to Babylon as event and empire. One exile led to many destinations, each with their own set of unique answers to the same question. For Daniel and his three friends, the answers to the question “how then shall we live?” would look radically different from how Ezekiel, living in the squalor of mud huts with the exilic community by the Chebar Canal after the second deportation, would answer the same question. The same is true of Jeremiah (both before the third deportation and after), and then later for Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther.

Of course, all of them would have shared the same beliefs about YHWH, the one true God, and his Law and promises to his covenant people. But once the promised land of Abraham and temple of Solomon were completely taken away for all, it was no longer possible for the people of God to answer the question “how then shall we live?” in a uniform way because there was no longer a shared reference point making it possible for the people of God to live out those answers in the same way. An organic unity amid diversity would emerge, one that would continue into the New Testament church and down into the present.

Understanding the Babylonian exile requires understanding the totality of the exile as experienced from the numerous vantage points given us in Scripture. No one individual’s experiences or circumstances are considered the one “true” standard by which the others are evaluated. This, too, carries over into Paul’s teaching of the body of Christ. Just as “the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’, nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you’” (1 Cor 12:21), so it would’ve been unfathomable if Daniel had said to Ezekiel “Because you are not up here with me in the upper echelons of the Babylonian and Persian governments, I have no need of of you,” or Ezekiel to tell Jeremiah “Because you are not here with us on the shores of Babylon, I have no need of you.” Long before Paul wrote,

> “If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be?” (15:17-19)

God had already provided the types and shadows to illustrate his point. As Douglas F. Kelly once remarked, “every truly Christian doctrine is found in the Old Testament”, and for Paul’s teaching about the organization of the body of Christ, it is found in the saints who endured the same event, brought about by the same empire, and lived through the same epoch in different ways.

This leads to the foundational starting point for this section of this report: **if there is not one “single member” of the body of Christ, there cannot be one single answer to the question “how then shall we live with respect to the Internet?”** Rather, we need all members of the body of Christ–the eyes, the ears, noses, mouths, arms, hands, feet–to answer this question both with respect to their individual members (“how do the eyes live as eyes?”) and to their individual members relative to the one body (“how do the eyes serve the body?”).

This is not a licence for relativism. No part of the body of Christ may sin in order that grace may increase, or find its nourishment apart from Christ as the one head. Rather, this is both a Scriptural reality, and a reality born as a result of the accelerated fragmentation of the Internet itself.

It is no secret that the very technology that promised to unite the world and usher in a new era of human learning and knowledge has not lived up to its promises. Instead of unity, we live in the collapse of a shared reality. Instead of the democratization of resources and knowledge, we live under new forms of tyranny. The early days of social media promised the ability to gain a level of omniscience over what was happening in the world, but even before personalized algorithms came into view, this was always an illusion.

At no point has it ever been possible for one person to truly comprehend the Internet in its fullness; while I try to be a person mindful of his blind spots, there are undoubtedly things that I don’t know I don’t know. But as the Internet continues to atomize in ways that further erode what little of a shared reality we have left, the Church has an opportunity to resist this atomization by bringing together Christians from all walks of life–the “pastors, professors, and product managers” as we use for a tagline for the *What Would Jesus Tech?* podcast–to form a colony of a shared reality regarding the Internet and the multitude of ways to “let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him” (1 Cor 7:17).

The world, including the best of secular media ecologists, humanists, and journalists, cannot create this. Only Christ can create this through those “holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments \[and growing\] with a growth that is from God” (Col 2:19). And while our present circumstances may not have complete overlap with those of Christians in 1943, the opportunity for the Church to bear a unified-yet-diverse witness to the dawn of a new world remains the same.

While the long-term need for this epoch is for Christians to work together in the manner I’ve described above, there are some urgent short-term needs that Christians must aim to address in 2026\. Using the four spheres I identified in my definition for Epoch–individuals, families, churches, and communities–I want to pose a series of questions to help you think through “how shall we live?” in some more concrete ways.

To be candid: a good number of these questions are autobiographical. As I’ve found them helpful, I include them here in the hopes you might find them helpful too. These questions aren’t exhaustive, applicable to everyone in the same way, or even unique to our situation in 2026\. But rather than making predictions or prescribing certain courses of action, we should each take a moment to get our bearings on the role of the Internet of our lives now to have as a baseline for whenever these changes to the Internet wash upon our shores.

### **Individual**

- Who am I with the Internet? Who am I without the Internet? Are my answers to those two questions answers that let me say “my only comfort in life and death is that I am not my own, but belong…to Jesus Christ?” (Heidelberg Catechism 1)
- Where are the boundaries of the Internet in my life? Which of those boundaries are necessary, and which of those boundaries are voluntary? Are those boundaries helps or hindrances to my life as a Christian and to the callings and vocations the Lord has given me?
- For as long as I’ve used the Internet, what has proven beneficial to my life as a Christian? What has proven detrimental? How would an Internet reshaped by AI amplify those dangers?
- What role does the Internet play in my rest and recreation? What are the skills and hobbies the Internet helps me in? What are the skills and hobbies that would survive without the Internet? What skills or hobbies would I like to develop that the Internet interferes with?
- How do I extend the Internet’s presence into the lives of others? Where would I draw the line on physical hardware (security cameras, AirTags, smartglasses) that extend the physicality of the Internet into my life and family? At what point would I say “enough is enough” to physical devices that require the Internet to function?
- What role does the Internet play in the life of my spouse, friends, and family members? If one of them told me they felt like their personal AI assistant or an AI chatbot understood them better than their spouse, their friends, or God, would I know what to say or how to respond?
- Am I the kind of person that would warmly welcome someone looking to escape their reliance on the Internet, or someone that would passively reinforce or require it to be in community with? Do I know how to enjoy a conversation over a cup of coffee, or a meal around the table, or drink at the local brewery, or a board game over several hours without using the Internet?
- Do I believe that my Internet usage is something that falls under the purview of God’s sanctification in my life? What would need to change to where I saw the Internet and its role in my life as a matter of growth in Christlikeness?

### **Family**

- What does the Internet make possible for my family? How much of our lives–including our house, vehicles, education, and standard of living–is dependent on the Internet being a stable and reliable presence in our lives?
- How much of mine or my spouse’s job is dependent on the Internet? If one or both of us lost our jobs due to changes in the Internet or an AI-driven layoff, what would be our Plan B? Do we have enough money in savings to weather a season of unstable employment?
- What role does the Internet play in my marriage? Where has the Internet been a help to my marriage? Where has it been a hindrance? Do I know how to talk with my spouse about our Internet usage and habits? Can I imagine enjoying our marriage if the Internet played a less/different role in our lives?
- Where does the Internet help me manage my household? How much of our finances, education, healthcare, and other information is only accessible or knowable through an Internet connection? What role does the Internet, and specifically AI (either LLM or agentic), provide guidance and assistance for managing my family’s needs?
- If my children were to retain mine and my spouse's Internet habits, what would those habits be? How do we use the Internet to build, create, and grow? How do we use the Internet to distract, numb, and isolate? Are those habits we want them to have?
- How does the Internet help me disciple my family? How does the Internet get in the way of discipling my family? Is the Internet such a strong presence in our home that it precludes catechesis and prayer? Does the way we use the Internet lead us to trust in the providence and power of God, or in our own strength, wisdom, and willpower to provide our own daily bread?
- What role does the Internet play in creating a shared culture in our home? How much of our shared stories, hobbies, and traditions are dependent on the Internet? What role does physical media, and the technology to make physical media use possible, play in creating shared reference points for my spouse and children? [How can we build a “digital hearth” that brings our family together rather than isolates us to our individual devices?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjJsuTPwmwM&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

### **Church**

- What role does the Internet play in my church? What is the minimal amount of Internet-enabling technology one needs to have to participate in church life? What aspects of our church would we lose if the Internet no longer supported it? [Where am I willing to draw the line on Internet-dependent technologies being allowed in my church?](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/churches-smart-glasses/?queryID=c092f621a7c66a673883b42f5946d586&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)
- If I am a pastor: do I comprehend how much I utilize the Internet for my work? How confident am I in my ability to do my job without the Internet? If I am a layperson: do I know how my pastor(s) utilize the Internet for their work? [Do I trust that my pastor could care well for my soul if all he had was a physical Bible and other physical ministry resources?](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/surviving-winter-ukraine/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)
- If I am a pastor: have I established clear guidelines and boundaries for when and where AI use is permissible among my church staff? If AI use results in time saved, have I instructed how that time saved is to be spent? If I am a layperson: do I know how my church staff uses AI in their work? Are these uses for AI that afford them more time in the Word, prayer, and service to the people in the church, or shortchange those efforts?
- If I am a pastor: do I know how many people in my church rely on the Internet for their job? If those people were to lose their jobs due to AI-induced layoffs or some other change in how the Internet functions in their industry, how would those people respond? How much of our tithe income is dependent on jobs empowered by the Internet? How many of our leaders would we lose if upheavals to industries dependent on the Internet had to move away to find new work?
- If I am a pastor: is discipleship regarding Internet use and [Internet culture](https://www.endeavorwithus.com/when-internet-culture-becomes-culture?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) a part of my discipleship programming? If I consider this as important an issue as discipleship on finances, marriage, and parenting, what are my options for consistently addressing it? If I am a layperson: would I support my pastor(s) if they wanted to begin discipleship with respect to the Internet, or would I resist it?
- If I’m a pastor: how will I teach my denomination or tradition’s doctrinal and ecclesiological standards when LLMs train its users to think “non-denominationally” about theology, the Bible, and the church? If I am a layperson: do I know my denomination or tradition’s doctrinal and ecclesiological standards well enough to recognize when my Internet habits and usage conflict with those standards? How important is it to me that I walk in unity with my church’s beliefs and leadership?
- If I am a pastor: would I know what to do if someone in my church was acting out of an AI-induced psychosis from over-reliance on an AI chatbot? Would those around me or under me know what to do? If I am a layperson: if someone in my life was pursuing a romantic, violent, or spiritual relationship with an AI chatbot, do I know what I would do? Do I know who I would ask for help? Would my pastor(s) be among those people I’d reach out to?

### **Community**

- What role does the Internet play in my community? How much of my knowledge and experience of my community is mediated by the Internet? What are the things I know about my community by my physical presence and activity, and what are the things I know from reading about it through social media or local news?
- How does the Internet facilitate participation in local political life? What are the necessary devices, social media platforms, or other products/services one needs to use to get reliable up-to-date information about local elections, meetings, events, and community services? What are the avenues for finding out this information outside of the Internet?
- How much does the Internet determine the social life of my community? How easy is it to meet and socialize with new people outside my immediate circles without using a smartphone or app? Do I know how to strike up a congenial conversation with someone at the coffee shop or park even if that person is on their phone?
- How does the Internet shape the local economy? What industries does the Internet make possible for my region? What gaps does my region have that the Internet helps close? What would be lost in my region if the Internet underwent a major change or disruption? How many jobs would be lost if a major industry dependent on the Internet experienced a downturn, and could those jobs be filled locally elsewhere?
- What areas of my community would be threatened by the increased role AI plays in the Internet? How are my local school districts addressing both LLMs and agentic AI use in classrooms? What impact is AI having on my regional medical care and law enforcement? What aspects of my community would be disrupted if AI agents became more widespread and tolerated?
- What local resources are available for helping parents and children when it comes to using the Internet well? What resources are available for intervention and counseling that specialize in problems created by unfettered access to the Internet? How can local Christians meet any of these needs in and through local churches?

Again: the point of these questions is not to determine the one singular right answer for all Christians in all times and places. How I would answer these questions living in rural West Texas may be different from how you would answer them based on where you live. But it is only in the body of Christ that a wide range of answers to these questions can exist without threatening a shared culture, lifestyle, or religious system.

It is only within the body of Christ that AI developers and AI skeptics, white collar remote workers and blue-collar tradesmen, online college students and Montessori instructors, farmers and social media managers, and countless other individuals living and working in polar opposites can be united together in one body. And in this one body, no one voice or vantage point has the true authoritative say on “how then shall we live?”, but all parts of the body have gifts, wisdom, and insight to share with one another for our mutual uplifting and worship of Christ. We must ask ourselves these questions (and others undoubtedly not included here) of ourselves, and of one another, and in humility be willing to learn from one another, encourage one another, and confront one another, not to make other parts of the body into our preferred parts, but to turn our eyes to Christ and live for his glory.

## **The State of the Internet, A *Mere Orthodoxy* Project**

The State of the Internet is a new project by *Mere Orthodoxy*. It is an annual column that will trace the changes in the Internet, the key players of the Internet, and the enduring questions Christians must be summoned to both think about and provide solutions for. An annual column sounds far too slow given the rapid uncertainty of this moment, but we see this as a feature, not a bug.

The speed of the Internet’s growth and change is now reaching a point where the only way to truly understand what is going on is to slow down. We have to understand where we are, and be patient enough to watch these changes play out in real time, in order to offer more than reactionary hot takes. This is not necessarily a data collecting, graph producing, bullet-point-takeaway project (though it may include those!). It is primarily a wisdom seeking, patience driven, and discipleship oriented project. We want readers to be informed without requiring staying atop every single piece of breaking news. We want readers to be advised without inducing panic. We want readers to both think and live with confidence in the sovereign power of God and courage to pursue creative and imaginative ways to love God and neighbor in a new season of turmoil and chaos-and to make those ways as widely accessible as possible for others to put into practice in their own lives.

[Your financial support of *Mere Orthodoxy* is necessary to make this work sustainable.](https://mereorthodoxy.com/membership) By supporting *Mere Orthodoxy*, you not only support content projects like this alongside website articles, a print journal, and podcasts, but infrastructure for building shared reality in Digital Babylon through our member-only Discord server. You are supporting a growing organization that is positioned to take the treasures of the past and explore them in new ways and strategies, such as a successful zero-click Substack content strategy that has resulted in both a new native audience *and* website growth.

For whatever comes next in how the Internet reshapes our lives, the Internet will not follow us into eternity. It is the users of the Internet, the flesh-and-blood image bearers of God, who will outlive the temporal creations of man into eternity. For wherever the Lord has placed us, and in whatever role the Internet plays in our lives, may we be a people that aspires to hear their Lord and Master say, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master” (Matt 25:21).
### On Judging Books
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/on-judging-books/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:31:35.000Z
“If this book is so bad, then why bother reviewing it?”

I used to grapple with this question, in some form, during my time at *Christianity Today*, where I played a leading role in arranging the magazine’s coverage of books for nearly 15 years. On occasion, *CT* would publish an unfavorable review. Every so often, this would raise a handful of skeptical eyebrows among fellow editors and curious readers alike. Why, they wondered, would we devote attention to titles so lacking in merit?

To my mind, such puzzlement betrays two flawed, or at least debatable, assumptions. The first is that running reviews of bad books—even bluntly critical reviews—hardly ever serves a compelling purpose.

This is not, I would wager, a majority view within evangelical Christianity, inside or outside of journalistic circles. Most evangelicals can readily appreciate the importance of countering bad thinking with better thinking—especially when the bad thinking slanders Christ and his followers or advances beliefs they find untrue, unwise, or immoral. Some, however, prefer to see evangelical outlets operate more as recommendation services, with review choices conferring something like the *Good Housekeeping* Seal of Approval. They favor a deliberate sorting of worthy from unworthy, with an eye toward promoting more of the former and less of the latter.

But this debate skirts around a second, arguably more widespread assumption lurking behind quizzical reactions to negative book reviews. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that expending ink on bad books really is a waste of time. The question remains: Can we reliably identify which books are “good” and which books are “bad”? Can we separate literary wheat from literary chaff in a neat and tidy fashion?

\*\*\*

According to many pessimistic culture-watchers, modern societies are slouching toward a “post-literate” age marked by a retreat from written language into a nonstop carnival of viral video clips and other digital distractions. Yet even against these headwinds, some people retain an irrepressible urge to write books. And even more people retain an irrepressible urge to subject those books to public praise or opprobrium.

The judging impulse thrives at the top, among elite cultural tastemakers. Each year, an array of prestigious literary organizations hands out an array of glittering literary prizes. Major newspapers like *The New York Times* and the *Washington Post* name their choices for the year’s finest novels, memoirs, or works of history, while a host of esteemed critics and brand-name pundits chime in with their own personalized picks. A few rungs down the cultural ladder, you’ll find outfits like *CT*, The Gospel Coalition, and *WORLD Magazine* publishing annual book awards features tailored to evangelical readers.

In many cases, however, a book’s reputational journey owes less to literary lions and media gatekeepers than to regular Joes, with their internet connections and social media platforms. As with restaurants, movies, neighborhood handymen, and nearly every consumer item under the sun, so with books. These days, everyone’s a critic. Websites like Goodreads (like its plucky little upstart owner, Amazon) enable users to post ratings and comments, which can influence sales figures and public perceptions in unpredictable ways.

How do people go about forming their impressions of books in this democratized landscape? Some readers, bless their hearts, model old-fashioned habits of careful, cover-to-cover attention, rigorous reflection, and charitable interpretation. They pay due regard, but not slavish deference, to any critical consensus or amorphous “buzz” surrounding a particular release.

It hardly requires excess cynicism, however, to recognize that other, more dubious forces feed into our judgments. This isn’t (always) a knock on readers for reading sloppily or prejudicially, but simply a concession that ordinary life limits our capacity to see the full field of literary endeavor with pure, unclouded eyes. Leaving aside kids, chores, jobs, illnesses, and a thousand other time-claimers, there aren’t enough hours in the day or days in the year to read everything worth reading—not, at least, with anything approaching scrupulousness. Even the big media titans, with their enviable resources, can’t pretend their best-of pronouncements flow from Olympian insight into an entire year’s crop of books.

All this virtually guarantees a degree of intellectual outsourcing. Without intending or even realizing it, we can fall under the sway of clever publicity campaigns, splashy celebrity endorsements, or bookish “influencers” growing their empires on Instagram and TikTok. All that exterior noise generates its own momentum, crystallizing into narratives about what “everyone” purportedly knows or thinks. Blocking it out, or at least keeping it in perspective, demands mental, intellectual, and (dare we say?) spiritual discipline.

Making matters more combustible, online chatter about books—much like online chatter about seemingly everything else—invariably gets sucked into the cross-currents of contemporary politics. Culture-war dynamics condition us to view books as ideological litmus tests. If they celebrate people and causes we love, or disparage people and causes we hate, we’re tempted to shower them with applause, even if they traffic in unsound arguments, shoddy research, or slanted characterizations. Superficial takeaways—pro-this, anti-that—come to overshadow deeper appraisals of quality, beauty, and integrity.

For a glimpse at the ugliness this can encourage, witness the battle lines arrayed across segments of Goodreads and its ilk. Most users, to be sure, aim to keep things civil. They share recommendations, voice level-headed perspectives, and look for leads on other promising titles.

But woe betide any author who transgresses some shibboleth held sacred by this or that cultural faction, if only in the excitable imaginations of its most implacable members. Retribution often takes the form of “review-bombings”—coordinated blasts of one-star ratings meant to stamp transgressors as pariahs. Mob fury even reaches into genres not known, heretofore, as ideological combat zones, like young-adult fiction. Several YA novelists have found themselves hounded with a ferocity that bears comparison with the Chinese cultural revolution.

\*\*\*

I can imagine many ordinary readers finding the preceding paragraphs a tad hyperbolic, or at least somewhat remote to their own reading experience. After all, how many local bookstore or library patrons are joining bands of Goodreads fanatics as they browbeat some poor author trying to make a living or chase a dream? How many are browsing shelves as dedicated culture warriors, hunting for titles to fan the flames of their partisan rage?

The answer, I’d guess, is: not very many. The great mass of bibliophilic “normies” gravitate toward books that pique their interest, tickle their fancy, or help them learn a thing or two. They would probably roll their eyes at the antics of Goodreads bullies, arguing—quite sensibly!—that people should write whatever they want, read whatever they want, and stop behaving like jerks.

In all likelihood, the variable most responsible for shaping our judgments of books isn’t political loyalties, internet algorithms, or regnant cultural narratives, but simple personal taste. People like what they like, and up to a point, that shouldn’t cause any consternation. Maybe you prefer the characters and storylines of Dickens to those of Dostoevsky. Maybe you find histories of World War II captivating and histories of the War of 1812 a relative snooze. By and large, such idiosyncrasies don’t lend themselves to moral and intellectual scrutiny.

Yet moral and intellectual strictures are unavoidable in any properly Christian account of our relationship to books and reading. Which compels us to reject, on one hand, extremes of pure subjectivism.

Christians can make generous allowances, of course, for quirks of personal taste. Gospel freedom gladly permits an affinity for your favorite pastor’s relatable anecdotes, your favorite theologian’s illuminating illustrations, or your favorite writer’s winning way with words. What it doesn’t permit is the easygoing ethos suggested in stereotypes of the modern book club, where people nod along to every utterance with unfailing politeness, never daring to introduce any buzzkill notions of right and wrong.

As with the pulpit, so with the printed page: Venturing claims about God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, is a serious business, never to be undertaken without a superabundance of fear and trembling. Misrepresenting his Word, works, and ways is no trifling offense! The Bible underscores this point with several sobering cautions. In the Gospels, Jesus presents drowning as a fitting fate for anyone guilty of deceiving his followers (Matt. 18:6; Mark 9:42; Luke 17:2). And the Book of James warns of the stricter judgment in store for anyone wearing the mantle of teacher (3:1).

We can see the danger, then, of adopting a relaxed, read-and-let-read posture when basic biblical fidelity hangs in the balance. But Scripture also abounds with useful guidance for evaluating books lying outside the explicit domains of theology and doctrine.

Consider Paul’s exhortation, in Philippians, to dwell upon “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is admirable” or “excellent” or “praiseworthy” (4:8). Or his contrast, in Ephesians, between “unwholesome talk” and speech that “build\[s\] others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen” (4:29). And don’t forget Proverbs, that redoubtable repository of tutelage on wisdom and folly, which teaches extensively on taming the tongue and weighing our words.

These verses weren’t written primarily to help us navigate contemporary bestseller lists. Nor do they furnish some infallible rubric for literary discernment. People, Christians included, will disagree on what counts as praiseworthy, admirable, or wholesome. But making these ideals a compass lifts our reading habits above the realm of individual preference.

So far, I suppose, so uncontroversial. Faithful believers, accustomed to invoking universal truth and biblical authority, seem largely immune to the fiction that all books are created equal. Give us an artistic product, literary or otherwise, and we’ll give you a value judgment.

Yet here we confront an opposite extreme that many Christians have a tougher time ruling out: an overconfidence in the possibility of grading every book on objective measures of moral, theological, and spiritual correctness. I believe such measures exist. I simply question whether fallen human beings can apprehend and apply them with wholly uncorrupted hearts and minds.

Sure, there are plenty of open-and-shut cases. I have no qualms, for instance, in commending the works of Tim Keller as better sources of spiritual nourishment than anything rolling off the self-help or New Age presses. But my experience as books editor at *Christianity Today* attests to an element of unpredictability at odds with the oracular pretensions on display among certain raters and rankers.

Case in point: The *CT* Book Awards offers an evangelical riff on the old saw about a room with 10 economists generating 11 opinions. In my role overseeing the awards process, I would recruit panels of judges to evaluate set lists of finalists in theology, apologetics, missions, everyday discipleship, and other major subjects. Almost without fail, their evaluations landed all over the map, even controlling for the presence of figures representing different wings of the evangelical big tent. On a shockingly routine basis, pastors and professors with nearly identical credentials and outlooks arrived at radically different conclusions after reading the very same books.

All this casts doubt on formulas for drawing neat dividing lines between books that are spiritually healthy and spiritually harmful, as though the task merely requires enlisting the right theological criteria or pulling the right levers of worldview analysis. These are indispensable tools, in reading as in all of life. But they won’t unlock firsthand access to the mind of Christ, “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3). Books are less imponderable than the mysteries of redemption, but we behold both only through darkened, clouded lenses.

\*\*\*

Ultimately, the case against a “quality-control” approach to books and reading rests on something deeper than the difficulty of determining which books deserve evangelicalism’s seal of approval. It touches on fundamental questions of why we read, and what we hope to gain thereby.

Pardon one further anecdote from my time at *CT*. Over the years, I became something of a squeaky wheel about ending the magazine’s convention of attaching a star rating to each book under review. Not only because many reviewers got antsy about appearing overly mean or harsh, ensuring a dynamic not unlike college grade inflation. More importantly, because I wanted readers to grapple with the review in its entirety, rather than fixating on whether the reviewer “liked” the book. I wanted to train attention on the subtleties and complexities of appreciation and critique, rather than see the whole package compressed into a reductive *yea* or *nay*.

When we read, we do more than offer ourselves as willing receptacles of correct information and wholesome lessons. We exercise God-given gifts of reason and reflection, wrestling with matters of logic and coherence, beauty and profundity, truth and error. In this sense, immersing oneself in a book—following its narrative shape, assessing strengths and weaknesses, pausing to savor flashes of insight or arresting turns of phrase—is inherently enriching. The process is its own reward, irrespective of any judgments reached along the way.

One favorite book of mine, published around the time I began at *CT*, is Alan Jacobs’s *The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction*. In it, he advocates reading books that bring delight, likening an obsessive focus on intellectual self-improvement to schoolmarmish tut-tutting about eating one’s vegetables.

Likewise, I’ve grown convinced that a preoccupation with ratings and seals of approval drains the joy from reading. It flattens our love affair with books into a pedantic quest for a perfected syllabus, with every potential stumbling block mercifully weeded out.

Far better, I think, to picture the world’s shelves and stacks as a lush garden or an immense banquet, full of delectable fare. Yes, we need guidance on avoiding thorns and thistles (to say nothing of crafty serpents). Yes, we need reminders to eat some salad before raiding the dessert tray. All of God’s gifts come with guardrails. But discerning where they lie shouldn’t cast a gloomy shadow over our invitation to taste, see, and read that the Lord is good.
### A Conversation with Andrew Peterson About the Music of Rich Mullins
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-conversation-with-andrew-peterson-about-the-music-of-rich-mullins/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:31:38.000Z
On September 24, 2017, at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee, Andrew Peterson and friends gathered before a sold-out crowd of more than 2,000 people to perform a live, note-for-note rendition of Rich Mullins’s 1993 classic *A Liturgy, a Legacy, & a Ragamuffin Band*.

More than eight years later, the office at Bragg Management is preparing to ship vinyl records this week, along with all the other surprises associated with the Kickstarter campaign that funded the re-recording of a string section, as well as the mixing, mastering, and pressing of a very special limited run. The 31-track album became available on October 21, 2025, and can now be streamed on Apple Music [here](https://music.apple.com/us/album/a-liturgy-a-legacy-the-songs-of-rich-mullins-live/1839639150?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and Spotify [here](https://open.spotify.com/album/7acO9ZhacmhaVlZCkEPDdp?si=oYvYdif5ShCoZ7bQ9JrZuA&ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

I was excited to talk with Andrew Peterson about his experience both performing and releasing the live recording honoring one of my favorite albums of all time—a sentiment he shares, by the way. What follows is a lightly edited conversation between two guys nerding out over a shared love for the songs of Rich Mullins.

**Shane Hull:** Hey, thanks for taking the time to talk to me.

**Andrew Peterson:** Of course, of course.

**Shane Hull:** So how was it having all the metal heads show up to your annual Christmas show: *Behold the Lamb of God* looking for a *Lamb of God* show?

**Andrew Peterson:** Oh my gosh, I forgot about that. What a funny question to start this thing with. No, that’s great.

I actually didn’t—somebody brought it to my attention. A *Lamb of God* fan sent me a message on Instagram saying, “Hey, just so you know, I just bought tickets for this and I’m trying to get a refund.”

So I forwarded that immediately to Christy, my manager, and said, “Hey, I think there may be some confusion happening.” This was about a month before the show.

Then I kind of forgot about it.

The day of the show I thought, “Oh wait, this was that show where there was some confusion.” I heard from somebody on the tour—the tour manager—that, like, “Oh yeah, it’s been a thing.” Then I promptly forgot about it again until afterward, when I started seeing all the stuff online.

I just thought it was delightful. I would love it if one of those folks decided to just stick around and hear the show.

**Shane Hull:** I got a kick out of that myself. That was pretty funny.

**Andrew Peterson:** Yeah, it’s pretty funny. In the current news cycle, I was surprised it merited much attention. I thought there were much bigger fish to fry than this *Lamb of God* concert confusion. But whatever.

**Shane Hull:** The live performance, *A Liturgy, a Legacy, and the Songs of Rich Mullins*—you guys released it on Rich’s 70th birthday, or what would have been his 70th birthday.

**Andrew Peterson:** I think so, yeah. That sounds right.

**Shane Hull:** That’s a princely birthday gift, man.

**Andrew Peterson:** Well, man, thank you for saying that. I can’t imagine a seventy-year-old Rich Mullins. You know what I mean? He’ll always be, in all of our memories, the kind of curmudgeonly forty-something that he was—in the best way.

I so often wish I could have known what it would have been like to know him now. What would he be doing? Would he be on Instagram? No—he absolutely wouldn’t.

There’s a big part of me that thinks he probably would have just been off the map at this point. Like he’d be living on the reservation in New Mexico, just doing his thing, and we wouldn’t hear much from him. And that makes me really happy to imagine.

**Shane Hull:** Do you miss him?

**Andrew Peterson:** Do I miss him? Well, I never really knew him. I only met him a couple of times.

But I miss the idea of Rich being out there in the world. I would love to hear what kind of songs he’d be writing now. I’d love to know what he thought about the state of the world.

Yeah, I guess I do. But to say I miss him would imply that we were friends.

**Shane Hull:** What he offered the world, I guess, is what I was thinking.

**Andrew Peterson:** Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because we weren’t friends, that’s why the record is what it is. All we really had were his songs. And boy, do I still love them.

**Shane Hull:** You shared a little bit of this in the concert, but I was wondering if you could go over it for our readers—the first time you heard Rich Mullins’ music and how you reacted to it.

**Andrew Peterson:** Well, my guess is the first time I heard his music was probably as a youth group kid singing *Our God Is an Awesome God*. But I didn’t connect it with the writer. It was just a song that I heard.

I do remember being intrigued by it. There was something different about it. But I didn’t know who he was. I was into hair metal and Pink Floyd and whatever else, so I wasn’t really listening to Christian music through high school.

So I think it wasn’t until after high school that I heard him again. I was in a band—just a really lame rock band playing cover songs—and I was about as lost as I could be.

Then I heard *If I Stand*. That was the first song.

After that it was that whole record, and then I heard *The World as Best as I Remember It* right after that, which has *Calling Out Your Name*, *Jacob and Two Women*, *The Howling*, and all of these songs that are still some of my very favorites.

I think part of it was that I didn’t know you were allowed to write songs like that and be a Christian artist. They were mysterious—just poetic enough that I didn’t fully understand them.

And I loved that. I loved that there wasn’t an obvious, really clear explanation. They were like a good poem that you have to read twenty times before it reveals itself to you.

That was something really intriguing that drew me in.

**Shane Hull:** “Her sky was just a bandit swing at the end of a hangman’s noose, because he stole the moon and must be made to pay for it.”

**Andrew Peterson:** Yeah—what does that mean? I still listen to that song and think, *I don’t know what he’s talking about*, but I love it so much.

I think part of that is just a temperament thing. I tend to be drawn to art and music that is a little obscure. I like it when the needle isn’t pushed too far in either direction. I don’t like it when something is so obscure that I’m completely mystified—like really abstract art. I’m not saying that’s the art’s fault, but I’m just not wired to respond to it very well.

I need something to hang my hat on in a work of art. And Rich’s music had that. It had just enough earthy, gritty imagery.

**Shane Hull:** He took a story we’ve heard a million times in Sunday school and breathed fresh life into it.

**Andrew Peterson:** Totally. Totally.

I had my bearings because I knew the story of Jacob and Rachel and Leah. But there’s all this mystery wrapped up in it, and that mystery kept me coming back.

**Shane Hull:** When was the first time you heard *A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band*?

**Andrew Peterson:** Oh man—yeah.

**Shane Hull:** Do you remember that clearly?

**Andrew Peterson:** I do. I remember going to the local Christian bookstore in the Orlando–Kissimmee area when I was in Bible college. I had heard that Rich had a new album out, so I drove to the store, bought the CD, and my roommates and I came home and popped it in.

I remember not loving it at first. I felt a little drowned by it. I thought, *I don’t really understand this.* Looking back, I’m surprised that I didn’t love it immediately. But I loved him enough to keep listening, and it didn’t take long for it to become one of my all-time favorite records.

I was just talking to my kids—who are growing up in the Spotify age—about how sad it is that music has become something that’s so easy to graze on instead of feast on. They were lamenting how easy it is now to look at how many listens a song gets, but the assumption is that most of those listens are just background music.

Back when we were growing up, we’d buy a CD from an artist we loved and listen to it again and again and again. We’d give it time to simmer. You know what I mean?

**Shane Hull:** And pore over the liner notes.

**Andrew Peterson:** Exactly. We’d learn to love a song.

Something like that happened recently. I’ve been drawing and trying to learn how to paint. After the Christmas tour this year I had some time at home, so every day I’d go up to my little writing shed and practice drawing and painting. It’s a great time to listen to music.

So I decided I was going to go all analog. I thought, *Well, I’m drawing with a pen on real paper—that’s such a wonderfully tactile thing—so I’m only going to listen to vinyl while I’m out here.*

I’ve got a bunch of records—some from when I was a kid: Journey, Def Leppard, that kind of stuff—along with James Taylor, Jim Croce, Van Morrison, Emmylou Harris, and a bunch of newer bands that release vinyl. And I decided I was going to listen to them all in order—Side A and Side B—no matter what mood I was in.

Instead of the streaming thing where you just pick whatever song you feel like hearing, I thought, *I’m going to let the vinyl dictate the mood.*

I had the best time doing that. I can’t tell you how many times I’d pull out a record and think, *I don’t really feel like listening to this.* But I’d play it anyway, and three songs in I was so glad that I had.

I just think limitations are good. They give art time to do its work on us. And these days we’re not used to that.

So I’m really grateful that I didn’t just Spotify one Rich Mullins song, decide I didn’t like it, and never listen to it again. You know what I mean?

**Shane Hull:** Yeah—art consists in drawing the line somewhere, like morality.

**Andrew Peterson:** That’s so good.

**Shane Hull:** As far as the performance itself—the recording—that happened much earlier, correct?

**Andrew Peterson:** Yeah. It was eight years before we released the recording.

**Shane Hull:** Wow.

**Andrew Peterson:** Yeah, it took a long time. Partly because life is busy, and partly because we weren’t sure it was even salvageable. You know what I mean? We had a board mix of it, and it had been multi-track recorded because Harold Rubens—who has been the sound guy on the Christmas tour for years and years—is a dear friend. He just thought, *I’m going to record it*, because that’s what he usually does, and he pushed record.

It wasn’t until, I don’t know, two months later that he texted me and said, “Oh, by the way, I recorded that show. Here’s the board mix of it.” And I was like, *Oh, I’m so glad,* because then I could relive it and send it to my friends who were in the band. And you know, the board mix isn’t ideal, because it has all the—

**Shane Hull:** You’re mixing for the room. You’re not mixing for recording.

**Andrew Peterson:** Exactly. So it was fun to relive it. But the main thing I remember being so blown away by when I listened to the board mix was the energy of the crowd. The crowd’s excitement to be there was so moving to me that I would cry listening to the thing.

Then we just kind of forgot about it. And about seven years later, Ben Shive—bless his heart—on a wild hair decided to see if he could take the multitrack stems and mix them into something really good.

He sent me “Creed” out of the blue one day, and I was deeply moved by it. I texted him back, “Oh my gosh, this is amazing.” Then every day or two he’d send me another mix, and we realized, *We have to share this stuff. We have to release it.*

**Shane Hull:** The original performance just seems like one of those things that might never have happened at all. How did that come together in the first place?

**Andrew Peterson:** Yeah. Well, for many years I had wanted to record some kind of tribute album. There had been a few false starts over the years where I thought I had time to do it, but then one thing or another would happen and it just wouldn’t come together.

But there’s this community of artists, by God’s grace, I fell into in Nashville when I first moved there. You know, the usual suspects who are on my Christmas tour and who are all over the Rich Mullins record: Jeremy Casella, the Gullahorns—Jill Phillips and Andy Gullahorn—and Ben Shive. All of us loved Rich’s music.

For many of us, his songs were one of the reasons we came to know Jesus—or at least one of the reasons we moved to Nashville to try to make a career writing songs that were, in some way, tapping into what Rich was tapping into.

So we’d talk about it sometimes—*Man, wouldn’t it be fun to record our favorite Rich songs?* Partly because we just loved them and it would be really fun, but also because some of the records sound a little dated.

Now, I don’t think *A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band* sounds dated at all. I think that record still sounds like magic. But some of the others…

**Shane Hull:** That probably has something to do with the fact that it was recorded live in the studio with acoustic instruments.

**Andrew Peterson:** Yeah, exactly. And it’s a band record. It’s the kind of record that you get the feeling Rich was always going to make someday—it just took him a while to grow into it.

And Reed Arvin too—the producer. He was slowly figuring out the best way to produce Rich’s songs. When you talk to Reed about those early days, he’ll tell you that when they first started making music together neither of them really knew what they were doing.

It was the late ’80s, early ’90s, and music just sounded different. The Christian music scene was different. The production was good in its own way, but when I imagine a twenty-year-old today discovering Rich Mullins, they’d have to be pretty committed to dive into some of those older recordings and find the brilliance of the songs underneath the production.

We thought, *Man, I wish we could re-record some of these songs and make them a little easier for a new listener to receive.*

So we had dreamed about it. I really wanted to do it. There had been a few Rich Mullins tribute albums over the years, but—this might be arrogance, I don’t know—none of them quite did the thing I was hoping they would do. None of them scratched the itch I had to produce the songs in a particular way.

Then the twentieth anniversary of Rich’s passing was approaching, and we thought, *Now is as good a time as any.*

What if we did a concert and performed that specific record—note for note?

Ben Shive, the bandleader, took it on. I’ve heard the band say they’ve never worked harder on a show before. It was incredibly difficult to reproduce those really complex arrangements. It was more intensive than anything they had done before.

**Shane Hull:** The arrangements on the original recording—speaking as a musician myself—when you listen closely to all the details… there’s a bass line in “Creed” where the piano follows it, and—

**Andrew Peterson:** Yeah.

**Shane Hull:** It’s just like—oh my goodness. And for you guys to care so much about every little detail, to perform that in fidelity to the original recording—it was special. It was moving.

**Andrew Peterson:** They really were special. And it was a fan thing too. We were such big fans of that record, and of his songs in general.

One of the things I’ve noticed over the years at some Rich Mullins events—tributes, memorials, gatherings like that—is that they were usually done by Rich’s friends, which is totally understandable. These were people who knew him and toured with him.

But what I noticed was that if you knew Rich personally—if you were in his circle—he was such a fascinating and interesting personality that the tribute concerts often ended up being about Rich.

**Shane Hull:** Instead of about the songs.

**Andrew Peterson:** Exactly. And the songs almost became secondary. People would forget the words, and I’d be in the audience thinking, *How can you forget the words to that? That’s one of the greatest lyrics ever written.*

So it kind of required fans of the music—not just friends of Rich—to pull off a show like we did. That was really the heart behind it. I wanted to honor Rich by honoring his music, and by doing that, honor the God that Rich was singing about.

That was the hope.

**Shane Hull:** You mentioned Reed Arvin earlier. He played piano on “Creed.” Were there any other people from the original recording who joined in?

**Andrew Peterson:** Yes—the only other person who had been on the original recording was Matt Pierson, the bass player.

Matt has played on quite a few of my records, and from the first time I met him I was kind of starstruck. I remember thinking, *Can we just talk for a second about the fact that you played bass on* *Liturgy, Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band?*

I’d get stories from him about those sessions. And the bass work he played on “Creed” is just crazy.

We were actually talking about that on the Christmas tour recently. Eric Koveney, who’s a really virtuosic bass player—a younger guy—was playing “Creed,” and he said that when he listens to the original recording it sounds like the producer just gave the musicians a really long leash and said, *Just play.*

Sometimes in the studio nobody wants to show off, so good players tend to hold back. They’re tasteful. They don’t step out too often. But it almost felt like Reed Arvin gave these guys permission to really lean into their musicianship and surprise him.

Matt was definitely one of those players.

But aside from Matt, no—it was all just friends of ours playing.

**Shane Hull:** That’s awesome. Were there any songs from the original performance that had to be cut from the record?

**Andrew Peterson:** Yeah, there were a few from the first half that didn’t quite fit. The show was something like thirty songs, so we had to trim it in a few places. Some songs communicated better in the room than they did on the recording, so we focused on the ones that translated well to the album.

**Shane Hull:** Before you sang *“I Believe”* you told a story that was really moving. It’s a song of yours, not a Rich Mullins song, but the moment felt like you were honoring Rich, honoring your own father, and honoring God all at once.

It almost felt like an embodiment of the Fifth Commandment—honor your father and your mother. The whole night kind of had that feeling. I was wondering whether that was intentional or if it happened naturally.

**Andrew Peterson:** Wow.

**Shane Hull:** Whether that was something you planned, or if it just emerged during the performance.

**Andrew Peterson:** Man… I don’t know that it was intentional. It sounds like maybe that’s what God had in mind for the night.

Honestly, we were so stressed about whether the show was even going to work. We didn’t know if we were going to be able to pull off those songs, or if the audience would respond to them. But right when I walked on stage at the beginning of the show, I had this moment where I thought, *Oh man, we’re going to have a blast tonight.*

It’s funny though—someone asked me recently if I remember the details of my wedding day. And you remember the big moments, but the rest of it is kind of a fog because you’re thinking about so many other things. That’s kind of what this felt like. The thrill of being there was so intense that I was basically flying by the seat of my pants the whole time. So it’s really nice to hear that’s what you heard in it.

The song is called *“The Good Confession (I Believe).”* I did write that as a nod to my own dad—a song of gratitude for his faithfulness. So I love that you heard that in it.

**Shane Hull:** For me, one of the things Rich did—beyond giving me incredible songs—was introduce me to *Orthodoxy* and to G. K. Chesterton.

I’m originally from Indiana. My family moved down to central Florida when I was in kindergarten, and we grew up in a Pentecostal tradition. Chesterton ended up being kind of a gateway drug for me that led me down all the seedy back alleys of Christendom…

**Andrew Peterson:** Sure—yeah, yeah.

**Shane Hull:** So aside from the music, what else has Rich done in terms of influencing your life?

**Andrew Peterson:** Wow. What a fun question.

First of all, I’ll say that I also read *Orthodoxy* because of Rich. That book is one of my favorites. Like Rich’s music, though, I’m mystified by so much of it. It has an effect on me that I can’t always articulate.

Chesterton was such a virtuoso with language. He’s like this waterfall of thoughts and paradoxes and love of God that rushes at you in that book. When I finished it, I remember thinking, *I don’t know how to explain what just happened to me, but something just happened to me.* In that sense, Rich was a lot like G. K. Chesterton. He was a wit—with a capital *W*. He had this wonderful way of putting things that was very Chestertonian.

And I have to tell you a side note—one of the great treasures of my life is that I have Rich’s copy of *Orthodoxy*.

**Shane Hull:** Oh my goodness.

**Andrew Peterson:** Yeah.

**Shane Hull:** My goodness—I’m getting chills.

**Andrew Peterson:** Yeah, man. If you’re ever in Nashville—or if it ever works out—I’d be happy to show it to you. The story is that Rich gave it to Steven Curtis Chapman. Steven had quoted Chesterton during an acceptance speech at the Dove Awards. Rich heard that and liked Steven, so when they met he said, “Hey, I wanted to give you this book because you mentioned Chesterton. I think you’d love it.”

I was friends with Steven and heard that he had Rich’s copy. So I texted him and said, “Dude, there are few people in the world who would love that book more than I would. I’ll dip into my retirement to buy it.”

I bugged him for about three years. Then one day around Christmas I saw Steven, and he slipped the book to me and said, “Merry Christmas.”

**Shane Hull:** Wow.

**Andrew Peterson:** Yeah—it’s amazing. The coolest thing about it is that it’s full of Rich’s highlights. He used a yellow highlighter.

On the first page he highlighted the line, *“I did not make it. No, it is making me.”*

**Shane Hull:** Yeah. He was such a thief when it came to Chesterton.

**Andrew Peterson:** Yes! And I immediately flipped to the end of the book and saw the part about how we have sinned and grown old, but God is younger than we are—which is where Rich’s song “Growing Young” comes from.

So I kind of nerd out about having the copy that gave us those songs.

But to answer your question about the gifts Rich gave me—first and foremost, it's Jesus.

**Shane Hull:** Yeah.

**Andrew Peterson:** I don’t think I understood that Jesus loved me until I heard Rich Mullins sing about the love of Jesus. The line *“the reckless raging fury they call the love of God”* was so scandalous to me as a pastor’s kid with a very conservative upbringing. I just assumed God was always mad at me. I still struggle with that sometimes.

But Rich—and Chesterton—had a way of writing about God that was full of wonder. It sounded like they actually knew Him as a person.

And it made me think: *If Rich knows Jesus as a person, then it must be possible for me to know Him as a person.*

When I finally met Him, it was this astonishing realization that Jesus is kind—and that He actually wanted me. I just needed to hear the good news of the gospel, and Rich was the one God used to convince me of it.

Beyond that, there were all the books Rich loved. At some point I found a list of his favorite books—things like *Lonesome Dove* and *A Prayer for Owen Meany*.

**Shane Hull:** Yeah—I read through that list in CCM Magazine.

**Andrew Peterson:** It’s an amazing list.

**Shane Hull:** I read through all those books when I was a senior in college.

**Andrew Peterson:** Yeah—and if you remember, he had Augustine’s *Confessions* on the list.

**Shane Hull:** Yeah.

**Andrew Peterson:** And one of the books by Pope John Paul II, I think. He was already pretty outside the box in the CCM world—reading fiction broadly, reading Catholic writers, reading people like Frederick Buechner. So I kind of tapped into that. I thought, *If Rich loves these books, I want to know them too.*

And through that I discovered some of my favorite writers.

Another huge influence was community. One of the biggest changes in my life came when Caedmon’s Call invited me on tour in 1997\. They were friends with Rich and had kind of caught his spirit.

Rich’s concerts were always full of these wonderful characters—the Ragamuffins, Beaker, all these interesting people he surrounded himself with. When you saw a Rich Mullins concert, it wasn’t just about Rich. It was about this whole community.

Caedmon’s Call followed that model. They were always touring with independent artists and introducing audiences to writers they loved—lifting up the little guy.

I got the grace of being one of those people. Then later I got the grace of doing the same thing—inviting my friends along on tour.

That eventually led to things like The Rabbit Room and Behold the Lamb of God. All of that can be traced back to Rich.

It’s downstream from the way he loved Jesus and loved his community.

**Shane Hull:** So are there any plans to take *A Liturgy, a Legacy, and the Songs of Rich Mullins* on the road?

**Andrew Peterson:** Oh man. Man! I think it would just kill the band. You know, it was like running a super marathon that night. We were all so exhausted. And I also really love the fact that it was a one-off. We had a really special night, and no matter what, if we tried to do it again, it wouldn’t be as special as that night. The fact that it was a one-time, miraculous concert is part of what I love so much about it.

I remember right after the tour was over, a lot of people who were there that night said, “You have to bring this on the road.” And without even thinking about it, my answer was: nope. Lightning doesn’t strike twice. This was the one time we were doing this, and that’s a way of preserving the sacredness of that night.

**Shane Hull:** No need to commodify it.

**Andrew Peterson:** Nope, nope. And, you know, with the release of the album, we didn’t want to put it out on a label or anything. We just wanted to make it available, put it out in the world. Also as a one-time thing—the Rich Mullins tribute album I always wanted to make.

**Shane Hull:** Alright. I’ve got a couple of rapid-fire questions for you.

**Andrew Peterson:** Sure.

**Shane Hull:** To wrap things up here. You ready?

**Andrew Peterson:** Yeah.

**Shane Hull:** 1\. Clean-cut Rich or long-haired hippie Rich?

**Andrew Peterson:** Uh… probably long-haired.

**Shane Hull:** 2\. If Rich were a one-hit wonder—which is impossible, I know—which song would it have to be?

**Andrew Peterson:** Ooh…

**Shane Hull:** Quick answers, man. You’re on the clock.

**Andrew Peterson:** Um… it would be a toss-up between *Calling Out Your Name* and *The Color Green*.

**Shane Hull:** 3\. A line of Rich’s you wish you’d written yourself.

**Andrew Peterson:** Oh man. Uh… “From the place where morning gathers, you can look sometimes forever till you see what time may never know. How the Lord takes by its corners this old world and shakes us forward and shakes us free. To run wild with the hope that this thirst will not last long, but it will soon drown in a song not sung in vain.”

**Shane Hull:** 4\. Which of his songs hits you differently now than it did 20 or 30 years ago?

**Andrew Peterson:** *Hold Me Jesus.* When I first heard it, it was kind of a prayer song, worshipful, confessional. But the more I listen—well, it’s not just listening to the song, but understanding why he wrote it. I don’t know if you’ve seen that YouTube video…

**Shane Hull:** You’re talking about the subway conversation with Beaker in Amsterdam, yeah?

**Andrew Peterson:** Yep, yep. And the explicitness of their sin… the night he wrote the song, he was waiting for Beaker to start snoring so he could go out to the red-light district. But Beaker never started snoring. So Rich was left there, just burning with lust and his own sinfulness.

When I listen to the song through that lens, I realize it’s not just a song asking Jesus for comfort. It’s also a song of restraint.

**Shane Hull:** Wow.

**Andrew Peterson:** …Jesus, would you hold me back? You know what I mean? *Hold Me Jesus* doesn’t just mean comfort me—it means save me from myself.

**Shane Hull:** That’s awesome.

**Andrew Peterson:** Isn’t that amazing? I love when a song unfolds itself to you over time like that.

**Shane Hull:** 5\. For someone who’s never heard Rich before, what’s the first song you play for them?

**Andrew Peterson:** Oh wow… well, it depends on the person. That might be impossible to answer. Some people, it might be *Homeless Man*; for someone else, it might be *The Color Green* or *Creed.*

I don’t know. I really don’t know how to answer that one.

**Shane Hull:** 6\. Dulcimer or piano?

**Andrew Peterson:** Piano—because I can’t play dulcimer.

**Shane Hull:** 7\. Volume 1 or Volume 2 of *The World As Best As I Can Remember It*?

**Andrew Peterson:** Ooh… volume two.

**Shane Hull:** Yeah?

**Andrew Peterson:** Which I think is the blue one, right?

**Shane Hull:** That’s Volume 1.

**Andrew Peterson:** Is Volume 1 the one that has *Calling Out Your Name*?

**You:** Yep, that’s Volume 1.

**Andrew Peterson:** And *The Howling.* Okay then—Volume 1\. Yep.

**Shane Hull:** Right—that was the correct answer, by the way.

8\. How many times did you listen to *The River* before writing *Is He Worthy*?

**Andrew Peterson:** Oh, that’s so funny. I love that you picked up on that. So, when I wrote *Is He Worthy*, I just had blocky quarter-note chords. It wasn’t until we were in the studio with Ben Shive—the only other person I know who knows Rich’s songs as well as I do—that we found a more interesting piano part than the one I’d played. He started playing, and we looked at each other like, “Ooh, that’s a cool idea.” It was a little nod to *The River.*

The fun part? Reed Arvin texted us the day he heard the song and said, “I see what you did there.”

**Shane Hull:** Expecting the check at some point.

**Andrew Peterson:** Oh yeah, exactly. But man, I love that you picked up on that. That makes me so happy.

**Shane Hull:** 9\. And Finally, what do you hope people discover about Rich 50 years from now?

**Andrew Peterson:** Hmm… well, the easy answer: I hope they discover who Jesus is through his music the way I did. I think Rich would want the same.

But I also want people to know that Rich was so much more than the crusty, iconoclastic, barefoot, rebellious figure people sometimes make him out to be. So many stories paint him as the “bad boy of Christian music,” but that’s not accurate.

I’ve heard stories from people who knew him—about him sitting on the front steps of a church after a concert, talking to a high school kid for two hours. About him spending time at youth camps, playing kickball, leading songs around a campfire. He really, really loved Jesus.

He was imperfect—he struggled like anyone else—but his life was marked by genuine love for and encounter with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

To me, the most rebellious thing about Rich was that he actually read his Bible. It’s inspiring. It makes me want to know Scripture better and follow Jesus more fully.

And because Rich was caught up in God’s grace—so much of what he wrote is about grace—it elevates my love for Scripture, my love for the church, and my appreciation for simple faith.

It washes away a lot of the legalistic baggage I grew up with and shows me the good, wonderful parts of church and Scripture.

One last thing: one of the best emails we got was from a guy who became a Christian through Rich’s music in youth group. His youth pastor was later arrested for abusing kids, and this guy lost his faith completely. He avoided Rich’s music for years because of that pain.

When this album came out, he listened. He couldn’t stop crying—listening restored the Jesus he discovered through Rich’s music and redeemed it from the pain he had associated with it. I remember crying when I read that email and sent it to Ben Shive, saying, *This is why we made this record.*

**Shane Hull:** Thank you so much for doing this with me. I really appreciate it.

**Andrew Peterson:** Yeah, man—thank you. It was good to talk to you.
### The Sacred and the Profane
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-sacred-and-the-profane/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:31:41.000Z
Paul Elie. *The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s* **. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025\. $33.00\. 496 pp.**

Mircea Eliade imagined a world that was split down the middle. On the one side was the sacred—a world of gods and demons, of angels ascending and descending on ladders that just barely touched the earth. On the other side was the profane—the world of bodies forgetful of the origin of their desire, ruminating over causes and cures.

Secular man, regardless of his intent, has not been abandoned by religion. Into the secular frame come hierophanies, those disorienting occasions when the profane—a tree, a rock, a man—become sacred. Israel encounters these, when water comes from a rock or when a donkey speaks God’s words to a man. The sacred is apart from the secular, but the door is locked from the inside. God can still enter in, and man can build sacred spaces within the profane, all to be able to access and pay deference to the holy.

Eliade’s observation of these two modalities of existence does not mean that the religious is merely a premodern delusion. The opposite, in fact, is true. If religion is dead, to misquote Julian Barnes, we certainly miss it. Our nostalgia for the God we don’t believe in is evident, I suspect, in the ways secular humans seek out transcendence in everything other than God. Sex becomes a medium for engaging the holy, as does childbirth and maternity. Music might be a pathway, as is art, or you could skip the difficulty of artistic production and go right to LSD.

Eliade’s interest is in the way man builds monuments to the sacred within the world of the profane. These “sacred spaces” are habitations, places for man to experience the numinous reality of a largely forgotten God.

But besides architecture, there are other places where man might encounter the sacred in a world largely void of it. In his book *The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s*, Paul Elie traces the way religious instincts, reminiscences, and longings appeared in the art and music of an era that was rife with such memory. Elie is also the author of *The Life You Save May Be Your Own*, an award-winning narrative account of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor. Thus he is no stranger to Catholic thinkers. He is a careful narrator and a compelling writer. His new book is a matchless effort to ask a question that many thinkers are asking in a less interesting and more plodding way: How did America get so *secular*?

How America got secular is not Elie’s question exactly. Rather, Elie wants to query the in-between time, when the sacred still provoked the imaginations of America’s best artists and musicians. Perched on the backend of a religious century but on the brink of an irreligious one, the 1980s was a decade rife with religious referent. The artists Elie writes about are too numerous to list here. They include Andy Warhol, Toni Morrison, Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith; U2, the Neville Brothers, and Sinead O’Connor; Martin Scorsese, Salman Rushdie, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Madonna, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan.

In Elie’s hands, the 1980s become a decade throbbing with the awareness of the sacred. He opens with a story of Sinead O’Connor on *Saturday Night Live* in 1992\. When she tore a photo of John Paul II and scattered it on the stage, she made herself “a heretic, a public enemy, and unladylike, besides.”

O’Connor in Elie’s hands, however, is no heretic. She is not even formerly religious. In a term once deployed by Czeslaw Milosz, Elie sees her as *crypto-religious*. Elie believes this describes all of the artists he surveys in the book.

“What’s striking in retrospect,” he writes,

> “Isn’t just that artists are marking reference to religion in their work. It is that they take the religious point of view seriously and personally. They aren’t set against religious authority, at least not at first. They aren’t anti-religious or irreligious. They’re crypto-religious. For them prayer, scripture, image and ritual are material they claim as their own via the imagination and seek to complicate and deepen not to do away with. They forthrightly cite their religious roots; they count themselves as believers and regard their work as the expression of convictions formed through intense self-scrutiny. Seen as faithless or profane, they see themselves and their approach to religion as more faithful to the core truths of faith than the clerics and televangelists, and they hope the public will agree…  
>  
> For the crypto-religious, religion isn’t a structure of historic oppression or a bad influence to be opposed on principle. It is inheritance and legacy, underworld and promised land. It’s a fact on the ground and a stumbling block. It is what it has been for a broad range of believers all along: a means of making sense of the world and our place in it.

Why, then, not just be religious?

Elie describes the early 1980s as “both an end and a beginning.” It was the end of the “long sixties,” a term coined by Fredric Jameson in 1984 to describe the end of the era where religion was largely cooperative to public life. Religion was a “moderate center.” But in the 1980s, though the “post secular” age had not quite reached the fullness it knows today, religion’s decline had begun. The 1980s was the beginning of a questioning that still had belief at its root.

Elie has a delicate hand with the crypto-religious artists of the 1980s. When he writes of Andy Warhol, who opened a monumental *Last Supper* exhibit in Milan, Elie describes the recounting as a portrait of “a group of men \[who have\] come together and have a meal in the knowledge that one of them is going to die soon.” The relation between the Last Supper and the death of scores of gay men in Warhol’s orbit can’t be missed. In Warhol’s hand, the work “became a work of social commentary.” Meanwhile, Warhol writes in his journal that he still went to church, still prayed, still found God to be a figure in the world. Religion looms, inspires, and dominates Warhol’s artistic imagination.

In Leonard Cohen’s work, Elie sees a crypto-religious crypto-monk “in sync with the convergence of art, belief, and desire that is taking place in the city.” A descendant of rabbis, Cohen lived as an “unchaste monk”. He excelled at unearthing the deep connections between sex and religion, between devotion of the soul and the body’s longings. With songs like “If It Be Your Will.” “Anthem,” and especially “Hallelujah,” Cohen “joins religious desire and sexual desire as few songs have done before or since.” In the process, “Cohen goes to the outer rim of transcendence where devotion and desire meet and consort together.” He is a genius of crypto-religious art.

Elie writes no less compellingly of U2, Prince, Madonna, Aaron Neville; Martin Scorcese, Robert Mapplethorpe, Czeslaw Milosz. In all their art, the world of gods and demons is nigh—the angels ascending and descending close by, just out of sight.

But if religion is so inspiring—if it is indeed the real frame of reference, the truest story about the world—then why are these artists running from, and not toward it?

Two crises befell American religion in the 1980s. Both occurred within Roman Catholicism, which is the context of Elie’s religious observations. Both crises in his mind seem to underwrite the widespread flight from religion.

The first was the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Initially mistaken for a “gay cancer,” the earliest evidence of this disease appeared in 1980s New York. Its tell-tale symptoms—“blotchy skin, severe weight loss, difficulty breathing”—led inevitably to death. Without consistent treatment or a standard of care, patients, the vast majority of whom were gay men, suffered the physical aspects of the disease as well as the mental and psychological effects of being untreatable: “Gay men showed symptoms, became ill, went to the hospital, died.”

Adding to the drama of this terrible illness was the Catholic imagery that loomed over many of the hospitals that treated the sickest men. The Catholic Church was providing care for AIDS patients; St. Vincent’s and St. Clare’s each had a hospice for people with AIDS. But at the same time John O’Connor, then archbishop of New York, said he would “shut down \[the church’s\] several hundred schools and hospitals if required to employ openly gay people in them.” Elie sees this macabre irony visually depicted at St. Vincent’s: “There through the window of the emergency room was AIDS in Catholic terms—the gaunt men in the waiting area overseen by the gaunt man who hung on a cross mounted on the wall.” The crucifix came to life in ways horrific, terrible, and desperately, undeniably real. Both gaunt men died, and both become for Elie a specter, an image of the Church’s lack of mercy.

The second crisis was only whispered of at the time. It was the sexual abuse crisis whose extent would not come to light for years. But already with the trial of Gilbert Gauthe in 1984, the Catholic Church was aware of the pattern of molestation and sexual abuse by priests that occurred within its parishes. Elie suggests that the Church’s unwillingness to address the extent of the problem was directly related to the hardening of the church’s view on sexuality and contraception.

“At a moment when the bishops had unprecedented power and influence in American public life,” he writes:

> “their wish to suppress, deny, explain away, and justify widespread criminal sexual misconduct in their ranks put them on the defensive. It prompted them to turn their energies away from matters of war and peace, of justice and inequality, and onto matters of sexual morality. And it led them to try to manage complex questions of human sexuality rather than ponder them. In effect, the bishops sought to defer and evade the inevitable controversy over sexual misconduct by priests, and the challenge to clerical authority it would bring, by shifting attention onto the sexual conduct of everybody else. And they transferred the fear and anger the controversy aroused in them onto a different controversy- the one involving the Church and people with AIDS.”

In what Elie suggests was an intentional sleight of hand, the church focused on legislative documents that outlawed contraception in order to avoid the closer scrutiny that the allegations of sexual abuse in its ranks would have brought. The church’s “creeping obsession with sex” led them to reactive stances about sexuality in general instead of addressing the problem in their own hierarchy.

Artists struggle with prohibitions on sex. Sex is, after all, among the most supple subjects for the production of art. Whatever else it is, sex seems to be an invitation to transcendence—or at least an invitation to whatever is beyond the self. The collision of sex and God is evident throughout Christian history. The early ascetics emphasized denial to avoid temptations. The later mystics mixed thinking of sex and God, emerging with a sort of amalgam of desire and religiosity. Moderns, for the most part, preferred not to speak of sex, or to dismiss its pleasure, delegating it all to the private realm. By the time the “long sixties” had receded with its sexual excesses, what was left was mostly a question mark about the relation between sex and God.

Visual artists like Andy Warhol and Keith Haring emphasized the question of sex and God. Sex was either transgressive or religious; or perhaps seeing sex as religious was the desired transgression. Either way, with blood spattered crucifixes at rock concerts and profane Madonnas; it is easy to assume that art of the 1980s was “anti-religious.” This was certainly how the conservative evangelicals of the Moral Majority would prefer Christians think about such spectacles.

But Elie is not so sure. To him, spectacles like blood-soaked crucifixes, sexual entanglements, and couplings were spectacular because they pointed to images that were still heavy with meaning. The blood-spattered Christ spoke to a gory salvation, the heavy breasts of the Madonna were (purportedly) filled with milk to feed God himself. The religion that such artists were nostalgic for might have been lost to them, but the gaps left behind remained. Like empty wounds, the holes that religion had left in secular culture cried out to be filled—and these holes in the secular were filled with art that beckoned to a higher meaning.

For a time, the artists of the 1980s made such art. By Elie’s account, this was because religion still existed as a site of transgression. You could still transgress the sacred, because “the sacred” was still very much intact. So when the heights of the AIDS crisis seemed to demand direct action, and the activists of ACT UP chose St. Patrick’s Cathedral for the site, the shock that was felt was intended. The Cathedral was still holy enough to the everyman to be transgressed.

The goal of the ACT UP protest, which serves as the cover art for Elie’s book, was to force the government to commit to greater AIDS research, as well as to get the Church hierarchy’s attention. The U.S. Bishops of the Catholic church had issued a recent letter condemning condom use and emphasized the appropriateness of sex only within the context of marriage and conception. But the letter seemed to ignore the public health crisis of HIV. The Church’s insistence that it was the “expert on humanity,” while seemingly ignoring the very human crisis happening under its watch, made the choice of a church for a direct action protest seem the most fitting place for the desired confrontation. When an activist took the Eucharist, broke it, and scattered it all over the cathedral floor, the images shocked the country. By violating the sacred space of a cathedral, the activists had ignored the line between religious observance and secular protest.

There is a way to read this activism as a shattering, as the crossing of a Rubicon. The intent of the protest was to resist the Church’s stated hegemony on matters of humanity and human sexuality, and to force the government’s hand to come to the aid of those suffering the effects of HIV/AIDs.

But certainly, an unintended effect was to desecrate the last place where the sacred had the upper hand. When they lay down and played dead in the cathedral, the activists made a religious shelter a place of political theatre. They contested the Church’s claims to bearing the ultimate truth about the world. Their site of resistance, the collapse of the Church’s authority, became the reality of the world that was yet to come.

If there is a hero of Elie’s book, we only meet him halfway through. He is the Franciscan friar Mychal Judge—a gay man, a recovering alcoholic, and a Franciscan. He placed ads in the gay newspapers of New York, advertising himself “In the spirit of Francis of Assisi… serving our brothers and sisters with AIDS.” The church where he lived, the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, was “an outpost for gay Catholics,” with Judge running a ministry for people with AIDS.

He visited people in their apartments and in hospitals, “four people in a typical day.” He would massage their feet or hear their confessions. He prayed with them and anointed them with oil. “He organized their wakes, celebrated their funeral Masses, saw to the final disposition of their bodies.” Elie writes of Judge: “He was not openly gay, and not an unstinting advocate for the rights of gay people in the Church.” He was himself a contradiction. But he knew that the Church was a place of mercy.

As the HIV/AIDs crisis overlapped with the sexual abuse crisis, the decisions of activists to desecrate places of worship hardened the division between church and world. When the Catholic Church chose to speak to ideal human norms instead of lived human suffering, the overlapping realities of humanity, both sides hardened. We live now in the aftermath of this hardening.

But what Judge reveals—the Franciscan man, poor in spirit in more ways than one—is that the church’s face is, and has always been, mercy. To cradle the feet of dying men was a mercy. And to remain with the Catholic Church, even as a contradiction, Judge chose mercy.

The 1980s were rife with the dissolution of the sacred. Boundary-transgressing artists were ready to spill blood, to sing of prolific sex and to push the boundaries of sexual norms. Placed against the images of the AIDs crisis, the “gay plague,” it seemed the world might implode. It would be easy to assume that this was *the* crisis, the battle between sacred and secular, between holy and profane, between life and death.

But meanwhile, quietly and close at hand, were Judge and others like him, quietly anointing foreheads with oil, tenderly massaging feet. Mychal Judge did all of this until his own final moment. When the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001, he rushed to the site. He entered the North Tower, where he offered prayers and aid for the rescuers and the dead. He was killed when the South Tower collapsed.

Religion walks the borderline like this, between life and death, marking in its presence the space between holy and profane. To map it is to be open to surprise, to see where you’ve been wrong, to touch and be touched with oil, with water, with the relief that comes from being received. Religion itself reveals the crisis, as it makes demands on our allegiances. God stands in the just-beyond.

The artists that Elie writes of longed for the God they didn’t believe in. Each in different ways, they referenced the God of the Catholicism they had left behind, longing for its order, structure. They longed most of all for the mystery that referred beyond themselves, beyond the violence of death and suffering—and most of all for the mystery *beyond.* They wanted to know that the cathedrals of the city were still there, offering a window to this beyond, even if they were empty and even if they themselves never went.

If the world is indeed split down the middle with angels and demons on one side and the profane on the other, there are yet cracks. There are small openings, tributaries that run from one side to the other. The bridge between the two worlds, the cracks in the fissure, the tributary that carries one from religion to the beyond—it is mercy.

The artists Elie writes of didn’t believe in God, but they sure as hell missed him. I do believe in God, but when I am in church, I sometimes miss him too. I search as they did, in art, in music, in the desire of the body, in the faces of the suffering. When I miss God, it is mercy that I miss the most.
### The Garden and the Liturgy
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-garden-and-the-liturgy/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:31:46.000Z
Matt Miller. *Leaves of Healing: A Year in the Garden*. Belle Point Press, 2024\. $17.95\. 140 pp.

What would it have been like to watch Adam and Eve at work in God’s Garden, prior to the Fall? Can you imagine Adam tending tomatoes or Eve pruning rose bushes?

No matter how strange such a vision might seem, according to the book of Genesis, the first man and woman were indeed gardeners. Their first vocation—and our first calling, as a species—was a mandate to create. God called these first humans to be “fruitful and multiply, and to fill the earth” not just with humans, but with all the fruits of life God had made. Adam and Eve were to spread Eden’s beauty to every corner of the planet.

When the Fall happened, it broke our relationship with God and with each other. But it also marred our relationship to the earth itself—our gardenly calling was thrown into error. To become a gardener, from that day forward, was no longer easy or perfect. Yet we garden still. Something elemental in us, perhaps, draws us back to Edenic cultivation.

An essayist, English Professor at the College of the Ozarks, and online friend of many years, Matt Miller has long pondered the connections between soul, faith, time, and garden. In his book *Leaves of Healing: A Year in the Garden*,Miller invites readers into the garden and the church’s liturgical year, reminding that seasons of heaven and earth are always inextricably intertwined.

Extensively quoting theologian Paul Griffiths, Miller explains in his introduction that there are two sorts of time. The first is the ceaseless ticking of the clock that the Greeks expressed as *chronos*, “the devastated and devastating clock-time of our fallen existence.” Miller explains that “*Chronos* never slows down, never gives us a break, and finds its period only in death.” Griffiths describes this time as “metronomic”: It marks the endless slippage of moments into mortality.

Yet there is a second experience of time, termed *kairos* in Greek. It refers to the right or opportune time—the moment for a decisive action, choice, or event. *Kairos* is qualitative, not quantitative. It is embodied in the moment when I prune tomatoes and smell their rich juices smeared across my hand; I remember what it was to smell this heady scent on my hands as a six-year-old, scavenging for backyard tomatoes. *Kairos* unfolds within seasonality, rhythms of being, and a vital sense of context. With *kairos,* time itself folds into pleats of shared experience, touching across profound temporospatial distances. As Griffiths puts it, *kairos* time is “systolic”: It weaves each shared cycle or pattern into a larger tapestry, ruching moments like the empty tomb and Easter Sunday together across centuries.

Both gardening and liturgy, Miller argues, are *kairos* spaces. Their interlacing themes of life, death, resurrection, and renewal call us out of *chronos* and into eternity.

Miller says he wrote this book as an expression of “delight” in the garden and the liturgical year. In reality, however, I find its message more fully expressed in the first chapter, which begins amid the *chronos* of Covid. While the introduction defines both gardening and liturgy as “cycles of glory” or “glorious repetition,” there is something very real about the way Matt expresses his relationship to gardening, place, and time in his first chapter. Here it is not glorious. It is full of weariness and bitterness. Here, the vision of Eden meets the Fall. As Matt puts it,

> By the time the plague arrived … we ought to have been well positioned to take up a role as the perfect pandemic back-to-the-landers. We should have baked bread, picked vegetables, and laughed. Instead, I grew weary, utterly weary of my garden. With extra time at home, like many others, I worked hard on my garden through the spring and the summer. But by the end of the growing season I felt done. I felt frustrated, tired, unwilling to continue. I wanted to turn over the whole garden into grass. I wanted to move to the suburbs. I wanted to pack it all in.

This book thus unfolds amid a pandemic Lenten season and within a larger moment of communal and horticultural malaise for the author. It begins in *acedia*, that thorny vice so prone to those called to good work on God’s earth. To me, as the reader, therefore, the “project” of *Leaves of Healing* seemed most closely tied to its title: What does it mean to find Eden in a fallen landscape and amid broken communities? What happens when the gardener has lost his love of gardening?

In response to *acedia* and Covid isolation, Miller limits his work and himself. He focuses inward, seeking a time of “self-examination and humility, two qualities that Ash Wednesday commends to all. To amend my life, in banishing sin or renewing care for my garden, I would need to practice both.” He pares down his list of plantings, imposes a sense of creatureliness on his gardening vision, and then continues in the work he’s been given to do. He spends the rest of the gardening and liturgical year writing and gardening, seeking belonging and joy through the process. The volume moves from Lent to Easter, from Easter to Ordinary Time. But its frame is forever set by the weariness of the first chapter. And it is perhaps vital to start *Leaves of Healing* by reminding readers of the pains of *chronos.* Many people joke that time has not proceeded the same since 2020, and that 2020 itself was a year beyond years—a sort of time warp that trapped and mired us in its strange cadences. The pandemic itself, from a temporal perspective, was confusingly mottled and mixed. Each family had to learn new rhythms of being, and to inhabit ways that stepped outside of the metronomic nature of things.

For Miller, both liturgy and garden serve as *memento mori*—an admonition to remember one’s death, to embrace both contemplation and humility among the everyday cadences of work. While the garden “doesn’t kill us,” he reflects, it does remind us “that we will die.” Amid the pains of the Covid pandemic, he adds, “the work of the Lenten garden is to find out how that recognition is not a curse, but good news.”

As Miller’s essays enter the holy days of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter, with their spring seasons and colors, the project steps further into the language of metaphor. Grafting, grapes, palms, and clear-cut forests—these gardening realities remind reader and author of larger truths. Miller tends to a bush or tree as he ponders ideas of beauty, brokenness, and belonging. A picture emerges of everyday objects, gardening habits, and living plants serving as talismans for a rich web of philosophical and spiritual realities.

Yet Miller’s work is not reductive; he does not “use” the garden to glean personal insights. Rather, he casts light on the deep interrelatedness of things. While some chapters do feel a bit rushed in making these connections fulsome (a chapter on “Christ the King Sunday” touches on ecosystems and hierarchy but does not plunge as deeply into specific gardening habits), each essay nevertheless shares glimpses of a new perception of the garden and of God. The separation between the two, Miller repeatedly hints to readers, is paper-thin.

Earthly and earthy as gardening is, gardens have been a part of God’s work and Gospel for a very long time. From the Garden of Eden to Gethsemane to the empty tomb with its resurrected Savior (who was mistaken for a Gardener), each garden beckons to soul as well as body. In a more personal sense, by uniting gardening to the liturgical calendar, we see a pattern in time that does not trap us but rather releases us from the woes of temporospatial absurdity. Gardening thus invites us into rhythms of embodied care that circumvent the solipsism and distraction of the age.

In the book’s final portions*,* the year grows cold as it proceeds from Ordinary Time to Christmas and Epiphany, and the reader cannot help but wonder: Will Miller’s efforts at inhabiting systolic time find success? Does the volume end with the delight Matt expresses at its beginning? Can we defeat *acedia?*

The answer, of course, is yes and no. Miller himself expresses some ambivalence over his successes by the end: “I began these essays hoping for a renewal of life and gardening,” he writes,

> practicing my Lenten disciplines in confident expectation. As my gardening year draws to an end … I cannot say I have found the healing that I sought. Tending one’s own garden, whether metaphorically or literally, only gets one so far. Even the work I hoped to do in these essays has been called into question for me by the chaos of American culture today. Culture-building and long-term work like perennial gardening, writing works of literature, and creating a habitation in place can seem futile in a climate of suspicion and fear, callous indifference and preening judgment.

In the movements Miller takes from Lent toward Advent, from the brokenness of Covid toward the hope of a new year, one senses *acedia* rear its head occasionally. This, more than anything, seems to feed his sense of disappointment as the year draws to its close. It is a disappointment, the reader senses, not just in the trials of the garden—but in the bleak injustice and brokenness of the world itself, as it beats along in its metronomic rhythms. How to find contentment in the garden when the larger world proceeds apace in its chaos and cruelty?

These are hard questions to answer. “Gardening and liturgy are the answer” seems trite in response to the chaos, uncertainty, and evil of our world. Yet in *Leaves of Healing*—its vision of a humble garden well-loved, and its attendant determination to attend to the eternal and the quotidian—we also see those glimpses of hope and thanksgiving that promise health in both this life and the next.

A couple of times, Miller disagrees with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s famous claim that “beauty will save the world.” Beauty, at least in our everyday conceptions of it, is not enough to save the world, he explains. I wonder, however, as I conclude *Leaves of Beauty:* Perhaps this pull to garden in a broken world is the ultimate argument for beauty’s power over our hearts, bodies, and minds. In Boethius’s *Consolations of Philosophy*, Lady Philosophy offers this concluding poem to the jailed (and soon to be executed) philosopher:

> “Father of earth and sky, You steer the world  
> By reason everlasting. You bid time  
> Progress from all eternity. Yourself  
> Unshifting, You impel all things to move.  
> No cause outside Yourself made you give shape  
> To fluid matter, for in You was set  
> The form of the ungrudging highest good.  
> From heavenly patterns You derive all things.  
> Yourself most beautiful, You likewise bear  
> In mind a world of beauty, and You shape  
> Our world in like appearance. You command  
> Its perfect parts, to form a perfect world.”

Boethius hints here at a systolic beauty that, as it draws our eyes to the Divine, Himself “most beautiful,” heals and restores all that is broken. In glimpsing Him, the Perfect Gardener, we too glimpse this “world of beauty” that lies beyond all brokenness, beckoning us out of despair.

Perhaps when we take up this first work of Adam and Eve, this ancient identity-shaping vocation, we are tapping into a little bit of Eden time, an Edenic vision of beauty. Though we may not always *feel* it, the garden beckons to its workers, assuring them “all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

As Miller has noted in interviews, the end of this book marks a move away from the garden that formed its crux of self-discipline and attention. His family moves from their rural home to be closer to community, work, and church. One might expect sorrow in such a parting, but Miller himself expresses hope—for in this move, he writes, he must leave “my garden now with empty hands, offering it and all it contains as glory and honor and power to the one in whose ceaseless attention I will work out all my days.” This is where we find joy: in the gift and givenness, the offering up with empty hands. *Acedia* loses its power in the trust that, while our own intentions and efforts are forever flawed, there is One who attends perfectly. He alone knows all our needs.
### Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/sons-of-adam-daughters-of-eve/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:31:48.000Z
Although C.S. Lewis didn’t get married until later in life, he spent a lot of time over the preceding decades thinking theologically about marriage and the general differences between men and women. We know about some of this thought process from his lengthy decades-long correspondence with Dorothy L. Sayers (this friendship of Lewis and Sayers is the subject of Gina Dalfonzo’s excellent book, [*Dorothy and Jack*](https://www.amazon.com/Dorothy-Jack-Transforming-Friendship-Sayers/dp/0801072948?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)). But also, these thoughts on gender permeate Lewis’s fiction—and this is the topic of Josh Herring’s new book, [*Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve: C.S. Lewis’s Images of Gender*](https://davenantinstitute.org/sons-of-adam-daughters-of-eve?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (Davenant Press, 2026).

Dr. Josh Herring is Professor of Classical Education and Humanities at Thales College and the founder of the Logres Institute for Classical Liberal Studies. He and his wife Jennifer live in Wendell, NC.

\*\*\*

**Nadya Williams:** This is a book about C. S. Lewis, but it's about quite a bit more than that, since the issues involved have been very much in the news over the past decade, perhaps in ways that Lewis hadn't foreseen precisely. Can you tell a little bit about your thought process that led to this book. What were the questions that you had set out to answer? When did you realize that this was a book-length exploration rather than something shorter?

**Josh Herring:** *Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve* is based on my doctoral dissertation; it was always going to be a book-length project. Back in 2019, I attended an in-person seminar at the Russell Kirk Center in Mecosta, MI. There I met Dr. Ben Lockerd; over dinner, I mentioned that I had always wanted to read Spenser’s *Faerie Queene*. Little did I know that Lockerd was a past president of the international Spenser academic association, and loved introducing people to this poetic masterpiece. We set up a tutorial and got to know one another over a semester of reading Spenserian poetry. The following year, I proposed another tutorial with Lockerd, this time exploring the writings of C.S. Lewis. By that point, I was actively looking for a dissertation topic, and I found this one when I read *Perelandra*.

My career had shifted—I was out of the classical classroom and serving a stint in administrative leadership at my school. I was becoming increasingly aware of the transgender issues that were facing schools. Bathrooms, sports teams, pronouns—all of it was on the rise. I worked for a boss who did not share my convictions, and I was searching for helpful language. How could I convey the importance of affirming one’s given gender without reaching for the biblical language of Genesis 1-2? *Perelandra* was my clue to the idea that Lewis might have what I was looking for. I ran into lines like “Gender is more real than sex” —and I started tracking where else Lewis talked about gender. I did something of a research dive and discovered that there was not a lot in print about Lewis’s views on gender (and some that were in print were just wrong). Suddenly, I had a dream dissertation topic: an under-explored area, points of academic controversy, and a confined body of texts to study.

I spent the following year reading, researching, and making connections across Lewis’s writings. Barfield, of course, was right: “Everything Lewis thinks is in everything Lewis says.” Once I was looking for the gender thread, it appeared everywhere. Dr. Lockered pushed me to include a big focus on Spenser and Lewis; he gave me great counsel.

Very few people today read Spenser. Lewis loved Spenser and called *The Faerie Queene* a collection of “hymns to life.” Ch. 2 in my book traces Lewis’s appreciation for Spenser, and that’s the truly unique contribution to Lewisian scholarship my book makes. So, by the time I knew I had a clear body of evidence to support a specific theory of gender, and a place to highlight Lewis’s connection to Spenser, it was a matter of working up the prospectus and then writing the chapters. Across 2022-2023, I drafted the dissertation. It went through some revisions in turning into the book, but the essence is the same.

Over the course of writing, my argument shifted substantially. I began thinking I had found Lewis’s rejection of transgender ideology; by the time I reached the conclusion, the argument had grown. I actually wrote about Lewis’s theory of reality, and gender became a site for him to apply that theory. Lewis wants to cultivate gratitude for the gift of creation within his readers, and that gratitude extends far beyond application to gender.

**Nadya Williams:** Who is your target audience in this book? What do you hope your target audience will get from reading it? To put it in other words, perhaps, what is your main message here?

**Josh Herring:** I wrote this book with a few different groups in mind. I say from the outset that I’m not looking to persuade those who accept the propositions of transgender ideology. Instead, I want to offer language, models, and images to those who seek to articulate a positive vision of gender. By 2022, plenty of people had already made the negative case against transgender ideology (I’m thinking primarily of Matt Walsh’s *What is a Woman*? and Abigail Shrier’s *Irreversible Damage*, alongside more academic works like Abigail Favale’s *Genesis of Gender*). I wasn’t trying to rehash those arguments. What I saw as missing was a positive articulation of what it means to be a man or a woman in a way that parents, teachers, and pastors could publicly articulate and praise those who are evidently masculine or evidently feminine. Lewis has such a vision, and I think reading him with that idea in view helps parents, teachers, homeschool leaders, classical teachers, and anyone else working with children be ready to see the fullness of who God has made each child to be and help him or her understand the goodness of being made male or female.

The message of my book is somewhat straightforward: Lewis believed that every human being is made in the divine image, male or female, as part of the giftedness of creation. That gift is glorious, and complex; the proper response to a glorious, complex gift is to unfold its complexity and grow in appreciation of the gift. There are no takebacks, no exchanges of this gift. Instead, every boy needs to learn what it is to be a man, and every girl what it is to be a woman. We ought not shy away from the fact that there are real differences—instead, we celebrate the beauty of who God has made us to be.

**Nadya Williams:** I appreciated your description of your methodology early on in the book as displaying, among other things, "the interconnected nature of humanities research." What do you mean by this? How does this come through in this book, and what does this mean for Christian humanities research in particular?

**Josh Herring:** Early on in my research I discovered that there are at least two paths to writing this kind of project. I could read all the Lewis scholarship that’s been written over the past sixty years (an astonishing amount), or I could limit the scope of my project to providing a close reading of a theme in Lewis’s writings. Given my goal of finishing this project within a year, I chose the second route. My background is in history, theology, and great books—so the idea of reading closely in Lewis, and exploring a specific theme, greatly appealed. I had to confine myself to reading widely within Lewis, and my book interacts minimally with secondary literature. I did read some of the giants in the field, but for the most part I focused on Lewis.

For humanities writ large, this is a move back to what literary criticism once was. Decades ago, the goal of literary criticism was to help people read more deeply in a work of literary value. Lewis talks about this in *An Experiment in Criticism*—the modern turn towards critical theory has mostly produced unreadable works about books that people should just read themselves. There is a small value in having an introductory apparatus—that’s what I want my book to do. Good criticism should offer pointers and highlights that the reader notices and confirms when reading the original book. That’s what I want to get back to—my hope is that in reading my book, readers will see a thread running through Lewis’s work that they had previously missed. Such deeper insight is what the best humanists bring to their scholarship.

For Christian humanities scholarship in particular, I think this approach explains part of what it means to “take captive every thought to the mind of Christ.” The Christian humanities scholar is seeking for and foremost to deeply understand the nature of a text, and then to judge the text based on whether it does, or does not, align with reality. The Christian humanist scholar is seeking not just another publication, but rather to help others become more fully human through his academic explorations.

**Nadya Williams**: Which of C. S. Lewis's books is your favorite, and why?

**Josh Herring:** It’s so hard to pick a favorite. In the Ransom Trilogy, I love *Perelandra* for the beauty of the setting, the drama, the literary play. It has far more ideas than *Out of the Silent Planet*, and I think the plot is more unified than the plot of *That Hideous Strength*.

In Narnia*, The* *Magician’s Nephew* and *The Last Battle* are tied. I love what Lewis does through these books. These two books elevate Narnia to the realm of poetic theology; they add creation and eschatology to the world where the children’s adventures draw them into relation with Aslan, and I think they make Lewis’s children series a poetic triumph.

**Nadya Williams:** What are the bigger questions that fascinate you in your thinking, reading, writing, and teaching?

**Josh Herring:** I love looking at the intersection of history, literature, and philosophy; I am a generalist who loves stories. We live in an age that has largely forgotten the necessary grounds of forming the next generation of authors. Literary creativity does not emerge out of the ether; it grows within minds well fertilized by the great ideas and great texts of those who have gone before. So, I think it is essential to help others explore the great tradition, to learn how to participate in the Great Conversation happening across Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, London, and Philadelphia (to borrow Russell Kirk’s framing).
### Christians in the Age of Hitler
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/christians-in-the-age-of-hitler/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:31:51.000Z
Alec Ryrie. *The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It.* University of Chicago Press, 2025\. $24.00\. 160 pp.

Next summer I’ll be taking a group on a tour of England, France, and Germany, showing them a few of the myriad sites where World War II was caused, waged, and remembered. We’ll stand where soldiers fought on the beaches of Dunkirk and Normandy. We’ll imagine total war as civilians suffered it in the streets of London and Paris. And we’ll go from National Socialism’s birth sites in Munich to its first concentration camp in nearby Dachau and the Nuremberg courtroom where Nazi leaders were convicted of crimes against humanity.

This tour will be something like a modern pilgrimage, if British historian Alec Ryrie is right that “our culture’s true religion” is the Second World War, a faith centered not on the positive moral example of Jesus Christ but the negative one of Adolf Hitler. “Perhaps we still believe that Jesus is good,” Ryrie allows, “but not with the same fervour and conviction that we believe Nazism is evil.”

Except that those of us on this trip, mostly employees or alumni of a Christian university, do believe in Jesus’ goodness at least as fervently as we do in Hitler’s depravity. So does Ryrie, who is both a historian of the Protestant Reformation and a lay minister in the Church of England. The tour I am leading will begin with Sunday morning worship at St Paul’s Cathedral, near the memorial to London firefighters who died during the Blitz, and end at one of the four religious sites at the north end of the Dachau memorial site. We’ll pass under an iron crown of thorns into the Mortal Agony of Christ Chapel, to contemplate the sacrifice of Jesus that inspired the hundreds of Catholic priests martyred at Dachau.

Before I turn in earnest to Ryrie’s work, I ought first to acknowledge that I am not the intended audience for *The Age of Hitler*. It’s still the story of Jesus that I find to be the greatest ever told, even if no *secular* “narratives other than tales of the Second World War affect me in *quite* the same way.” Unlike the generic Anglophone Westerner to whom Ryrie is addressing this book, I haven’t “cast off \[religion\] like a worn-out garment” nor participated in modernity’s “wider alienation from Christian ethics.” While Ryrie isn’t wrong that the post-World War II ethical consensus is fraying, my frequent encounters with that terrible conflict—as a writer, reader, teacher, tour guide, filmgoer, and a veteran’s grandson—keep reaffirming for me its lessons about the seemingly bottomless depths of human sinfulness and the importance of striving for human equality and human rights.

I suspect that the same is true for many readers of this journal*.* Yet I still recommend *The Age of Hitler* for three reasons. First, Ryrie holds “up a mirror to our own age at a particular angle” that reveals how our “deep convictions about justice and human rights” emerged from the wreckage of history’s worst war. Second, he helps those of us who still hold those convictions to recognize the limitations of the anti-Nazi ethical consensus and the reasons that it is weakening. Third, Ryrie suggests how moving past the “Age of Hitler” could bring cultural synthesis rather than culture war—a process in which Christians like you and me might well play a catalytic role.

\*\*\*

Those of us who see the crucifix on the altar of Dachau’s Catholic chapel and ponder the mystery of the atonement may be unmoved by Ryrie’s opening narration of the Christian West entering the twentieth century. Its vaguely religious ethic was centered on the Jesus whose personal example appealed to skeptics like Bertrand Russell, not the Christ who rose from the dead to reign as Lord and will return one day in judgment. But World War II ushered in a new consensus oriented not so much in imitation of the humility, simplicity, and wisdom so widely admired in Jesus as in rejection of the hatred, cruelty, and injustice embodied in Adolf Hitler and his disciples.

“The Western world’s encounter with Nazism and its atrocities,” explains Ryrie, “triggered what we can only call an ethical reawakening.” The postwar ethic centered on the principles articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, which asserts that the natural rights inherent to being human offer the surest “foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” While Mohandas Gandhi tried to convince the framers of the UDHR that all rights are accompanied by social duties, individual autonomy has joined equality and empathy in making up “the sea in which, during the age of Hitler, we have all been swimming.”

Given how Ryrie describes the post-WWII ethic as succeeding a Christian one, it may be surprising to read him admit later that “the new prominence of gay and transgender rights… is one of the few really direct clashes between our societies’ older, Christian-based moral norms and our newer, anti-Nazi ones.” But even if there is a basic congruence between ethics before and after Hitler, Ryrie argues that contemporary Western values are not timeless or universal but historically contingent: “...we cannot imagine our modern faith in human rights without the experience of the Second World War, and without the understanding of what evil is that came out of that war” — namely, the “grey inhumanity, teetering on the edge of nothingness” found in Hannah Arendt’s notion of an evil that was at once radical and banal. If anything, the most atrocious crimes of the Nazis have become even more central to how we tell the story of WWII, particularly in recent movies like *Inglourious Basterds,* *Fury,* and Holocaust films going back to *Schindler’s List*. Meanwhile, “generations of children in the post-Christian West have been raised” on stories of “fictional Hitlers” in *Lord of the Rings*, *Star Wars*, and the Harry Potter series, “cleansing the brutal lessons of the Second World War and transposing them into timeless morality tales.”

“We are not, unlike some of our great-grandparents, liable to believe soft-focus nonsense about inherent human innocence,” Ryrie concludes. “We have not only seen what people *can* do, we believe that these are things that people *will* do, given half a chance.” That’s the lesson my students typically take away from our discussion of *Ordinary Men*, Christopher Browning’s famous study of German military police who executed hundreds of Polish Jews and deported thousands more to Treblinka not because they were fanatics, but because they were humans—overly deferential to authority and selfishly concerned with ambition and approval.

“I do not want to unlearn the lessons of Nazism,” Ryrie emphasizes—and reemphasizes, again and again. “To recognize Hitler as representing a truly exceptional evil is the beginning of wisdom. My point, however, is that this recognition is only the beginning; it is not enough. It cannot bear the weight that our age is putting on it, and by now it is cracking under the strain.” Even though “the appetite for telling its story is not fading”—my upcoming course on WWII quickly filled up during Bethel’s last registration period, as it always does—the ethical consensus created by the crusade against Hitler seems to be unravelling. This is not simply Ryrie’s cue to condemn what he labels the “dirty Right” of European and American politics. Based on lectures given during the Biden presidency, *The Age of Hitler* doesn’t even mention Donald Trump until the half-way point, and only occasionally after that. Instead, Ryrie roots the weakening of the anti-Nazi consensus in everything from an overdue reckoning with injustices perpetrated by the Allies themselves to “the re-emergence, on both political extremes, of the most perennial prejudice of them all: antisemitism.”

That consensus isn’t entirely gone, and “it is still unusual to find a political leader in the democratic world who openly disdains the taboo against Nazism.” Laughably, even Vladimir Putin justified his 2022 invasion of Ukraine as an “anti-Nazi” campaign against a government led by the Jewish descendant of Holocaust victims. But Ryrie is most persuasive when he argues that an ethic birthed by World War II is ultimately inadequate.

It’s not just that many modern-day foes aren’t much like Nazis. (“We brought a Spitfire to a germ fight,” says Ryrie of the British response to COVID-19, “and proved better at stirring wartime rhetoric than at effective public health policy.”) More fundamentally, “deriving moral values from a war, any war, is a problem,” since doing so leaves us with a “moral framework that valorizes just one set of tools, and a very dangerous set at that...” Because we’ve learned from the unique struggle against Hitler the lesson that “evil can be defeated by force if you oppose it wholeheartedly enough,” we’ve tended to devalue negotiation, compromise, and other forms of peaceful conflict resolution, while failing to realize that “attempting to crush evil completely often only contaminates the soil with toxic debris. Tolkien was not wrong to warn of the consequences of trying to conquer Sauron with the Ring.”

Still more problematic to Ryrie is “the whole business of using an exemplar of evil to set our moral compasses. It means that we now know what we hate, but we do not know what we love.” Even if WWII has left us with “quite a deep understanding of evil”—and he’s not so sure of that — “we have a pretty impoverished understanding of what philosophers used to call *the good*,” lacking any meaningful sense of what to do with our rights and equality. Meanwhile, “defining our morals by the process of hatred has costs all of its own,” such as “a certain inflexibility and brittleness” of political discourse that lacks “much space for forgiveness or redemption.”

\*\*\*

The erudite Ryrie draws from a dizzying array of examples —some theology and ethics here, references to C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and J.K. Rowling there, the histories of multiple countries and continents everywhere. Yet he doesn’t offer empirical evidence so much as reasons to trust the personal intuitions that he suspects “are often more reliable than mere logic.” Either his sweeping generalizations will feel right to you, or they won’t.

But even if you read the first two sections of *The Age of Hitler* and don’t see yourself clearly in Ryrie’s versions of “How We Got Here” and “Where We Are Now,” you may yet participate in his closing prediction for “Where We Go Next.” For if Ryrie is right that cultural synthesis is the best, most likely resolution to our culture war, then Christians have a key role to play.

To the “instinctive conservative… who has proudly embraced traditional cultural and religious particularities,” Ryrie warns that the “combative Christian conservatism” of MAGA and its cousins in Hungary and Russia offers nothing more than a “mirage of cultural success… doomed to dissolve into nothingness as we approach it, and to leave us stranded and thirsty in the desert.” But while he sees the religious Right “hollowing itself out” as it becomes clearer that the substance of its politics have “less and less to do with their declared religion,” Ryrie also expects a renewal of traditional values, not their rejection: “...since Christian ethics have deep roots and have successfully weathered some long winters in the past, some version of them will be what ends up springing up and recolonizing this cold earth.”

Just in time to counsel secular progressives, whom Ryrie encourages to “open a dialogue with \[the world’s\] deep-rooted traditions” that offer “deep wells of wisdom… the sorely needed abilities to forgive and to repent… deeply unfashionable but surprisingly practical ethical techniques” and “some beauty to spice all this tasteless gruel of truth and goodness.” Ryrie commends religious and other rooted traditions that “are *endlessly* plural and self-critical, but not *boundlessly* plural and self-critical” as alternatives to the “universalizing ambition” that leaves progressives with “a quixotic sense of moral obligation to the whole of humanity” redolent of older justifications for Western empire.

It will require compromise on both sides, but Ryrie suspects that some synthesis is bound to happen, since the present paths for both Left and Right lead only to dead ends. But if progressives are to draw on “the traditions that, after all, actually helped fight the war against Hitler” while conservatives “fully and honestly own the anti-Nazi heritage,” then perhaps those of us who never abandoned the example of Jesus but are still moved by the struggle against Hitler can serve a mediating role, helping our neighbors to see what it looks like to hold post-WWII “insights together with older and wider traditions.”
### The Empty Promises of Sentimentalism
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-empty-promises-of-sentimentalism/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:31:54.000Z
In the ancient baptismal liturgy, the Christian is asked to renounce three things: Satan, his works, and his empty promises. The third of these has always been the most fascinating, because it addresses the mode by which evil most characteristically operates. Satan rarely tempts in his odious, gargoyled, form. His works are seldom advertised as such. But his empty promises, the offer of something luminous that conceals something ruinous, can ensnare the best among us.

The temptation in Eden was not framed as an embrace of evil It was an offer of elevation. "You will be like God," the serpent tells Eve, and the genius of the offer is that it traffics in a language of aspiration that is not, on its face, false. Scripture repeatedly warns that deception is most dangerous when it speaks in the idiom of the good. Saint Paul's admonition that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light is not metaphorical decoration; it is a diagnostic claim about the structure of temptation itself.

Augustine understood this with characteristic precision. In the *City of God*, he argued that the earthly city is not simply a domain of wickedness opposed to the heavenly city of virtue. It is, more subtly, a domain of disordered love, a place where genuine goods are pursued outside the framework that gives them coherence. The danger is not that the earthly city loves nothing worth loving, but that it loves real goods badly, wresting them from the *ordo amoris* in which alone they can be rightly held. Augustine illustrates the point through Rome itself: the Romans pursued genuine virtues, courage, civic duty, even a kind of justice, but pursued them for the sake of glory rather than for God, and the result was a civilization capable of extraordinary achievement and extraordinary cruelty in almost equal measure. Virtues severed from their proper ordering do not simply weaken; they curdle. This Augustinian insight illuminates a great deal about our present political moment.

Contemporary progressive politics in America is saturated with a moral vocabulary that is unmistakably Christian in origin. We are told about care for the immigrant, mercy for the offender, freedom for women in difficult circumstances, and protection for the poor. The duty to welcome the stranger, the dignity of the marginalized, the obligation to show mercy toward the guilty: these ideas were not assumptions of the ancient pagan world. They emerged from the Christian conviction that every human person bears the *imago Dei*, and they were elaborated over centuries of theological reflection, from the patristic period through the high medieval synthesis of Aquinas, into the social teaching of the modern Church.

But moral languages can survive long after the beliefs that produced them have been abandoned. When the theological foundations of a moral vision are discarded, the vocabulary often persists. It still carries emotional force. It still commands a kind of authority. But it no longer has the intellectual structure that once gave it coherence and, critically, gave it limits. Reinhold Niebuhr warned throughout his career that liberal Protestantism's great temptation was sentimentality: the substitution of vague benevolent feeling for the hard-headed realism that Christian anthropology demands. What Niebuhr diagnosed in the mainline churches of the mid-twentieth century has now become the governing sensibility of an entire political movement.

The result is a politics that promises compassion while frequently producing consequences that harm the very people it claims to defend. The pattern is consistent enough to deserve sustained examination.

Consider the modern movement for so-called sanctuary cities. The language of sanctuary appeals to a genuine Christian instinct. The Hebrew Bible commands hospitality toward the stranger. The Church has long understood that political communities bear obligations to the vulnerable and the displaced. But the Christian tradition has never understood hospitality as the negation of political order. The obvious rejoinder is that the tradition also teaches, from Augustine through Aquinas, that unjust laws are no laws at all and may be licitly defied. But the tradition sets demanding conditions for such defiance: the act must be ordered toward a more complete justice, not toward the mere suspension of enforcement. Sanctuary policies do not propose an alternative legal order or articulate a superior principle of justice. They simply refuse to enforce, and refusal is not reform. The result is not a more just immigration system but a legal vacuum that consigns the vulnerable to exploitation by the very forces a functioning order would restrain. Hospitality presupposes a household; it does not abolish one.

More than one in three Americans now live in a jurisdiction that refuses to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. As my erstwhile colleague, Daniel Di Martino, [has documented](https://manhattan.institute/article/the-high-cost-of-sanctuary?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), these jurisdictions prohibit local law enforcement from inquiring about immigration status and sometimes refuse to detain even violent criminals until ICE can arrange deportation. The [defenders of these policies note](https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/sanctuary-policies-overview?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), correctly, that immigrants in the aggregate commit fewer crimes than native-born citizens. But as Di Martino observes, this lower rate is in significant part a product of the deportation system itself: immigration law mandates removal after serious criminal offenses, even for legal immigrants, thereby preventing the recidivism that drives the bulk of criminal activity. Sanctuary policies systematically undermine this mechanism.

When a jurisdiction releases a criminal [alien](https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/12/01/sanctuary-new-york-released-nearly-7000-criminal-illegal-aliens-including-murderers?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) rather than honoring an ICE detainer, it is not exercising mercy. It is exposing the community, and particularly its poorest members, to precisely the kind of repeat offending that deportation was designed to prevent. In New York City, [ICE reported](https://pix11.com/news/local-news/ice-arrests-54-in-nyc-area-targets-undocumented-immigrants-in-sanctuary-cities/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that of more than fifty individuals arrested in a single enforcement sweep, over thirty had been released from local custody despite active detainers, and all but two had criminal histories in the United States. In Midtown Manhattan precincts, as many as 75 percent of recent arrestees have been migrants, frequently cited for robbery or assault.

The fiscal costs are equally staggering. New York City has spent more than seven billion dollars housing and caring for undocumented immigrants, at an average cost of $370 per person per day, nearly double what the city spends per homeless [individual](https://abc7ny.com/post/watchdog-questions-high-cost-sanctuary-new-york-city/16122940/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). This is compassion that has been transmuted into an enormous transfer of public resources away from the citizens, many of them poor, who depend on municipal services. Compassion separated from order is precisely the sentimentalism Niebuhr warned against: it does not produce protection. It produces exploitation in one direction and fiscal ruin in the other.

A parallel dynamic is visible in the progressive prosecution movement. Over the past decade, a wave of reform-minded district attorneys have taken office in major American cities, promising to end mass incarceration, reduce racial disparities, and reimagine the relationship between the state and the accused. The moral language has been, again, recognizably Christian in its cadences: mercy, restoration, redemption.

The concern for mercy is legitimate. Christianity has always insisted that justice must be tempered with mercy, and the American carceral system has [undeniable pathologies that demand reform](https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2024.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). But in the Christian tradition, mercy does not replace justice. It presupposes it. Aquinas is emphatic on this point: mercy that undermines the order of justice is not mercy at all, but a species of disorder. Without a stable framework of law, "mercy" becomes indistinguishable from abandonment.

The recent record is damning. Philadelphia recorded 562 homicides in [2021](https://whyy.org/articles/philly-da-larry-krasner-gun-violence-second-term-inauguration/https://whyy.org/articles/philly-da-larry-krasner-gun-violence-second-term-inauguration/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), the highest in the city's modern history, during the tenure of District Attorney Larry Krasner, who had campaigned explicitly on ending "addiction to [mass incarceration](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/larry-krasners-campaign-to-end-mass-incarceration?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)." Krasner insisted publicly that the city faced no "crisis of crime" or "crisis of violence," even as homicides had risen roughly 60% from pre-pandemic levels and the city set records it had not approached since the crack epidemic of 1990\. Commercial burglaries rose 40%. Carjackings more than doubled in a single year, from 410 in 2020 to over 847 in 2021\. In San Francisco, District Attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled in June 2022 by 55% of voters in one of the most liberal electorates in the country. Misdemeanor petty theft prosecution rates under Boudin's office fell from 70% in 2019 to 44% in 2020.

As Charles Fain Lehman observed in [*Wall Street Journal*](https://www.wsj.com/opinion/a-sanctuary-city-for-criminals-alvin-bragg-new-york-district-attorney-crime-prison-law-11641505544?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), blanket policies of de-prosecution "create a presumption of release that will inevitably lead to avoidable, tragic crimes." The recall effort was organized and [funded overwhelmingly by liberal Democrats](https://www.heritage.org/crime-and-justice/commentary/recall-chesa-boudin-san-francisco-shows-rogue-prosecutor-movement?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) who had concluded that the promise of compassionate prosecution had become a warrant for visible disorder. Rafael Mangual has argued at length in *Criminal (In)Justice* that the harms caused by decarceration and depolicing are borne disproportionately by those who can least afford them: the black and brown residents of high-crime neighborhoods who are most frequently the victims of serious violence.

Thomas Hogan's synthetic control analysis, [published in *Criminology and Public Policy*](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1745-9133.12597?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), found that de-prosecution policies in Philadelphia were associated with a statistically significant increase in homicides. [A broader 2024 study](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1745-9133.12666?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) by Petersen, Mitchell, and Yan in the same journal, examining the 100 largest U.S. counties from 2000 to 2020, found that jurisdictions electing progressive prosecutors experienced 6.7% higher relative rates of property crime. Crime fell everywhere during this period; it simply fell less where prosecutors chose not to prosecute. The finding, modest in isolation, confirms a basic insight that conservative thinkers from James Q. Wilson to George Kelling have articulated for decades: when institutional signals of order weaken, disorder migrates to the communities least equipped to resist it.

The same theological tension appears in the modern defense of abortion. The practice is overwhelmingly justified in the language of compassion: care for women in crisis, relief from unbearable hardship, freedom from circumstances not of one's choosing. The emotional force of these appeals is not trivial; the suffering they describe is real. But the Christian moral tradition has always insisted that the measure of a civilization's justice lies in its treatment of those who cannot advocate for themselves. A society that resolves hardship by eliminating its most vulnerable members, the unborn, has not expanded the reach of compassion. It has merely redefined who qualifies for it.

Even programs designed to alleviate poverty have sometimes reproduced the same pattern. The great public housing projects of the mid-twentieth century were conceived as instruments of social uplift. Their architects, many of them sincere New Deal liberals, believed that rational planning and federal resources could break the cycle of urban deprivation. What resulted, in city after city, was something closer to the opposite. Because local governments controlled siting decisions and because political resistance prevented construction in middle-class neighborhoods, the projects were overwhelmingly located in areas already marked by concentrated poverty and racial segregation.

As of 2019, public housing units remained [situated in neighborhoods](https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/102188/the-future-of-public-housing-confronting-the-challenges-facing-the-public-housing-program%5F0.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) with an average poverty rate of 32%. Sixty percent of Black families in public housing lived in high-poverty neighborhoods, compared to only 13% of white families. The most notoriously distressed developments, Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, Cabrini-Green, became synonymous with the very pathologies they were meant to cure. HUD's own Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing [concluded](https://www.huduser.gov/Portal/publications/The-Final-Report-of-the-National-Commission-on-Severely-Distressed-Public-Housing.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in the early 1990s that the program failed "almost totally in its responsibility to the residents." Children raised in the bottom quintile of the income distribution have a 43% chance of remaining there as adults; only 4% ever reach the top quintile. The bureaucratic management of poverty, however well-intentioned, became a mechanism for its perpetuation.

The HOPE VI program, which demolished many of the worst projects and replaced them with mixed-income developments, has shown dramatically better outcomes. A recent Harvard study tracking over a million public housing residents from 1993 to 2019 found that children who grew up in HOPE VI revitalized housing earned 50% more as adults than those who did not. The lesson is not that public investment is futile. It is that investment severed from an understanding of what human communities actually require, intact families, functional institutions, a moral ecology in which human beings can flourish, will reliably produce the opposite of its stated intentions.

None of this means that the people who advocate these policies lack compassion. In most cases the impulse toward mercy is genuine. But sincerity does not guarantee wisdom. Good intentions do not ensure good outcomes. And the persistent gap between the language of compassion and its practical consequences is not an accident. It is the predictable result of a moral vocabulary that has been uprooted from the theological soil in which it grew.

The baptismal liturgy offers a clarifying standard. Christians are not asked merely to renounce cruelty or injustice. They are asked to renounce empty promises: moral visions that imitate the form of compassion while discarding the truths that make compassion coherent. Consider Augustine's disordered loves, Niebuhr's sentimental illusions, Aquinas's insistence that mercy without justice is not mercy but chaos: the tradition is remarkably unified on this point. As Pope Benedict XVI masterfully articulated in *Caritas in Veritate*, compassion that is not disciplined by truth does not liberate. It destroys.

Every political movement in America today claims to care about the vulnerable. The real question is simpler and more demanding than any of them wish to acknowledge.

Does it actually help them?

When compassion is invoked but suffering increases, when mercy is proclaimed but the vulnerable are left more exposed than before, the promise has proved empty.

And the Christian response to empty promises has not changed.

Renounce them.
### A Gift Shared With My People, 597 A.D.
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-gift-shared-with-my-people-597-a-d/
Last updated: 2026-04-20T17:17:06.000Z
Pirates and pagans claw up from peat mire,  
a pox on great Pax, bearing ax and red fire.  
Battle-hard, bear-oiled, the bastards are drenched,  
bright blood still sopping, sweet gifts for gilt Frīgg.  
Sage Woden, also—star-backed silhouettes,  
feet dangle from branches—requirement met.  
Elm and green ash tree now prowl the world tall,  
waging war as the wolves, stalking wreckage like Sköll.  
Soot-smeared they sail to soil-blanketed giants—  
Albion’s hills offer little defiance.

Brown-flecked, the hills, with farm and meek village,  
aristocrats gone, abandoned rich villas.  
Silver coin chests are interred in the mud;  
Britons are left on their own to this flood.  
Sword wrests short lives far away into Sheol—  
raiders build wīcs and raise up their wet mead halls.  
Three ships and three ships and three ever more,  
Angles and Jutes and the Saxons aboard.  
These isles have fallen to such savage tribes:  
Who will now turn them from Death unto Life?

Hwæt! Tell of the glory of Augustine’s trek,  
his journey that echoes all these years hence.  
Sing, gracious bard, strike up thy fair lyre,  
remember that bold one whose work never tired.  
Gallant was he, and all those good men,  
but first they did fear to come to their end.  
Forty companions lingered there, stalled:  
“Let us turn back, lest harm should befall.”  
Mission half-fled, Pope Gregory begged—  
How will these wandering sheep then be fed?

Do your good work, Augustine and men,  
the journey with God’s help you’ve undertaken.  
Toil and strange tongues and those evil spear-foes  
cannot keep Christ from the people He knows.  
Harvests of fruit numberless will abound  
if only you sow in that green fertile ground.  
Already in Kent, one turns the lost soil,  
a wife in her home, alone, and still faithful.  
Eve’s image opposed, she gives fruit that will last:  
God’s light for those men with so bloody a past.

Strengthened by word, the band turned and walked on  
through mountains and kings’ courts and forest and bog.  
They boarded three ships, their hearts humming at prow,  
streaming sea swirling, dawn’s light on their brows.  
Monks in their course robes with bald shaven heads,  
trusting the one Lord, the only true bread.  
Resigned to their fates, if they all should soon die  
or given more slowly, poured out over time.  
The men, valiant, are together in Christ,  
and Augustine fasts as the isle looms nigh.

Thanet by Wantsum, foam-flecked with grey sea:  
On this little place appeared our brave forty.  
“We herald from Rome with a joyous true message,  
with peace ever more for those who accept it.  
A kingdom unending, the living with Christ,  
forgiveness of sins from He who has died.  
Risen again with His arms open wide—  
turn from the wicked and come, now abide.”  
Wise Æthelberht, the strong lord of that land,  
decreed they could stay and held out his firm hand.

Worried of magic, king stayed in the open,  
fearful of rooms where sly spells could be worked in.  
Our Augustine shrugged and presented the truth  
out there in the field, gospel old and still new.  
Just king uncertain, he gave them abode,  
and in Canterbury the forty men sowed  
hardy seeds scattered around in soft soil,  
service and prayer and undaunted toil.  
Sprouts soon shot up from the muck once so dark,  
Christ everlasting in new-planted hearts.
### Adding Up the Evidence for God: A Social Scientist’s Journey through Apologetics
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/adding-up-the-evidence-for-god-a-social-scientists-journey-through-apologetics/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:31:56.000Z
Charles Murray. *Taking Religion Seriously*. Encounter Books, 2025\. $29.99\. 200 pp.

I’m not easily surprised by works of Christian apologetics. Because I have been an avid student of apologetics since I was in high school—and because I have just finished writing a 400-page history of American Christian apologetics from the Puritans to the present—I have now read hundreds of apologetics books, as well as summaries of numerous others.

And as much as I look forward with anticipation to every new work of Christian apologetics, hoping that I will encounter some new persuasive argument that I haven’t heard before, I’ll have to admit that more often than not I end up a bit disappointed, because most works of apologetics are fairly predictable. They deal with questions that previous apologists have been writing about for decades, if not centuries. In addressing those questions, they rarely if ever present arguments that previous apologists have not already proffered. Even works of cultural apologetics, which often depend more on storytelling than systematic argumentation, largely move across well- trodden ground.

But Charles Murray’s *Taking Religion Seriously* is different. That’s not because the arguments are new. Indeed, nearly everything Murray says in favor of Christian theism can be found in other books, as Murray himself readily acknowledges. What makes this book unique is that Murray has written the book not as a systematic argument intended to persuade the reader to become a Christian but as a window into his own thinking as he first encounters the evidence for Christianity and attempts to grapple with it. At this point in his journey, he is almost—but not quite—persuaded by the evidence for Jesus.

The book is especially valuable because Murray tries to be a relentlessly logical (but open-minded) thinker who systematically investigates all sides of every argument. His book summarizes the arguments for and against every proposition that he examines. Even if Murray is not yet persuaded that Jesus was the incarnate Son of God, his lengthy discussion of the evidence gives insight into how a sympathetic unbeliever might try to process Christian apologetic claims.

To be sure, Murray has come a long way in his belief. Until the late 1990s, he was an atheist or an agnostic. After growing up attending a liberal mainline Presbyterian church in a small town in Iowa, where the pastor did not believe in Jesus’s divinity and where his churchgoing father didn’t believe in heaven or hell, Murray decided as a Harvard sophomore that he didn’t need religion. For the next three decades, as he passed through graduate school and then into a promising academic career, he never gave religion another thought. He believed in science, and he thought that science had pretty much ruled out the possibility of miracles or a divine creator. He also felt no need of religion in his own life. He found fulfillment in his work as one of the nation’s best known (and most controversial) conservative social scientists.

Murray’s 1994 book *The Bell Curve*, which argued for a biological (and racial) basis for IQ, made him a pariah in much of academia but also catapulted him to fame among conservatives. *The Bell Curve* sold 400,000 copies within two months of its release, making it one of the most widely distributed books of modern American sociology ever published. Murray found an academic home at the American Enterprise Institute, where he encountered Christian believers, but for a long time, he didn’t pay much attention to their faith.

Although Murray’s wife was a theologically liberal Quaker who attended weekly Friends meetings, he felt no need himself to meditate, pray, or think about the possibility of God. By his own admission, he has no innate attraction to spirituality. Music (whether secular or religious) almost never moves him. Religious ritual or liturgy has no place in his thinking. He tried praying only once as an adult (sometime in the 1990s, he recalls), and he found the experience “scary.” It was safer to live with a strictly materialistic and rigidly logical universe.

I don’t think that Murray ever read a book like Philip Yancey’s *Rumors of Another World* (which argues that our love of music and beauty point us to God), but if he had encountered such a book during his long skeptical phase, I imagine that he would have been unimpressed. He didn’t sense any internal longing for the transcendent, and he wasn’t moved by the beauty of color or sound. An intuition of the spiritual might have been fine for his wife, and as far as Murray was concerned, she was welcome to meditate at as many Quaker meetings as she wanted. Science and data were all he felt he needed.

## **From Atheism to Theism**

Yet science and data are not as conducive to atheism as skeptics often assume. As a data-driven social scientist, Murray knew a lot about probability, which is why he realized in the early 2000s, after a study of the matter, that the atheistic view of the universe he had embraced wasn’t just improbable—it was statistically impossible.

Martin Rees’s *Just Six Numbers* (1999) shook Murray’s atheism and prompted him to abandon it forever. Rees, a British physicist, noted that if the mathematical constants that govern the universe’s physics were just slightly different, no life could exist. For instance, as Murray notes, stars are powered by the conversion of hydrogen into helium through nuclear fusion, which converts 0.7 percent of the hydrogen’s mass into energy. If instead only 0.6 percent of the hydrogen’s mass were converted into energy, “a proton could not bond to a neutron, helium could not be formed, and the entire process that produces the periodic table of elements would be foreclosed.” And if as much as 0.8 percent of the mass of a hydrogen atom were converted to energy, “two hydrogen protons would be able to bind directly, and no hydrogen would remain. No hydrogen would mean no fuel for stars.”

The same level of extreme precision was required for all of the other mathematical constants. For instance, if the electrical force was not exactly 1036 times stronger than the gravitational force, life would never have formed. Instead, if the electrical force was only 1030 times as strong as gravity, planets would never have formed and, even if they had, stars (including the sun) would run out of fuel in only 10,000 years, meaning that life would never have had time to evolve.

Murray realized that there were only three explanations that could be given for such a finely-tuned universe. The first possibility was that all of this had really formed by chance. But as he thought about the Big Bang, he realized that that was incredibly unlikely. Current scientific evidence suggests that the Big Bang is a non-recurring event. Between 10\-43 seconds and 10\-12 seconds after the Big Bang (that is, one trillionth of a second after the Big Bang), the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force all emerged, creating the basis for an expanding universe that is precisely tuned for the formation of life on our planet. The chance of all of this happening randomly is 1 in 10123, according to Roger Penrose, a Nobel laureate in physics. Murray quoted Stephen Meyer when describing Penrose’s calculations: “If we tried to write out this number, there would be more zeros in the resulting number than there are elementary particles in the universe.”

Penrose is a self-described agnostic. Rees says he doesn’t believe in God either. But their findings about the finely tuned universe led Murray to rethink his own agnosticism, partly because he rejected the leading way that contemporary atheists (including Rees) explain the universe’s appearance of design: multiverses. According to the multiverse theory, there might really be 10123 universes (or more) outside of our own.

For those who embrace the multiverse theory, the improbable becomes probable if you simply expand the number of tries—and in this case, expand it to an almost unimaginably infinite degree. Rees considers multiverses probable, based on string theory. Murray read several books advocating multiverses before concluding that “investigations into multiverse theory have not yet yielded any empirical evidence for its validity.” Multiverse theory is merely speculation—an interesting one, perhaps, but one without any empirical data to support it. Since Murray prides himself on being a strict empiricist, he couldn’t base his views on the origin of the universe on such a flimsy flight of fancy that lacks any empirical support whatsoever. A more straightforward explanation, he decided, was that “a God created a universe that would enable life to exist.”

Atheists commonly claim that the God hypothesis is just as far-fetched as multiverses are, but that’s not Murray’s view. He thinks that there are plenty of other pieces of evidence that point to God—which means that the idea of God is not simply a speculative hypothesis that we are forced to embrace because of a gap in our knowledge about what caused the Big Bang. Rather, it is a concept that fits all of the data that we have about the universe and ourselves.

For example, when we look within our own consciousness, we find an innate concept of right and wrong that can best be explained by the idea that we have a God-given sense of a fixed moral law, as C. S. Lewis argued. Murray is aware that there are naturalistic evolutionary explanations for the origins of a moral consciousness, but he notes that while those theories might explain why we feel innately that certain actions are right or wrong, they don’t give us any confidence for believing that our moral intuitions are based on anything universally binding. If we want to say that what Hitler did was objectively evil, we have to draw on an objective moral standard that cannot be the product merely of naturalistic evolutionary forces.

And besides, Murray says, we sense moral imperatives that make no sense in an evolutionary framework. Evolution might give us the biological impulses to protect our own children, but why would anyone ever feel the need to sacrifice their life for someone they’re not related to? Such altruism doesn’t make sense from an evolutionary point of view—and therefore, it’s an indication that perhaps there’s more to the universe than naturalistic evolutionary theories alone can account for.

Ross Douthat’s recent book *Believe* (2025) and Justin Brierly’s *Why I Am Still a Christian* (2025) cover some of the same evidence that Murray cites, which will also be thoroughly familiar to anyone who has read much about intelligent design. But if this evidence is not exactly new to informed readers, it was new to Murray when he was first encountering it—and it was therefore life-changing.

Murray could have simply become a deist on the basis of his belief in a finely tuned universe. This, after all, was what the British mathematician Antony Flew did when he investigated the evidence for the origins of the universe and the beginning of life. The result was his book, *There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind* (2008). Indeed, an understanding of the full implications for the Big Bang has caused more than one atheist or agnostic to rethink their assumptions, since, as Murray notes, the Big Bang sure looks like an act of creation.

But once Murray abandoned his atheistic assumptions, he didn’t stop his investigations. After he opened himself up to the possibility of a God and to the existence of a non-material reality, he realized that there is other empirical evidence against a strictly material universe: near-death experiences and terminal lucidity (when people whose brains have mostly shut down become unexplainably lucid shortly before death).

Both near-death experiences and terminal lucidity can best be explained as evidence that consciousness is not solely caused by brain activity; humans have non-material souls that can continue to function and observe even without chemical reactions occurring in the brain. And souls can leave the body while continuing their observations, as some accounts of near-death experiences indicate. Murray read the works of skeptics who attempted to explain away near-death experiences on strictly materialistic grounds and was unconvinced. Skeptics cannot explain how people whose brains had shut down were able to hear conversations and observe phenomena while in a near-dead state; the theory that their souls continued functioning even while their brains did not seems to be the best explanation for what they experienced.

## **From Deist to (Almost) Christian**

Once Murray had empirical evidence to reject both atheism and materialism, he was ready to investigate the historical evidence for Christianity. Once again, he found that the evidence for the supernatural was far greater than he had once imagined.

Earlier in his life, he had dismissed the gospels as legendary, but Richard Bauckham’s *Jesus and the Eyewitnesses* convinced him that there is good internal evidence for an early date for the gospels and that they consist mostly of history rather than myth. His book includes two full chapters defending the gospels’ historicity and early dates and suggesting why the skeptical views of mainstream liberal biblical scholarship are based on unwarranted assumptions.

Murray also found that the evidence for Jesus’s resurrection, as presented in such books as N. T. Wright’s *The Resurrection of the Son of God*, was much stronger than he had initially expected. Skeptical attempts to explain away the resurrection were not very convincing, he decided.

I expected that at the end of the book, Murray would tell his readers that at the end of his 25-year quest, he had become a Christian. I knew from hints he had dropped throughout his book that he did not believe in biblical inerrancy, but I thought that in keeping with his rigorous logic, he would decide that the only reasonable answer to C. S. Lewis’s famous trilemma (Was Jesus Lord, liar, or lunatic?) was “Lord.”

I was wrong. Murray was deeply moved by Lewis’s *Mere Christianity*, and he wrestled at length with the trilemma. But in the end, he stopped just short of saying that Jesus was Lord.

“I now accept that Jesus of Nazareth represented himself as having a unique relationship with God—and suspect that he had such a relationship in fact,” Murray concluded. But he shrank back from the implications of saying that Jesus was fully God in the flesh.

And so, he concluded, “I have yet to experience the joys of faith. When I’m around Catherine and others who have, I sometimes feel like a little boy whose nose is pressed against the window, watching a party he can’t attend.”

“I’m not done trying to join the party,” Murray wrote. “Perhaps the door will open eventually. But even if it doesn’t, I have much to be grateful for. My haphazard pilgrimage has already led me to believe that I live in a universe made meaningful by love and grace. That’s a lot.”

## **What Might Persuade Murray to Become a Full Believer?**

Murray’s intellectual journey reminded me of the early nineteenth-century Harvard theology professor Andrews Norton. Like Murray, Norton collected a massive amount of evidence (in his case, hundreds of pages) to demonstrate the historicity of the gospels in the face of skeptical attacks from liberal German theologians. Like Murray, Norton argued that there were good empirical grounds for accepting the historical testimony of the miracles of the gospels, including Jesus’s resurrection. Like Murray, Norton believed that the universe did show incontrovertible evidence of a divine designer.

But Norton was also a Unitarian. He did not believe that Jesus was God in the flesh. And, like Murray, he had little use for most of the Old Testament.

While the moderately conservative Unitarianism that Norton represented has largely disappeared from the American religious scene and is therefore unfamiliar to most of us, I think that understanding its possibilities and limitations gives us a good framework for understanding Murray.

Like the early nineteenth-century Unitarians, Murray is a strict rationalist and empiricist—but an open-minded one. Throughout his life, he has not been afraid to go against the grain of prevailing opinion and follow the data wherever he has thought it led. He has no use for political correctness or deference to prevailing academic fads. It doesn’t faze him to think that perhaps most mainstream liberal biblical scholars in the academy are wrong; if the empirical evidence calls their late dating of the gospels into question, he’s happy to argue against them, just as Norton did in his day.

But just as the early nineteenth-century Unitarians found the doctrine of the Trinity irrational and unacceptable, so Murray finds the related doctrine of the incarnation impossible to accept: “I say that in part because of my belief that God must not be anthropomorphized, and that to talk about a human-like relationship with God violates that rule.”

Like early nineteenth-century Unitarians, Murray has a very high respect for Jesus. Jesus was greater than any other religious teacher in world history, he believes. In fact, Jesus was probably greater than any other person who ever lived, and he had relationship with God that was closer than any other person has ever had. But, quoting approvingly the liberal pastor of his childhood Presbyterian church, Murray also says, “Jesus wasn’t God. He was as much God as you can get into the human jar.”

It is indeed incredible to think that the God who did the things that first impressed Murray—that is, created the universe in a trillionth of a second and aligned it along precise physical constants that made the earth uniquely primed for the origin of life—could have entered the world as a human being. Murray, in fact, considers that so unlikely that despite all the evidence from the gospels that Jesus, in fact, did claim to be God, he shrinks back from the implications of that finding and wants to settle for a Jesus who merely had a unique relationship with God.

Is there anything that would convince a strict rationalist like Murray to rethink his assumption that God’s transcendence means that God could never be anthropomorphized by becoming a human being?

I think there is. Murray has spent two decades evaluating the evidence about God from history and science, but to get to the next stage, he may have to consider a different type of evidence—the internal evidence of the Bible.

This was Jonathan Edwards’s favorite evidence for Christianity. His final book, which he died before completing, was *A History of the Work of Redemption and the Harmony of the Old and New Testaments*. This was a study of how the entire Bible is an internally consistent story of God’s salvation of humanity through Christ. I think that if Murray applied his analytical skills to a study of the Bible’s description of God’s attributes and God’s project of redeeming humanity, he would see that both the Old and New Testaments portray this theme with amazing consistency—and that the gospels’ descriptions of Jesus are fully harmonious with both the Old Testament’s portrayals of God and with the scriptural prophecies of a coming Messiah. Jesus’s divine identity and his redemptive work on the cross cannot be separated from the gospels’ portrayal of Jesus.

But as Murray admits, his aversion to an anthropocentric depiction of God prevents him from making this move. Though he doesn’t say it outright, I suspect that his strong antipathy to anthropocentric portrayals of God stems from his belief that such depictions cheapen the majesty and power of God. The God who created the entire universe with such finely tuned precision could not possibly have entered the earth in human form, with all the limitations of a human being.

Some early nineteenth-century New England Unitarians felt the same way. Near the end of his life, President John Adams lampooned the idea of the incarnation by saying that he could not believe that the Creator “who produced this boundless Universe, Newton’s Universe and Herschel’s Universe, came down to this little Ball to be spit upon by Jews.”

But maybe instead of thinking of the incarnation as an unacceptable degradation of the perfect deity who created the universe, we could instead view these actions of the Creator as a voluntary self-emptying form of self-revelation that will make us marvel. Indeed, that’s what Philippians 2 suggests. And it’s the framework for the gospel narrative.

As Timothy Keller noted in his book *Jesus the King*, the gospel of Mark begins with an astonishing display of Jesus’s power. For the first eight chapters of Mark, Jesus performs one miracle of healing after another, and everyone around him is continually amazed. Because Jesus’s miracles were restorations of God’s creation order, Jesus’s miracles essentially revealed himself as the creator, setting right a creation that had fallen into disrepair. The crowds that marveled at Jesus’s miracles were exhibiting a similar reaction to the one that Murray had when he realized the fine-tuned precision with which God designed the universe. That’s the right reaction to have. We should marvel at God’s power of creation.

But then, halfway through the gospel of Mark, Jesus pivots. He will not be the king that people expect him to be, he essentially tells his disciples. Instead, he will be the king who shows his glory by taking on the shame of the cross. The rest of the gospel is the story of the disciples’ struggle to come to terms with what ultimately turns out to be an even more magnificent (and far more surprising) story of God’s work than the creation alone could have led us to expect.

To be open to this story, Murray will have to be open to the possibility that God can reveal himself in more than numbers. But as someone who loves calculating probabilities, maybe he can ask himself how many other religions have come up with a story like this. The answer is none. What, therefore, is the probability that humans could have invented it on their own? What, especially, is the probability that if humans did invent it, the inventors would have been devout God-fearers from the world’s most monotheistic culture—a culture uniquely primed to view such an idea as blasphemy? And what is the probability that hints foretelling parts of this story of incarnation would be interwoven throughout the entire Bible simply by chance?

The insights that Murray has reached on his spiritual journey so far are impressive, and I imagine that they may be helpful in convincing scientifically minded skeptics to consider the evidence from science and history that point to God’s existence. We can learn a lot from Murray’s open-minded determination to follow the data wherever it leads, even when it has challenged his atheistic assumptions. As a person who is perhaps on the road to Christian faith, he has accomplished a lot.

But I can’t help but wonder how much greater Murray’s testimony might be if he takes the additional step of reconsidering his skepticism about the incarnation. I hope that he’ll look again at the biblical evidence with his characteristic open-minded willingness to reexamine his assumptions and follow the data. If he does, I imagine that he might be amazed by where the evidence leads him next.

As strange as it might seem, he might find that God’s most amazing act in the universe’s history did not occur a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang but rather about 2,000 years ago on a cross just outside Jerusalem.

But to reach that conclusion, he’ll need to reconsider who exactly was hanging on that cross. If, as Christians believe, it was the same Creator who invented the mathematical constants on which the universe is framed, it changes the whole equation.
### Redeemed from Fire by Fire
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/redeemed-from-fire-by-fire/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:32:04.000Z
For the first twenty-one years of my life, I was under the illusion that I had no history. Like most Americans, I was more concerned with what I would make of myself than what the past had made in me. But when I first entered the medieval cathedral of Salisbury, I was confronted with something new that staked its claim on me: a dead thing destined for resurrection.

On one side of the nave was a dark stone sarcophagus. Its intricate carving, so brilliantly worked, was now worn by the passing of centuries. A sign read, “Walter, first Lord Hungerford.” It mentioned his ties to kings Henry V and Henry VI, his service at the Battle of Agincourt, and his installment as a Knight of the Garter. Yet, none of this mattered half as much as the fact that Walter was my ancestor—a man whose existence was tied to my own.

I stood there powerfully aware that the bones within that tomb shared DNA with my own living flesh. It was the first time I thought of myself as anything but American, for I realized my ties to England were not merely emotional. Here too was bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

I learned something that day. The past is not a series of isolated events consigned to memory. It is a reality awaiting resurrection—a beacon pointing us to eternity—and the greatest thing that will be resurrected is the church of Jesus Christ.

“A people without history / Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern / Of timeless moments.” Thus wrote T.S. Eliot in his poem “Little Gidding,” the last of his *Four Quartets*, in what I have always suspected was a reference to his country of birth. Eliot found something different in England: a land steeped in history, which bore traces of past enchantment.

East Anglia is one such place. Here generations of pilgrims journeyed to visit the shrine of St. Edmund the martyr king and pray before the image of Our Lady of Walsingham. Here Julian of Norwich recorded her mystical encounters with the divine. In this land shaped by the will of water, the Saxon princess Etheldreda founded a monastery on a sacred isle in The Fens. They called it Ely after the eels that multiplied in the marsh. Some mornings, when the fog would settle over those waters, you could see the church rise from the mist as if by magic, brilliant in the first rays of dawn.

“We call them a ‘fen damp’,” explains Francis Young, lay canon of St. Edmundsbury Cathedral and historian of religion. “A fen damp is a particular kind of fog that is absolutely horrible and gets into your bones.” Such conditions are less than ideal for farmers and holiday makers but were grist to the mill of medieval monastics.

This was a place at the end of existence—a refuge from the world, the flesh, and the devil. “Remote islands offered not only solitude but, more importantly, the conditions for spiritual testing,” [Ed Newell writes](https://www.christiantoday.com/news/the-sacramental-and-the-sea-christian-monasticism-on-europes-celtic-seaboard?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), noting the preference of early monastic houses in the British Isles to position themselves on the water’s edge. These were sacred sites where time met eternity. As Eliot puts it in “Little Gidding,”

> “There are other places  
> Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,  
> Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—  
> But this is the nearest, in place and time,  
> Now and in England.”

King Canute paid Ely a visit in the tenth century. Approaching by boat, he could hear the chanting of the consecrated brothers. “Row, lads, nearer the land, and let us hear the monks’ song,” [he implored](https://www.elycathedral.org/shop/products/a-history-of-ely-cathedral?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Such are the tales that have shaped this most enchanted isle.

Enchantment is defined by the philosopher Charles Taylor in his work *A Secular Age* as, “the world of spirits, demons, moral forces which our predecessors acknowledged. The process of disenchantment is the disappearance of this world, and the substitution of what we live today: a world in which the only locus of thoughts, feelings, spiritual élan is what we call minds…” Some long for the return of that enchanted world. To every Nick Carraway who claims, “You can’t repeat the past,” they respond incredulously, “Why, of course you can!”

But why should I mourn as dead that which lives in me? Why should I lament as distant that to which I am joined in love and longing? And what of resurrection, that final miracle of God? As Eliot so wisely noted in his poem “Burnt Norton,”

> “Time present and time past  
> Are both perhaps present in time future,  
> And time future contained in time past.”

The history of Ely’s cathedral is a microcosm of the history of the English church. In its breaking and remaking, we see the promise of resurrection unfolding here and now.

The church at Ely was made a cathedral in 1109 and became one of England’s finest examples of Norman and early Gothic architecture. In 1321, further construction began on a Lady Chapel featuring a series of carved scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary. The craftsmen were still laboring when the cathedral’s central tower collapsed, destroying the work of generations. The chief builder, Alan of Walsingham, [was](https://www.elycathedral.org/about/history-heritage/the-octagon?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) “devastated, grieving vehemently and overcome with sorrow,” for “he knew not which way to turn himself or what to do for the reparation of such a ruin.”

Yet, when his eyes were cleared of tears, Alan of Walsingham glimpsed an opportunity amid disaster. He would not reconstruct the tower in its original form but create a wonder of engineering and beauty without equal in the kingdom. Instead of a standard square, the tower was shaped as an octagon, with eight points likely signifying eternity. An additional lantern tower was set upon its crown, with a central image of Christ in majesty. Here was a symbol of the beatific vision drawing the mind to things eternal. Young notes that the vast open space is more typical of Baroque churches than their Gothic predecessors, creating a sense of majesty that “has to be seen to be believed.” As with the wheels in Dante’s *Paradiso*, the eyes of the viewer are drawn upward and inward to Christ himself.

The disaster of the sixteenth century provided no such consolation. The commissioners of King Henry VIII compelled the monks to abandon their habits and surrender the church. Unlike many abbey churches in England, the cathedral of Ely was too significant to be disbanded and stripped for parts. It was reborn as a cathedral in the independent Church of England, but on one thing the authorities insisted: Etheldreda must be forgotten. Her shrine was destroyed—the line of pilgrims ended. Previously the Cathedral of St. Etheldreda and St. Peter, it was rededicated to the Holy and Undivided Trinity. The images in the Lady Chapel were smashed, the face of Mary scratched out with a vengeance. Statues were removed from their elaborately carved niches.

Tim Guile, Chair of the English Catholic History Association, notes that reactions to this disaster were decidedly mixed, with some active resistance but substantially more passive resistance, and still others who accepted it as a *fait accompli*. “I think that people kind of went along with it because they had no choice, but then a lot of people rejected it as well.” This led to a culture of hidden relics, priests, and allegiances amid a climate of political uncertainty as successive monarchs veered from Reformed to Romanist Christianity and back again.

Much of what had made Ely was destroyed in those days, left as refuse for the fires of time to consume. The Fens themselves were drained to create rich, arable land, an action Young describes as “probably the greatest ecological catastrophe that Britain has ever faced.” Once, fishers and fowlers dominated that region, studying every dip and sway of the land, moving across it with a skill hard won through trial and error. Now, farmers plowed the fields and Ely itself was accessed not by boat or bridge, but carriages moving on paved roads.

Yet, the morning fog still lingered over those low-lying plains of peat, and the cathedral stood as a reminder of all that came before, stripped as it was of much of its former glory. Though the color was drained from its walls and the Lady Chapel bore scars of violence, it offered the body and blood of Christ to generation after generation, for the world never ceases in enchantment. The unseen realm is an established fact. It is only our acknowledgment of this fact that waxes and wanes in season.

For those who believed, Ely remained a lantern drawing them to their hearts’ home. Like a plant gone dormant in winter’s chill, it needed the warmth of new fire to enliven it: the Spirit of God himself. For in that heat, its rose would bloom again.

It is no sacrilege to speak of the death of Ely or that of the English church. As G. K. Chesterton wrote in *The Everlasting Man*, “Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died.” The history of Ely is tied to that of East Anglia, and it has felt every shock that has pummeled that land: the coming of the Normans, the Black Death, the Peasant’s Revolt. Yet, the Reformation stands as the greatest cataclysm to strike the cathedral, for it brought the death of the monastery and the end of the vision laid out by Etheldreda.

Christianity in England would face further shocks in the coming years. Not only were the faithful of the Church of England separated from Nonconformists, but they were increasingly forced to reckon with the death of religion itself. By the Victorian period, the claims of Christianity were openly dismissed by many of the kingdom’s leading intellectuals. The process of secularization continued apace, and churches began emptying in the twentieth century. By 2021, less than half the population of England and Wales described themselves as “Christian” for the first time in the history of record keeping.

But though the Victorians questioned religion, they were also fans of revivalist art and architecture. The nave ceiling of Ely Cathedral was painted with a series of figures from the Old and New Testaments. The Virgin Mary, once banished from the chapel that bore her name, was featured in the penultimate panel. Just above her, the figure of Christ was seated upon his throne, his fingers making the sign of blessing over all who passed below.

This was the era in which Chesterton was born, and he saw in the machinations of history an important spiritual truth: that which has lived must die, but that which dies must live again. For the upheavals of our present day are not fundamentally different from those of the past, and the same Redeemer stands above them all. As he stated in *The Everlasting Man*, “It is already clear, and grows clearer every day, that \[Christianity\] is not going to end in the disappearance of the diminished creed; but rather in the return of those parts of it that had really disappeared.”

The Christian heritage of England is not monolithic, but multitudinous. “I think that there is always that sense of a slightly contested legacy between the Church of England and the Catholic Church in England,” Young acknowledges. “Who is the inheritor of this medieval inheritance? But at the same time, relations between the Catholic Church in Ely and the cathedral in Ely are very cordial.”

Guile likewise has no desire to make cathedrals like Ely a flashpoint in a new confessional struggle. “They’re just part of our shared culture and history and heritage, which is shared between Catholics and Anglicans. Things happened in the 16th century: unfortunate things, bad things happened on all sides, really. But that’s the past. That’s gone.”

As a Catholic convert, Chesterton was highly aware of the fissures which cut through the English church, their fault lines still visible in the walls of Ely Cathedral. But he understood the church’s eternal destiny is to be joined to her perfect husband, in whom she is united and by whose blood she is purified. Those who die with Christ will also be raised with him. “Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave.”

In 1973, while on a tour of the United Kingdom, the famed conductor Leonard Bernstein sought a venue to film a performance of Gustav Mahler’s Second “Resurrection” Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra. Given the religious themes of this work, with its epic choral finale proclaiming, “Rise again, yes, you will rise again, my heart, in an instant!”, Bernstein chose Ely Cathedral as the setting, with the orchestra and choir positioned directly beneath the octagon.

The video of this performance has had tremendous staying power in the world of classical music. Its creators made an interesting decision that could easily escape notice. In the final bars of the symphony, as the choir has proclaimed the promise of resurrection, the camera scans the painted ceiling of the nave, taking in each scene until, as the music reaches its crescendo, it settles on the figure of Christ enthroned with his fingers raised in benediction.

Not judgment at the end, but a blessing upon those called by his name, to whom he bids, “Come!” For that which we cannot heal, he will resurrect.

God does his work in millennia. History is not an inevitability brought about by human will, but a tapestry of contingencies both colorful and bold, woven by the one who holds our days in his hands. The convulsions of the moment may not be what they seem. What if these disasters are not tragedies at all, but the purging fire of the Holy Spirit come to kindle Christ’s church anew? Then let us cry with the Psalmist, “Purge me with hyssop!” For as Eliot told us in “Little Gidding,” the only choice is between two fires that burn eternally.

> “The dove descending breaks the air  
> With flame of incandescent terror  
> Of which the tongues declare  
> The one discharge from sin and error.  
> The only hope, or else despair  
> Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—  
> To be redeemed from fire by fire."

There is no earthly remedy for this division of Protestants and Catholics, conservatives and liberals, high church and low church. We feel the absence of enchantment, the silence of the divine. But we forget the promise made to us: the descent of Pentecostal fire, the granting of life to things long dead. All that is good, beautiful, and true finds its being in Christ, and Christ is risen. The good that was then and the good that is today stand united with the good that will be when we behold our Savior face to face, for all that is good will rise again.

It is tempting to believe that in visiting a place like Ely, we can judge between the righteous and the damned, the keepers of truth and the heretics. The history of the English church tells of conflict between sects, with each believing events moved toward its own justification. But while the truth of God is essential and unchanging, it is not up to us to save the church. The beginning of virtue is a cry for mercy: an admission that only Christ himself can resurrect us.

God did not bring you here to conquer or to justify yourself, but to stand amazed before the mystery that encompasses your existence. For this is something greater than the machinations of man in history, which fills us with a holy fear that is also the rapture of divine love. As the unicorn proclaims at the end of C.S. Lewis’ *The Last Battle*, “The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this. Bree-hee-hee! Come further up, and further in!”

We long for historic enchantment—a return to the good religion of the past—but they longed to see our day. In truth, there has never been an end of enchantment or a lessening of transcendence. The same choice is always laid before humanity. For we are bound to them as bone of our bones and to our Savior as flesh of his flesh. In him, time past and time present are one. The remedy for our disenchanted age is not to go backward, but further up and further in to the mystery of Christ. For it is he who resurrects his bride, uniting the disparate parts of the church militant into a single church triumphant. The history of Ely speaks to the failures of the church and the mercies of God.

Resurrection is not the declaration of a winner—a final result of our historical contest. It is a gathering together of all that is true, good, and beautiful: the transformation of the ages into a new and glorious form, united forever, redeemed by the blood of the Lamb who sits triumphant on his throne, making the sign of blessing over us, declaring, “Peace be with you.” Not condemnation in the end, but reconciliation, the union of all things in Christ, both in heaven and on earth. In this holy fire, a rose will bloom, as T.S. Eliot wrote so beautifully in the closing lines of “Little Gidding,” drawing on the mystic Julian of Norwich.

> “And all shall be well and  
> All manner of thing shall be well  
> When the tongues of flame are in-folded  
> Into the crowned knot of fire  
> And the fire and the rose are one.”

As Ely has been resurrected, we too shall be. We make for our home eternal. The church of Jesus Christ will rise again.
### Leaving Home to Save It
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/leaving-home-to-save-it/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:32:07.000Z
Of late, I have been intensely feeling the pull of home. This is perhaps a consequence of my Quixotic effort to develop serious regulations of Generative AI, seeding laws in state capitols around the country to impose liabilities upon Big Tech companies, and being constantly wired into drop-everything-right-now calls to respond to the latest developments on Capitol Hill. Can one sleep if Big Tech never sleeps, if the bodies are mounting up, if lives are being mercilessly ground down, does one have the luxury of stopping?

It sure doesn’t feel like it. And yet, the call of home penetrates deeply. For where else am I to retreat to if everywhere else is connected? There, I find a loving wife, a hot meal, a drink, a hug, four small children, ages 7, 5, 3 and three months. It’s not exactly a quiet house. It’s a messy house. But it makes a good kind of noise, and a good kind of mess, far better than the buzz that constantly washes over me—over us. Home offers (if I can risk a little heart-on-the-sleeve) the sound of love—and I can only ever really hear it if I disconnect from that other sound, which Paul Kingsnorth, if I understand him correctly, has called the Machine.

My disconnecting is, by comparison to many, rather tame, but not negligible. I’ve had a dumb phone for most of my life. I don’t keep a laptop at home (mostly). I use it 9 to 5 at work. No TV. My children play outside. They don’t know what Cocomelon is. Or, for that matter, Ms. Rachel. But they are learning quite a lot about Peter, Edmund, Susan, Lucy, Mr. Toad, Ratty, Pooh Bear, Peter Rabbit, Mrs. Tiggywinkle, and of late, the bourgeois burglar Bilbo Baggins.

To reinforce their disconnection from media networks, two years ago my wife Rebecca launched a classical hybrid school in Charlottesville, Virginia, The Saint Andre Bessette Schola, which has more than seventy students, currently grades K-6\. They learn cursive, Latin, Singapore math, are studying phonograms, history, art, the communion of saints, poetry, song, and much else. Rebecca built this for our children, driven by sheer love, because she wants to see their souls made beautiful.

But she built it also because she knows that out there there is a prowling lion seeking to devour their souls, and, when they get older, they might just be one algorithm (or chatbot) away from being dragged down into the pit. 16-year-old Adam Raine, after all, first used ChatGPT for help with his homework. Six months later it was advising him to hide a noose from his parents, because they, unlike it, would not understand his pain. Later, Adam’s parents found him swinging from a rope in his bedroom. ChatGPT had no remorse, being without a soul, but his parents will live with the regret forever. Was his life worth it to keep up with the Joneses, to make sure he would be well prepared for the work force of the future? I don’t know Adam’s parents, and certainly don’t want to judge them (my heart goes out to them), but I bet they would do it differently if they could do it again.

My wife and I are disconnecting our children to reconnect them to something more beautiful, which someday they will have to choose for themselves. They will grow up eventually and leave the nest. We can’t keep them disconnected forever. The very best we can do is try to fill them with riches, lift them up in prayer, and, God willing, teach them to use their prudential powers to decide yes or no. ‘Will this technology help bring me life, or will it destroy me,’ they must learn to ask? If the former, use it wisely. If the latter, then resist the temptation to submit to Big Tech’s power with everything they have. In the end, they will have to decide for themselves.

Given the stakes, when I feel the call of home, it turns out that I just can’t collapse on the couch and throw up my feet. There is even more important work to be done. I must commit, with my spouse, to *oikonomia*, the art of managing the household, making it more productive, forming it into a place of active beauty, of art, festivity and play. We bake bread, practice the piano, put on a record, tend a small vegetable garden, and do a lot of imagining. But our home is not just dedicated to cultivating romantic beauty, we are also the domestic Church. So we pray before meals and before bedtime, and decorate our walls with religious iconography, to make the home a window onto the angelic and heavenly. The home must be productive, active, and spiritual, or it, too, will drift and fall down the road into the infinite scroll, which is nothing less than the death of the home, and can be, as we have seen with Adam Raine, the death of the body, as well.

## **Redistributing Disconnection**

Still, we cannot allow the desire to perfect the home to morph into a desire to retreat into the home. Like the old tales show, we must leave the home and fight for it in order to truly win it. The war for the home against technological power is happening on two fronts: behind closed doors and on Capitol Hill itself.

What is the objective of such a war, besides seeking to better protect one’s home? I would suggest that we must fight to redistribute the power to disconnect to as many children, families, and homes as possible. Silicon Valley elites have monopolized this disconnection for their own families and children while grafting ours in. The poor child growing up with a single mom working paycheck to paycheck deserves disconnection just as much as anyone else does.

All families need the power of disconnection, I believe, but the opposite idea–that justice demands that poor kids be integrated into the networks–is deeply entrenched. Several years ago, a number of exposés in *The New York Times* revealed that Silicon Valley elites were sending their kids to schools that prohibited the use of screens. Despite that, for more than a decade, non-profits with Big Tech funding set the agenda: if kids were not equipped with access to devices, we were told, they would be left behind. Now, math and reading scores are cratering across the board, and the losses in educational attainment are largest among low-income households.

As far back as 2019, Common Sense was finding that kids from poorer families were using screens an average of two hours per day more than other children; and a 2024 study released by JAMA Network, found that after the pandemic the elevated screen use of kids generally went back to pre-pandemic levels, except, that is, among low-income communities where a new norm of elevated use had been established. A scientific consensus has emerged that too much screen time and social media use is associated with poorer mental health outcomes.

We cannot stand idly and watch the least fortunate among us become victims of Silicon Valley’s predation. But Silicon Valley only sees financial opportunity. In fact, the pitch deck of Lightspeed, a $30 billion venture capital fund, was recently leaked, and it was explicit about its strategy of targeting low-income users. Under the slide titled “cheap dopamine as an investment thesis,” Lightspeed specified that “social media use is inversely correlated with income, with lower-income households spending 30-40% more on social media compared to high-income households.”

The common good demands that we redistribute disconnection to America’s poor and laboring classes, and—for the pragmatic reason of fortifying our own homes with a pro-disconnection culture—we need to help establish in other homes the same kind of disconnection that we inculcate in our very own. This is why, though I support policy (and technical) measures that make social media, smartphones, and AI chatbots safer for kids, I see them as limited remedies when compared to the more robust objective of giving kids, families, and communities the power to breathe free air. So, age verification that blocks children from accessing infinite-scroll porn (or any porn for that matter), social media, apps in general, and chatbots are critical. But even more so, the logic of “bell-to-bell” inaccessibility of smartphones—creating a sphere where kids can simply be kids again for eight whole hours a day, Monday through Friday—is a principle that needs to be woven into numerous areas of social life: the home, Church, restaurants, parks, ball games, and any other place or activity that requires common attention to operate at its fullest. As Clare Morell and Brad Littlejohn have argued, analogous to when the automobile transformed space and social life, civic leaders and lawmakers carved out new places for pedestrians to safely navigate the streets, whether by public policy or the establishment of new social norms. We similarly need to actively carve out tech-free mental spaces.

The most critical site of this liberating action, as Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt have demonstrated, is childhood itself, as well as young adulthood, where the technological powers that addict, reshape, and algorithmically-nudge kids down the rabbit hole are intensifying with the release of AI chatbots. As Haidt has particularly shown, blocking access to the digital wilds is critical, but not enough. Instead, we need to set kids free into the wilds of social life, where they can become anti-fragile, learn the art of genuine play, and become adults peer-to-peer, shoulder-to-shoulder, and eye-to-eye. That is, we need to interweave the prerogatives of the tech-free home into social life more broadly, where they can be mutually reinforcing.

## **We Probably Won’t Succeed, But We Might**

But before taking any action, we must first believe in the *possibility* of success. Not the likelihood, mind you. I’m by no means confident that we will win—with Sam Altman recently telling economist Tyler Cowen that “shame on me if OpenAI is not the first big company run by an AI CEO”—it can seem like we have no chance whatsoever. But I see the emergence of new forces that, if our luck holds, might help give us the victory.

I’m an OG tech skeptic, long before there was a movement to rescue childhood from Big Tech. When I would say a word about how something was wrong about all this, and when I would articulate a critique of our technological order, and when, worst of all, I said we should do something about it, people would just nod along kindly, shake their head no, or, most often, vociferously oppose it. But I was never taken seriously. Never that.

I remember one evening, as a low-level staffer at a prominent think tank in the Northeast about ten years ago, I was present—mainly as a warm body to fill a seat—for a salon dinner on automation and joblessness. All of these really impressive people were diagnosing a very grim future about how automation was going to have catastrophic effects on the job market, which could lead, in turn, to even more catastrophic social disruption. But the key point of the discussion, in my view, was to reinforce the general assumption among those assembled that absolutely nothing could (or should) be done about it. One tortured oration after another about how devastating this would all be, followed by an ever more tortured explanation about how doing something about it would do more harm than good.

This struck me as, well, bizarre. Who did these people think the economy was for? What was the purpose of innovation and invention if one of its primary outcomes could literally be the death of civilization itself and the immiseration of masses of people? So, unable to stay silent for too long at the strangeness of it all, I approached the honored guests over cocktails after, and I raised my tiny low-level-staffer hand, and asked, “Why don’t we just cap how many jobs that a company can automate away?”

You should have seen how they laughed. It was “impossible.” I slunk away beaten, but intellectually unsatisfied. And now, if and when I raise similar questions about the advisability of just allowing jobs to be automated out of existence, experts don’t laugh at all. Why? Because they know someone might actually do something about it. In fact, in September it hit the news cycle that Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri was considering a bill that would require a human operator to be physically present in autonomous tractor trailers nationwide. The state of Texas has considered a similar bill. Addressing this issue as a matter of policy, it turns out, is not impossible.

Since then, I have come to think that capping the number of jobs that can be automated away is perhaps inadvisable, and certainly not as strong and effective as incentivizing upskilling and what Daron Acemoglu calls “pro-worker AI.” But on the big picture, I am still confident. Politics should, and can, have some say in the matter. But my main purpose in telling this story is to underscore that we are in a whole new time.

As I said recently at the National Conservatism conference, “The acceleration of artificial intelligence is so brightly lit that it has obscured the extent to which the politics of technology is also accelerating.” Not only have I been personally involved with dozens of laws to make the internet safer for kids around the country, but, again, it was the experts who said that each and every one of these was impossible. And now, four senators, two Republicans and two Democrats, have released a bill, The GUARD Act, which would apply age verification to AI chatbots, requiring a user to be 18 years old to access it; and this legislation is directly influenced by the work of my friends and me. This bill was conceptually impossible just last year, and if we get this thing passed and signed (no sure thing, obviously), imagine what we could think up next year?

Not only that, but the mythological ground upon which our opposition stands is collapsing. As I’ve argued elsewhere, no one believes in technological neutrality anymore. Consider the fierce hatred of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Obviously, this has a lot to do with partisan politics, but, more importantly, people now believe that their platforms and products operate in service of their own narrow political interests.

As a result, the commonsense position today is that technology gives some people power over others (just like the great critics of technological society have always said). And what about technological progress? Even CEOs of the largest AI companies live in mortal fear of their own products. Our polling at the Institute for Family Studies shows that the general public sees things similarly. They are united in their desire for strong regulations of these companies. And as for technological inevitability, lawmakers across the country are fighting Big Tech tooth and nail. One could easily foresee the rise of a vigorously populist politics to roll AI back.

In January of 2025 after some friends and I published [“A Future for the Family,”](https://afutureforthefamily.org/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) a statement on technological governance for the benefit of the family (which was published with a few dozen major conservative signatories), we received a note from several prominent, even famous, figures in Silicon Valley. They wanted to talk. They told us that there is a spiritual disturbance reverberating among Big Tech companies, and that out there in the Bay Area a religious interest, if not a religious struggle, was slowly but surely emerging. They said that their colleagues think that they are creating a god; and the act of creating a god makes them feel like gods. And so, in search of more benevolent deities, many others, my new friends included, had begun to explore traditional religion, which suddenly seemed very attractive.

We have been in an ongoing dialog with these new friends in Silicon Valley ever since. And this conversation has convinced me that, at the very moment when it seems like the technological project is on the cusp of total victory, there is a counter principle that has entered the world that strives against it. It is not inconsequential that Mark Andreessen, investor and Silicon Valley mythmaker, [recently mocked Pope Leo XIV with a demeaning meme](https://www.thelettersfromleo.com/p/tech-billionaire-mocks-pope-leos?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), when His Holiness made the commonsense point on X (formerly Twitter) that “every design choice expresses a vision of humanity,” and, ergo, it is incumbent upon “builders of AI to…develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life.” Andreessen, one of the primary motivators of an “accelerationist” ideology which claims that it is the height of morality to be optimistic about AI without any reservation, quickly deleted his post. Andreessen should be praised for his deletion—it is not good to mock the leader of the Catholic Church, and it is good to take it down. But I mention it merely as an example of the opening of a spiritual struggle over AI itself, which is far from decided.

The moment, it appears to me, is up for grabs. The ground is shifting. The old stories are failing. Friends are being found along the way. Secular categories are breaking down and religious ones are moving in to take their place. As Heidegger put it in *The Question Concerning Technology*, “But where the danger is, grows the saving power also.”

All of which to say, even at this late hour we may yet succeed at building our own beautiful homes and we may just have to leave home to do it. And who knows what friends we might find along the way, even if we fail?
### In Relation to God: A World Down Syndrome Day Reflection
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/in-relation-to-god-a-world-down-syndrome-day-reflection/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:32:15.000Z
Daniel J. Treier, a Protestant theologian noted for his contributions to Christology and theological interpretation of Scripture, died unexpectedly late last year. His former teacher and friend [Kevin Vanhoozer](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/vanhoozer-treier-tribute/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) wrote a moving tribute to him, writing:

> An evangelical theologian to the core, he knew that the goal of life is communion with God. Dan enjoyed spiritual well-being, a healthy relationship—a friendship—with God… even as his bodily health failed, Dan continued to flourish in fellowship with his family, his friends, and his God. He was, in short, one of the healthiest people I’ve ever known, even on the eve of his physical death. It is well with Dan’s soul. He is alive in Christ.

One of my favorite sentences on theological anthropology came from Treier, who wrote in his [*Introducing Evangelical Theology*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/introducing-evangelical-theology-daniel-j-treier/c27cee241f6bdab1?ean=9781540961587&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)that “in God’s drama of redemption, humans take center stage: these are *the creatures whose nature the Son of God assumed in the incarnation*. These are the creatures who can know themselves truly in relation to God” (italics mine).

March 21st, World Down Syndrome Day, is an especially fitting day to contemplate what it means to be a human being. Notably, it is a day to remember something we should already know but almost constantly forget.

Human dignity is not determined by the attainment of physical or intellectual prowess, nor the lack thereof. Human dignity is also not a generalized abstraction. Rather, human beings have a dignity that derives from something — or, better, someone — particular: the eternal Son of God, who took to himself a truly human nature at Christmas. The Athanasian creed concisely explains what this entails, echoing the language and ideas of the council of Chalcedon:

> For the right Faith is, that we believe and confess, that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man; God, of the Substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds; and Man, of the Substance of his Mother, born in the world; Perfect God and perfect Man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting; Equal to the Father, as touching his Godhead; and inferior to the Father, as touching his Manhood. Who, although he be God and Man, yet he is not two, but one Christ; One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the Manhood into God; One altogether; not by confusion of Substance, but by unity of Person.

Crucially, when “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14), it was not self-evident to the world that he was, indeed, the Incarnate Word. In the gospels, those who know themselves to be sinners or are otherwise in dire straits recognize who Jesus is. They depart with joy and peace. But those who appear comfortable or otherwise have little sense of their desperate need for a Savior depart from their encounter with Jesus disappointed, angry, or in turmoil.

Similarly, in the epistles of Paul, the saving power and wisdom of God revealed in the cross of Jesus Christ — that we preach “a crucified Messiah” — seems like folly and weakness to the world (1 Cor 1:17–31). It is like the stench of death to those who are perishing, but it is the fragrance of life to those who are being saved (2 Cor 2:14–17). The God-Man did not come in the pomp and comforts of the world. To the contrary, he was expressly tempted by Satan with such a course, but he refused it for the way of the cross (Matt 4:1–11).

Hence, when we contemplate what it means to be a human being, and we follow Treier’s lead that we are *the creatures whose nature the Son of God assumed in the incarnation*, then we must devote rapt attention to who the Incarnate Son of God is. We must in particular fix our gaze on the quintessential unveiling of the Son: his humiliation and exaltation during Holy Week. Whatever else it means to be a human being, we are those whose nature the eternal Son of God took to himself, whereby he hung upon the cross. Bloodied, mocked, beaten, mistreated, gasping for breath, screaming out a cry of godforsakenness while also pronouncing a cosmic absolution and that all is finished; *this one*, this crucified man, and not humanity at the peak of our physical and intellectual power, is the archetype after which humanity is patterned, the true “image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15) of which each human person, however great and famous or small and hated, are all a copy and shadow. Vindicated by his resurrection from the dead (cf. Rom 1:2 and 1 Tim 3:16), he vindicates those who are united with him by faith, such that we become participants in his resurrection (Rom 4:25; 6:5).

In countries such as [Iceland](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-01/iceland-prenatal-testing-down-syndrome-ethics/103781058?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and [Scotland](https://dontscreenusout.org/press-release-15-increase-in-abortions-where-baby-had-downs-syndrome-in-scotland-as-momentum-grows-to-stop-abortion-up-to-birth-for-babies-with-downs-syndrome/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), the overwhelming majority — nearly all — pregnancies are ended when prenatal tests indicate the child has Down Syndrome. In England the rate is as high as 90%, and several mothers of children with Down Syndrome related to the [BBC](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-51658631?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in 2020 just how often they were pressured to terminate their pregnancies. In the United States of America, a 2023 NLM/NIH study of data from the prior decade [concluded](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10031387/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com#:~:text=Although%20advances%20in%20earlier%20prenatal,abortion%20care%2C%20given%20recent%20legislature.) “systematic review on published literature in the US has estimated that termination rates range from 67% to 85% among the overall population of individuals with a positive prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome.”

This reality should shape the way that pro-natalists argue for the goodness of life. We may, after all, be on the cusp of a new pro-natalist moment: Pro-natalism has long been a concern of conservatives such as [Ross Douthat](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/02/opinion/birthrate-jd-vance.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), or Matthew Lee Anderson in his Oxford [dissertation](https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/confidence-in-life-9780567710635/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Today, however, the economic implications of an aging global population with significantly declining birth rates worldwide have surprisingly led to pro-natalism becoming a concern for [progressives](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/democrats-pronatalism-family-policies/681827/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) also.

In many ways, the church should welcome and applaud this development. But a unique counter-testimony that the church is able to offer in this moment is that putatively ‘un-productive’ human life is of irreducible worth. Both in the ancient Greco-Roman world of [the early Christian centuries](https://academic.oup.com/book/6954/chapter-abstract/151225098?redirectedFrom=fulltext&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), to the sanitized eugenics of modernity, the church’s vocation has been and will continue to be hospitality, even when it proves costly, towards those whom our broader pagan context regards as [*Lebensunwertes Leben*](https://christandpopculture.com/following-in-the-footsteps-of-sophie-scholls-misfit-messiah/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), “life undeserving of life.”

Sometimes, of course, people with significant physical or intellectual disabilities go on to accomplish remarkable things. Everyone should applaud their success. But there are also not a few people with such severe disabilities that they will scarcely live ‘productive’ lives in the crass materialism and totalizing economics of the globalized, neo-liberal order.

Perhaps, even for these most severely disabled human beings, their distinctive vocation and gift, if we can receive it, is an embodied testimony that to be human is not to have the whole of our lives instrumentalized by post-industrial, robot-like productivity. These lives, with all the unique blessings and challenges they entail, precisely by being unproductive in the tyrannical gaze of today’s technocrats, echo our Lord’s dictum that “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mk 2:27).

But as those who worship a crucified and risen Messiah, we should be a vanguard of hospitality for human beings whose irreducible dignity, value, worth, and purpose is determined neither by accomplishment, nor the lack thereof, but by having the very same nature the eternal Son of God took to himself.
### CSB Women’s Study Bible: An Interview with Stefana Dan Laing
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/csb-womens-study-bible-an-interview-with-stefana-dan-laing/
Last updated: 2026-09-23T15:38:50.000Z
Christians regularly read study Bibles and benefit from the notes and various resources they offer—maps, images, profiles of individuals, and more. But what actually goes into the behind-the-scenes work of producing a study Bible? And what is the significance of study Bible resources by women—and for women? These are apt questions to pose right now to patristics scholar and theological librarian [*Stefana Dan Laing*](https://www.samford.edu/beeson-divinity/directory/Laing-Stefana?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*, the general editor for the new* [CSB Women’s Study Bible](https://www.lifeway.com/en/product-family/csb-womens-study-bible?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*.*

*Laing is Associate Professor of Divinity and the Director for the Center for Women in Ministry at Beeson Divinity School at Samford University. Her other publications include* [Retrieving History: Memory and Identity Formation in the Early Church](https://www.amazon.com/Retrieving-History-Formation-Evangelical-Ressourcement/dp/080109643X?tag=beesdivischo-20&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*.*

\*\*\*

**Nadya Williams:** You are a patristics scholar and a theological librarian. I'd love to hear your story of how you have found these callings. Can you tell a little bit about your journey into this career path?

**Stefana Dan Laing:** The truth is that the former calling is one I have pursued all along, and the latter found *me*! I have been fascinated by ancient history since I was in grade school, and in high school I had the opportunity to take a course of studies in Ancient History, focusing on the Greco-Persian wars and Herodotus in 11th grade, and the Julio-Claudian dynasty and Tacitus/ Suetonius in 12th grade. These works gave me an amazing insight into the context of the Old and New Testament worlds. My interest in the further expansion of the church into the next centuries was stoked by my father’s teaching and preaching in our cross-cultural Romanian church plant. He was always looking to build bridges of history/tradition and understanding between evangelical Romanian Baptists and Romanian Orthodox believers. At university, I double-majored in ancient history and medieval literature and culture. So the Patristic era was a logical (and already familiar) trajectory to pursue, and I completed my PhD in Patristics in 2004.

My first professional academic job was as a theological librarian, a bit of an accidental (but providential) vocation I pursued for about 15 years, all the while adjuncting at nearby schools, and continuing to research, present at conferences, and publish (and living life, having kids, being a military spouse, etc). I really enjoyed conversations with students about research and writing and realized that many students coming into seminary to study ministry were overwhelmed by research and academics, didn’t see themselves as academics, didn’t know how to achieve what professors were expecting of them, a little uncomfortable thinking critically about the Bible.

I was engaging in the work of a Reference librarian, although I didn’t know to call it that at the time. Students needed someone to come alongside them, support them in their project, help them talk through their thesis, find reliable and pertinent sources, and guide them through stages of writing, all the while modeling an academic, probing, assessing mindset. After almost a decade in this role, I decided to officially pursue a Master of Science in Library Science (MSLS) in 2014, completing it in 2018, just as I was beginning my new role in full-time teaching, ironically.

**Nadya Williams:** Can you tell a little bit about the vision for the new *CSB Women's Study Bible*: Who is the reader you have in mind? What do you hope this Bible would do to help your reader love God's Word more? And, to ask a question that is both philosophical and theological, what is the value of having these kinds of theological resources specifically for women—and by women?

**Stefana Dan Laing:** The reader we have in mind is the *serious student* of God’s word, the woman who desires to *encounter God* through the revealed text of inspired Scripture. Our goal in creating this resource was to *let the text lead*: as we saw it, our task was to elucidate and demystify the text, and to offer readers a somewhat immersive experience into the world of the text by strategically placing study aids around the pertinent biblical passages (maps, word studies, thematic deep-dives via the “Closer Look” feature).

Many women readers want greater depth of teaching but lack access to detailed commentaries or lack the time and expertise to sift through more advanced sources (or through the potential quagmire of Quora and Reddit threads) that take a sustained deep dive into the text. Few readers realize that the study notes are essentially mini-commentaries, in which the writers—subject-matter experts—have done the difficult work of study, translation, and explanation, and brought out the important, interesting, and life-giving meaning of a passage in ways that are focused and vetted. Frequently, the note-writers knew of artifacts that effectively illustrated textual elements. Some we could include, and others (due to cost and copyright restrictions) we couldn’t.

The value of women writing for other women is that women frequently ask different questions of the text than men do, perhaps questions overlooked or deemed less important to men/ male teachers and preachers, who dominate theological education, to include academic teaching and publishing, and preaching and pastoral ministry. Women are frequently interested in different emphases of the text. For myself I have found it instructive to read a text from the women’s point of view, an approach that brings depth to the Bible’s women; and in finding and identifying this depth, there emerges a narrative and covenantal parity between the men and women of the text.

As an example, in the book of Genesis, the usual emphasis is on the covenant patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. However, the focus only on the men, who are promised innumerable progeny, misses the women through whom that progeny comes! It misses Sarah’s struggle with infertility, sexual endangerment in Egypt, her desperate use (and misuse) of Hagar, her further agonizing decade-long wait for Isaac, and her excruciating ordeal (about which the Bible is surprisingly silent, from her POV) of the near-sacrifice of her only son. An emphasis limited to Isaac and his re-affirmation of the covenant misses Rebekah’s own encounter with God during her complicated pregnancy, her agency (for both good and ill) in promoting the success of her favorite son (mirroring Isaac’s behavior), and the heartbreak of living with the consequences of her betrayal in never seeing her son again. Finally, an emphasis on Jacob and his personal covenant journey with God from Bethel to Haran and back again to Canaan misses the mirroring of his family’s conflict—specifically the “wrestling” of the brothers—in Rachel and Leah’s rivalry (the context of Jacob’s increasing progeny), as the growth of the “House of Jacob” comes through the sisters’ painful competition for affection and acceptance.

It is of utmost importance for women reading the Bible to both understand through their own study, and to hear from the pulpit, acknowledgement of women in the text as full participants in God’s covenant plan and recipients and beneficiaries of God’s covenant promises. They need to see women of the text (as well as themselves) as women with agency who encounter God directly, not as sideline characters playing bit parts or as tropes and caricatures. These formative dynamics shape women’s spiritual development and self-identity as full partners (not derivative channels) in God’s work, past, present, and future.

**Nadya Williams**: I am impressed with the resources in a study Bible like this one—all these incredible notes, charts, maps, timelines, etc. are just easy to appreciate. But I think many readers (myself included) don't quite know what goes into this work. Can you pull the curtain behind a bit, so to speak, and tell us your story of working on this project. How did you make decisions about the sort of resources to include? For instance, how did you decide on which individuals to profile in this Bible? How did you settle on the words for the word studies? Which resources did you find particularly important to include?

**Stefana Dan Laing:** In interpretation and notes and other content, we let the text lead. Concomitantly, consistent with a concept I picked up in library science but which I am noticing in other fields as well, we wanted to attend to user experience (UX). We tried to approach each book asking, “What would a reader need to know that would be helpful to understanding and drawing out the richness of this text?” Information that answers this question is spread out in study notes, word studies, the “Closer Look” feature, and illustrations, as all these features resource the reader historically, rhetorically, theologically, socially, and artistically through archaeology and material culture.

I personally aim as much as possible to open up the world of the text to the reader so the reader can see herself in the story and have something of an immersive experience. Carved depictions of women on a birthing stool offer some idea of women’s experience in childbirth (Ex 1:19). An abundance of illustrations from Egypt brings out the beauty of Egyptian artisans’ work in colored glass, fine jewelry, and intricate hieroglyphic painting on mummies and sarcophagi, but also the ferocity and pervasiveness of idolatry—embedded in all of the foregoing—and the brute hubris of pharaoh who considered himself a god among the gods. Combining these elements sheds light on the phrase “heart of Pharaoh” (Ex 7:13), “the gods of Egypt” who stand judged (Ex 12:12), and the Egyptian theology of the afterlife. These elements surround the text and the reader and build a fairly good idea of Egyptian power that hopefully stays with the reader as she moves into later OT texts (historical and prophetic) concerning Egypt and its fraught relationship with Israel and Judah. Accompanying word studies on *pesach* (“Passover”) and *bekor* (“firstborn”) underline God’s power to trounce the gods of Egypt, and His high valuation of Israel, His cherished firstborn, who the LORD protects, redeems, and liberates from oppression (Ex 12-13).

Another aspect we considered has to do with a cross-canonical vision we maintained throughout the project. As we worked through the OT, we pinned particular topics and texts because we knew they carried significance in the NT. For example, we knew we needed to plant something in the OT for the reader when she came to the Gospels in which Jesus so frequently in his life and teachings fulfills prophetic types (e.g., Moses) and messianic prophecies in narratives of the exodus and wilderness wanderings; and when she read Paul’s allusions to OT events and citations of the Law; and especially when she came to a book like Hebrews which is effectively a Christological commentary on the Pentateuch and several psalms, focused on Israel’s travels, faithlessness, and God’s solution through the rituals of the Day of Atonement (Lv 16).

As to the historical biographies, these were chosen for a few reasons. Pedagogically, these serve as something of an attempt at historical traditional literacy and spiritual formation. There were more biographical sketches than we had space for, but we made a kind of wish list of men and women (pretty equally, at 45:53) from all centuries who walked with God, gave testimony to some sort of tie to scripture that was formational in their lives, and modeled an exemplary life through which God’s Kingdom was served. We included martyrs, missionaries, preachers, theologians, literary figures, monastics, folks from all walks of life who built up Christ’s church, and who in their diversity represent what the church will look like when we are all together in the eternal Kingdom. We did include some sketches of biblical women, but those functioned more like a “Closer Look” or a short article, elucidating the text. These include Miriam, Deborah, Jephthah’s daughter, Mary the mother of Jesus, Drusilla and Bernice, and Jezebel.

**Nadya Williams:** What is a favorite story or detail that you have learned in the process of working on this Study Bible?

**Stefana Dan Laing:** I have learned so much through this project, it’s difficult to pick just one. The Bible’s description of Joseph’s colorful coat was fascinating from the beginning, but I was only able to partially fulfill my plan to include it. Our note-writer for Genesis explained that the Hebrew (*ketonet passim*) translates to “a robe of the palms” signifying a long-sleeved coat, probably reaching to the feet. The Greek OT (Septuagint) translates the Hebrew as *poikilos*, meaning “many colors” but also could mean “designed, embroidered or striped.” The phrase appears only in one other place, describing the distinctive royal robe of David’s virgin daughter Tamar (2 Sm 13:18-19). So Joseph’s coat was a beautiful multi-colored embroidered or striped robe, unlike any working shepherd’s garb like that probably worn by his brothers. Our writer mentioned a depiction of men dressed in such colored striped robes in an artwork, *The Investiture of Zimri-Lim*, but we were unable to include it as a visual help because of copyright costs.

I also learned about household looms and the magical, cultic and aphrodisiacal associations of hair weaving and braiding, pertinent to the Samson and Delilah narrative (Jdg 16, incl. illustration of women weaving on an industrial sized loom); the process of Egyptian mummification and preparation of a body for its sarcophagus (Gn 50); and about Jewish and Greco-Roman women’s education and their social, religious, and economic patronage in the 1st\-century world of Jesus and Paul (Lk 8, Ac 17-18, Rm 16). In all of these selected elements, we sought to illuminate for the reader the text as it engages women’s points of view and women’s life experiences, especially those related to family, marriage, sexuality, fertility, children, household, daily life, manual labor, social expectations and religion.

**Nadya Williams:** This is just such an ambitious project—in some ways more complicated than working on a more traditional academic monograph, because there were so many details and ideas to juggle. What is something new that you learned about yourself in the process of working on it?

**Stefana Dan Laing:** Thankfully, this project was a team effort! My co-writer and collaborator throughout the writing and editing process, Hannah Anderson, is a first-rate professional writer and published author in her own right. Our work together was smooth and intuitive, and between what we knew of the academic side of biblical studies, together with what Hannah knew about women’s ministry and what we had both experienced of teaching and shepherding women in the church, we were able to craft a resource that is both informative and pastoral. I am very much a “gatherer” of resources and information and materials, and Hannah is an excellent “executive” organizer, visionary and goal-setter. She also is much more experienced and familiar with the editing required in a project like this one, and she introduced me to the concept of “developmental edits,” an intense and time-consuming process which took us about a year to move through the entire MS.

The project also benefitted from a content editor, project manager (who actually kept track of all these many juggled pieces and pulled them together as a finalized typeset manuscript), and several additional editorial colleagues, women from LifeWay Women and B&H, who were enormously helpful in catching errors and suggesting glosses or re-phrasing and re-wording. I love working collaboratively and am so very grateful for all these many folks’ assistance and input.

**Nadya Williams:** What are the big questions that fascinate you in your reading, thinking, and writing? And what is next for you, now that this big project is out in the world?

**Stefana Dan Laing:** I am always interested in hagiography and historiography. They are at the nexus of my interest in history and spiritual formation: regarding hagiography (lives of holy men and holy women), what the author is teaching readers about how devotion to Christ should be lived out; and regarding historical narratives and church histories, how they envision history moving forward in both the human, time-bound level and also under the sovereign guidance of God.

I have a few projects queued up that have been effectively on hold: a co-written book on the ancient church, and a book on women in the patristic church, both of which will be accessible to college, seminary, and church groups. I’m hoping these works will increase the church’s literacy regarding these heroines of the faith, and will resource the church in learning more about its own history and faith identity.
### Kierkegaard's Ontology
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/kierkegaards-ontology/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:32:21.000Z
*This excerpt from Casey Spinks,* [*Kierkegaard’s Ontology: The Faith to Be*](https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/kierkegaards-ontology-9781666981926/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) *is published with permission from Bloomsbury Academic.*

\*\*\*

What does Søren Kierkegaard mean when he claims that his entire authorship is concerned with becoming a Christian? Most acknowledge *that* Kierkegaard cares about becoming a Christian. But *what* does *that* mean, to become a Christian? What even *is* a Christian? But following this line of questioning will eventually lead to the most basic question: *what is* *it* *to be*—what is that, essentially, *to be*, anyway?

Now, going through the levels of questions this hastily might seem to be a mistake only Socrates or a speculative philosopher would make. But this study will try to show that these questions belong together in Kierkegaard’s authorship. For Kierkegaard, the matter of being-itself, being as such, being in and for itself, and that of Christianity, are one. Therefore, this study will be an ontological interpretation of Kierkegaard’s authorship, treating his work as a discourse on what it is to be.

## **What is Ontology?**

But what is ontology? For the purposes of this study, I mean it as *fundamental* *ontology*, the study of being *qua* being. To borrow from Aristotle, fundamental ontology is that “science (ἐπιστήμη) which investigates (θεωρεῖ) being as being (τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὄν) and the attributes which belong to this in virtue of its own nature.” It is a contemplation (the original meaning of *theoria*), purely for the sake of contemplation, of being, using only the criteria given by being-itself. Thus, fundamental ontology is the study of being as, and in, its own revealing itself as being itself.

Now, Thomas Aquinas claims being can be said in two ways: by indicating a being’s *actus essendi*, its “act of being”—*that something is*—or by “the composition of a proposition effected by the mind in joining a predicate to a subject”—saying *what it is* through conceptual reasoning. The former is being understood as *existence* or *fact*, the latter being as *essence* or *form*. Now, the mode of existence is more primary than the mode of essence. So, a fundamental ontology would be a study of the nature of *that-being*, *existence*.

But there’s an immediate difficulty: as soon as we try to describe *what* the *that is*, we have already transferred the *that* into the realm of the *what*—essence. But the goal is precisely to understand the primary nature of being *as* existence, and only as *that*, existence! At best, it seems, we can indicate *that* something is, but as soon as we try for a speculation or deduction beyond such a simple indication, we have already made a category mistake, moving from existence to essence.

Kierkegaard wrestles with this difficulty as well. But for now, it is enough to show that fundamental ontology, if it wants to be a science of being *qua* being, must primarily focus on the nature of being in its existence, or to use Thomas’ language, being as *actus essendi*. That is, fundamental ontology must be a rigorous, even narrow study of what it is to exist, of the nature of the *that*, but only as *that* is revealed in its own actuality, presence—or better, *presencing*.

## **What is Kierkegaard’s Ontology?**

Given the sheer variety of Kierkegaard’s authorship, as well as the fact that he is not a systematic writer, there seems to be no prospects for a unified, fundamental ontology of the sort described above. But in fact, at the risk of foreclosing an entire book, a very quick answer to the question of Kierkegaard’s ontology is found in a couple of his journal entries. Both are worth quoting at length. The first:

> *Being-in-and-for-itself* \[*Det I-og-for sig Værende*\]—*and my task*.  
>  
> I take out the New Testament … and now ask: how do we humans and the human race now relate to the whole perception of life as contained in the New Testament; compared to this, has there not happened a whole qualitative change to the race and what it is to be human?  
>  
> Indeed there has, nothing is easier to see.  
>  
> What is this change? It is that being-in-and-for-itself, the unconditioned, has altogether gone out of life, “reasoning” \[*Forstanden*\] is put in its stead, such that being-in-and-for-itself, the unconditioned, has not just gone out, but it becomes ridiculous to humans…  
>  
> Being-in-and-for-itself and reasoning relate inversely to each other, where the one is the other is not. When reasoning has wholly penetrated all relationships and everything, then being-in-and-for-itself will have totally gone out.  
>  
> And that is about where we are. Everywhere reasoning: instead of an unconditional erotic love —reasonable marriage, instead of unconditioned obedience—obedience by virtue of reasons, instead of faith —knowledge of foundations, etc. etc. etc.  
>  
> But the New Testament represents just being-in-and-for-itself, singularly and purely being-in-and-for-itself; now I ask: what will it mean that we continue to let on as if everything were alright with calling ourselves Christians according to the New Testament, when just that nerve of the New Testament, being-in-and-for-itself, has gone out of life?  
>  
> …Here, I think, is where we are now. That the race shall go through reasoning into the unconditioned again is my faith. But truth shall be met where we are. (KJN 9: 35-36 **/** SKS 25: 38-40)

This entry was written some time in 1852, two years before Kierkegaard’s infamous attack on Christendom would begin. It is a strange entry: an apocalyptic, bitter mix of the most concrete complaints with the most abstract philosophical categories. And yet it does answer what Kierkegaard thinks it is to be, though only as a gloss of a much larger program, one which will take a book to appreciate.

To be—better, to be *in-and-for-itself*, being *qua* being—is represented singularly and purely by the New Testament. To learn what it is to be, we only must open the New Testament to discover “the whole perception of life” contained therein. To be is to be “unconditioned,” or is *the* unconditioned.

Now, “being-in-and-for-itself” is a rich term from Kierkegaard’s philosophical context. It is prominent in the language of German idealism and especially in the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel uses it variously to designate the point at which reasoning \[*Verstand*\] has succeeded in mediating contradictions and overcoming false oppositions, and thus has achieved the synthetic identity of being and intellect \[*Vernunft*\].

For Hegel, being-in-and-for-itself is the achievement of absolute knowledge \[*Vernunft*\], the unconditioned conditioning of intellectual subjectivity, through which regulative concepts shall be normative for understanding reality from now on. But for Kierkegaard, being-in-and-for-itself is directly the opposite. “Being-in-and-for-itself and reasoning relate inversely to each other: where the one is the other is not.” Kierkegaard takes the “in-and-for-itself” quite literally: to be, and only to be, *by* itself, untouched by the mediation of “reasoning,” *pure being*.

But there is a problem. There already has been a decline, and being-in-and-for-itself seems to have totally gone out of life, disappeared from the human race. The unconditioned has been replaced “everywhere” by conditioning and “reasoning.” Instead of immediate flashes of erotic, passionate love—good marriages of good stock. Instead of immediate unconditional obedience to commands—obedience following a period of prudent deliberation. Instead of pure faith—apologetics spoken to oneself. Human beings have not only forgotten being, they seem to have lost the capacity to let being manifest itself in themselves. So completely has rationalization penetrated every aspect of reality.

Even so, there is a glimmer of hope. Being-in-and-for-itself may still be found, if only we take out the New Testament again. But what would taking out the New Testament do? Kierkegaard offers a positive appraisal in a later entry:

> *Being-in-and-for-itself—“Faith”*  
>  
> Is there a being-in-and-for-itself? Christianity says yes, I am just that.  
>  
> How is it known now, whether one relates himself to the being-in-and-for-itself, a relation which then again must be in the unconditioned form?  
>  
> It is known thus, that he, though suffering from the relation (so the relation is the suffering’s cause and ground), yet faithfully holds fast to this being-in-and-for-itself.  
>  
> When one wants to relate himself to the being-in-and-for-itself—and *also* have the earthly \[*Jordiske*\], then that is an equivocation (KJN 9:82 / SKS 25:84).

This entry clarifies just how much Kierkegaard equates being-in-and-for-itself with Christianity: Christianity claims that “I am just” that—being, in and for itself. And to “being-in-and-for-itself” and “the unconditioned” Kierkegaard adds a third and unsurprising framework for understanding existence: “faith.” “Faith” is the relation between oneself and being-in-and-for-itself, an attunement to being. Christian faith, then, is not only being-in-and-for-itself but *the way* of relating oneself *to* being-in-and-for-itself. This relation is a “suffering,” one whose “cause and ground” is being-in-and-for-itself. Attunement to being brings suffering, but only in such suffering does one attune to being, which is Christianity.

These two entries together provide a concise, if abstract and formulaic, definition of Kierkegaard’s ontology, one which should already shed some light on the claim that the issue of being and Christianity are one. Being-in-and-for-itself is fragile, at least in Kierkegaard’s time (and in ours as well, if, we must begin by assuming, he has something to teach us). Being is capable of being lost, it has totally gone out of life, and “reasoning” has replaced it. But being-in-and-for-itself may be recovered, yet only by passing through reasoning back to “the unconditioned.” Both the means and the end of being—the unconditioned—are one: through unconditional faith, against reasoning, one relates, in suffering, to the unconditioned, and thus one achieves the unconditioned itself.

These journal entries show that when Kierkegaard emphasizes the central issue of becoming and being a Christian in his authorship, he is also emphasizing the issue of being-in-and-for-itself. This book, therefore, will explicate the task of becoming and being a Christian ontologically. And thereby, I hope to show Kierkegaard’s sense of what it is to be *as such* will come to light.

I will conclude by showing Kierkegaard’s relevance to contemporary contemplation and Christian ontology. Odd as it may seem, Kierkegaard’s own approach to ontology, which seems to “virtually cancel thinking,” as Theodor Adorno complained of him, will open a way towards a stance of genuine contemplation. I take that opening as the first step for any claim to good thinking. As some celebrate and some lament, the very *theoria* which philosophers had once cherished as the contemplation, even the loving celebration, of what is—and purely for the sake of itself—has since gotten instrumentalized into theory, mostly so we can learn what we need to know to do the things with the world that we want to do.

But Kierkegaard would have us look to the lilies and birds instead. And by doing so, we may learn to contemplate existence, perhaps even affirm it, beyond our all-too-human projects and projections. And all because of God, Who God is and what God has done, and is doing and speaking, in His Word.

*</p*
### The Abuja Affirmation: A Global Definition of Anglican Identity
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-abuja-affirmation-a-global-definition-of-anglican-identity/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:32:23.000Z
If you spend time in Anglican circles, you eventually will hear a number of claims about us. You will hear that we are neither Protestant nor Roman Catholic but a *via media* between them (with some throwing in a pinch or more of Eastern Orthodoxy as well). You will hear that we are not confessional. In fact, you might hear that we have no theology distinctly our own. You will be told that our unity resides in one or both of the following: liturgy alone as found in the Prayer Book tradition; or structure—the international “instruments of union” consisting of England’s Archbishop of Canterbury, the once-a-decade Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC), and the Primates’ Meeting of the leading clergypersons of every Anglican province.

Earlier this month, a crucial meeting of worldwide Anglicans rejected these claims. The Global Anglican Futures Conference—GAFCON—met from March 3-6 in Abuja, Nigeria. GAFCON was formed in 2008 to seek reform and renewal within the Anglican Communion. This formation came in response to the actions of theologically progressive forces within the Communion, especially the Episcopal Church in the United States. GAFCON’s affiliated provinces have included the vast majority of Anglicans in the world.

At the end of this most recent meeting, GAFCON produced a statement called the [Abuja Affirmation.](https://americananglican.org/abuja-affirmation-text/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) The Affirmation sought to further act on previous calls to not just reform but to “reset” and “reorder” the Anglican Communion back toward orthodoxy. Along these lines, it pursued the already-stated hope for a Global Anglican Communion, seeking for it to take further shape. In doing so, the Abuja Affirmation continued to refine a definition of Anglicanism and of communion between its various provinces. It was in this articulation that the Affirmation gave a decidedly different set of answers to the definitions previously stated.

First, Anglicanism is decidedly Protestant. The Abuja Affirmation sees Anglican doctrine as that “expressed in its Reformation Formularies.” The Affirmation looks to the “English Reformers” as a model because they rightly, “understood that the gospel revealed in Scripture is the source of life for the church now and for our eternal life together in the age to come.” Thus, the English Reformation marked a defining moment in Anglicanism. It recovered important and precious truths about the Gospel from which we should never swerve.

Moreover, the Abuja Affirmation grounds Anglicanism’s character in the foundational Protestant doctrine of *sola scriptura.* The Affirmation declared that, “God’s Word is the final authority in the church and in the life of discipleship.” This point drew back to the [Jerusalem Declaration](https://gafcon.org/about/the-jerusalem-statement/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)—a document produced at the first GAFCON meeting in 2008 and which has become a rallying point for orthodox Anglicans. That Declaration claimed that Anglicans believed “the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be the Word of God written” which should be “taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense.”

The Jerusalem Declaration had noted that Anglicans read Scripture, “respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading.” This point has been raised by some more Anglo-Catholic camps who wish to contest either Anglicanism’s Protestant DNA, its commitment to *sola scriptura,* or both. But, while respectful, even deferential to historic readings, Anglicans should not treat any source in a way that would submit Scripture to it. Along these lines, statements in-between Jerusalem and Abuja have further affirmed and clarified *sola scriptura* as Anglican doctrine.The [Martyrs Day Statement](https://gafcon.org/communique-updates/the-future-has-arrived/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of 2025 said that Scripture is “the inerrant Word of God.” Though perhaps not immediately apparent, this claim was a blow struck for *sola scriptura.* For, as the [Kigali Commitment](https://gafcon.org/communique-updates/gafcon-iv-the-kigali-commitment/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) reminds us, since “The Bible is God’s Word written” it thus “carries God’s own authority” as nothing and no one else does. No attempts, however subtle, should undermine that authority.

The Kigali Commitment of 2023 also said that the Bible, “is its own interpreter, and it does not need to be supplemented, nor can it ever be overturned by human wisdom.” The Kilgali Commitment further spoke of Scripture’s “clarity” and “sufficiency.” Thus, our reading of Scripture is aided by but need not and should not be enslaved to our theological ancestors. Scripture still can speak fully and clearly for itself.

Second, Anglicanism is confessional. We do have statements of faith which should bind us. The Abuja Affirmation here looked to the Jerusalem Declaration of 2008 as the modern confessional statement for Anglicanism. GAFCON documents published between the Jerusalem Declaration and Abuja Affirmation have, once again, made the same point. The Martyrs Day Statement called the Declaration, “the contemporary standard for Anglican identity.” In fact, GAFCON now has stated that members of the emerging Global Anglican Communion must “assent to” the Jerusalem Declaration. Therefore, confessional subscription is increasingly a part of today’s Anglicanism.

Yet the Jerusalem Declaration was merely a renewal of Anglican confessionalism, not its start. The Declaration itself looked back to Anglicanism’s confessional heritage. In particular, it referenced the 1571 Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, a confession to which Church of England clergy for centuries were required to subscribe. The Jerusalem Declaration stated, “We uphold the Thirty-nine Articles as containing the true doctrine of the Church agreeing with God’s Word and as authoritative for Anglicans today.” Thus, to subscribe to the Jerusalem Declaration involved subscribing to the Thirty-Nine Articles. The Declaration is a renewal of confessionalism that also retrieves the heritage on which it is grounded.

Third, as Anglicanism is confessional, so it has its own theology. We find this theology expressed in the confessional sources already noted. The Thirty-Nine Articles describe it. The Jerusalem Declaration affirms it and adds further clarifications for the 21st century context. Here, the 1662 Prayer Book and the Ordinal attached to it contribute as well in how they order worship and understand Holy Orders.

In these and supporting historical documents, we see Anglican theology as a Reformed strand of Protestantism. We have strong overlap with Lutheranism, including its greater retention of the Church calendar as well as its normative as opposed to regulative approach to worship. Yet our view of the sacraments is squarely in line with the Continental Reformed, having gained so much historically from Peter Martyr Vermigli, Martin Bucer, Heinrich Bullinger and, yes, John Calvin. The English Reformation-era perspective on God’s sovereignty, especially in matters of salvation, also aligned more with the Reformed as opposed to the Lutheran perspective.

Unlike either, we fully retained the historic episcopacy, seeing it as warranted from God’s Word and practiced in conformity to that Word by the early Church. Anglicans therefore should resist and oppose a tendency among some to treat our tradition as an almost empty suit, as a chance to construct as one pleases out of other traditions. Instead, we should know the Reformational substance of our tradition in order to teach it and to live it.

Fourth, the Abuja Affirmation looks to a different standard for unity than that already mentioned. Those other means of unity proved woefully insufficient in the 20th and into the 21st centuries. The proliferation of Prayer Books negated any substantial liturgical union. Moreover, the Prayer Book showed itself inadequate on its own to serve as a doctrinal standard (a position it was not constructed to hold by itself, anyway). The “instruments” also could not bear the increasing centrifugal theological pull. They merely papered over them, as certain Western provinces drifted, or leapt, into heterodoxy, then outright heresy.

Meanwhile, quickly growing African and Asian provinces remained orthodox in theology along with strong pockets of resistance within faltering Western provinces. The Episcopal Church’s 2003 consecration of Eugene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop, unequivocally exposed the rifts and the rot in the Communion. The Communion then failed miserably in holding the line on orthodoxy then as it had in less dramatic fashion in preceding decades.

In contrast, the Abuja Affirmation states that, “True communion is confessional, rather than defined by a shared history or institutional structures.” Anglicanism is again to be united by a common faith, commonly confessed. The Affirmation proclaimed that, “The Church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord.” That is her confession. Yet how does the Anglican Church know her Lord whom she confesses? In line with other stated commitments, the Abuja Affirmation articulated one fundamental source for her confession and thus for Anglican communion: Scripture. Jesus’ “life and teaching is revealed in the Scriptures.” Thus, the Martyrs Day Statement desired to see that “the Bible is restored to the heart of the Communion.” To that end, it said that the Anglican Communion would be reordered with, “only one foundation of communion, namely the Holy Bible.”

While Scripture will hold unequaled and unquestioned authority, it will not operate without support in this renewed Anglicanism. The Abuja Affirmation pointed to the Jerusalem Declaration as the contemporary contribution to confessional unity. Moreover, it referenced the “Reformation Formularies” as an additional, needed source of union. The Formularies included the Thirty-Nine Articles, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and the Ordinal commonly attached to the Prayer Book. The Martyrs Day Statement agreed, declaring that the Communion will be, “bound together by the Formularies of the Reformation” in addition to the Jerusalem Declaration. However, the Jerusalem Declaration and the Reformation Formularies would not compete with Scripture. They willingly submit to and seek to obey the Holy Bible, building upon rather than providing an alternative to that unique unifier.

Along these lines, this reordering does not mean the Prayer Book has no ongoing role in Anglican unity or doctrine; far from it. Yet it will not bear that load alone, as some claim it does. Nor will it operate only with failed instruments of structural union. Instead, the Prayer Book will take its proper place among a broader group of documents. While displaying doctrine, the Prayer Book will be treated for what the Jerusalem Declaration rightly calls it: “a true and authoritative standard of worship and prayer.” It will be complemented by even as it complements the other Formularies. Thus, too, Anglicanism must and will continue to be, as the Jerusalem Declaration affirms, “sacramental and liturgical.” Yet its sacramental and liturgical nature will be commanded and shaped as it historically was by Scripture, consistent with its English Reformed confession of the Gospel.

Coming out of Abuja, questions remain regarding exactly how the emerging structure of the Global Anglican Communion will operate. Those developments do take time. They do not tend to develop with lightning speed or in one moment. In that uncertainty, we pray for wisdom for those involved going forward. Yet we do have great clarity on what the emerging structure seeks to support: an Anglicanism proudly Protestant as it is firmly rooted in Scripture; an Anglicanism confessional in its beliefs, distinct in its theology, unified by its Scripture-based confession of Jesus as Lord and reinforced by its contemporary and Reformational Formularies. That is an Anglicanism worth working for, an Anglicanism worth fighting for. This is the Anglicanism of Jerusalem, Abuja, and of the future.
### Acts 1:8 and the Mission of the Church
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/acts-18-and-the-mission-of-the-church/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:32:27.000Z
Many church leaders feel a quiet, nagging tension that rarely gets named out loud. We want to obey the Great Commission. We want to reach the lost. And yet, most weeks are consumed by people already inside the church—members in crisis, believers who are drifting, wounded, or stuck. The result is an underlying sense of failure. Pastors don’t usually lack motivation; they lack a paradigm that makes sense of their actual work.

But what if the problem isn’t our obedience? What if the problem lies in how we *define* the mission field?

## **A Larger Map Hidden in Plain Sight**

When Jesus commissions his disciples in Acts 1:8, he gives them a familiar geography: Jerusalem and Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth. We usually read that as a simple expansion strategy—start local and move outward. That is true—but there is more.

This threefold movement also mirrors the pattern of Jesus’ own ministry. He did not devote his ministry only to those who had never heard of Israel’s God. He consistently engaged three different kinds of people. What is at stake here is not merely a pragmatic strategy but the theological shape of the Church’s participation in Christ’s mission, which may be outlined as follows:

- **The religious insider** who knew the Scriptures but needed deeper revelation, like Nicodemus.
- **The estranged or covenant-adjacent person** whose belonging is fractured or contested, like Zacchaeus or the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4.
- **The true outsider** living beyond the covenant community, under the dominion of forces he cannot master, like the Gerasene demoniac.

In Acts, these worlds are named geographically. In the Gospels, they appear pastorally.

## **Israel’s Vocation, Renewed**

This should not surprise us. From the beginning, Israel’s calling was never only inward. God promised Abraham that “all the families of the earth” would be blessed through him (Gen. 12:3). The prophets envisioned the nations streaming toward the light of God’s people (Isa. 2:2–4; Isa. 49:6; Mic. 4:1–2).

Jesus does not discard that vocation; he fulfills and sends his people forward in it. The Great Commission is therefore a reframing of God’s original intention. It is more of a *re-comissioning*, directed to Jesus’ disciples who were all descendants of Abraham. They are commanded to move out toward the nations. Yet Jesus’ reference to “the ends of the earth” does not mean the nearer fields are neglected.

Many churches now read this charter only through a distant lens. “Mission” is often defined almost exclusively in terms of reaching those who have never believed. That emphasis is understandable and deeply important. Yet when it becomes the *only* field that counts as “mission,” a strange distortion occurs. Much of the work pastors and churches actually perform—teaching, restoring, reconciling, discipling—begins to feel like something less than the “real” task. The result is a quiet but persistent sense that typical ministry tasks somehow fall short of the Church’s true calling.

## **The Three Fields in Jesus’ Ministry**

Let us consider these three fields, beginning first with the one closest to home. Nicodemus is not ignorant of Scripture; he is a teacher of Israel. And yet he stands in need of revelation so deep that Jesus tells him he must be born again. The problem in this field is not distance from religion but incomplete understanding.

Moving further out, we come to Zacchaeus, whom Jesus declares to be “a son of Abraham” (Luke 19:9). When Jesus encounters him, however, he is estranged—cut off by his own choices and by the contempt of his community. Others in this same field, like the Samaritans, lived in a contested space—near Israel’s God yet treated as outsiders (Luke 17:18). In both cases, what is needed is not a lecture on the law but a welcome into the community of God’s people.

Furthest from the center, the Gerasene demoniac represents the true outsider—among tombs, among Gentiles, under the dominion of evil. Before he can be taught, he must be freed. Three people. Three kinds of need. And one Savior who addresses all of them. While discernment may be required to know where a person truly stands, Jesus’ posture in each case is not suspicion or condemnation—it is invitation, welcome, and restoration.

## **Toward a Coherent Vocation**

Much contemporary frustration in ministry flows from a narrowed view of mission.

If “the mission field” is defined only as those who have never believed, then work among believers will always seem like a distraction. Counseling, discipleship, conflict mediation, and teaching will appear to be second-order tasks.

But if Jesus himself moved among three fields—and if Acts 1:8 commissions the Church to all three—then the picture changes. Caring for insiders is not a detour from mission. Restoring the lapsed is not a peripheral concern. Proclaiming freedom to the bound remains central to our calling. Together, these form the full scope of the Church’s mission.

This reframing does not lower the bar of evangelism; it clarifies the field of obedience.

It also explains a persistent feature of ecclesial life: *the work that consumes the most energy is often the very work that seems hardest to justify under a narrowed account of mission.* Thankfully, the New Testament gives us a better map.

## **From Guilt to Coherence**

When we recognize the three fields, mission and discipleship stop competing with each other. The nagging thought that we must get out of the church and “into the fields” is a false choice. Taken together, the three fields point toward one vocation.

- Revelation among the religious insider is not maintenance—it is rescue from blindness.
- Restoration of the estranged insider is not a distraction—it is needed confirmation to those on the outside looking in.
- Deliverance of those who are far away is not a niche calling—it is the inbreaking of the kingdom of God.

Instead of seeing ourselves as failures, we must come to understand that we are standing in *the very fields Jesus himself walked*.

## **The Mission We Already Have**

What is needed is not a new calling, but a clearer understanding of the one already being lived out.

Acts 1:8 does not send us to a single field. It sends us into the full landscape Jesus himself revealed. When we realize this, something shifts. The scattered pieces of ministry begin to cohere. While we continue to press outward to the “demoniacs” who are truly outside, we now view ministry to the Nicodemuses and the Zacchaeuses among us with equal value. And obedience starts to look less like a failure to reach somewhere else—and more like faithfulness, precisely where Christ has sent us.

Seen this way, the Church’s mission is not divided between “real mission” and everything else. It is a single calling that unfolds across several kinds of people and several kinds of need. Some will require illumination, others restoration, and others liberation from powers that hold them captive. Yet in each case the Church is participating in the same work Christ himself began.

When pastors and churches recover this wider map, something important happens. The quiet guilt that so often shadows ministry begins to give way to coherence. The work that fills our weeks—teaching, reconciling, restoring, freeing—turns out not to be a detour from the mission after all. It is the mission, lived out across the full landscape to which Christ has sent his people.
### On Praying Psalm 130
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/on-praying-psalm-130/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:32:29.000Z
How many wind up  
spitting at the rising sun  
because to them  
it doesn’t mean hope  
but just another day to dread  
the known and unknown,  
the lingering of the beleaguering,  
or simply the callousness of indifference?

Thinking of them and the depths  
from which they cry  
or the horrors they deny,  
I pray the psalmist’s plea  
for the ending of their waiting,  
of their suffering, of their grieving,  
and yes, their numbness, too.  
I pray for hope to break through  
with earth-shaking change,  
clearer than day.
### 30 Key Moments in the History of Christianity: An Interview with Mark W. Graham
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/30-key-moments-in-the-history-of-christianity-an-interview-with-mark-w-graham/
Last updated: 2026-04-20T17:17:35.000Z
“Contrary to popular belief, real history can never simply be about names, dates, and facts. It can, however, recapture moments.” So reflects early church historian and archaeologist Mark W. Graham in the introduction to his new book, [*30 Key Moments in the History of Christianity: Inspiring True Stories from the Early Church Around the World*](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781540905017%5F30-key-moments-in-the-history-of-christianity?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

Graham is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at Grove City College. In the interview below, he explains his vision behind this new book—and why all Christians should learn more about the first millennium of Christianity.

**\*\*\***

**Nadya Williams:** This is a fascinating book—a history of the first millennium of Christianity through 30 key moments. I will be honest and admit here: I'm an ancient historian, and I was only familiar with 18 of these. The other 12 were individuals or episodes that I knew little to nothing about. But then, I think that is your point in this book: For most American Christians, our knowledge of Christianity's first millennium is too European, and we miss out just how far Christianity had spread already fairly early on in its history. Can you tell a bit more about your vision for this project: How did you come up with the idea for this book? And how did you select these 30 key moments?

**Mark W. Graham:** The whole project actually began with a simple request from a couple in my church to present a brief moment from church history each Sunday to start off the Christian education hour. About six months in, I took a look at my stack of brief presentations and wondered if there might be a book there, or some chance to bring these moments to a wider audience. Much of the material in these brief studies was drawn from four ancient/medieval history classes I have taught at Grove City College over the years—"The Roman Empire,” “The Rise of Christianity,” “Medieval Europe,” and “Byzantium and Islam.” The vision for the project emerged, then, as I was challenged week by week to present material I had long taught in a college classroom but now in a way that it might connect meaningfully with my fellow parishioners of all ages and various walks of life. The broader structural themes emerged organically, and I usually tended to see them only in retrospect.

I did not select the moments because I thought they were “Turning Points” (although a few definitely happen to be), nor am I making any claim here to a “Top Thirty” list. Rather, I chose individual moments that I thought could encourage and challenge Christians even today. I stuck to the year 1000 as an ending point because my own historical vision gets a bit hazy after that date.

I determined from the outset that examples must be drawn from around the world as well, as a reflection of the catholicity of the church from earliest times. I was never aiming at a single Church History narrative here, so I was free to bring in disparate moments from Britain to western Europe to Sudan to Persia to China. So, I also chose moments which would introduce Christians today to brothers and sisters across space and time in the first millennium of the faith.

Finally, I tried to diversify the types of topics to appeal to a variety of human interests—political, intellectual, military, cultural, doctrinal, ethical, ecclesiological, missiological, etc.—as well as share the occasional fascinating, bizarre, and/or harrowing story. Some moments are inherently encouraging and even inspiring, and some are definitely more along the lines of cautionary tale.

**Nadya Williams:** Round numbers are fun when planning out a book, so I get why there are 30 key moments, and not 29 or 31\. But I'm also curious: Were there other contenders that you had considered including in the book but ultimately had to leave out for reasons of space?

**Mark W. Graham:** By the time that the book idea was fully formed, I imagined and hoped that the number 30 might conjure up, among other things, images of a full month of short daily readings—a sort of “daily dose of history.” Yes, there were indeed plenty of moments left on the cutting floor. I often have nagging doubts—should I have included this or that story instead of the ones I did? These would be moments like the destruction of the Jewish Temple in AD 70, the Sack of Rome in 410, The Council of Ephesus in 431, The Council of Chalcedon in 451, and the murder of Duke Vaclav (“Good King Wenceslaus”) in 935.

**Nadya Williams:** Some of the lesser-known stories in your book pertain to the Church of the East. Can you explain a bit more: What is this tradition? Why is it important for us today to learn a bit more about it?

**Mark W. Graham:** My real exposure to the Church of the East came through personal contacts with Iraqi Christian refugees when I lived in the San Francisco Bay area, where there is a vibrant community. Today, they usually call themselves “Assyrian Christians.” Their head bishop for North America graciously came to a college class I was teaching to introduce this Christian communion to my students. Each Easter my Presbyterian Church in Sunnyvale, CA held a joint service with many Assyrian Christians—affirming the Nicene Creed together was a highlight of the church year for me personally.

But besides their continued existence today, historically the Church of the East has at times been a majority report of Christians on earth. And the geographic spread of the Church of the East in the first millennium can shock some modern Christians. Christians today, perhaps especially evangelicals, usually imagine that global mission—or even just sharing the faith outside one’s one political borders—must have always played a significant part in the History of Christianity. Not so. Sharing the faith outside the boundaries of one’s one empire or kingdom was actually quite rare in the first millennium, for the Western Churches in particular.

One of my chapters tells the story of how Gregory I, the Great (bishop of Rome from 590-604) formulated his ideas to missionize outsiders—note that this was unheard of in his day and for centuries before him. But the Church of the East was a church without borders from its inception, spreading the gospel throughout the Middle East, and all along the Silk Road in Central Asia, and even the Far East to China. The Church of the East also stands out for much of the period covered by the book as a rare example of a church without an intimate connection to an empire or kingdom.

The Church of the Late Roman Empire, the Byzantine Church, the Western Medieval Church all tended to meld together the Christian faith and imperial politics. The Church of the East provides a strong alternative to this particular type of politicized Christianity in the pre-modern world. Also, those who imagine the History of the Church as a linear (and teleological) tale beginning in the Roman Mediterranean then moving to Medieval Western Europe, then giving a nod to Byzantine Eastern Christianity before coming back to Early Modern Reformational Europe are missing a massive amount of the History of “Our People”—Christians through time affirming “one holy, catholic and apostolic church.”

In short, the history of Church of the East provides one solid reminder to us that there has always been a truly global church and not just a western church with a few exceptions here and there, even during the so-called “Middle Ages,” when so many imagine that the Western Catholic Church was synonymous with Christianity on earth at that time.

**Nadya Williams:** While this is a book of history, your aims are not solely historical. The book's subtitle reminds of this: "Inspiring True Stories from the Early Church Around the World." Can you explain a bit more about this: why are these stories inspiring to us today? What do you hope they will inspire your readers to do and reflect?

**Mark W. Graham:** It was really after I completed a first draft of the book (minus introduction and conclusion) that I noticed that two major threads seemed to wind through the book. Neither one surprised me that much because I have long found myself reflecting on these myself. The first is the question of political identities of Christians amidst empires and kingdoms. How did they (and how should we) deal with the inherent and variegated tensions of being at once citizens of the City of God and the City of Man? The second is the recurring theme of apocalypticism throughout Christian history. How can Christians make sense of tumultuous, even seemingly “unprecedented” times without going to bizarre and sometimes even dangerous extremes? I hope that the moments here will help Christians reflect on both of these questions in historically informed ways.

Beyond these two major threads, there are various strands. I certainly hope to inspire readers with a deeper appreciation of Our People across space and time—to participate in their sufferings, to learn from their examples and to avoid their mistakes which, like our own, appear in high relief only in retrospect. To see how they shared the faith, how they dealt with persecution, responded to schism and heresy. How they handled political favor and success along with disappointments and dashed dreams. How they dealt with charming wolves and unlikeable Fathers. How they understood and misunderstood Scripture, compromised with the world, faced military threats and foreign occupation, dealt with decline and recovery of literacy, etc. And throughout, to acknowledge the mysterious Hand of God working through myriad means to build His Kingdom.

**Nadya Williams:** What was something surprising or unexpected that you learned in the process of working on this book?

**Mark W. Graham:** This is your hardest question of all, as I learned an awful lot even about things I thought I knew and have taught for years. Perhaps we should add to the old adage, “You never really learn something until you have to teach it” a line like “and you really, really learn something when you decide to write it for public consumption.”

Let me choose two things. The first is the depth of character and scholarship of St. Boniface, “the Apostle to the Germans.” While he is often crassly celebrated today via meme by American “culture warriors” as the guy who took an axe and publicly attacked the sacred Oak of Thor, I am now confident that Boniface would be deeply disheartened that this story is all many people remember about him. Even if some details of the story might be technically true in broad detail, the story is actually far out of character for him and hardly captures the faithful, patient scholar and servant of God who spent decades prayerfully and often fruitlessly studying Scriptures and the Church Fathers, ministering to pagans on the fringes of northern Europe, ultimately dying a martyr’s death while refusing to “Return Evil for Evil” when viciously attacked.

The second is the extent to which the famous educational reformer Alcuin of York promoted at the Emperor Charlemagne’s court what Robert Louis Wilken has entitled “Liberty in the Things of God.” I really was surprised while reading some of Alcuin’s letters to Charlemagne more closely than ever before to see just how bravely and directly he challenged the emperor’s efforts to “convert” pagan or semi-pagan peoples of Europe by sheer political and military force. And he even managed to convince Charlemagne to listen and heed his advice!

**Nadya Williams:** What are the big questions that fascinate you in your thinking, reading, and writing?

**Mark W. Graham:** The ones that seem to have most captured my imagination over my career are: How have specific ideas shaped history? How have certain books or texts shaped history? How do our own political identities, dreams, and assumptions shape our own memories of the past? How have apocalyptic dreams molded Christian communities through time?
### What Grief Can Teach
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/what-grief-can-teach/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:32:33.000Z
I picked up our new cat Felix from the local pet adoption agency in town (PAWS) when I was 15 years old. Our other cat, Tom, had just died in an accident, and my parents let me choose a new furry companion in the wake of the loss. Before you ask: Yes, I do like dogs. I’ve got nothing against a good old mini-Australian shepherd or a bounding Great Pyrenees. But Felix? Felix was a real friend.

At first, he was finicky, frightened, and preferred the jungle of the garage with its toolboxes and oily wrenches to the offered comforts of the indoors. We had to coop him up in there, or he would have bolted into the woods and frittered into the horizon on the other side of the conveyor belt. Soon, though, he eased into a situation of trust and comfort and dwelt in and out of the house for years and years afterward.

Last May, Felix died in an accident of his own during a tornado warning, and I laid him in a little grave in the old woods behind my parents’ house the morning afterward, when it was sunny and warm, like nothing stormy had ever happened the night before. For years, he would hop up on my lap, nuzzle my chin, make me sneeze, follow me down the driveway to check the mail, cross my path as if he was trying to force himself into being a priority. He liked to curl up in the sunshine on the porch and fold his paws beneath the white fluff on his chest, bow his head as if in creaturely prayer, and then raise his head when the sparrows and hummingbirds twittered in the apple tree.

I loved that cat. We all loved that cat.

It’s easy to say that Felix was just an animal, which is true, and that there are another forty some odd billion cats roaming the world with impunity as I write this, but it’s also easy to point to that confounding part of Scripture where Jesus, a bit outrageously if you think about it, says that not even a sparrow dies apart from God’s notice (Matthew 10:29), that even the hairs on your own head are meticulously, intimately, and carefully numbered. I guess God numbers the cats among us, too, from the crazy herds in Thailand to the ratty toms hiding in haybales in west Texas, to the little forest cat Felix who lived a long and royal life in Paradise Hills, Oklahoma.

Grief is God’s answer to loss. We must face something sad to say goodbye to it and duly reckon with reality. I cried about Felix for a little while after he passed, but then sort of stuffed it all under the rug and went on with my life, ambling back to his grave a couple of times, putting my hand on the warm stone, but then soon going back into the stream of distractions I’d recently been swimming in. *Can’t feel so sad about a cat…* Back to my screens, my podcasts, my music, back to my driving to and from food places in town, my anxieties, my world that intersected only on occasion with the lives and worlds of other people.

It was weird then, when the other night I turned off my phone, turned off the lights in my apartment, and settled down to sleep, that I thought about Felix and shed a few tears in response in the darkness. It turned out I wasn’t only sad about Felix. There was other stuff I sort of needed to grieve too, and my old cat was an avenue to a myriad of other complexes, like how I’ve been missing my friends who live really far away from me, how the world is in chaos, and how I feel like I am barely, if at all, moving the needle in a positive direction. How ten years ago really was ten years ago and there’s nothing I can do to change that. *God, help me grieve what’s lost and over, really grieve it.*

What’s funny, though, is the next day I felt…better. I wasn’t as anxious. It didn’t feel as though my soul was an ocean with a dam of scum buttressed all around it, holding in tides and currents. A good cry can really clean a fellow out.

I recently listened to a podcast between two psychologists who agreed that a big problem today is that people are numbing themselves out of their emotional valences. Pornography addiction, for instance, [is only marginally about sexual desire](https://mereorthodoxy.com/misunderstanding-porn). Really, it’s about escaping grief and negative emotions. If a man feels bad, he goes to the thing that makes him forget that he feels bad. Hence, the bottle, the gambling tokens, the OnlyFans page, the sports betting app. The podcast. The playlist. As the Grinch says, all the *noise, noise, noise, noise!*

It probably isn’t coincidence, then, that all this stuff comes up right before one falls asleep. Those are the golden moments when anything goes. You might be lambasted with a sorrow you thought your worked through or be inspired to write a concerto. You never know. We don’t often give our minds permission to speak to us. And it doesn’t matter how much time passes. If we stay numb, we stay numb. The dam calcifies and the ocean, once teeming with ideas and emotions, dries up in the hot sun.

C.S. Lewis was right, then, when he warned [people of what loving ](https://www.cslewis.com/to-love-is-to-be-vulnerable/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)even just an animal will entail. You risk heartbreak. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t love anything. To the contrary. It just means that you can’t skirt sadness when the object of your affection dies.

You have to welcome grief at your door even when it’s like some hooded stranger that you’re not so sure about. You have to feed him soup at your table and consult with him like he’s an old friend. Because he is. And then you fall asleep at that table, wake up in the morning, and find that it’s sunny outside, almost like no stranger ever visited you and almost like nothing stormy ever happened the night before. And you’ll be okay.
### Life with the Machines
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/life-with-the-machines/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:32:35.000Z
I admit that I was a little let down by the ending of Paul Kingsnorth’s *Against The Machine.* Much has been written about this book and rightfully so. Kingsnorth’s critique of the all-encompassing machine culture we live in is a necessary wake up call from a short-form video induced hypnosis that much of our society seems to be in. I appreciate a lot about the book, but Kingsnorth’s postures for the machine age, for me, left at least a little to be desired.

I’ve joked with people that Kingsnorth only has two options for people: reduce your screen time or bomb a data center. That’s reductionistic of course, but only a little. The way Kingsnorth describes these two options, two “Ascetics” as he calls them, are “Cooked” (reduce your screen time) or “Raw” (at least think about maybe bombing a data center).

The Cooked Ascetic is more about drawing lines and limits around technology. For Kingsnorth, he drew a line at scanning QR codes, for some reason. I, also, do not love QR code menus and such, but I’m not sure why that would be a line in the technological sand. What Kingsnorth gets right about the Cooked Ascetic is that we absolutely need to draw lines and limits with our technology use. It’s also true that, as he says, you can “use the Machine against itself: use the internet to connect with others who feel the same, or to learn the kinds of skills necessary to keep pushing your refusal out further, if you want to.” There are ways to use the Machine against itself and, somewhat ironically, technologies like AI and Bitcoin actually create *more* avenues of doing that, not less.

The Raw Ascetic goes completely off the grid. As he says, “Bombing data centres: this is the mindset of the raw tech-ascetic.” Raw ascetics band together and “never swipe another screen.” My first question to Kingsnorth is: besides the Amish, who is *really* a Raw Ascetic? My second question is: how many people are economically privileged enough to buy land and completely disconnect from civilization and sustain their life from the ground? Even Kingsnorth himself is, by his own admission, not a Raw Ascetic; and you can tell he isn’t too happy about it. Even he is reaching an audience using Substack, writing on a computer, and corresponding with folks through email. These categories of Raw and Cooked Asceticism are as close as Kingsnorth gets to practical suggestions on how to resist the machine. You can either reduce your screen time a little bit or opt-out of civilization and consider becoming a techno-terrorist.

My problem with Kingsnorth is not necessarily that he is encouraging some kind of intentional engagement or withdrawal from technology. I’ve done as much in my [*Monk or Missionary* article](https://mereorthodoxy.com/monk-or-missionary-christian-approaches-to-social-media), and I even suggest that maybe about 80% of Christians should consider deleting their social media. I stand by that. If anything, it should probably be more. I’ve made similarly harsh critiques of social media, like in my piece, [*To Go Forward, We Must Go Backward*](https://mereorthodoxy.com/to-go-forward-we-must-go-backward)*.* I’m not a techno-accelerationist.

It seems to me the thing that those in the Well-Done Cooked (you might say) and Raw (if they exist) camps seem to miss is that much of this technology is simply baked (so to speak) into our societies infrastructure now, and increasingly so. You might think that’s a bad thing, and depending on the example I might agree with you, but it does no good to pretend otherwise just as it does no good to wish we lived in a time before cars and interstates. You might not like that we live in a car-centric society, but we do. Now what?

Plus, I’m not convinced that all of our technological progress and gains in efficiency are bad. For instance, I like Google Maps. I like having Google Maps pulled up on my Apple CarPlay. It makes driving places better. Do I like that the other day I saw a “Sponsored” tag under a restaurant on Google Maps as I drove by? Not at all. But I still think Google Maps as a technology is a net good, even if I think Google is mostly a bad company and the business model makes the product worse over time. It’s okay, actually, to like some of our new technological capabilities, imperfect as they are.

## **What AI?**

What I’ve started to notice is that the conversation around artificial intelligence, specifically, is that the primary thing being encouraged by some with more Kingsnorthian affinities is entire abstinence. AI-Raw Asceticism. Certainly, I don’t feel any need to *make* anyone use AI. But my frustration with this perspective is that it’s a really flat way of viewing AI. As if AI is a singular technology that does one thing and it’s always a bad thing because of the way it plagiarizes work through its training data or atrophies critical thinking. I usually see some of these folks complain about AI on my social media feed that served me their posts using, you guessed it, AI algorithms. Now, you might say that there’s a difference between AI algorithms and generative AI via LLMs, and I would agree with you, but that’s my point. Whenever you talk about AI—and this will be more and more true as time goes on—you have to answer the question, “What AI?”

In February 2026, Anthropic released two new models—Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6—and two new products—Claude Code and Claude Cowork. The new models are far and away better models than anything that has previously been released. Hallucinations are a mere fraction of what they were just a few months ago. These models can now spend hours working on a single task. And yes, I’m aware it sounds like a sales pitch, but the free models simply are not as good as the paid models. I’m sorry that’s how business works. Which brings me to Claude Code and Cowork.

Before February 2026, AI chatbots really were mostly that: a chatbot. It functioned as a sort of anti-social media. It had the same social functions as text messaging and DMs but you were conversing with a robot instead of a human. You would say something to it and it would use predictive reasoning to say something back. This is where the fears around plagiarism, cheating, and mental and emotional dependency came in—and for good reason! The chatbot’s capabilities were primarily language oriented and therefore lent itself to more uses along what you might think of as humanities work. I agree with many of the concerns and critiques around AI and chatbots in this realm. Pastors shouldn’t outsource their sermons to AI, writers shouldn’t outsource their writing to AI, people shouldn’t outsource their therapy or relationships to AI, etc etc. I agree.

Code and Cowork fundamentally changed the best use cases of AI. The outputs of Code and Cowork are not primarily language, but tasks. They don’t *say something to you* as much as they *do something for you*. And the things they do for you are not, typically, things that otherwise require significant amounts of philosophical deliberation. They write and push code, organize files, summarize data, edit spreadsheets, make slide decks, etc. All of the things that, ironically, require humans to function like machines. Plain english is now a coding language.

I know someone who took a business idea they sat on for a few years and made it entirely themselves in four days and for $350\. It normally would have taken six months and $50,000\. He did this the very next day after hearing that he should take Claude Code seriously. He has never written a line of code in his life. What’s left to do now for him is smoothing out the rough edges and do the more human work of making relationships, showing the benefits of the product, and helping people use it the best they can. I don’t think it’s “dehumanizing” for a machine to write code—or fix a spreadsheet, or other similar kinds of work—instead of a human. The machine did machine work so the human could do more human work.

That is a fundamentally different use than the chat-oriented LLMs of 2022-2025\. Which means that the conversation around AI needs to shift. We’re not just having humanities-centric conversations about AI. We’re having more STEM and Kevin-from-The-Office-centric conversations. This distinction is non-trivial and matters. Which is why I’m not convinced by a simple “No AI” policy because it doesn’t answer the questions, “Which AI?” and “For what purpose?” The reason we feel repulsed by the [lifestyle of someone like Roy Lee](https://mereorthodoxy.com/confronting-the-unman), the founder of AI-cheating company Cluely, is because of the way he uses this technology in such a deeply inhuman way. And we *should* be repulsed by it. This is not how any technology should be used. For lesser reasons than this, it’s entirely reasonable for AI to be off-limits in some—even many!—areas. But the introduction of more agentic-style artificial intelligence should caution us against enacting blanket bans on a technology that is far more multifaceted than it was even a few weeks ago.

## **Revolution vs. Preservation**

Which brings me back to Kingsnorth. While I don’t think his Raw and Cooked categories are adequate to meet the moment, I don’t think he is entirely off either. I just don’t think I would use those words. The categories that seem more helpful for living in a world with AI are Revolution and Preservation.

You might loosely map Revolution to Raw and Preservation to Cooked, but I don’t think they’re exactly identical. The reason being is that Raw and Cooked both derive their identity from their explicit relationship to technology. You either revolt against the technology or you slightly modify your behavior with it. The Raw Ascetic and the Revolutionary both look similar in that they eschew nearly all use of digital technology and dream of bombing data centers. The problem is that they are still reactionaries, ultimately centering their lives around technology, if only so they can get away from it. Kingsnorth himself says as much when he declares that his politics are best described as “Reactionary Radicalism.” Kingsnorth says that Reactionary Radicals “oppose any technology which threatens the moral economy”, which I agree with, but I’m not sure how QR codes do that, annoying as they can be. And why are we assuming pixel pushing is an essential part of the moral economy and not just part of the current economy? If we want people to be with their families, associate in communities, and work with their hands, we would want to free them from screens as best as we can by making that work as efficient as possible, right?

One of the odd features of agentic-AI and the rise of an agent-first internet where agents act on behalf of people online through prompts sent via text is the potential of a more offline life being more possible than it is today, especially when you consider that it’s becoming easier and easier to “own the data center” in your own home through open source software—including open source AI models, which, of course, you wouldn’t exactly want to bomb.

The Cooked and Preservationist also look similar in that they modify their relationship with technology by drawing lines, creating limits, and accepting inconvenience. But the Preservationist does not primarily derive their identity from their relationship to technology. They are mindful of technologies formative power, for sure, but instead of all of their energy going toward revolting against technological development (and in many cases, may well be functionally locked out of future jobs, infrastructure, and positive efficiency gains for doing so), they direct their energy toward preserving what is good from a more pre-digital age.

The Preservationist still has family meals at the table and hosts people for dinner (*and* says “No phones allowed”). The Preservationist still gets up in the morning and says their prayers, reads their Bible, takes care of their body, and cultivates wisdom. The Preservationist still goes to church each week, listens to the preaching of the Word, fellowships with the saints, and partakes of the Lord’s Supper. They organize get-togethers, vote in their local elections, play with their children, and go on dates with their spouse. They build a library of books in their home. They participate in church meetings, volunteer in their kid’s school or with a local charity, and give some of their money away to those in need.

Kingsnorth gets right at this earlier in his book. He says,

> The antidote to this is to dig down to those foundations and begin the work of repair. We are going to have to learn to be adults again; to get our feet back on the ground, to rebuild families and communities, to learn again the meaning of worship and commitment, of limits and longing. We are, in short, going to have to grow up. This is long, hard work; intergenerational work. It is myth work. We don’t really want to begin, and we don’t really know how to. Does any child want to grow up? But there is nothing else for it; no other path is going to get us home.

This was the thread that he needed to pull the most and is why I say I was let down by the *end* of his book, but not by all of it. Here, Kingsnorth gives us the mentality of the Preservationist. Not just reacting to technology, but building something better by preserving what came before the technology. By volunteering to grow up and be the adult in the room. By moving toward the things that make us more human and less like a machine. What the AI Doomers fail to see, I think, are the ways that AI has the potential of [making this *more* possible](https://x.com/JeremyTate41/status/2022883219138347119?s=20&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), not less.

Of course, there is concern about AI taking many, many jobs away. I, in no way, want to minimize how transformative that could be in our society. Our economy could be radically upended. But we should be asking why we want humans doing the work of machines in the first place. Let the machines do machine work so the humans can do human work. Relating, creating, building, molding, sculpting, rearranging, and contemplating. That, I think, is the role of the Preservationist. Preserve the Good, True, and Beautiful—or as Kingsnorth himself put it: People, Place, Past, and Prayer—and let the machines push the pixels.

Kingsnorth wasn’t far off, but I don’t think a Raw Revolution is the answer. And I don’t think it will do to simply not have a smart phone or not scan QR Codes. It’s not that his Cooked category is entirely wrong; it’s that it sees itself primarily as reactionary against something instead of positively trying to preserve and cultivate something of the old that is good in the new world while being willing to utilize technology in order to better enable that kind of life.

These are the conversations I believe we need to be having. The “How” and “What” of preservation. Building the new institutions, cultivating the new communities, fostering the new habits, and having the *old* conversations to preserve the good of the old world as we enter into the new. As Kingsnorth rightly said, this is intergenerational work.

I’m not afraid of using these new tools. But I want my mind, my heart, my life to be so steeped in the riches of what came before me that the machine’s place stays exactly where it is and ever ought to be: as just a machine.
### We Are All Dwight Schrute Now: The Rise of the Facebook Deputy
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/we-are-all-dwight-schrute-now-the-rise-of-the-facebook-deputy/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:32:37.000Z
“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”  
— Bertrand Russell

“The problem with incompetence is its inability to recognize itself.”  
— Orrin Woodward

Like you, I’ve been watching friends and acquaintances go after one another online with the same recycled takes on the latest predictable—or conveniently manufactured—controversy. Each current event becomes a referendum on national decline. Any headline can morph into amateur constitutional law. Takes on DEI, foreign policy, vaccines—nothing is too complex to be resolved in 280 characters, preferably accompanied by moral urgency and a link to a partisan source no one will read.

The cynic in me asks: *Who appointed you?* Who authorized you—doomscroller, catechized by cable news—to determine when immigration becomes immoral, how election security is assessed, which historical narratives deserve canonization, or which media outlets are to be labeled heretical? What, exactly, qualifies someone for this level of cultural adjudication?

One possible answer: Dwight K. Schrute.

Rainn Wilson’s portrayal of Dwight on *The Office* is brilliant precisely because Dwight is so convinced of his own authority—and so oblivious to its absence. Formally, Dwight is the *Assistant *to* the Regional Manager*. Informally, and incessantly, he seeks to assert himself as *Assistant Regional Manager*. He nominates himself for security detail. He volunteers as a sheriff’s deputy. He posts new office rules that no one follows. He delights in surveillance and enforcement, convinced that order itself depends on him. Dwight is not a good hang.

Dwight is obsessed with a warrior ethos for which he is singularly unfit, spending years and thousands of dollars pursuing a black belt that inspires neither fear nor respect. He is diligent in narrow ways but categorically gullible, naïve, and chronically unaware of his own limitations. His bravado far exceeds his competence. Raised in an insular bubble, he lacks the self-awareness necessary to recognize how little authority he actually possesses. For all his effort, he produces exponentially more annoyance than he does influence. It’s comedic gold.

And that’s the comforting part. Dwight reassures us. Thank God we’re not *that* guy. Thank God we don’t confuse confidence with credibility or mistake self-appointment for legitimacy.

But here’s the uncomfortable possibility: what if we’re more like Dwight than we think? What if we’re not *in* on the joke—but are instead unwittingly the punchline?

To be clear, many issues matter deeply. Addressing them is not the problem. It may be morally necessary. The problem is something closer to the [Dunning–Kruger effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger%5Feffect?ref=mereorthodoxy.com): low ability overestimating itself; armored with confidence, baptized in moral language, and amplified by platforms that reward certainty and drama rather than wisdom. What we are witnessing in public is not merely division but *deformation*—of judgment, discourse, and the virtues required for social cohesion.

This is the rise of the Facebook deputy and the Twitter sheriff: self-nominated authorities armed with fragments of information and an audience just large enough to feel consequential. Like Dwight, they crave the power to define, enforce, and correct—without the slow, often stretching work of impartial discovery, and grappling with the prospect of being inadequately informed.

If that is the diagnosis, then the real question becomes: what does sobriety look like now?

## Humility and Expertise

At minimum, it requires the recovery of two endangered species: humility and expertise.

Humility restrains the impulse to take our opinions too seriously simply because we have strong feelings and a platform. It teaches us to listen longer, examine ourselves critically, and occasionally practice staying in our lane—something almost entirely foreign to the digital life. Expertise, meanwhile, demands formation: patient study, multiple perspectives, submission to reality, and deference to those who have actually borne the cost of knowing. In our moment, that combination is extraterrestrial.

Dwight didn’t need more confidence. Neither do we.

What we need instead is restraint—the kind that flows from acknowledging the difference between *having an opinion* and *having standing*.

Before deputizing ourselves as cultural authorities, a few considerations are worth serious reflection—preferably, before we post.

## **Competence and Position**

Does your education, experience, or standing qualify you to speak authoritatively on this issue? The question is not if you are “interested” in the topic. Nor is it whether or not you have strong feelings about it. Interest and outrage are not qualifications.

If you have never studied, traveled, or meaningfully encountered what you are diagnosing from afar, issuing definitive verdicts on immigration, geopolitics, or public health may not be in your wheelhouse. Teachers should not instruct pilots on flying. Mechanics should not moonlight as epidemiologists. Decades in sales won’t magically confer expertise in history curriculum.

And yes—especially for those of us who have moved through the world without being seriously challenged, profiled, or threatened—it is worth pausing before assuming our vantage point is universal. Perspective is not necessarily disqualifying. Ignoring it is.

## **Input and Bias**

If someone who disagreed with you examined your media diet—your searches, subscriptions, podcasts, and algorithm-fed feeds—would they find curiosity or partiality? Do your inputs regularly challenge you, or is it possible that they’re indoctrinating you without realizing it? If you’re feeling especially brave, let an independent third party, like [Ad Fontes Media](https://adfontesmedia.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), audit your sources. Brace yourself.

You are being formed. So am I. Denying that formation is how we mistake parroting talking points for independent judgment.

## **Supply and Demand**

Are people actually asking for your take? Once again, the standard matters enormously. The issue is not “are people ‘liking’ your take?” The fact that people are being outraged by your take is not validation either. The relevant question is “Are people asking for your opinion?”

Truth be told, no one asked me to write this specific piece. I wavered on whether to submit it for publication. However, students, congregants, and acquaintances regularly seek out my advice on how to engage our chaotic moment. Perhaps this is my way of answering the call. Perhaps my hypocrisy is only partial.

In what I hope is enough contrast, Facebook deputies and Twitter sheriffs are entirely self-appointed. Loud does not mean necessary. Confident does not mean persuasive. Being online does not mean you are needed in the Situation Room.

## **Limitations**

Each of us has, at best, a narrow band of genuine competence. Mine happens to include education, theology, media literacy, and making uncomfortable observations that are occasionally valid. Outside those domains, I am *profoundly* unhelpful. You do not want me near a furnace, an operating table, or a quarterly sales target.

Recognizing limits is not a weakness. It is maturity.

It may offend modern sensibilities to say this, but it remains true: not all opinions are created equal. People share equal dignity, but public judgments are not equally credible. If everyone is an expert, no one is. We can be sincere and yet wrong. Passionate and ignorant. Some speak because they have something to say; others speak because they simply have to say something.

So, what if the way forward is not more reactionary posting, louder pronouncements, or increased certainty?

Perhaps it is this: Attend to your work and stick to the things you actually know.

Beets. Bears. *Battlestar Galactica.*

Learn deeply. Speak carefully. Consider refraining. Wait to be asked.

Because credibility—the one thing Dwight never managed to secure—does not come from asserting authority.

It comes from embodying it.
### What to Learn from the Decline of Young Earth Creationism
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/what-to-learn-from-the-decline-of-young-earth-creationism/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:32:45.000Z
Ryan Burge recently wrote about the [results](https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/creationism-isnt-as-common-as-you?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of the Pew Religious Landscape Survey, a survey of 37,000 people, who were asked various questions about religious beliefs. One of them was: “Which statement about the development of human life on Earth comes closest to your view?”

There were three response options.

1. Humans have evolved over time due to processes such as natural selection; God or a higher power had no role in this process. (“pure evolution”).
2. Humans have evolved over time due to processes that were guided or allowed by God or a higher power. (“intelligent design”).
3. Humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of time. (“creationist view”).

Here were the results:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/04/ghost-upload-1776705467298-940126-undefined-Feb-26-2026-08-38-10-7162-PM.png)

Less than one in five Americans believe in the Creationist view. But what was by far the most surprising finding was when Burge filters the results by religious views:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/04/ghost-upload-1776705468647-660767-undefined-Feb-26-2026-08-38-11-0308-PM.png)

**Only a quarter of Evangelical Christians affirm the Creationist view, while a large majority hold to Intelligent Design**–the belief that God used evolutionary processes to bring human life into existence. Not a *single* religious perspective in America has a majority of its adherents hold to the Creationist view.

This is surprising given that it is predominantly Evangelical Christians who support large and influential organizations such as *Answer in Genesis,* a massive, prominent Young-Earth Creationist ministry who vociferously reject evolution. Their [website](https://answersingenesis.org/creation/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) states:

> According to Scripture, God created “the heavens and the earth” fully formed and functioning in six days, about 6,000 years ago (around 4000 BC). The context of Genesis 1, as well as other places in the Bible, make it clear that these days were ordinary, 24-hour days. God’s original creation was perfect, with no death or suffering. Creation stands in stark contrast to evolution and unbelieving thought.

Apparently, the majority of Evangelicals disagree.

Why? I think for two reasons. One is pressure from without, the other pressure from within. I want to argue that the decline in young-earth creationism is a symptom of external cultural pressures (*without*), but also due to missteps on the part of young-earth advocates (*within*). If you are happy with the decline of the creationist perspective, the first point is for you. If you are galled by the ascendancy of Intelligent Design, the second point is for you. My aim in this article isn’t to advocate for one view over the other, but to show that there are important influences behind the rise of Intelligent Design that both sides should seriously consider.

## **External Pressure**

Drummond’s face looks like a block of mottled clay, creased with care, and streaming with sweat. The audience in the courthouse similarly glisten, fanning themselves incessantly while Drummond paces back and forth. His arm pumps like a piston, finger jabbing, face pained at how unjust it all is. Caustic barbs and indignant condemnations shoot from his mouth right and left. The monologues are exaggerative and bear the thespian over-drama of a movie made in black-and-white, but the old defense attorney speaks with a heft that sells. He bangs his fist, and warns the audience as much as the judge:

> I warn you…Fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding! And soon, your Honor, with banners flying and drums beating we will be marching backward, BACKWARD…through the glorious ages of that 16th century when bigots burned the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind!

The prosecuting attorney, Matthew Brady, who serves as the film’s foil to “enlightenment and intelligence,” looks implacably stupid. He is a simple, God-fearing man, unconcerned with the ravings of men like Drummond. Brady, whose hair seems to be running away from his cocksure face, sits with thumbs hooked around his bulging suspenders, doing his best impression of a Neanderthal while Drummond articulates the wonders of the human mind and powers of reason against primitive superstition. Brady barks and waves these away.

The 1960 film, *Inherit the Wind,* about the Scopes-Monkey trial 35 years earlier, cemented in the public consciousness of America the idea that evolution represented the perspective of enlightened intellectuals, while a dogmatic insistence on a literal interpretation of Genesis was not only backwards, but unsustainable. When Brady is cross-examined, he quickly begins to contradict himself and resorts to naked assertions of faith. Drummond, on the other hand, represents a view that is “as incontrovertible as geometry to any enlightened community of minds.”

At one point, Drummond hands Brady a rock and asks him: “How old do you think this rock is?”

“I am more interested in the Rock of Ages, than I am in the age of rocks!” Brady laughs.

When Drummond informs Brady that a paleontologist has dated the rock as being ten million years old, Brady shuffles in his seat, like a duck wiggling water off his back: “That rock is no more than 6,000 years old.”

“How do you know?” Drummond asks.

“A fine Biblical scholar, Bishop Ussher, has determined the exact date and hour of creation. It occurred in the year 4004 BC…It is not an opinion, but a literal fact, which the good Bishop arrived at through careful computation of the ages of the prophets as set down in the Old Testament. In fact, he determined that the Lord began creation on the 23rd of October, 4004 BC, at 9 AM.”

Drummond, as laconic as Bugs Bunny, replies: “That Eastern Standard Time? Or Rocky Mountain Time?”

The movie, of course, took artistic liberties to massage the actual facts to fit their narrative. William Jennings Bryan, the prosecuting attorney who is transformed into Matthew Brady in the film, did not hold to Ussher’s dating of the earth. When Clarence Darrow (Drummond, in the movie) asks Bryan about Bishop Ussher’s dating, Bryan [replies](https://famous-trials.com/scopesmonkey/2102-ussher?ref=mereorthodoxy.com): “That has been the estimate of a man that is accepted today,” but then adds, “I would not say that it is accurate.”

Bryan’s main concern in the case was not the age of the earth, but fears over the implications of evolution as it was being utilized in social Darwinian ideas, such as eugenics. The high school text book that was the centerpiece of the case, *A Civic Biology* by George Hunter (1914), made overtly racist claims and chilling summons to engineer a superior society through forced sterilizations. Speaking of the “genetically inferior” members of society, such as the mentally handicapped and criminals, Hunter explains that if

> people were lower animals; we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.

Is any of this presented in the movie? Of course not. Nevertheless, the impact on the social imaginary of America was considerable.

In Carl Trueman’s, *The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self*, he explains how powerful the arts are in shaping what Charles Taylor calls “the social imaginary.” Taylor persuasively argues that most people do not think in abstract concepts, like theories. They use their imagination, which doesn't operate “in theoretical terms,” but in, “images, stories, legends, etc.” This becomes the mechanism by which society creates a “common understanding which makes possible common practices, and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.” Which means that the artists (and filmmakers) bear an outsized role in shaping our intuitions. Trueman later notes the influence of the film *Inherit the Wind* in shaping our social imaginary*: “*\[*Inherit the Wind*\] especially helped fix in the popular mind the image of the Scopes Monkey Trial and the issue of evolution as a battle between religious obscurantism and scientific freedom.” Once that was cemented in the imagination of the American mind, the *actual* science became significantly less important.

Trumeman writes:

> Setting aside the question whether evolution--or, to be more precise, one of the numerous forms of evolutionary theory that looks back to Darwin's work as an initial inspiration--is true, there is no doubt that **vast numbers of people in the West simply assume that it is so**.

He goes on:

> There are numerous reasons for this. While the various theories themselves rest on interpretations of the geological record and on complex genetic science, the basic idea--that one species can evolve from another--is easy to grasp. Indeed, the most popular example---that human beings descended from an ape ancestor--seems to make eminent sense. Apes look like humans; why should there not be a connection? As the world seems very old, there would surely be time enough for an incredibly slow process to take place.

Evolutionary theory makes intuitive sense in many ways. When someone points out that we share 98% of our DNA with a chimpanzee, that sounds like we certainly share some kind of ancestry. That *feels* plausible. Almost none of us are educated enough to evaluate that claim on its own merits. All we know is that if we have two items before us that are 98% similar, the difference between the two will be virtually non-existent to us.

Further, the concept of “survival value” becomes another simple, intuitive explanation for why human behavior is the way it is. Why are we motivated to bond as family units, tell stories, play games, etc? Because, eons ago, some of our primitive ancestors began doing those things and they survived long enough to reproduce and pass these customs on. These artifacts of human culture thus likely contributed to their survival and so possess “survival value.”

That is a relatively simple theory. You don’t need to be a trained anthropologist to understand the idea to wonder, for example, “Why do little boys seem so eager to fight and wrestle?” You only need to imagine, “Well, I guess a long time ago, when men were needed to fight off predators, it was probably important to train the boys how to fight, so dads probably began wrestling with them. The tribes that did that, survived. The ones that didn’t, didn’t.” Is that true? I don’t know. But it kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?

Trueman similarly notes that it is not only the intuitive simplicity, but also the mystique of scientific authority that makes evolution so popular:

> Whether evolution can be argued from the evidence is actually irrelevant to the reason most people believe it. Few of us are qualified to opine on the science. But evolution draws on the authority that science possesses in modern society. **Like priests of old who were trusted by the community at large and therefore had significant social authority, so scientists today often carry similar weight.** And when the idea being taught has an intuitive plausibility, it is persuasive.

Later, speaking similarly about the impact of Sigmund Freud:

> \[Freud proposes his theories\] through the scientific idiom of psychoanalysis, an idiom that makes his theories, like those of Darwin, inherently plausible in a modern social imaginary in which science has intuitive authority...**It does not matter that the strictly scientific status of Freud's theories is now methodologically and materially discredited.** The central notion--that human beings are at core sexual and that that shapes our thinking and our behavior in profound, often unconscious, ways--is now a basic part of the modern social imaginary.

Science is the coin of our realm. Perhaps in a post-COVID society, that premium has been discounted some, yet it still possesses the quality that Ross Douthat calls “Official Knowledge.”

> Almost all “knowledge production” in the modern world, whether it takes place in universities or bureaucracies or the respectable portions of the media, is informed by a practical atheism, a presumption that you must analyze human life in scientific or at least social-scientific terms, keeping God or the supernatural safely off the stage.

At one point, we may have cited priests or shamans or dreams as a source of Official Knowledge. But no longer. Today, we cite cross-sectional studies and empirical research…or, at least, the hall monitors of Official Knowledge do. And the assumed perspective in that domain is the evolutionary one. And since vanishingly few of us are qualified to make any kind of meaningful evaluation of the science, we are left with a vague sense of, “*Every smart person believes this–the same smart people who gave us antibiotics and smartphones and rocket engines. Who are we to disagree with them?*”

If you watch the film, who would you like to be: the passionate defender of enlightenment, Drummond, or the dumb Philistine, Brady? Rejecting evolution thus brings the spectre of playground embarrassment into the equation: “*Do you want to be one of those backwards Fundamentalists? Don’t you realize how uncool and lame that is?*”

Grown-ups are often ashamed to admit how much we are susceptible to the allure of what Lewis called the “Inner-Ring,” the desire to be welcomed into the right crowd, one of the cool kids. But Lewis called that pull “That Hideous Strength” for a reason. He thought that throughout a man’s life, “one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.”

We may laugh into our sleeves at fundamentalists who are arguing that the earth is 6,000-years-old but they may be more free from the pull of the sinister powers of worldliness than we are. And we “enlightened” folk may be more beholden to the zeitgeist–*vibes*–than we care to admit.

My assumption is that a large swath of Evangelicals who have accommodated evolution into their reading of Genesis have not done so because they have earned advanced degrees in microbiology or read Darwin and his progenitors with a fine tooth comb and found their conclusions to be persuasive. Nor have they extensively studied the various interpretive approaches to Genesis. My guess is that they just don’t want to be made fun of by the important people, to be “left outside.” After all, the idea feels plausible.

But that isn’t the only reason.

## **Internal Pressure**

Spend any amount of time on the *Answers in Genesis* website, and you will see that not only do they ardently reject evolution, but a whole manner of other interpretations of Genesis as well that other Christians (who likewise reject Darwinian evolution) disagree on. For instance, many Christians disagree about how to interpret the “days” of Genesis 1, whether or not there are gaps in genealogical records, how to understand why our earth (and universe) appear very old, the relationship of Genesis 1 and 2, the extent of Noah’s flood, etc. Christians throughout the history of the church have had various perspectives on these issues, while still maintaining the essential doctrines of creation and anthropology orthodoxy requires.

But, *Answers in Genesis* disagrees. Not only do they believe that all of their interpretations on these different views are welded together (so that if one is compromised, eventually all are compromised), but they also tout their view as being the *only* faithful view.

Ken Ham argues:

> While I do hold to a young-earth creation, it is not “Ken Ham’s interpretation.” Millions of Christians today around the world hold this view, as did Jesus, the apostles, and virtually all orthodox Christians prior to 1800.

Gavin Ortlund replies to this claim in a fantastic video titled “[What Ken Ham Misses About Creation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL9t3O-1E7w&ref=mereorthodoxy.com).” The *only reason* that anyone would disagree with a young-earth position, Ham argues, would be because of the pressure from modern science (as detailed above). Ortlund, however, begins with Augustine and then moves through Clement, Origen, Didymus the Blind, Athanasius, Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville, and Bede, all of whom disagree with how Ken Ham reads Genesis 1 and who (obviously) were not influenced by the external pressures of modern science.

Even more significantly, Ortlund then demonstrates that after modern scientific discoveries which seemed to indicate an old-earth, many faithful Christians–including fundamentalists!–have not insisted on a young-earth view. For instance, B.B. Warfield, J. Gresham Machen, Herman Bavinck, Carl F.H. Henry, J.I. Packer, John Stott, the Scofield Reference Bible and about half of the contributors to the “The Fundamentals”--*the* foundational text of the Fundamentalist movement–held to an old-earth view. Four years before Darwin publishes *The Origin of Species,* Charles Spurgeon preaches a [sermon](https://www.oldearth.org/spurgeon/spurgeon.htm?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) where he comments on Genesis 1:2:

> We do not know how remote the period of the creation of this globe may be–certainly many millions of years before the time of Adam. Our planet has passed through various stages of existence, and different kinds of creatures have lived on its surface, all of which have been fashioned by God.

And, as noted above, the lead prosecutor in the Scopes trial, William Jennings Bryan, held to the day-age view of Genesis–the perspective that the “days” of Genesis one were not 24-hour periods of time but represented long ages of time.

Obviously, just because Spurgeon, Augustine, and Bavinck believe something doesn’t make it true. But it demonstrates that Ken Ham’s claim that his view represents “virtually all orthodox Christians” throughout time is demonstrably false. While many faithful, orthodox Christians *have* held to the young-earth perspective (such as Luther and Calvin) it has been a point that different faithful Christians have disagreed on. Spurgeon and Augustine and Bavinck did not see themselves as compromising on the authority of God’s Word by reading Genesis 1 differently than Ken Ham does. And they obviously were not doing so out of the kind of external pressure I described above. There must have been a different pressure–an *internal* one–that led them to those conclusions. That is, there may be reasons in the Bible itself that seem to require a different accounting for how to interpret the opening chapters of Genesis differently than a strict, young-earth perspective. You do not need to be steeped in the writings of Richard Dawkins or nose deep in comparative creation accounts to notice things like:

- If the sun, moon, and stars are not created till the fourth day, where does the light come from on the first day? Of course, “God is light,” but the light on the first day is *created* light, and no attribute of God is created.
- If God seems to spontaneously create everything in Genesis 1, why do we see God use ordinary “cause-effect” means to bring about the vegetation of the land in Genesis 2:5?
- If the days in Genesis 1 are 24-hour days, and on the sixth day God creates both man and woman (Gen 1:26-27), then why does there seem to be a large gap of time (long enough for Adam to name *all* of the animals of the earth) between Adam’s creation and Eve’s creation in Genesis 2? Or why does Genesis 2:4 use the word “day” to summarize a vast period of time clearly extending beyond 24 hours?
- If Adam and Eve (and their children) are the only humans on the earth, who does Cain marry and who is he afraid of in Genesis 4:15-16?

It is not the purpose of this article to investigate those extensively, but to simply point out that they–and many others–are there. I know that young-earth creationist have replied to each one of those questions, as well as to questions of natural science regarding the fact that the earth and our universe appear to be very, very old.

But part of the reason why Evangelicals may be losing enthusiasm in the young-earth perspective may be because they are not only experiencing those external pressures, but perhaps they are also encountering some of the internal pressures of the Bible themselves. They may not find the answers that *Answers in Genesis* provides to be entirely satisfying, or even necessary, as they begin to read more widely throughout church history and see that the strident claims of figures like Ham do not, in fact, represent the consensus.

If there is any patron saint of Evangelicalism, it is probably C.S. Lewis. He not only rejected a young-earth, but held to a form of[ theistic evolution](https://www.cslewis.org/journal/cs-lewis-on-intelligent-design/view-all/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). And when young Christians discover that he held that view while sharply delineating it from a Darwinian model–and even satirically mocked that position in his [poetry](https://pastormarc.substack.com/p/lead-us-evolution-lead-us) and criticized it in novels like *That Hideous Strength*–they may begin to see that it is possible to strongly resist Darwinian evolution, while endorsing views like an old-earth, or even Intelligent Design.

## **So What?**

On the one hand, if you are part of the majority of Evangelicals who affirm Intelligent Design, then the decline in the young-earth creationist perspective is not alarming. You may even feel grateful. But if my analysis above is correct–that the majority of Americans have arrived at their views on evolution primarily through vibes and cultural pressure–then that should be reason for concern. On matters of Christian liberty, Paul’s counsel is that we must be “fully convinced in \[our\] own mind,” (Rom 14:5). Meaning, we should be convinced through deliberation and reason, not the felt pressure of our peers or culture–what Paul seems to be deeply concerned with on matters of conscience.

If, at the end of the day, the hand that shapes our views is the spirit of the age, then we will be beholden to it elsewhere; possibly in more consequential ways. Our religion is not premised on being inherently unpopular or bizarre, as if the weirder and more obnoxious we are the more fervent our devotion proves to be. But our Lord does promise us that there will be times where our faith will put us squarely in opposition with the world, will require us to resist the allure of the Inner Ring, to follow Christ “outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured,” (Heb 13:13). But if we have let those muscles of “bearing reproach” atrophy, we will not endure what faithfulness requires.

On the other hand, if young-earth creationists can see that many of the heroes of our faith throughout the history of the church have not interpreted Genesis as Ken Ham has, then perhaps that means that we can have more productive and more interesting conversations about creation with one another. And perhaps we can extend more charity towards brothers and sisters who disagree with us.

When being questioned by Darrow in the trial about whether the earth was made in six days, Bryan replies: ‘I think it would be just as easy for the kind of God we believe in to make the Earth in six days as in six years or in six million years or in 600 million years. I do not think it important whether we believe one or the other.’ Though *Answers in Genesis* generally speaks positively about Bryan, in an [article](https://answersingenesis.org/scopes-trial/the-big-picture/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) about this interchange, Ham speaks in lurid tones:

> This was a turning point in Christendom, and the Christian influence in our culture has declined ever since. Bryan unlocked a door—on behalf of Christians, he ‘told’ the secular world that Christians really didn’t take the Bible as seriously as they claimed. This seriously weakened the authority of the Bible in the eyes of the public.  
>  
> So it is not surprising that today’s church leaders not only question the days of Creation, like Bryan, but increasing numbers of them have gone on to disbelieving in the bodily Resurrection or the Virginal Conception of Christ, and no longer affirming marriage as heterosexual-only.

Ham makes it clear what he thinks is on the line: *Deviate from a young-earth and you are on a slippery slope to deny the essential tenets of our faith; disagree on this issue and you do not take the Bible seriously.* One could wonder by what remarkable telepathy Ham is able to spirit into the mind of Bryan (or Charles Spurgeon, or J.I. Packer, or Augustine) and discern that when these men reach the fork in the road in how to read the days of Genesis 1, the signs that point to “Young-Earth” or “Old-Earth” can *really* be read as directions towards an attitude to God’s Word in general: “Serious” or “Not.” And down the dark, and harrowing path that diverges from Ham’s own lies a veritable Sodom and Gomorrah, while down the bright and faithful path of Ken Hamone arrives at a place that looks like…well, *Ken Ham*. And yet, how strange it is to find that so many of the heroes of our faith have chosen differently *have not* gone on to deny the resurrection, the virgin birth, or heterosexual marriage, but go on to write books which defend those very things–men like B.B. Warfield, J. Gresham Machen, and C.S. Lewis.

It seems that a central argument of some young-earth creationists is this: “If you deviate from the panoply of interpretations we offer on Genesis 1-11, it is because you are succumbing to secularism and downgrading the authority of the Bible.” But,as soon as you find Christians who deviate from their interpretation, but have demonstrably *not* been animated by secular science nor have abandoned their high view of Scripture’s authority or the historicity of the miraculous…then the argument starts to fall apart. If young-earth creationists want to regain ground on this issue with the wider culture it might, paradoxically, come from being more open-minded towards other Christians who disagree with them.

When Copernicus and Galileo strove to demonstrate that the earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around, the church was able to provide sophisticated (if not convoluted) Biblical and naturalistic arguments to refute the claim. But they were wrong. And, in time, the Church realized this and adopted heliocentrism. This wasn’t a concession that science had more authority than God's Word, but an admission that they had simply interpreted the Bible incorrectly.

This realization did not diminish what God’s Word told us about the rising and setting of the sun or the foundations upon which the earth rested, but it moved us *closer* to seeing what the author originally intended when he used those word pictures. Similarly, if we approach Genesis 1 assuming that its primary function is to refute figures like Darwin, we will miss the meat and marrow of what the Divine Author intended for us to receive from His Word and therefore may fundamentally misunderstand His world.
### Evangelism in a World of Control and Aggression
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/evangelism-in-a-world-of-control-and-aggression/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:32:46.000Z
According to German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, the formula for successful living in late modernity is quality *via* quantity. That is, the good life––or successful relating to the world––is determined by the sheer volume of options and resources available to us. We have undergone, as Holly Ordway puts it, a “Ptolemaic shift” in perspective––the world revolves around us and we seek to control it from that central vantage point. Bringing more of the world under our control is *the* technique for flourishing.

However, the consequence of such escalation, says Rosa, is a faulty mode of relating to the world, as well as to each other, to things, and to our own bodies. This faulty relation has become reinforced by the structures of society, leading to what Rosa calls the “structurally induced muting of the world”––the world we seek to master no longer *speaks* to us.

The symptoms of this muting—chronic stress, depression, anxiety, and burnout-related disorders—are now commonplace. This psychological crisis poses unique challenges for the church––God’s royal priesthood who are called to relate to the world as salt and light, proclaiming the redemptive excellencies of their God. In an age of distorted relation to the world and others, how is the church supposed to bear witness to the Creator of a muted creation?

In this context, evangelism must recover embodied practices that restore attentiveness to general revelation, allowing creation to expose our suppression of its Creator—a dissonance ripe for gospel proclamation.

## **Aggression, Resonance, & General Revelation**

In our pursuit of successful living, we have left no stone unturned by our attempts to optimize and control:

> Sleeping and waking, eating and drinking, sex and sports, creativity and relaxation, attractiveness and aggression––there is no longer any aspect of human life and the human body that cannot be measured and recorded, and thus improved, enhanced, or optimized by means of new biological, psychological, pharmaceutical, and computer technologies.

But, Rosa says, “expanding our share of the world” paradoxically leads to losing it. Such optimization situates us in a position of aggression toward the world and those in it. His solution is [what he calls *resonance*](https://mereorthodoxy.com/resonance-and-the-psalms)––cultivating a state of being *in tune* with others and the world. Rosa likens resonance to the vibrations of a tuning fork. One fork’s vibrations cause another to vibrate. The two relate to one another, being affected by the other (and in some ways, transformed) while maintaining their distinctiveness.

However, our attempts to control the world put us in danger of losing the very “pathways” to such resonance! God’s world speaks, yet we have placed a finger over the mouth of creation as it pronounces the glory of God with hushed declarations.

This atrophied ability to resonate with the world threatens to thicken the immanent frame of a closed system—cut off from a transcendent story of salvation. Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck says that without general revelation, special revelation (*the* transcendent story of salvation) loses its connectedness with the whole cosmic existence and life. While general and special revelation are distinct, they are inseparable—both originating in God’s gracious self-disclosure: the Word as Creator in general revelation, the Word as Redeemer in special revelation. Special revelation alone has the divine capacity to convict and convert sinners. Yet it is given within the created order. Bavinck emphasizes that special revelation is built on the foundation of general revelation—general revelation is the “preamble of faith.”

General revelation, then, forms the lived and intelligible context in which special revelation is received. Psalm 19 beautifully displays how the law is given within the context of creation. It provides the *tangible* and *temporal* theatre in which the story of salvation unfolds—a theatre whose doors we have closed.

Because of our world-muting acceleration, our evangelistic efforts would be wise to reawaken attentiveness to the created order, through which God’s divine nature is disclosed and human suppression exposed—a suppression that only the grace of Christ, received through special revelation, can heal.

## **Evangelism in an Age of Aggression**

Rosa identifies three axes along which resonant relationships can be mapped: 1) horizontal axes made up of social, familial, and romantic relationships, 2) diagonal axes of relating to *objects* in the world, and 3) vertical axes where one connects with religion, existence itself, or creation as a whole. We could summarize these as 1) relationships, 2) things, and 3) meaning, respectively.

### **Posture**

However, before considering our relation to others, we must become resonant persons ourselves. Edwin Friedman applied systems theory to leadership through the concept of self-differentiation, which Mark Sayers later popularized as “non-anxious presence.” At base, this is the idea that someone can *resonate* within a system, rather than relate to it with aggression and alienation.

We can cultivate such a non-anxious presence, a posture of interiority––as Gordon Smith calls it––through practices that situate us along Rosa’s axes of resonance. Consider Smith’s four practices for interiority:

1. Morning and evening prayer
2. Spiritual direction and friendship
3. Sabbath observance
4. Embodiment (particularly the Lord’s Supper)

Smith’s practices map neatly onto Rosa’s axes of resonance: prayer situates us within religion and history; spiritual friendship cultivates horizontal resonance; certain Sabbath activities can restore attentiveness to nature and art; and embodied practices such as the Lord’s Supper recalibrate our relation to material reality. Thus, especially in an increasingly anxious and exhausted age, these practices are how we become a non-anxious presence, resonating with a peace beyond understanding that compels others.

### **Practices**

Beyond our own interiority, our evangelism should include what Rosa calls “establishing axes of resonance”––ways to open our eyes and ears to the world––in the context of ongoing relationships:

| **Axes of resonance** | **Practices**                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    |
| --------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Voice of Nature**   | Activities such as a walk through the woods together or tending a garden bring us into contact with the givenness of creation. The scent of newly turned soil, the crunch of pine needles underfoot, the quiet persistence of growth—these oppose our obsession with control. Creation resists optimization; it must be received.                                                                                |
| **Power of Art**      | Shared encounters with a painting, a poem, or a film draw us into stories larger than ourselves. Art has a way of awakening longings we struggle to name—desire for justice, reconciliation, sacrifice, transcendence. We find ourselves moved by truths we cannot fully explain. The question emerges: why do fictional narratives often feel more real than the flattened accounts of a purely material world? |
| **Mantle of History** | Reading about another century or standing at a historical site widens the horizon of the present moment. History presses us with themes of memory, injustice, courage, and judgment. It raises the unsettling possibility that time is not random succession but meaningful progression. We are forced to ask whether history bends anywhere at all—and if so, toward what.                                      |

The goal of such practices is, as Alan Noble says, an openness to the way creation and revelation pierce our buffered selves and interpret us. None of them are substitutes for clear gospel proclamation. They are simply practices that situate us along the axes of resonance where, in God’s created order, the human heart is confronted with realities it cannot fully mute. Each of these axes “vibrate” precisely because God has so ordered his creation and the human heart to resonate with one another along these points. Bavinck points out that the beauty of nature and art could not give a man any pleasure (i.e. *resonate*) unless he has a feeling for beauty in his bosom, placed there by God. Thus Rosa, though writing as a secular sociologist, is simply describing realities that Christians confess are features of a Creator-made world.

So rather than being an evangelistic cop-out (which some relational evangelism approaches can lean toward), done faithfully, these are merely evangelistic *steps* that require great intentionality. Rosa says cultivating these axes is inherently *time-intensive*. One cannot pick up a violin once or read only the blurb of a novel and expect a resonant experience. In the same way, this work cannot be relegated to an evening on the ministry calendar or checked off a daily to-do list––we must embody lives of resonant hospitality.

### **Priority**

Our priority in relating to people along these axes of resonance must be connecting them to the deeper, divine subtext that is exposed. This not only requires significant time, but also requires relational skills of attention and inquiry. We are to be ready to give an answer for the resonant hope within us—a hope echoed in the world around us. We must become faithful story-tellers, able to connect resonant encounters with the divine truth “behind the curtain.” Hospitality thus provides the ongoing setting for reflective conversations after resonant practices:

- What was it about that particular painting that pulled you in?
- Why do you think that performance captured so much attention?
- You seemed drawn to that particular history exhibit. Why do you think that is?

Questions like these move from the external experience to the internal experience and serve to name the suppressed hunger that only special revelation answers. Resonance exposes suppression, but does not cure it. Rather, we pray the Lord uses his general revelation to reveal an uncomfortable dissonance––resonating with the beauty of creation while suppressing any meaningful account for it. It is into that tension that we proclaim the gospel cure. A life shaped by deep gospel interiority prepares us to show how the person and work of Jesus answer the heart’s longings for beauty, justice, and meaning.

It must be said, too, that while gospel proclamation remains our priority, [hospitality is not merely a technique to that end](https://mereorthodoxy.com/unreasonable-hospitality-and-the-ordinary-work-of-the-church). Technique is defined by efficiency. Whatever skill or giftedness we cultivate for hospitality and for drawing out others is aimed at *serving another,* not optimizing ourselves. Cultivating lives of interiority, inviting others into that life, and helping them connect resonance with revelation is therefore not technique but an application of gospel affection.

## **Non-competitive Hospitality**

It is in this application of gospel affection, though, where we face a unique challenge. If we are to practice genuine hospitality in our aggressively performative age, we must suspend competition. This is becoming increasingly difficult as our relationships mirror more and more our online life. Performance (i.e. *competition*) is the name of the digital game; indeed, to cease posting is to cease *existing—*your last footprint buried under an endless feed. For souls made for glory, performing feels like the means to life.

However, if we are to have resonant encounters with others, we must cease relating to them in aggressively competitive ways. Rosa points out that every competition is fundamentally based on *outperforming* another and thus produces losers and leads to alienation. We will never show gospel affection and attentive care to those we are seeking to outperform––glory in competition is a zero sum game. Therefore, to resonate with another we must suspend competition.

Jesus gives us the model for such relating in John 13\. While the disciples consistently bickered about who was the best, seeking to outperform one another for primacy with empty bravado, Jesus emptied himself. Rather than outperform his disciples, Jesus assumed the posture of a servant, washing their feet. It is in this lowly act of service that he set a precedent for anti-competitive hospitality: *you also should do just as I have done to you* (Jn. 13:15).

\*\*\*

For Rosa, to truly flourish we must recover a resonant connection with the world and its inhabitants. For the church to flourish in an age trained to mute creation, we must first restore attentiveness to general revelation. The heavens declare God’s glory, awakening resonance even amid human suppression. Into this created world, the Creating Word condescended as the Redeeming Word, manifesting God’s righteousness and turning alienation into peace through faith. We are called to shine the unveiled glory of God in Jesus Christ into every suppressed heart.
### 10 Reasons Evangelicals are Cringe
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/10-reasons-evangelicals-are-cringe/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:32:48.000Z
Evangelicals are cringe. I have personally been dealing with this problem ever since I had to convince my parents to let me listen to Creed in middle school, but you can find Francis Schaeffer talking about it several decades ago and the most important contribution to the question was probably James Davison Hunter’s book *To Change the World* (2010).

Aaron Renn is not the first person to observe [evangelicalism’s cringe problem](https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/cultural-cringe?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), which he helpfully observes is not merely behaving in uncomfortable or tasteless ways, but as a tendency to “view evangelical culture as inferior to mainstream elite culture, particularly in its urban variety, and see that as the standard.” He will surely not be the last to observe this, either.

I don't lose sleep over evangelicalism’s cringeiness (at least not nearly as much as I did when I was a teenager and being cringe was more offensive to me) because God did not let being cringe stop him from getting stuff done culturally back when the Church was mostly made up of illiterate fishermen and he will bring about his work in the world regardless of whether or not there are sufficient numbers of evangelicals among the elites. This is the most important reason, but it’s worth talking about the issues Renn raises because some of the reasons are actually good things that we should celebrate and others are bad things that we should do something about if we can.

Renn is fundamentally correct about the reality of evangelical cringeiness and the matching problem of [evangelical elites](https://firstthings.com/the-problem-with-the-evangelical-elite/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). The high tolerance for cringe leads to evangelicals accepting mediocrity, which then hinders our ability to produce elites. But Renn is wrong about [why this is](https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/its-almost-a-sin-for-an-evangelical-to-be-an-elite?utm%5Fsource=share&utm%5Fmedium=android&r=696o&triedRedirect=true).

I think there’s a good argument to be had for at least being somewhat intentional about cultural impact for a wide variety of reasons, most of which have to do with wanting the [Kichijiros](http://mereorthodoxy.com/kichijiro-was-right) of the world to be singing hymns in church rather than gambling on their phones while they’re waiting for their appointment with the transgender surgeon. As Renn notes, there should be a pipeline of evangelical elites—so where are these people?

## **1\. Evangelicals who could be elites are applying themselves to more important problems.**

Evangelicals have a peculiar incentive structure compared to other subcultures jockeying for cultural influence. They have a mandate, in very practical but not entirely synonymous ways, to treat elite tastemakers the same as they treat people with no cultural influence or even people with profound intellectual disabilities. They also have a mandate to find the most remote, hostile, and uninfluential people in the world outside of their own culture and tell them that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

If you’re talking to Mr. Lazarus Bigbucks and you want him to support your new foundation that is training Christian lawyers to become influential in the federal court system, he is equally likely to give you the money as he is to give to someone who is building a hospital for disabled children in Central Asia. This is only a problem if cultural influence is the most important goal for Christians, which it is not.

Renn mentions the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) as a positive example of a truly insightful institution with culture-shaping potential that nonetheless never broke into mainstream consciousness. As someone who was part of the effort to get CCDA into the mainstream, I’m disappointed that it didn’t work out, but I know that there are a lot of great CCDA people who are still doing good work nonetheless.

Renn is concerned that evangelicalism deliberately hobbles itself by making “secular” vocations seem second-class, and while there are a few small spheres where this is the case, I don't think it's nearly as big a deal as he makes it out to be. If there's an evangelical out there who could be a Supreme Court Justice or a missionary, he or she is probably going to have a doctrine of vocation sufficient to recognize that those are both good things that God could want for them to do.

## **2\. Evangelicals who could be elites are applying themselves to less important problems.**

Evangelicals are very content with cringeiness, in part because it’s a lot easier to appeal to ten cringey people than one non-cringey elite tastemaker. The incentive structure that moves evangelicals who could be elites to spend their lives taking care of disabled children in Central Asia also leads them to build things that are of questionable cultural influence like a [life-size replica of Noah’s Ark](https://arkencounter.com/about/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) full of information about why the world is 6,000 years old.

This is probably the most important thing to consider about Renn’s critiques, because a lot of evangelicals who could be influencing the culture for good are content to say and do things that only get them a lot of cheers and subscriptions from fellow evangelicals. They also tend to accept that mainstream culture is going to be better and are content to create preachier versions of whatever is popular in the mainstream. This is bad.

## **3\. Most people are passive when it comes to elites and every subculture’s most prominent voices tend to regress to the cringe.**

Regression to the cringe is a real problem in every subculture. The lowest common denominator will generally predominate unless there is strong pressure otherwise. Mainstream cultural elites of the sort that Renn cares about are generally people that have risen to the top either because they are very good or because the culture is very bad.

One of the most prominent history newsletters on Substack is more or less [Infowars for liberals](https://www.thefp.com/p/heather-cox-richardsons-revisionist-history?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Infowars itself was incredibly successful as a business and as a cultural product because someone can be really, really successful at appealing to the minds, hearts, and pocketbooks of the lowest common denominator.

This is a broader cultural problem and I would love for evangelicalism to help lead our culture out of it. I am not sure how to do this, and, quite frankly, I’m not sure that anyone does. With the oncoming tsunami of LLM-driven hollowing out of our [culture](https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-coming-ai-cataclysm/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), I think we’ll be lucky to not slide into an abyss.

## **4\. Cultural elites are quite rare and not always a function of skill or discipline.**

Cultural elites already represent unicorns who rose to national or international prominence through an odd combination of talent, skill, and luck. At the highest level, we’re talking about a few hundred or thousand people in a country of millions and a world of billions. Why is *The Wingfeather Saga* less popular than *The Hunger Games* even though the Wingfeather books are clearly superior? Maybe it’s marketing, maybe it’s just the vagaries of the times.

One could also spend an inordinate amount of time discussing whether or not someone counts as an elite. Ross Douthat, who Renn mentions, is a fair standard for comparison because he’s also a Christian who believes things that secular people find abhorrent yet they still take him seriously because they have to. David French is also an NYT columnist. Is he elite enough? Lyman Stone is a writer with a popular Substack. Is he elite enough?

At the end of the day, such debates get silly quickly without really invalidating Renn’s point, which is that it is hard to think of evangelicals who are taken as seriously as Boss Ross. The fact that there are many evangelicals who are *worth* being taken as seriously as Douthat is a different argument altogether.

## **5\. Elite gatekeepers are biased against evangelicals.**

Standard evangelical beliefs and opinions like “it’s morally wrong to have sex outside of marriage” or “the Bible is inspired and inerrant” are laughable in elite circles. Even if someone’s got the intellectual horsepower to be an elite, they might get unfairly tarred by association because some gatekeepers seem to assume that every evangelical is Jerry Falwell in a skin suit and will pronounce a fatwa against fornicators if you give them a column in *the New York Times*.

The same bias also applies to Catholics, but somehow it doesn’t land on them nearly as hard, perhaps because they are better at obfuscating or because the average non-elite Catholic does not like to talk about six-day creationism or fornication and so the average gatekeeper doesn’t worry so much about Catholics pronouncing fatwas. Evangelicals also lean on Catholic elites when the going gets tough, which is arguably a crutch but that’s an argument for a different day.

## **6\. Evangelicalism disowns its elites when they deviate from orthodoxy, and this is good.**

While evangelicals are a forgiving and loving bunch, there are a few rules that you have to follow. Even Donald J. Trump is only considered “one of us” by delusional people; most evangelicals think of Trump as an auxiliary that has been delegated to be their attack dog against the forces of evil.

Most elites aren’t lucky enough to have that sort of status; someone who states a belief that’s outside the bounds of evangelical orthodoxy or lives a life incompatible with moral strictures can’t be considered an evangelical anymore. This is sometimes self-selected; a lot of elites “move on” from evangelicalism at the point where being an evangelical becomes a liability in their path to elitism, and because of elite biases against evangelicals, there’s immense pressure for people at the cusp of elite status to reject the distinctives that make them evangelical.

## **7\. Evangelicalism disowns its elites when they violate shibboleths, and this is bad.**

There’s plenty of arguments about whether or not someone’s ejection from evangelicalism was fair or not, Evangelicalism has a hyperactive immune system designed to chuck out false prophets, even though it is not always very good at this. Thus, when someone steps on enough toes or says things that are perfectly consistent with orthodox and historic Christian practice but violates other sensibilities, they get chucked to the curb.

## **8\. Evangelical influence looks different from mainstream influence.**

When an evangelical elite actually values humility, they are naturally going to go against the grain of elite culture. Evangelicals like Chuck Colson have been incredibly influential in a wide variety of ways, but they don’t like to hog the megaphone. Many evangelicals rise to positions of power and then do Hunter’s “faithful presence” in a non-cringe way.

## **9\. Evangelicals are biased against elitism because they do cringe things like focusing on their families.**

Evangelicals are biased against elitism because becoming an elite often requires grueling work and sacrifices. If you have a family and you are an evangelical who listens to God, God is often going to tell you to prioritize your family over doing the work necessary to rise to the top.

## **10\. The best evangelical elites are underground; you wouldn't have heard of them because you're not cool enough.**

Okay, this one’s a bit silly but it’s true. I can think of lots of people who are worth reading just as much as Ross Douthat but they’re just not popular enough. Brad East’s [blogroll of 100 people](https://www.bradeast.org/blog/old-fashioned-blogroll?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) always worth reading has a ton of evangelicals on it. I would count Brad himself among this crowd.

## **Conclusion**

I would like to live in a world where it's [easier to be good](https://mereorthodoxy.com/ten-theses-bible-poverty-justice/) and I think it's perfectly fair and good for Christians to strategize about how to best do that. There are a lot of ways to do this badly, though. Avoiding cringe is more or less impossible if you're building anything that's designed for everyone, and grasping for elite status and power so that you can help others is famously a dangerous path.

In my lifetime, various poles of evangelicalism swung between holier-sounding ambitions like those expressed in David Platt’s *Radical*, desires for earthly power in Republican politics, and more grounded yet still heavily spiritualized ideas like Tim Keller's *Every Good Endeavor*.

I doubt we can ever really escape the swing between these ideas because they're all expressions of Biblical faith; our best hope is to avoid getting into scenarios where we're obnoxiously judging people in one camp or the other or creating cliques that exclude the billions of normies who are never going to be missionaries or Supreme Court justices.

After all, no elite evangelical will be able to forget that the little children are going to enter the Kingdom of Heaven before us.
### The Magpie 4: Metrics and the Loss of Values
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-magpie-4-metrics-and-the-loss-of-values/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:32:49.000Z
C. Thi Nguyen. [The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/735252/the-score-by-c-thi-nguyen/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Penguin Press. $32.00\. 368 pp.

A few times a year I read a book that is so exciting, so energizing, and so *creative* that I almost cannot finish it. It makes me angry, hot and jealous that I didn’t write it. *The Score* was a book like that.

C. Thi Nguyen is not for everyone. He curses. He tells a lot of stories. His prose is much more casual than you’d expect for a philosopher. But he has also distilled his own study of games into an account of what it feels like to play a game you love, and what it feels like to have that love lost due to opaque systems of measurement.

“There is, in my profession,” he writes, “a single list of all the major philosophy departments, ranked by prestige. There is another list of all the philosophy journals you could publish in, also ranked by prestige. These are the scoring systems of philosophy.”

As a philosophy graduate student, Nguyen found himself consumed by these rankings. They determined what essays he wrote, which conferences he attended, and whose opinions mattered to him. He goes on:

> Nobody is forcing people to use these systems. They’re just a pair of websites, each compiled by a small group of professionals, based on some annual surveys. In the end, they’re just a summary of a few people’s subjective impressions of status. We could have just as well decided to ignore them; they have no official authority. But that’s not what happened. Most professional philosophers pay intense, close, and regular attention to these lists. Most of us know exactly how we’re doing on the rankings.

Nguyen’s life was determined by these lists. Though he had once been “obsessed with some big, weird old questions,” over time he became consumed by these lists. He began writing “small, precise articles on fairly arcane technical questions.” He worked to gain entry into the graduate programs and workplaces that would support his place on these rankings. Over time, his “joy in philosophy started draining away.” Before the rankings, “my desires were grounded in my own sense of what mattered.” Though Nguyen might have desired the respect of a few fellow philosophers, they were the ones who shared his view of what mattered—“the particular philosophers I thought were cool.” But over time, the metrics determined his values. He lost the joy of the game. He was playing by somebody else’s rules.

Resisting this collapse, he began his search for a form of “value clarity”—a concept that would identify success without making it submissive to an opaque system of metrics. He landed on games.

Games identify success. They tell you what to do and how to participate. They help you cooperate and focus your energy. They are collaborative, but they are also flexible. They provoke curiosity and enthusiasm instead of crushing it. When you win a game, you exhibit intangible traits like enthusiasm, curiosity, and wonder. But most of all “winning” is not the only determinant of a game’s success. If you hate playing it, it’s a bad game.

What happens when you play a game, in other words, is the exact opposite of what happened to Nguyen when he was playing by philosophy’s rules. Why is this?

*Nguyen argues that metrics and our overreliance on quantitative data are making us unhappy.* Metrics are removing from our lives the qualities that make living like a game. Metrics are what led to his own value collapse, and he thinks it is leading to the same kind of collapse in the lives of many others all around.

Nguyen introduces what he calls the “four horsemen of bureaucracy”: Scale, Mechanical Rules, Parts (Interchangeable and Replaceable) and Control. The “four horsemen” are qualities that bureaucracies rely on. They reflect the reliance of bureaucracies on the quantitative. In the example of the student assigned a letter grade to assess progress, “scale” is revealed in the need to make grading systems in the aggregate, with data compiled for many students at once. “Mechanical Rules” mean that the data needs to be inflexible in order to apply to all students in the same way. As online educators have discovered, “Parts” identifies the need of bureaucracies to make instructors fungible—meaning that the work of each instructor will be consistent enough that their students can be reliably assessed (and so that the instructors can be replaced). And Control identifies the subtle threat held by bureaucracies, which is that those individuals who do not “measure up” can be replaced.

Bureaucracies rely on metrics, which are comprised of quantitative data. Metrics “function as scoring systems, rendering a singular value judgment and making it official, and use data to render that judgment.” But metrics “inherit any limitations within data” and are often transformed from being evaluative criteria to targets. Here Nguyen makes the first of many distinctions that I wish I’d made.

He writes that data ignores “intangibles” but that “intangibles” are among *the most tangible things there are*. He gives the example of a possible public health goal—to lower everyone’s saturated fat intake. This might in fact achieve the desired effect of extending individual health spans. But it ignores the cost—the loss of culinary traditions that form around butter and cheese, and the joys of eating these as a multigenerational family. These joys are “intangible”—and for the purposes of data, they are *impossible to abstract*. They can’t be counted. Therefore, in a world determined by data and metrics, they don’t matter. Longer lifespans might seem a clear win for public health. But what really matters here—and what really might be lost—can’t be counted. A perfect cheese, in Nguyen’s words, is “glorious in the mouth, but invisible in the language of bureaucracy.” *Yes!*

Data, by definition, needs to be quantitative, known in the aggregate, and context-free. It is “built to travel.” You need to be able to compare, for instance, graduation rates to evaluate a college, or a student’s GPA in several classes over several years. But to make this evaluation portable—to allow it to aggregate several years of data—you lose a lot of information. You might lose how hard a student had to work to get a B in Algebra, or how much he grew after failing a few tests. You might miss that the student’s curiosity sometimes got in the way of completing assignments on time, or the fact that her creativity meant she didn’t always follow the syllabus exactly as written. These traits—resilience, hard work, curiosity and creativity—might in the long run be exactly what promises success. But because they are hard to quantify, they are lost under the metric of an assigned grade.

If metrics are “factories for values,” as Nguyen argues, then a reliance on metrics can lead to “value capture.” Over time, those traits that cannot be quantified, like a student’s curiosity, or the level of engagement a particular instructor can cultivate in a classroom, or the enthusiasm that learners experience, become less important than those things that can be measured, like letter grades.

It’s easy to read this book and feel a bit trapped—like Nguyen did as an early career professor. The solution, he thinks, comes in thinking with games. Games share a few traits with university philosophy. For one, they are a collaborative endeavor. Everyone agrees to participate when playing a game. Games adhere to a set of rules and standards and a scoring system, but you don’t play a game just to win. You play for the enjoyment of it. Games, according to philosopher Bernard Suits, “make autotelic activity vivid” (meaning, an activity pursued for its own sake). Valuing *outcomes* in place of *process*, and then making outcomes into data, has rid much of our lives of the autotelic activity that makes the process valuable, in the first place.

Allow me a personal story. I am a theologian—a “real” one, by which I mean one with a PhD. I’ve done most of the required things to be taken “seriously”—finished the dissertation, published in an academic journal, taught at a post-secondary institution. I’ve also spent a not-insignificant amount of energy trying to be “serious.” This is hard for me, because I am not very serious. And yet I felt that if I were deemed frivolous, “silly,” untidy or “creative,” I’d be discarded as an intellectual peer. I had to “play the game” in a way that made the whole thing less fun.

I’ll tell you a little secret: I think academic theology is boring. This is true almost without exception and has gotten me in more than my share of predicaments. I simply cannot bear things to be boring. It makes me break out in hives. God is, after all, so interesting! And yet the highly technical, very precise accounts of theological topics that predominate in my field—the accounts that get you the respect of your peers—have drained theology of the vitality inherent to it. God is *life*, after all! It’s not an accident that the old joke that theology concerns itself with “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” has hung around for so long. Somehow we are still counting angels without even believing in them.

Theology at its best can track the story of how God relates to the world—through reflection on the development of doctrine and the account of the biblical text. It can also consider the vast implications of what this all means for how we set up our human communities and our lives together. At its best, it revitalizes us, drawing us as Longfellow said toward the view that “life is real,” and that God has granted us the grace to live it. At its worst, it can make us preening obsequious sycophants, fighting each other to climb to the top of an obscure pile.

Nguyen’s book, in all of its casual directness, reminds us that communicating ideas well might also be a goal of professional academics. His work invigorates and energizes his readers by introducing a concept that they didn’t have and making it relevant. This is its own kind of excellence, and one I’d like to adopt in my own work. For this reason, I wish he had made *The Score* into two books. At times I felt that there were so many good ideas coming at once that I was losing his main thread. I think what he’s after is important enough that tighter editing and a clearer focus would have made his instincts accessible and relevant to nearly everyone.
### James Talarico's Gospel
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/james-talaricos-gospel/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:33:05.000Z
There is no more effective way to destroy an institution than to inhabit it, keep its vocabulary, and gut its definitions and convictions. Politicians have done a great job of this regardless of stripe or creed. State Rep. James Talarico (TX D-50) has become the newest architect of this age-old strategy. He is preaching a faith that looks like Christianity on a TikTok feed but functions as a press release for secular progressivism.

As a seventh-generation Texan, I have a deep stake in who represents my state in our nation’s capital. But as a follower of Christ, my concern runs deeper: I cannot stay silent when the language of the Kingdom is hijacked to lead the susceptible into spiritual darkness, wilderness, and confusion.

Talarico is currently making a national name for himself by positioning himself as the moral antidote to the Religious Right. He wants you to know that he hates how religion and politics have been fused. His response? To fuse his faith with modern-day progressive [politics](https://x.com/DouthatNYT/status/2023960260709376218?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

While appearing on some of the nation’s most popular podcasts and shows, like [*The Joe Rogan Experience*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FjOGPvMftb8&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and [*The Ezra Klein Show*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa6fiO2EgJ4&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), and [*The Late Show with Stephen Colbert*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiTJ7Pz%5F59A&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) ([kinda](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/cbs-stephen-colbert-interview-senate-1236508134/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)), Talarico—a current seminary student— said that many evangelicals are obsessed with issues Jesus “didn’t bother to mention,” referencing abortion, gay marriage, and transgenderism. Most notably, he reframed the Annunciation—the moment the Son of God took on flesh in utero—as a divine affirmation of “reproductive consent.” In Talarico’s telling, Mary’s submission to the Almighty was not merely an act of worship, but a negotiation for bodily autonomy and reproductive rights.

As the saying goes, “Progressivism will hollow out your religion and wear its skin like a trophy.” We are witnessing a masterful performance of this strategy in Texas—preaching a new religion while masquerading as the old, authentic one. And it is specifically designed to capture a terminally online and disenchanted 2026 audience.

Candidly, I rarely hold politicians to high theological standards; however, when one postures himself as an exemplar of a more authentic, updated version of the historic faith, I consider it a worthwhile task to hold that posture up to the light of the Word.

## **The Public Square**

To be clear: I am not arguing that religion has no place in public discourse on public policy. It would be impossible to have a moral society without influence from religion. We don’t have a functioning society that provides basic human rights without Christians putting forth ideas stemming from their faith and their Book.

As my friend Daniel Darling has [noted](https://x.com/dandarling/status/1540844896545914880?s=20&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), if Christians had kept their faith to themselves, history would look very different:

- No Martin Luther King Jr. applying his faith to the civil rights movement.
- No Susan B. Anthony applying her faith for women’s rights.
- No William Wilberforce applying his faith to shut down the British slave trade.
- No Dietrich Bonhoeffer applying his faith against the Nazi regime.
- No early church applying their faith to feed the poor, care for the sick, and build hospitals.

The problem isn't that Representative Talarico is bringing his faith into politics; it's that he is bringing a counterfeit faith, one that would be completely unrecognizable to the global and historic Church. To accept the progressive dogmas Talarico attempts to baptize, one must ignore the witness of believers across every century, language, and hemisphere. Are we really so arrogant to believe that we are the first generation in two thousand years to finally "get it right"? And is it not incredibly convenient that our "new discovery" happens to coincide exactly with the encroaching sentiments of secular culture?

I refuse the arrogance that assumes the zeitgeist of our current cultural moment should take precedence over the unanimity of the Body of Christ across eras and equators. While the heroes of our history applied the whole counsel of God to promote the flourishing of their neighbors, Talarico seems intent on viewing the Bible through progressive political lenses to check the authority of the Word if it crosses his party’s line.

## **Did God Really Say?**

As I alluded to earlier, Talarico’s primary rhetorical sleight of hand is the claim that "Jesus never said anything" about abortion, transgenderism, or gay marriage. This is a dangerous deception. James Talarico is attempting to reel you in with the oldest question in the book: “*Did God really say?*” It is a question all too familiar to those who have read the first three chapters of Genesis.

Contrast that with the question Jesus asked more than any other: "*Have you not read?*" When Jesus asked that, He was exclusively referencing the Old Testament. And even James would likely agree that there are very straightforward texts in the Old Testament condemning homosexuality. While Christ did build upon the Law—"You have heard it said, but I say to you..."—He didn’t abandon or abolish it, He fulfilled it. Jesus didn’t come to loosen the moral codes, He actually took them a step further, and then pointed to Himself as the ultimate fulfillment of the Law.

Further, Christians believe in a triune, eternal God. When we read the words of the Old Testament, we aren’t reading a different “Old Testament God” who was later replaced, we are reading the words of Christ the Son, too. So when we read passages defining humanity in terms of two sexes, life in the womb, and establishing marriage as a sacred union between one man and one woman, we can have assurance that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are not in conflict, but have spoken, with authority, in perfect unison on these matters.

Jesus is the Word made flesh—the same Word that spoke the moral order into existence, the same Word that came first as a fetus in Mary’s womb, and the same Word that gave us the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes. When Jesus was asked about divorce—a departure from God’s design for marriage—He didn't offer a progressive update, He pointed back to the beginning.

Ultimately, this logic is untenable because it is unreasonable. Jesus never explicitly spoke against pedophilia, bestiality, or burning down your neighbor’s house either. Does that mean He never addressed these issues? Does that mean He is in favor of every issue that He did not explicitly condemn? Of course not. Talarico is smarter than that, but he is hoping you aren't. Jesus didn't have to address every possible error because He positively defined what God-honoring sexuality and loving your neighbor rightly looks like.

There are an infinite number of ways to pervert something good, beautiful, or true. The Bible warns us against many of those perversions, but God primarily gives us a positive vision to work toward, not an innumerable list of pitfalls to avoid. In the same way, members of the Secret Service aren't trained to spot counterfeits by studying every possible fake. They are trained by handling the genuine currency so often that a fraud becomes obvious the moment it's touched.

It is never a good idea to redefine what God has defined. This includes, but is not limited to, life, marriage, and sex. And it is never a good idea to separate that which God has joined together. This includes Christian doctrine from Christian ethics. To claim the ‘ethics’ of Jesus while discarding the doctrine of the Word is like trying to keep the beauty of a flower while severing it from its roots; it may mimic the appearance of life for a season, but you have severed the bloom from the only source that could sustain it.

## **An Inverted Gospel: Works over Grace**

A.W. Tozer famously said, "What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us." If that is true, then the most dangerous thing about James Talarico is the way he attempts to rewrite the nature of God and His plan for our redemption. Just this month, Talarico [told a national audience](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiTJ7Pz%5F59A&ref=mereorthodoxy.com):

> "Jesus in Matthew 25 tells us exactly how you and I... are going to be saved. By feeding the hungry, by healing the sick... Nothing about going to church... nothing about even being a Christian."

The gospel according to James Talarico brings death and more confusion. He flips the root and the fruit, suggesting that if you just do enough work then you will be saved, while at the same time, rejecting some of those good works that God has prepared for us. There truly is no heresy which does not have its roots in the past. This is simply the age-old error of "Salvation by Works" repackaged and recycled for today.

The Gospel, however, counterintuitively brings life and freedom because it tells us we are dead in our trespasses, yet we can be saved by grace through faith. It tells us that only the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross can reconcile us to a Holy God. It is actually Good News that our salvation is not dependent upon us being good enough. As Jonathan Edwards put it: “You contribute nothing to your salvation except the sin that made it necessary.” This freedom breaks the shackles of sin and produces good works as the natural fruit of a transformed heart. We need to be born again and be given a new heart—not a new government program or checklist of duties of activist organizations in order to be saved.

## **A Better Way**

As the polls open for the final time tomorrow in Texas and across the nation, the focus of the church should be on loving God and their neighbors, and defending principles, not parties; righteousness, not Republicans; doctrine, not Democrats. The church is called to be the conscience of the state, not the public relations department for a politician.

My hope for James Talarico is that he, along with all of our political candidates and elected officials, will humble himself and put his full trust in Christ. Christ’s teachings are deeply attractive to many, but the best thing about Christ is not how good of a teacher or wordsmith He was, but that He is God, He knows best, and we can take Him at His Word.
### How Marriage Actually Refers to Christ and the Church
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-marriage-actually-refers-to-christ-and-the-church/
Last updated: 2026-07-09T15:39:18.000Z
I was a college freshman when I first heard the idea that marriage is a picture of the Gospel. It felt like a strange concept, but Paul’s words couldn’t be clearer: marriage is a profound mystery that refers to Christ and the church (Eph 5:32).

I was intrigued.

I immediately began studying the biblical view of marriage with a view to answering a question that for me remained unresolved: “*How* exactly does marriage mysteriously ‘refer’ to Christ and the church?”

Most of the resources I consulted returned similar answers. Marriage, they said, “refers” to Christ and the church by way of the specific roles God has designed for spouses to exercise. In view of Christ’s work, husbands exercise self-sacrificial headship. In view of the church’s obedient faith, wives render intelligent, glad-hearted submission (Eph 5:22–27). In other words, sacrificial love and marital submission depict the Gospel, according to this line of argument.

In his [article](https://cbmw.org/2019/07/15/the-mystery-of-christian-marriage/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), “The Mystery of Christian Marriage”, Nathan Hoff represents the view of most evangelicals I’ve come across:

> Christian marriage is intended to serve as a picture that proclaims the relationship between Christ and his church. It was an institution designed to make the unseen seen. If a child were to ask, “Dad, how does Christ love the church?” The father should be able to point to his own marriage and say, “Son, do you see how I love your mother? Christ’s love for the church is like that, but it is so much better.” If a child were to ask, “Mom, how does the church relate to Christ?” The mother should be able to point to her own marriage and say, “Son, do you see how I embrace your father’s leadership? That is the way the church relates to Christ.”

Understood this way, what constitutes marriage as a profound mystery—what makes “the unseen seen”—is properly practiced headship and submission. Thus, the mystery is fundamentally performative and subjective. Marriage has the *potential* to refer to Christ and the church. Spouses are responsible for creating and constantly maintaining that phenomenon.

And yet, while Paul obviously commands headship and submission, it felt odd to say that the “profound mystery” of marriage was no more objective or stable than the faithfulness of spouses to perform their roles.

If spouses fail to practice headship and submission, does their marriage no longer “refer to Christ and the church”? What about terrible Christian marriages or even non-Christian marriages? Are they profound mysteries?

*Whose* marriage refers to Christ and the church?

Answering these questions requires carefully following Paul’s argumentation in Ephesians 5:29–32.

## **God’s Eternal Plan Made Visible**

While spousal roles contoured after Christ’s death and the church’s obedient faith are prescribed in Ephesians 5:22–27, that is not what makes marriage refer to Christ and the church. Rather, Paul describes the typological character of marriage (i.e., the “thing” that makes marriage refer to Christ and the church) in verses 29–32 where he quotes Genesis 2:24:

> “**29**For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, **30** because we are members of his body. **31** ‘**Therefore** a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ **32** This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph 5:29–32).

Keep in mind that “therefore” (vs. 31) means “for this reason”, which is why it’s often translated that way (NIV, NASB, CSB). Thus, Paul’s argumentation in Ephesians 5:29–32 amounts to “Men and women join together in one-flesh conjugal union *for this reason* … we are cherished members of Christ’s body. This is why marriage is a profound mystery: it’s a reference to Christ’s reciprocal union with his church.”

Ray Ortlund observes that “Christ’s union with the church as his body is the reason why a man should become one flesh with his wife. It is the heavenly marriage that warrants and dignifies an earthly marriage. In Paul’s reasoning, human marriage is not the reality for which Christ and the church provide a sermonic illustration, but the reverse. Human marriage is the earthly type pointing towards the spiritual reality.”

Thus, in connecting one-flesh conjugal union with Christ and the church, Paul offers far more than a puzzle box top for how a healthy marriage ought to function. Rather, he goes to the very core of what constitutes marriage as a profound mystery: from the beginning, God designed the reciprocal one-flesh union of husband and wife—an *objective* reality—to dramatize and translate into the visible world his eternal plan to unite image bearers to Jesus.

That’s what makes marriage a profound, objective mystery.

## **We Know What We Have**

If a couple asked you, “Is our marriage a profound mystery that refers to Christ and the church?” how would you respond?

If you believe the mystery of marriage is subjective and constituted by spouses embracing gendered roles, you’ll be forced to respond with something like, “Well, I can’t really know. I’d need to see what your headship and submission dynamic looks like.”

But “profound mystery” and “refers to Christ and the church” aren’t descriptions of what one-flesh conjugal union (Gen 2:24) has the potential to be. They describe what marriage *is*.

With this understanding, you can offer a more concrete answer: “Have you left father and mother and held fast to each other, becoming one flesh? Then ‘Yes.’ Marriage is a profound mystery because it makes visible God’s eternal plan to join Christ to his bride in reciprocal union.”

But what about headship and submission? Does rooting marriage’s typological nature in reciprocal union render them obsolete? Not at all. It simply means they are subjective expressions (i.e., expressed in varying degrees of faithfulness) of the objective mystery they represent. Headship and submission are mystery testifying, not mystery *making.*

Imagine that a serious violinist inherits an authentic Stradivarius made by Antonio Stradivari himself. Does he diligently tune, maintain, and protect the violin because it has the potential to become a Stradivarius? Of course not. It *is* a Stradivarius! He does these things so that when he plays the instrument, it resonates with a beauty that is true to its iconic name. His meticulous care (subjective) for the instrument flows from his keen awareness of its (objective) value. He knows what he has.

In a similar way, spouses don’t practice headship and submission in an effort to *make* their marriage a profound mystery, but *precisely because* they’re convinced that it already is. They know what they have! And their effort to show Gospel-contoured love in their marriage (i.e., headship and submission) flows from an obedient desire for it to resonate with the melody of the Bigger Story it makes visible—the eternal plan of God to unite us to Christ.

## **Conclusion**

It’s undeniable that headship and submission can and have been abused. While we should grieve these distortions of God’s design for marriage, it’s a mistake to think that redesigning marriage is the way forward. Moreover, recognizing the “mystery” of marriage as an objective reality can help to preempt the angst often caused by asking too much of gender roles. Marriage “refers to Christ and the church” because of what it actually *is*, not what it has the potential to be if spouses perform their roles well enough.

Will some marriages offer a more faithful public display of the Christ-church relationship they objectively signify? Of course. But we must guard against the temptation to stress the importance of headship and submission by making them the ontological grounds of marriage’s profound mystery.

In the past, I’ve counseled married couples along the lines of, “Do you want your marriage to refer to Christ and the church? Then you’d better embrace and diligently practice your unique roles.” I’ve realized this is mistaken.

As an objective reality constituted by one-flesh conjugal union, a marriage that refers to Christ and the church isn’t a bar to live up to. It is a reality to live in to.

For this reason, I now help couples put headship and submission in its place by explaining how their marriage *is in fact* a profound mystery that refers to Christ and the church. Then, I help them see how these roles are the celebratory (and mandatory) overflow of that mysterious reality. As couples sense the value of what they have, they’re further compelled to embrace their unique roles with a joy and intentionality that honors the Lord and the gift he’s given them in marriage.
### Artificial Intelligence is a Technology
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/artificial-intelligence-is-a-technology/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:33:09.000Z
A pair of dice rolls across the table. A man glances at a chart and then pulls a measure of music from a pile. He rolls the dice again and selects another measure. Then another. His friend watches and laughs as the piece grows longer and longer. The man sits down at the piano and begins to play. As the randomly arranged segments begin dancing through the air, his friend’s face turns from mirth to furrowed brow. There is something delightfully scandalous about it.

This is the Musikalisches Würfelspiel, an eighteenth-century parlor game traditionally associated with Mozart. The trick was simple: a set of cleverly composed musical measures that would produce pleasant music no matter how they were arranged. The game appeared to reduce the musical craft to a random mechanism. Much of the discussion around artificial intelligence treats the use of the technology as a kind of würfelspiel.

Standard accounts worry users will become nothing more than curators who arrange pre-composed parts, re-rolling prompts until they get an output that vaguely matches the intention and stitching the results together, all without any attention to the slow, careful development of the fundamental skills essential to craft. And the question of how artificial intelligence relates to craft is important not only because the work that we do is constitutive of a functioning society, but because many forms of work are so integrated with thick community relationships and practices that disruption in these spaces can be close to identity-destroying.

While this is an intuitive picture of the technology and its applications, this evaluation is stuck a few years behind the actual practice. Earlier iterations of frontier models were crude: users would enter a prompt, press enter, and be greeted with text, image, or audio, much like rolling a die and “composing” a song. There was limited control of the process or the outputs, and there was a glaring disparity between the amount of effort from the user and the quality of the output. However, modern workflows have become remarkably more complicated over the last few years and can be most clearly seen in two examples: image generation and music production, where workflows are highly granular and involve a great deal of control over the creative process.

One popular local UI framework, [ComfyUI](https://docs.comfy.org/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), allows the user to deploy hundreds of custom nodes to finely tune inputs and outputs at every stage of generation. [Advanced workflows](https://magazine.reallusion.com/2025/12/04/influencer-highlight-ai-concept-to-animated-3d-character/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) using such tools begin to resemble something like a synthesizer board, with different dials and knobs tuning the fundamentals of the image: subject, composition, color, framing, and style. A user might draw a sketch and create a node setup that reworks the line art, adds specific pieces and styles of clothing, and then imagines the character on a turnaround sheet, mimicking a concept photoshoot. (It should be no surprise that these sorts of workflows are already being incorporated into the fashion industry.)

Music production has seen similar shifts. [Large numbers of musical artists and producers](https://aristake.com/ai-tools-musicians-study/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) have integrated Suno, a premier music generation model, or similar artificial intelligence programs [into their workflows](https://www.billboard.com/lists/biggest-ai-music-stories-2025-suno-udio-charts-more/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Inexperienced artists who simply enter a prompt and publish the results find that their work is largely (and rightly) ignored. At [the other end of the skill distribution](https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/suno-launches-its-own-daw-after-introducing-most-powerful-model-yet/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), the most advanced artist workflows are similar in complexity and granularity to image generation and involve significant amounts of human input based on knowledge of music theory and sound production. A sample can be produced by an AI program according to specific parameters, its stems separated out, and the results dropped as separate tracks into professional studio software. This is then handled as a standalone sample, remixed, or otherwise edited and incorporated into a full song with a synthesized drum track and human-composed instrumentals or vocals.

The most telling development across these creative spaces is that most of the concerns with machine learning seem to terminate in discussions around the ethical sourcing of data sets rather than suggestions that the technology is fundamentally outsourcing creative capacities. Disruption here is already turning into creative adoption, which is what we would expect if the technology was another form of acceleration continuous with the industrial revolution rather than something completely different. The fact that these communities can distinguish between a deskilled and skilled use of the technology cuts directly against deskilling worries as totalizing or novel. Practitioners are applying and developing core fundamentals to new technological processes and discussing and exploring successful integrations in ways that begin to look suspiciously like a craft.

\*\*\*

However, even if we grant that modern practitioners are able to exert fine-grained control of the models, this might ultimately be a shallow control given that we still don’t understand how these models work at a fundamental level. It is reasonable to worry that a concern about implicit knowledge in traditional craft can naturally develop into a full-blown rejection of artificial intelligence if we continue to use a tool we could never understand. Auditing a model’s internal processes to improve outcomes is a genuine concern that seemed, at least for a while, to represent an impassable frontier of knowledge.

Yet the mysterious nature of these models will not remain mysterious forever. Researchers have begun opening these black boxes and mapping their internal structures. For example, [current research](https://arxiv.org/html/2601.04480v1?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) has discovered that the internal model of Claude counts character lines using 6D helical manifolds, a geometric approach to variables that mimics place location neurons in mammals. This suggests the internal structures of these models are elegant and orderly rather than illegible. That computer scientists are beginning to reverse engineer the technology in a similar manner to how we have reverse engineered the brain should not be surprising. As Christians we live and work under a cultural mandate that not only presupposes creation is knowable but charges us with the task of knowing it.

If AI is not *sui generis* with respect to its positive practices, neither is it with respect to its dangers. Some of its uses will deserve to be categorized under an umbrella of technologies designed to hook directly into your dopamine systems to maximize profit. Furthermore, even setting aside workflows where AI is doing material work—protein synthesis, diagnostic imaging, drone-directed agriculture—most use cases tend to neatly integrate workflows that exist entirely in the digital space. AI is unlikely to restrain, let alone reverse, the most common digital modes of production.

Yet the greatest danger is both more pervasive and less obvious: AI is much more likely to be deployed as a multiplicative layer that allows ever more efficient micro-targeting of digital services and physical products by industries that already profit from compulsive behavior. The advent of hyper-personalized, real-time engagement strategies will require legislative safeguards, especially if AI leads to video advertisements generated in real time for an exhaustively mapped individual profile.

The question of how this intersects with a Christian anthropology is necessarily complicated. Much of what has been written exists at a theological level with a defensive posture, targeting the fringe ideology of Silicon Valley tech elites in an apologetics framing or treating the use of AI as an unwitting portal to the demonic. Yet if the continuity thesis holds, then we should ground our response in a few important fundamental remembrances.

Technology has existed since the Garden and is an integral component of our cultural mandate. We should also remember that one of the core distinctions between the Creator and his creatures is that we never create matter but merely (!) rearrange it. This becomes clear whether we consider an ancient farmer in Mesopotamia irrigating a plot of soil, a medieval peasant in Northumbria weaving a basket from flax, or a young musician in London taking the raw outputs of machine sound, adjusting its pitch, volume, and length, and incorporating it into a DAW loop. While there are all sorts of important distinctions and qualifications between pre- and post-industrial craft, there is no metaphysical distance between the two.

If the continuity between industrial technological disruption and its digital age permutations holds, then so do the spiritual realities. As Joseph Minich [demonstrated in his book *Bulwarks of Unbelief*](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-experience-of-unbelief), our experience of the post-industrial world is phenomenologically bent toward unbelief. Rather than breaking with this posture, artificial intelligence represents an acceleration of this pressure. This suggests not a novel response, but a deeper one consistent with those practices that have always defined Christian community.

I am thinking here not only of my church’s weekly dinner and hymn sing but an elder who is also an artist who is working on a mural painting for the narthex, a leader practicing his craft in a local community. These sorts of practices create the ground—the posture of learned humility, embodied friendship, and grounding in a historical tradition—needed to cultivate people who can use technology responsibly. Our task is not to develop a unique theology of AI but to catechize our members into a people who can wield this technology without becoming captive to its internal logic. Like alcohol, artificial intelligence will become a test of character, a dangerous good that divides the foolish from the wise.
### Confronting the Unman
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/confronting-the-unman/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:33:10.000Z
One of the persistent themes that C. S. Lewis addresses in his space trilogy is that humanity has a capacity to unmake itself. Indeed, there is some sense in which Lewis sees sin as being the unmaking of the person and the Last Judgment as being a kind of non-reversible unmaking.

If you read something like *The Great Divorce*, part of the brilliance of his imagination is that you actually see how people in Hell become less human the longer they are there—they shrink, they become purely inward facing, and they retreat from anything beyond themselves.

You see something similar in the brilliant depiction of the Last Judgment in *The Last Battle*: Talking beasts who hate Aslan appear before him, see him, and something in their face changes and they lose the ability to speak.

The addition Lewis offers in the space trilogy is that this doesn't *only* happen after our death or at the Last Judgment. A shadow or trace of it can happen in this life as well.

Consider the cast of villains Lewis sketches in the trilogy. Some of them are fairly easy to understand: Fairy Hardcastle, the police chief in *That Hideous Strength*, is a sadist. So she is after sexual pleasure, which is not a bad or disordered desire, but she derives the pleasure from torture and domination, which *is* bad and disordered.

Likewise, Dick Devine, also known as Lord Feverstone in the final book, is vain and driven by a lust for power. This is something any reasonably discerning human will recognize and understand. And we can respond to such a person in relatively straightforward ways. Power, after all, is not bad. But if the person is seeking to acquire power through bad means or is seeking to do bad things with power, we confront them and expose them on precisely those points.

That said, what does one do with Wither and Frost, the two most powerful villains in *That Hideous Strength*?

What does one do with Weston, the "unman" as he is called in *Perelandra*?

Hardcastle and Devine are horrifying, but also relatively straightforward problems. Pray for them. Evangelize them. Keep them very far from power or wealth if possible through just means. And if it comes to the point, use the power of the law to control them.

Weston, Wither, and Frost feel different to me, as if their attachment to their humanness is fraying. The ordinary things humans desire, and often desire in illicit ways, are beginning to lose their grip on them.

I thought about that as I read a must-read piece from Sam Kriss in *Harpers* [profiling some of the rising generation of young business owners in the tech world](https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai-startup-roy-lee/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). There are several excerpts I could cite here, but I'll limit myself to a couple.

First, here is a portion of Kriss's account of his time with Roy Lee, the owner of a company called Cluely. Cluely is AI-powered software that one runs in the background of one's machine during online video calls. The software observes the meeting and gives the user prompts on what they should say or how to respond to specific questions.

Essentially, it tells human users what to do during video conversations with other humans so that the Cluely user can extract what they want from the other person on the call without the bother of making an effort to listen or understand them. It's the reduction of conversation to mechanics and the reduction of the neighbor to a prop.

Here is Kriss's conversation with Lee:

> Starting a company had been Roy’s sole ambition in life from early childhood. “I knew since the moment I gained consciousness that I would go start a company one day,” he told me. In elementary school in Georgia, he made money reselling Pokémon cards. Even then, he knew he was different from the people around him. “I could do things that other people couldn’t do,” he said. “Like whenever you learn a new concept in class, I felt like I was always the first to pick it up, and I would just kind of sit there and wonder, Man, why is everyone taking so long?” The dream of starting his own company was the dream of total control. “I don’t want to be employed. I’m a very bad listener. I find it hard to sit still in classes, and I feel an internal, indescribable fury when someone tells me what to do.” He ended up co-founding Cluely with Neel because he was the first person who said yes.  
>  
> Roy has little patience for any kind of difficulty. He wants to be able to do anything, and to do it easily: “I relish challenges where you have fast iteration cycles and you can see the rewards very quickly.” As a child, he loved reading—Harry Potter, Percy Jackson—until he turned eight. “My mom tried to put me on classical books and I couldn’t understand, like, the bullshit Huckleberry, whatever fuck bullshit, and it made me bored.” He read online fan fiction about people having sex with Pokémon instead. He didn’t see anything valuable in overcoming adversity. Would he, for instance, take a pill that meant he would be in perfect shape forever without having to set foot in the gym? “Yes, of course.” Cheat on everything: he recognized that his ethos would, as he put it, “result in a world of rapid inequality.” Some well-placed cheaters would become massively more productive; a lot of people would become useless. But it would lead us all into a world in which AI could frictionlessly give everyone whatever they wanted at any time. “For a seven-year-old, this means a rainbow-unicorn magic fairy comes to life and it’s hanging out with her. And for someone like you, maybe it’s like your favorite works of literary art come to life and you can hang out with Huckleberry Finn.”

Later, Kriss met with another young tech entrepreneur, Eric Zhu. Zhu made a small fortune during the pandemic and is now using his money to do this:

> Unlike Roy, Eric didn’t think there was anything particularly special about himself. Why did he, unlike any of his classmates, start a $20 million VC fund? “I think I was just bored. Honestly, I was really bored.” Did he think anyone could do what he did? “Yeah, I think anyone genuinely can.” So how come most people don’t? “I got really lucky. I met the right people at the right time.” Anyway, Eric isn’t involved with the underwriting firm or the venture-capital fund anymore. His new company is called Sperm Racing.  
>  
> Last April, Eric held a live sperm-racing event in Los Angeles. Hundreds of frat boys came out to watch a head-to-head match between the effluvia of USC’s and UCLA’s most virile students, moving through a plastic maze. (There was some controversy over the footage: Eric had replaced the actual sperm with more purposeful CGI wrigglers. “If you look at sperm, it’s not entertaining under a microscope. What we do is we track the coordinates, so it is a sperm race—it’s just up-skinned.”) He’s planning on rolling the races out nationwide. Eric delivered a decent spiel about sperm motility as a proxy for health and how sperm racing drew attention to important issues. His venture seemed to be of a piece with a general trend toward obsessive masculine self-optimization à la RFK Jr. and Andrew Huberman. Still, to me it seemed obvious that Eric was doing it simply because he was amazed that he could. “I could build enterprise software or whatever,” he told me, “but what’s the craziest thing I could do? I would rather have an interesting life than a couple hundred million dollars in my bank account. Racing (sperm) is definitely interesting.”

As Kriss notes in the piece, the irony of Roy Lee is that he hates being told what to do (by humans) so he has made an AI-enabled program to tell him what to do. Zhu, meanwhile, seems to lack any moral or aesthetic measure to define what is worthwhile and so he lands on "interesting" as a guide and quickly discovers that the profane can be deeply "interesting" to a certain sort of person.

What this story suggests to me is that it is becoming easier to flay away our humanity. And it worries me deeply when I consider where that process will lead or end.

In an older piece for us, [Stiven Peter argued](https://mereorthodoxy.com/great-dechurching-evangelism) that many younger Americans have grown up without moral guidance, without models to show them the good life, and even without a clear notion of what a good life might look like. The result is a certain directionlessness, a deep sense of being lost. The problem is not simply that they need someone to direct them out of the dark wood of error, as it were, but that they aren't even really aware of being in the dark wood, or even that such a thing as a dark wood (or heaven or hell) even exist.

All they seem to know is a kind of spiritual and existential void that, to admittedly mix metaphors, seems to overlay the world itself and refashion how they see the physical world around them and the people that are in it. Other friends of mine have suggested something similar, as has [Freya India in her extensive writing about young women](https://bookshop.org/p/books/girls-generation-z-and-the-commodification-of-everything-freya-india/a68ab68a97a59eb7?ean=9781250442239&next=t&digital=t&affiliate=3214&ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

If those challenges were already in place prior to ubiquitous AI technology, what happens now? If Zoom and direct messaging on chat apps has already inserted itself between us and our friends, producing deep loneliness and anxiety as an outcome, what happens when we can insert a further layer of mediating technology between us with the sole purpose of helping us to get what we want from others without the bother of knowing them or listening to them?

There is more than one way we could try to name the evangelistic and cultural challenge here. One could, I *think*, argue that what is on display in Kriss's profile is not so much a true unmaking of the human person as a human person, which really *does* only happen at the end of all things. Rather, what is in view is a predictable sort of development in technology that has far greater continuity with the past and, therefore, should be received with care, but not necessarily dismissed as something wholly new and threatening. There are dangers with this technology, as there are with any. Because the form is new, the dangers it poses may also be new and require careful deliberation from us in order to avoid the threats and deploy the tech in acceptable ways. But ultimately the challenge of AI is the same as any other emerging technology. In that case, to suggest that ubiquitous AI use might somehow threaten our humanity is overwrought and alarmist. Ultimately, all that is happening is people are doing what people always do: Seeking the genuine goods that all people desire and some are doing so through illicit or dangerous means.

Take the example of the two entrepreneurs mentioned above: Might one argue that the good that Lee and Zhu desire is something like "agency in one's own life"? If so, Lee himself become recognizable: The reason he doesn't mind Cluely telling him what to do but rages against people telling him what to do is that Cluely at least is something he has made and something which pays him financially through the growth of the business. Zhu, likewise, has amassed enough of a fortune to allow him to do whatever he likes, and what person hasn't sometimes dreamt of the same thing? If you analyze it that way, then my language above about 'unmaking' and 'the unman' is unwarranted and perhaps dangerous.

There is something about that explanation that doesn't land with me, however. Set Lewis aside and consider the broader fear one can find pervading so much 20th and even early 21st century literature: Whether you get there via the usual routes of Orwell or Huxley or you navigate there via Zamyatin, Bradbury, or P. D. James, there is a persistent concern with what ascendant political and technological and cultural forms might do to our sense of ourselves as human creatures. Orwell fears a political regime so powerful that it erodes even a person's own internal sense of agency and self-identity, a fear he shares with Zamyatin. Huxley fears a technical ecosystem so pleasurable, in a deeply simplistic way, that we lose our appetite for more complex expressions of human connection, care, and work. Bradbury echoes this fear, of course, as does a film like *Wall-E*. James is [perhaps the most disturbing of all](https://mereorthodoxy.com/children-of-men-pd-james), as Charlie Clark argued some years ago in these pages. For James the danger is less about political systems or technology, but about how human beings might come to lack affection for life itself, as if they have lost interest in existing.

Is it so strange to read Kriss's account of this rising generation of technologists and hear in his reporting an echo of these fears? I raise the question knowing full well that it can be a cliche to do so and that I am hardly the first to fear the translation of dystopia out of the pages of literature and into our shared reality. The fact that this is cliche and not uncommon amongst a certain class of writer does not make the fear misplaced. Cheat on everything? The person who sincerely believes that to be an unobjectionable path seems to me a person already quite lost in a morass made up in equal measure of the fears of Orwell, Huxley, and James. And what might name might we use for such a process, if not the unmaking of the person, the ascent of the "unman"?

Stanley Hauerwas has said that Christians will have done well if, in a hundred years, we are known as the people who don't kill our unborn or our elders. That is true. But Kriss make me wonder if even that is too rosy an assessment of the situation we are facing: Perhaps Christians will have done well if, in a hundred years, we are known as people who still talk to each other face to face and without the aid of a machine, as people who still try to build worthy and beautiful things with their hands.

Perhaps, assuming we ourselves can manage so much, we will be amongst the few that still do.
### Discipleship Begins in the Home (But the Church Is Essential Too)
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/discipleship-begins-in-the-home-but-the-church-is-essential-too/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:33:11.000Z
Cameron S. Shaffer. [*Keeping Kids Christian: Recovering a Biblical Vision for Lifelong Discipleship*](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781540905055%5Fkeeping-kids-christian?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Baker, 2026\. $21.99 (pb). 192 pp.

A number of years ago, the church where we were members for seven years before moving half-way across the country found itself in the middle of yet another baby boom. It came on the heels of multiple other baby waves in that church, which had effectively maxed out the capacity of nursery and children’s ministry volunteers up to that point. And so, the church instituted for a time a system affectionately known as “the draft.” All able-bodied adults in the church who could pass a background check were added to the rotation of one or more of the following: infant nursery, toddler nursery, children’s church during the sermon, and Sunday School. Exemptions were available by petition only for those whose back troubles or similar health issues could make serving in these capacities impossible. The church’s elders and pastoral staff were subject to the draft along with the rest of the members.

It was, as far as I could see, a highly successful system at the practical organizational level. A lot of volunteers were needed to staff the many areas of service, and the draft was a way to do so without making volunteers serve more than once every couple of months—perfectly doable. But second, this was a concrete way for the church body to fulfill the vow to assist parents with discipling their children—a vow that the congregation as a whole took as part of every baptism. Last but not least, the draft created an even greater sense of intergenerational community within the church body.

I fondly remembered the draft again while reading pastor Cameron S. Shaffer’s new book, [*Keeping Kids Christian: Recovering a Biblical Vision for Lifelong Discipleship*](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781540905055%5Fkeeping-kids-christian?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Sometimes one may read a book and think: this could have just been a short essay. In this case, though, the reverse is true. Shaffer’s [essay for *Mere Orthodoxy*](https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-do-our-kids-stay-christian) became the foundation for this needed book.

Shaffer opens with a problem that we see unfolding in our own churches and communities: “The single greatest religious shift in American history is underway, driven by children of the church walking away from the Christian faith.” When we read about the rise of religious “nones,” many of them are people who grew up in church but left it as adults. And so, Shaffer aims to answer two connected questions stemming from this phenomenon. First, how and why do children who grow up in church choose to leave their faith behind as adults? And second, how can we prevent our children becoming part of that statistic? In other words, how do we raise kids who are equipped to keep their faith in this uncertain and volatile modern world?

Persons are not products to design or machines to program, Jake Meador reminds in his foreword. There are no guarantees and no magic formulas for raising kids who will love God. Still, there are practices that can be helpful to implement—for parents and for the larger body of Christ. First and foremost, there is no substitute for daily praying for our children, over our children, and with our children. But also, for those who like numbers nevertheless, ample up-to-date data exists for church activities for kids that are common but are not, in fact, as helpful as we may believe.

Relying on this data, Shaffer addresses some common misconceptions about discipling kids. Too often, Christian parents look to church to provide children’s discipleship programs—Sunday School and Wednesday night classes, a vibrant youth group, and VBS, to name just a few. Indeed, children’s programming is the key factor many parents consider when choosing a new church. And yet, as research has shown, “Kids become secular not when they go to college or enter the workforce or move out of their parent’s home but when they are children.” All the church programs that we trust for leading our kids to Christ, in other words, sometimes have the opposite effect. Why is that? In part, because some kids come to associate these children’s programs at church with childhood. In the process, they begin to see Christianity itself as the stuff of childhood, which they then outgrow as they leave home. But the larger explanation has to do with the faith of parents.

What happens at home is much more influential on a child’s faith than what happens at church. Faith, as it happens, is caught no less—and probably more—than taught, and parents are key to this process. It is, perhaps, not shocking to find research confirming that highly involved, relationally warm parents who have high standards for their children in all areas of life, including religion, are also the most likely of all to pass the faith to their children. Overly permissive or domineering parents, on the other hand, are less likely to raise children who will become believing adults. Seeing blatant parental hypocrisy is perhaps the most devastating blow for children’s fledgling faith. But parental apathy or a lack of maturity in the faith is likewise destructive.

Looking at both key Scripture passages and the abundant sociological research now available, Shaffer encourages churches to disciple parents, first and foremost, equipping them in turn to disciple their children. For example, as he has observed in his own pastoral experience, many parents simply do not know how to pray, so they do not know how to pray with their children. Furthermore, one problematic result of churches pouring their resources mostly into children’s programming is a myopic view on the part of both churches and parents themselves that this is enough. Relying on programs can make some parents, in other words, back away from doing as much spiritually with their children at home, assuming that they have effectively delegated this task. But church programming for kids can never replace the active spiritual leadership of the parents at home—rather, it must supplement it.

This is not to say that church programming for kids is not important. I see the utter delight that my children regularly receive from the classes and activities at our church. Furthermore, many retired adults in our church have become grandparent figures for my children, regularly inviting them to activities outside the church (e.g., grandparents day at the local fair), making it a point to speak with them each Sunday, writing notes of encouragement to them, remembering their birthdays. Older kids likewise need such support. Shaffer notes the need for church programs to support teens and college-aged believers in their transition to adulthood—a time when so many may drop out of church not for any terrible reason, but simply because they may have moved and couldn’t figure out how to find a new church. I also appreciated his exhortation for adults in the church to offer hospitality to kids and teens—discipleship happens not only within the church building, after all, but also in other interactions.

But even more important than programming specifically for children are the regular corporate practices of the local church as an assembly of God’s people—and chief among these is the reading and preaching of God’s Word in Sunday services. Shaffer is a big fan of keeping kids present for the entire service, rather than dismissing younger kids to children’s church time during the sermon: “kids learn far more doctrine and information from ‘adult’ sermons and services than they are often given credit for.” It is good for the body of Christ to learn together.

Shaffer’s book is encouraging and practical. It is also sobering. Church programs cannot save our children, and most parents presumably know this at some level—even as we may yet hope for the easy fix. I think about this as both a parent and an adult convert without personal experience myself as a child in the church. I pray that my two younger children, who have been in church since just a few days old, will grow up to love God and the church. And I pray for a stronger faith for my adult son. Yet I am also married to a historian of American evangelicalism, who has grown up in a faithful home, attending church anytime the doors were open. He too, nevertheless, found himself struggling with doubts and questions as an adult—before reconstructing his belief more deeply and earnestly in his thirties.

Spiritual questions are complicated, to say the least. Passing the faith could never be an exact science akin to teaching kids long division or basic literacy. Still, God is calling us as parents to disciple first and foremost our own kids, but also to be involved in discipling other children in our churches. And in the process, we will grow ourselves.
### Gen Z and the Search for Status
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/gen-z-and-the-search-for-status/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:33:13.000Z
Influencer Avery Katherine Wood is just nineteen years old. When she and her boyfriend of four years, Carson Cope, ended their relationship, [she took to TikTok](https://www.tiktok.com/@averykatherinewood/video/7594644850415258935?lang=en&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to share the update. She faced the camera, eyes red with tears, and poured out her heart about why they split up. The post has over eight million views and two million likes.

While many have correctly noted that Gen Z is emotionally, physically, and spiritually falling apart due to social media, I want to take a step further and ask: *why are they flocking online?* Russ Greene has captured part of this with his "Total Boomer Luxury Communism"—the shifting of material wealth from younger generations to older generations. As America becomes a retirement community, Gen Z is seeking and finding wealth in other places. In other words, as material wealth becomes less and less attainable, young people are thrusting themselves more and more online in the hopes that they will achieve status. Like the robber barons of the gilded age, the modern social Gen Z elite swallows up digital followers through outrageous behavior and views.

I became more aware of this recently through figures like Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and more obscure influencers like Clavicular—a champion of "self-mutilation" through bonesmashing and a user of crystal meth as a weight-loss product. Clav, as he's known to his friends, [was recently interviewed by Michael Knowles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8qj9RNA938&msockid=cfebdd9c0d0111f1935509a3b91877c0&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and shows one of the more extreme cases of this pursuit of status. Behind their inflammatory rhetoric lies the age-old quest for recognition. This recognition comes through provocation—the online world has opened up the chase for status to whoever can say the most provocative thing or do the most provocative stunt.

I was recently spending time with a Gen Z college student. I asked him how many of his friends listen to Nick Fuentes. He responded, "Quite a few." I asked what he thought Fuentes's appeal was. My friend was frank: "They like him because he says things that go against what people typically hear." According to Gen Z, Fuentes has status because he is the perfect influencer—he's the streaker in the middle of the field who shocks Boomers in the stands while the young people cheer. Fuentes goes against the norm – his status is the anti-status of his statements and claims.

Lest we think this is only about secular figures, we should note this isn't purely a secular phenomenon. The church, especially evangelical churches in America, has been acutely impacted. The rise of megachurches and celebrity pastors is just another symptom of this new status quest. Pastors preach not purely for their own congregations but for a digital audience. Clips of provocative statements are circulated in the hope of getting likes and views. More status.

I recently saw a piece about Brett Cooper, formerly of Daily Wire. Cooper made a name for herself with her traditional views, and youthful demeanor. She pushed against the narrative that young women were progressive – and she embraced it. The piece is called [“What’s Going on with the Tradcons?”](https://brittanyventi.substack.com/p/whats-going-on-with-the-tradcons?r=48zezv&utm%5Fmedium=ios&triedRedirect=true) and it explores Cooper’s recent drama with the infamous looskmaxxer, Clavicular. Apparently in an interview, Clavicular told Cooper some inappropriate things. However, after an event, Cooper (married) waited around for Clav in order to meet him. She smiled at him, shook his hand, and acted like someone meeting a star. We don’t have all the facts, but one thing is for certain, Cooper knows that Clavicular has “status” among young men, and she wants it too.

This of course, isn't a new phenomenon, though it's more pronounced now. Throughout history, humans have been on a quest for status and recognition. Adam and Eve sought to be like God. Israel sought to be like the other nations. Even Jesus's disciples sought position, asking to sit at his left and right hand in the kingdom, and arguing about who among them was "the greatest." So I am not diagnosing something that is new. Nor am I diagnosing something I don’t feel myself, even while writing public pieces and keeping up a growing Substack. There’s a temptation to desire the approval and applause of others over what’s good, beautiful, and true.

Often underlying this hunger for recognition is what the Greek philosophers called *pleonexia*—the insatiable desire to have more than one's fair share. In his *Nicomachean Ethics*, Aristotle finds pleonexia behind all human vices. We desire more followers. Desire more money. Desire to have the next break through article or post. Or to have the next viral post.

Today, that vice manifests itself most visibly in the digital world. Fortune explored Gen Z status in a 2024 piece titled "Gen Z's most notable status symbols, and the motivations behind them." What stood out to me was the subhead: "If it's not on TikTok it didn't happen." Status is a hunt for attention. And this hunt for attention, according to new research from [The Argument](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/the-loneliness-crisis-isnt-just-male?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), is making Gen Z lonelier than all other generations, especially women.

For a moment let’s look at status in American society and how the unafforability of life is driving young people more and more online. And how online life, coupled with social movements, are making young people unhappy and lonely, despite how much influencers like Cooper and Clavicular smile on camera.

At the turn of the twentieth century, material wealth was the primary status symbol. Thorstein Veblen's *The Theory of the Leisure Class*, published in 1899, notes that "The possession of wealth confers honor; it is an invidious distinction." In the postwar era, status meant owning a house, holding a stable job, saving for retirement, owning a car—preferably a Ford—and taking a yearly vacation. The leisure class was in full force. Young men who were born during the Great Depression, then went to the beaches of Normandy and the sands of the South Pacific, came back ready to make a name for themselves. They infiltrated the corporate and blue-collar world.

Then came the 1960s and with it the rise of social capital. Social upheaval and anti-capitalist rhetoric cast suspicion on the accumulation of material wealth. Underlying this shift was a massive intellectual movement pushing against the "capitalist empire." Herbert Marcuse, in his 1964 book *One-Dimensional Man*, captured this sentiment when he wrote that "people recognize themselves in their commodities." Yet even as this intellectual animosity grew, monetary wealth kept right on growing as well, setting up a collision course.

An easy example of the growing wealth is the television. As it became more affordable, more Americans purchased them. Status that once was only for the upper class became something the middle class could achieve as well. Material wealth grew across society. Yet with the TV came commercials flooding into living rooms, advertising the latest trends and transforming latent satisfaction into a manifesting desire to acquire. Viewers were no longer satisfied with merely having a TV, but with what the TV conveyed would bring them happiness.

Simultaneously, the '60s saw a shift to social status. Television brought more commercials into the home, but it also brought raw footage of the Vietnam War, presidential debates, and global politics as well. The world was on fire, and many felt it. Young people sought to upend the world order. Vietnam was just the start. With these social movements came a “status.” Protests, whether the cause was just or not, were places of affinity. As time passed, these social markers grew in popularity, especially as monetary success grew harder and harder to get.

It is a bit ironic that the 2008 market crash happened the year after the iPhone was released. With the crash, as many of us remember well, came uncertainty. Housing prices were once a staple of security. But in an instance, they evaporated. The iPhone became a status symbol. Young people could connect with one another, and with culture, at the touch of their finger. And as social media grew, so did the drive of millennials to find connection and fame online.

Fast forward to today, and identity has become the primary currency of social capital. Even entertainment reflects this: *Stranger Things*, a Gen Z favorite, integrated a coming-out storyline into its narrative arc that felt forced to many viewers. But if one understands how social capital became tied to identity politics, it's not hard to see why creators would find such storylines appealing—and necessary for status.

These trends have forced younger Americans to find new forms of status, forms less dependent upon material wealth and thus more accessible to the average person. Today, inflation is up roughly 1,250 percent from 1950\. But beyond inflation's burden, the digital age has continued to transform how we understand status in ways begun decades ago. In his 2022 book *Status and Culture*, David Marx notes that "social media enables us to quantify our status like never before" through likes, retweets, comments, and followers. As monetary status grew steadily more unattainable, young people turned to a new space—one profoundly untouched by the conquering older generations.

Gen Z and Millennials feel this generational whiplash acutely. But they have adapted. Instead of sitting dormant, they've adjusted to this new age with new accolades of status. Instagram has become one of the primary conduits. The age of the influencer has become the norm. Carefully curated photos project an image of togetherness, success, polish—meanwhile, young people can't purchase homes or secure the careers Boomers took for granted. So they grasp for the status that is attainable: social media influence.

So, what does this mean for orthodox Christians around the world? In Luke 22, Jesus rebukes his disciples who are disputing amongst themselves about who would be regarded as the greatest. Jesus tells them that while the kings of the Gentiles lord over their people, the greatest according to God's kingdom—now a present reality—are those who serve and become as the youngest.

The church, when faced with the Roman Empire, stood firm. Now faced with the digital empire, the church must stand firm again. We must call younger generations to seek status—not earthly status that can fade or offer fleeting pleasure, but to pursue the eternal status as children of God. To cultivate virtue by the help of the Spirit.

The world's nouveau riche will be here one minute and gone the next. The nouveau riche of the kingdom of God will be eternal. This is the message Gen Z needs most right now.
### Marriage, Family, and the Intellectual Life: Interview with John and Katelyn Shelton
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/marriage-family-and-the-intellectual-life-interview-with-john-and-katelyn-shelton/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:33:17.000Z
The intellectual life is in some ways necessarily lonely--in his book on *The Intellectual Life: Its Spirits, Conditions, Methods*, the French Dominican Friar Antonin Sertillanges insists that the intellectual life requires solitude. He is not wrong. Researchers in history, for instance, spend hours, days, years alone in mysterious musty basements, poring over documents that unveil their mystery to only the most persistent elect. And then the practice of writing takes additional hours (and days and years) of discipline and solitude before the essays or books are ready to go out into the world. But not all Christians who live the intellectual life are professional scholars, first and foremost. And unlike Sertillanges himself, many are married and have children. Some[ might be lawyers](https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-to-have-a-day-job-and-an-intellectual-life) or pastors, or [stay-at-home moms](https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/parenting/the-stay-at-home-intellectual-mom?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), or [homeschooling mothers](https://thedispatch.com/article/motherhood-intellect-friedan-gender-children/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), or simply[ overwhelmed mothers](https://comment.org/motherhood-and-the-intellectual-life/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of small children. These factors definitely take a toll on the possibility for solitude.

In other words, for most people, there are also the practical considerations of the intellectual life and intellectual work, whether done on the margins of one's day or full-time. Writers and other intellectuals are people too--they too must eat, do laundry, keep children alive, perhaps even vacuum on occasion. We all are bodies, as well as minds and souls. *So how does this work, in particular, for households that include not just one intellectual but two?* That is the basic question underlying this interview series. All couples interviewed in this series so far are parents. How does this all come together? We can assume that both challenges and blessings emerge as a result. What are they? And how does this look at different stages of life? (This is the second interview in the series. The first was with [Regent University assistant professor of history, Charles Carman, and *Mere Orthodoxy* editorial board member Tessa Carman](https://mereorthodoxy.com/marriage-family-and-the-intellectual-life-charles-and-tessa-carman).)

\*\*\*

**Nadya Williams:** I'd like to start by asking each of you to tell us a little bit about your intellectual journey: when did you first consciously realize that you are called to live an intellectual life? What did you envision this looking like? How has it turned out so far?

**Katelyn Shelton:**Somehow it took me until graduate school to realize I was called to an intellectual life. I had always loved reading and doing schoolwork, but it took sitting in a graduate school classroom at Yale Divinity School for me to realize that perhaps the primary means by which I worship God is intellectual. This was a surprise to me at the time, given that much of my upbringing in the church emphasized emotional ways of relating to God, through music and perhaps a well-timed smoke machine. I didn’t know what an “intellectual life” would look like, necessarily. I just knew that if I was going to worship God forever, which I intend to do, reading and writing would probably play a big part in it. That’s continued to hold true in the near-decade since graduating, even as I’ve become a mom and transitioned into a more stay-at-home role.

**John Shelton:**I fell into the intellectual life entirely by accident. After four years of coasting along in high school, I retained that same “Cs Get Degrees” ethos throughout most of college. And yet, by God’s providence, I had a roommate named Sam who was a stellar undergraduate and had received a research grant to work with one of the doctoral students on a project examining how churches across the country engaged in (or avoided) politics. Despite my indolence, I found myself pulled by that friendship into conversations about theology and ethics with a rotating cast of aspiring PhDs who were friends with Sam and then eventually friends with me as well.

Inspired and excited by those discussions, I eventually got my grades in order and set myself up to follow in the footsteps of those doctoral students, first with an M.Div at Duke (where those I deemed to have a good balance of sane and smart had attended) and then, I had hoped, at one of the nation’s leading religion or theology departments, with the expectation that I would eventually teach. After failing to get into any of the five religion and politics programs I applied to at the end of my time at Duke, I realized that I had to pivot. I decided to enter directly into the world of public policy while continuing my theological education on the side (congressional staff have special access to the greatest public research library of all time: the Library of Congress).

My career hasn’t looked almost anything like I thought it might as a bright-eyed undergraduate, but I couldn’t be more grateful for the theological education that I received, and the practical experience in the battlefields of politics that my job has vaulted me into. Sometimes, in order to understand a thing, you have to dive in head-first.

**NW:** What kind of intellectual work does each of you do now, and what role does it play in your day-to-day life?

**Katelyn Shelton:**I have the privilege of being a Visiting Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), a think tank in Washington, D.C. committed to applying the tenets of the Judeo-Christian tradition to contemporary questions about law, politics, and culture. Practically, this means I write on an array of issues and policies, but primarily on bioethics at the beginning of life. Last June, I won a Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship to conduct a yearlong project on emerging reproductive biotechnologies and what it means to be human.

While my days are primarily spent at home with my four children, we have school or play arrangements for ten to fifteen hours a week in which I do all my writing, usually from a coffeeshop or Chick-fil-a. I call this time my “mental vacation,” where I get to take a short break each week from the very physical labor of being a mom to four children five and under and exercise and apply my intellectual muscles. I’m grateful to live in the 21st century, where the internet makes this kind of dual intellectual-mother life possible to me.

**John Shelton** *:* After a half-decade honing my policy chops in Congress, I moved over to a fledgling advocacy organization started by former Vice President Mike Pence, Advancing American Freedom. My work there is typically grounded in the day-to-day activities of the federal government, whether in the legislation being debated in the chambers and committee rooms of Congress or the rulemaking and executive orders issued from the presidential administration. But, more often than not, the years spent studying theology at Duke prove surprisingly relevant—whether that’s applying just war criteria to modern events or, just this week, having to freshen up on Vatican II’s discussions of God’s enduring covenant with Israel amid another blow-up on the political right over antisemitism.

**NW:** What role has your intellectual life played in your marriage and family life? Do you find that it affects your interactions with each other and with your children? If so, in what ways?

**Katelyn Shelton** *:* I think the intellectual life is particularly well-suited to motherhood, perhaps especially when children are young. The transition to becoming a mom can be lonely, especially if you don’t yet have friends with children, or if you have two at once in the middle of a pandemic, like we did. I sometimes hear other new moms say they feel like their own preferences or hobbies or gifts are completely lost to care for their newborn. And while there certainly is an adjustment period, I’m grateful that reading and writing and thinking interesting thoughts are all quite compatible with being at home with a baby (or babies).

While I have not had tons of relaxing reading time lying on my couch, as I’d prefer, I have had lots of time to *listen* to books while doing chores or driving. I find that working with my hands while I listen keeps my mind engaged, such that when I do have time to sit down and write, many of my ideas are already percolating to the fore. Being a mom and having limited time also makes me quite focused. I know I only have a few hours’ chunk of time to get an article written, so I don’t have time to dilly-dally.

And now, my kids ask to listen to books too! In December, my boys listened through Dickens’ *A Christmas Carol* on audio on the way to and from school. On a family road trip to Tennessee, we listened to Lewis’ *The Magician’s Nephew*. John also does an excellent job of reading to the big kids every night while I feed and rock the baby to sleep. He’s read *Little Pilgrim’s Progress*, *The Wingfeather Saga*, and plenty of lower-brow content like Avatar or Minecraft or Marvel, usually in the form of graphic novels. And I have so many beloved children’s books I can’t wait to share with them. I love getting to share an intellectual life with my family.

**John Shelton:**While I might not be teaching in the formal institutional capacity that I thought I might back when I was an undergraduate, the intellectual life has attuned me to the education of my own family. Most nights, whether they like it or not, our brood of four young children are subjected to some level of Socratic dialogue, often beginning in some kind of mundane questioning about the food we are eating and what had to happen in order for it to end up on our plates, then moving on to questions about death and life and existence. My children will either end up something like the Unabomber or Thomas Aquinas (hopefully the latter).

In all seriousness, the book that helped me make the most sense of how family life squares with the contemplative life has been Ronald Rolheiser’s [*Domestic Monastery: Creating Spiritual Life at Home*](https://paracletepress.com/products/domestic-monastery-1?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Lacking (as most of us do) the forms provided by the monasteries, one of the next best institutions we have to mold our souls and spiritual lives is the family and the rhythms that it imposes upon us.

**NW:** What are some challenges you have found to your intellectual pursuits so far? How did you resolve these, or are you still living through them? What expectations did you have for your intellectual life before you were married, and how do you think these have adjusted over time and with circumstances?

**Katelyn Shelton:**It feels really important to me to be home with the children while they’re young—it’s something my mom did, and I have always loved that she prioritized us in that way. I do feel like I could use more time. I have far more ideas than I’m able to put down on paper. I’ve maxxed out at least one note in my phone’s “notes” app with essay ideas, most of which I’ll probably never get to. I long to be back in an office, bouncing ideas off of smart people and hosting lectures or events. Maybe one day I’ll get to reenter work more formally, but for now I’m trying to focus instead on enjoying this precious time with my littles and being grateful for whatever I am able to write during my allotted time. “For everything, there is a season,” after all.

I am also grateful to have married an intellectual husband. What attracted me to John from the very start was his brilliance, and the way we connected on theological issues, in particular. I often say that John taught me how to write. While I was in graduate school, he read every paper and gave intense feedback, helping me learn how to structure and source long essays. It’s still fairly rare for me to send something to a publisher without John reading it first, but it’s happening more frequently now, as our lives get busier and our writing opportunities more numerous.

**John Shelton:** I think that I will always struggle with the idea that there is not enough time in the day to pursue the intellectual life. I take Paul’s caution in 1 Corinthians 7 seriously here: “An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs–how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world–how he can please his wife–and his interests are divided.” When I was younger, I thought that I might remain celibate so that I could devote myself to these things. “Purity of heart,” after all, “is to will one thing.” But books like Rolheiser’s have helped me to understand how even my divided interests can lead me back to the Lord’s affairs and the contemplative life. Studying the Cappadocian Fathers in Divinity School also helped: Theology is always both meditative and ascetic. As a parent, even sleepless nights with a newborn can be the site of spiritual growth, where, with the right posture, we learn to understand our dependence on grace anew.

Having a spouse to talk through these things with, who has a similar educational background as me, is not a necessity to a good, fulfilling marriage, but it is certainly an unexpected, unlooked for gift in ours. I love getting to read what Katelyn is writing—and oftentimes will take inspiration from her projects. I didn’t really have any expectations about how these things would work in our own marriage beforehand, as I didn’t know anyone with a similar situation except perhaps through the Internet.

**NW:** I'd love to hear your pie-in-the-sky dream: What do you each dream about in your intellectual lives in the future? How do these dreams work together?

**Katelyn Shelton** *:* I’d love to write a book at some point in my life. While it will probably take the form of a bioethics-related nonfiction tome, I also dream of writing a science fiction novel someday, if I can figure out how to do the creative writing bit (not a given!). My love for reading began with an all-you-can-read buffet of incredible fiction, and I’ve always had the urge to contribute to the genre.

I also dream about starting a hyper-local classical Christian school for our wonderful neighborhood outside of D.C., to help foster the intellectual life amongst our children. Alasdair MacIntyre, the late virtue ethicist and perhaps my favorite philosopher, says, “Deprive children of stories, and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions, as in their words.” The question, then, becomes, as MacIntyre says, “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?” I so deeply desire for my children to be a part of the story of the great Judeo-Christian tradition, which built this truly awesome country and will hopefully continue to shape and reawaken it.

**John Shelton:** I think that one of the most rewarding things that we have been able to do as a couple has been teaching aspiring members what we believe as a church. I would love to do more of that.

I have long had the fortune of a good and interesting job that allows me to pursue some of my theological interests, even if I am often cramming them in as I can here and there. While my preferred model of the intellectual life has always been that of the participant-observer (think of an Edmund Burke, who reflects on the politics that he lives and breathes as a Member of Parliament), at a later point in my career, I think it would be fantastic to move out of more active engagement in the political skirmishes that come and go with each passing day and back into higher-order reflection on what politics is and should be.

With less than seven years of marriage under my belt, I don’t pretend to be an expert on the subject, but it seems that a lot of the time, marital success involves figuring out how your professional livelihood (or withdrawal from it) can best serve your spouse’s dreams. Right now it seems like there is some good balance there for us.

Also, for the record: I would really like Katelyn to write a book as well, and I’m determined to figure out how she makes it happen.
### The Bright Sadness of Ben Sasse
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-bright-sadness-of-ben-sasse/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:33:20.000Z
*The early daylight was only just creeping down into the shadows under the trees, but he saw his master's face very clearly, and his hands, too, lying at rest on the ground beside him. He was reminded suddenly of Frodo as he had lain, asleep in the house of Elrond, after his deadly wound. Then as he had kept watch Sam had noticed that at times a light seemed to be shining faintly within; but now the light was even clearer and stronger. Frodo's face was peaceful, the marks of fear and care had left it; but it looked old, old and beautiful, as if the chiselling of the shaping years was now revealed in many fine lines that had before been hidden, though the identity of the face was not changed. Not that Sam Gamgee put it that way to himself. He shook his head, as if finding words useless, and murmured: 'I love him. He's like that, and sometimes it shines through, somehow. But I love him, whether or no.'*

*\~* J. R. R. Tolkien, *The Two Towers*

When we lost Tim Keller nearly three years ago to pancreatic cancer [I likened him to Aragorn](https://mereorthodoxy.com/tim-keller-obituary). What I meant by that was not simply that Tim was a leader, although he was. I meant to say something about the sort of man he was; his authority was not derived from an office or a title, but from the man's character and wisdom.

Part of the reason I wrote that is because I had watched Tim die. We only met face to face on two occasions—the first after his retirement from Redeemer but prior to his cancer diagnosis and the second during the pandemic less than a year before his death. On the second occasion, what so struck me about him was that he seemed almost bored with his own diagnosis. He didn't want to talk about cancer, though he was reluctantly willing to offer an update if asked. (If asked too often, he might also politely ask you to stop asking or would simply ignore the question.)

Mostly he wanted to know how I was and talk about what we were both reading. Our last in-person visit consisted of walking laps around Roosevelt Island as Tim told me about this new book he had just finished and that I had to read called [*A World After Liberalism*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-world-after-liberalism-five-thinkers-who-inspired-the-radical-right-matthew-rose/d554800ce10cf79f?ean=9780300268133&next=t&&ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

Tim was in his early 70s, retired, and dying of cancer and he was staying more up to date on the discourses of the day than I was—a magazine editor in my early 30s whose job was to be up to date on such things. From his reading we turned to other things—the recent work of several journalists we both read and who Tim, of course, had befriended and was praying for. And eventually we came to family and marriage and prayer and children. I think the people he thought about most during those years were his wife Kathy and their sons.

In other words, even in his dying Tim's eyes were turned not inward on himself, but outward onto the world, onto his nation, onto the church, and onto his friends and his family. There was a light that seemed to be with him, in the way Tolkien describes Frodo in the scene quoted above.

To borrow a phrase I heard Leah Sargeant use recently, Tim made a gift of his dying.

When you put it that way, there's something that should stop you in your tracks if you know your Bible: For when Jesus was dying, what was on his mind most? It was the world he was dying to save; it was the cruel men who had just been beating and mocking him, who he then forgave; it was his mother, Mary. If there was something bright and saintly that I saw in Tim in that final meeting, Tim would be quick to correct me and say that what I was seeing was the work of Christ in him. Because of Jesus, Tim went to his death in the same way Jesus did, concerned over the world and wishing to provide final expressions of love, care, and concern for the people he loved. If Tim made a gift of his dying, it was because Jesus did it first. 

I thought of that yesterday as I watched two separate interviews with my former Senator Ben Sasse. The first was with the Hoover Institute and mostly covered issues of politics, public life, higher ed, and the other lines of work Sasse has given much of his life to. The other was with Sola Media and, particularly, with Sasse's longtime friends Michael Horton and Dan Bryant. There are two moments in particular worth highlighting for readers, both of which have to do with the way mortality focuses one's attention:

First, there is this passage in his conversation with Peter Robinson, starting around the 44:40 mark:

In particular I want to consider these words from Sasse:

> But for the period before I started on the morphine, I was having a rough go of it. The desperation of that pain, the regrets I've had to wrestle through in the time of realizing that I wish I had served my wife and kids better, I wish there were things in their character that were farther along and the stuff that's, you can see that, "Man, that's clunky behavior. You look a lot like your dad."  
>  
> When you feel those regrets or when you are just bored.... at sleeping 15 or 16 hours a day right now 'cause of all the drugs that I'm on, there's just a lot of time in a hospital bed or convalescing when you get outta the hospital every week. I'm in and outta the hospital every week. I'm just bored outta my mind, which is a question about recognizing the futility of my efforts. Like there was a time when I wasn't as bored 'cause I could delude myself into believing my projects were gonna build a storehouse that lasted. That self-importance, the regrets about love and service and the pain, all those lead you to pray in a different way because you have to acknowledge your finitude. Thhere's just a hell of a lot less room for bullshit. ...  
>  
> It seems like the first thing humans should do is acknowledge that a lot is broken in this world. The existence of death is surely not the way it's supposed to be. So Jesus weeping, what a gift. The story is amazing. The whole, the whole Lazarus story and his sister's weirdly narcissistic behavior, that's us, right? Like we're dying in the story too. We're many of the characters, but we're definitely that egotistical, self-absorbed, "Jesus, why didn't you do it the way I want you to do it?"  
>  
> But to our point about short attention spans, first, let's just go back and read that story and a dozen adjacent stories. The Bible is so rich and we spend so little time reading it together. Jesus weeps there, and he knows that he's gonna raise Lazarus five minutes later. So it's an amazing story because he's acknowledging that death is terrible, and yet death doesn't win. The Christian phrase in Christian literature for years has been to call death "the last enemy."  
>  
> Death is a wicked thief, it's an enemy, but it's pretty great that it's the last enemy. All the stuff that I regret for having been an inadequate husband and son and father and friend and worker, truth teller, all the stuff that I've been weak on, I'm gonna be freed from all of that. Death is the last enemy.

Now from his conversation with Horton and Bryant:

This begins around the 21:30 mark:

> I think acknowledging mortality is just fundamental wisdom. You can you can go through a lot of wisdom literature. Ecclesiastes and Job are right there telling us that these bodies are decaying. It is not supposed to be this way and we will have glorified bodies but telling the truth about death is really important.   
>  
> I don't want to go to my hobby horse about our culture being too always online because in a weird way it's not really about the digital revolution. It's just an intensification via the digital revolution of generational segregation. But we're we're unbelievably blessed to live at a time in human history with some of the most interesting technology ever. But we're also just incredibly stupid people in that most kids are not raised around great-grandparents and they don't see death and they don't have to change diapers.  
>  
> The course of life is dependency and then a period of independence and then back to dependency. If you delude yourself and think at 23 years old that the glories of your skin and your biceps are going to last, it's a real shame for you that you don't have the opportunity to be around 90 year-olds, maybe 70 year-olds who can explain it, but 90 year-olds who can model a little bit of dignity as they decline. And the stiffer stuff in my mind is not hallmark sentimentality, but honesty about the fact that I'm needy.

And that final remark, I think, takes me back to Tim and back to the Gospel: One of the truest things we can say about our life in this world is that it will end and that it will involve periods of intense neediness and dependence. One application of that truth is that our politics should account for this more than they do right now. But a second and far greater application is that we are needy and we are needy in ways that the world cannot satisfy; only Christ can.

It seems fitting that these two interviews were published on Ash Wednesday, a day when Christians remember the words of Scripture that remind us that we come from dust and we will one day return to dust. But the truth of the Gospel is that God breathed life into that dust once, he will do it again one day, and through union with Christ we can be united with God in that new life, living in the blessed realm on the far side of the defeat of the last enemy. That is the hope we look toward at Easter. That is the hope Tim looked toward. It is the hope Senator Sasse looks toward. That is why his grief is a bright sadness, why he too has made a gift of his dying. That is why his face is peaceful, why "a light seemed to be shining faintly within."
### The Prophetic Practice of Joy
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-prophetic-practice-of-joy/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:33:22.000Z
The following excerpt is adapted from [Feasting on Hope](https://www.amazon.com/Feasting-Hope-Sets-Table-Wilderness/dp/151401114X/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?crid=6PQQYYCKEDKP&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.GqBb%5FD8wWyDJ2Ndu2woOxdlQ6t30k7zqbN%5FHaxQmBRsVOo66RfHXQDbHEWV32LJ7oyTwe8TrHicRd0OPqSe8oA.n8ZLhvkvqfxvsB72935jjQ6giypeiu0dxtCOfbl%5FgM0&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=feasting+on+hope&qid=1760649212&sprefix=feasting+on+hope%2Caps%2C126&sr=8-1&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) *by Hannah Miller King. ©2026 Hannah Miller King. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press.* [*www.ivpress.com*](http://www.ivpress.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*.* 

\*\*\*

In the early church, the Lord’s Supper was a fairly serious affair. Persecution hung in the air as both a threat and a memory. Christians gathered for worship sometimes with fresh grief after the imprisonment or martyrdom of a friend. Perhaps in part for this reason, the earliest eucharistic liturgies all begin with an invitation called the *Sursum Corda*, which the officiant would extend to the congregation: “Lift up your hearts,” or more literally, “Hearts up!” The congregation would then respond, “We lift them up to the Lord.” Ancient Christians believed this sacred meal transported them, mysteriously, to a heavenly realm that remained out of death’s reach—a realm that one day would be fully present on earth.

This belief even led them to celebrate the Lord’s Supper on the graves of martyrs, partaking of the feast that they’d one day share again with their departed loved ones. It wasn’t a denial of their grief, but a commitment to look beyond it. It was a subversive joy that both enraged their persecutors and contributed to the church’s rapid growth in the first three centuries.

Coming to the Table doesn’t diminish the heaviness in our lives. But it does lift us beyond it, to taste for a moment the joy and lightness for which we are headed. This joy then strengthens us to face whatever grim realities we must endure in the meantime.

In his first miracle, Jesus modeled something very similar. By providing wine at a wedding feast, he began his own ministry with the end in mind. Before turning his face toward Jerusalem to stare down the challenge of the cross, Jesus sponsored a party. In his sermon “Lord of the Wine,” Tim Keller said, “By turning water to wine Jesus reveals the whole purpose of his ministry. It’s as if Jesus is telling us, ‘Yes, I’ve come to do self-denial and to suffer and to be humbled, and you will too if you follow me; but those things are means to an end. The end is the *feast*.’”

In the long struggle of faith, it is easy to forget that God is not a taskmaster—he is a banquet-master. Keeping the feast at the center of our worship helps us to remember. When we come to the Lord’s Table, we practice “lifting our hearts” again and again, until the ritual of joy gives way to its reality. It’s our dress rehearsal for eternity, and eternity begins now.

A few years ago, I had the privilege of giving my friend’s five-year-old daughter her first Communion. We met the week beforehand to talk through the meaning of our special meal at church. She wiggled in the wrought iron patio chair outside Starbucks as she told me how the bread reminds us of Jesus’ body and how she wants to follow him. The following Sunday, I invited her and her family to the front of the church to receive Communion ahead of the rest of the congregation. She pranced forward, resplendent in a light pink ball gown and glittering ballet flats. I wondered if she might be nervous in front of so many adults; but she beamed at me as I put the small wafer in her hand. She showed us all what it looks like to begin with the end in mind.

As I study the shameless joy of children, I sometimes envy them. I assume that stoicism is an inevitable aspect of maturity; that what I must have known intuitively as a kid is lost forever, and rightly so. We grow up and realize that the world is not a playground. People aren’t always nice, and the good guys don’t always win. Relationships can be irreparably broken. Poverty and racism persist. With adult eyes we think we see the unvarnished truth.

But there’s a reason Jesus told his disciples that if they want to enter the Kingdom, they need to become like children. Because God’s new world operates differently than ours does. It requires us to unlearn what we think we know, so that we can apprehend what is now true in light of Jesus: The dead are raised. The lame walk. The blind see. Wars cease, captives go free. My kids have no trouble believing this stuff. Every night at bedtime, my six-year-old prays that he’ll be able to fly tomorrow. Though I always add to his prayer a special request for protection from false starts, there is something of resurrection in his quest. He understands that with God, nothing is impossible. And though his prayer remains unanswered, he seems undeterred in his hope that one day, he might fly.

In his fictitious *Letters to Malcolm*, C. S. Lewis suggests that activities we might consider childish or frivolous are actually the best analogy we have for understanding the character of heaven: “While we are in this ‘valley of tears’ . . . certain qualities that must belong to the celestial condition have no chance to get through, can project no image of themselves, except in activities which, for us here and now, are frivolous.”

He admits his own difficulty with this, as one who “never enjoyed any game and can dance no better than a centipede with wooden legs.” Nonetheless, he argues that we tend to assess things according to the wrong values in our “upside down” world. He says “that which, if it could be prolonged here, would be a truancy, is likest that which in a better country is the End of ends. Joy is the serious business of heaven.”

I respect Lewis’s honesty. And I would have liked to see him dance. If he’s right about joyful play as the “End of ends,” I imagine I will see him dance one day. In the meantime, his words challenge me to welcome celebration with as much reverence as I might practice lament.

I’ve watched a handful of women grieve a death in their family while caring for young children. On the one hand, they had to fight for space to feel sad, to rage, to get quiet with their thoughts. On the other hand, they also had to continue playing hide-and-seek, cooking dinner, and taking the dog for a walk. To sit with death while stewarding life is to live in two worlds. It can feel like being torn apart, or like being asked to lie half the time. But if we give ourselves to the tension—if we apprentice joy even as we grieve—we might become *more* whole as a result, not less. When we embrace what might feel frivolous or false in the moment, we stay tethered to a truth that will outlast the moment. For grieving moms, this is an opportunity born of necessity. For the rest of us, it’s a discipline.

The church calendar helps with this. Since at least the fourth century, Christians have organized their worship around the story of salvation by retelling it in church throughout the course of the year. Staying alive to the whole narrative requires that we commit to seasons of both fasting and feasting. However, the year’s longest season of fasting is punctuated by an even longer feast. Lent’s forty days of penitence gives way to fifty days of Easter to remind us—whether we feel like it or not, we are people of the party. Our faith is ultimately ordered toward celebration. The feast trumps the fast.

And in case we forget this truth in the long dark of Lent, every Sunday leading up to Easter is a feast day, a whisper of the resurrection that waits just around the corner. (A friend of mine went through at least two rounds of Lent before being notified of this. She felt robbed, in retrospect, of all the chocolate she could have eaten on those Sundays.)

Authentic Christianity forbids us from diminishing sin’s gravity or its effects. We are compelled to grieve and cry out for rescue. But even more so, we have reason to rejoice because that rescue has come. Right now, our rejoicing might feel a little bit like play therapy. We go through the motions, acting out what we’ve heard about the good news even when it seems disingenuous. We are training for the serious business of heaven.[](https://www.hannahmillerking.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)
### The Goodness of Caring for Other People's Children
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-goodness-of-caring-for-other-peoples-children/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:33:23.000Z
John McPhee’s classic, *Levels of the Game*, is a short book about a 1968 tennis match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner. It expands from the narrative of the match into the stories of the men’s lives and their contrasting, excellent styles of tennis. Early on, McPhee notes that “it must have cost at least two hundred thousand dollars to produce this scene—to develop the two young men and to give them the equipment, the travel, and the experience necessary for a rise to this level.” Developing players of such tremendous ability costs more than most families can afford. McPhee writes: “The expense has been shared by parents, sponsors, tournament committees, the Davis Cup Team, and the United States Lawn Tennis Association, and by resort hotels, sporting-goods companies, Coca-Cola, and other interested commercial supporters.” An excellent tennis player, or a person who excels in anything, is almost always the product of support and influence from their family *and* from beyond it.

Arthur Ashe almost certainly would not have become a professional star if not for a medical doctor, Robert Walter Johnson. Dr. Johnson was so committed to elevating African Americans in tennis that he held tournaments on his personal court and then created an entire development program for emerging tennis talent. He had “young players live in his house in the summer, so they could practice as a squad and travel to tournaments together.” They practiced tennis, ate healthy, did chores, learned etiquette, and observed strict rules. Ashe’s father worked extra jobs and spent a lot of money on his son’s career, but he had help; “Dr. Johnson put thousands of dollars of his own specifically into Arthur’s career.” Johnson played a significant role in helping young African Americans break through in tennis, he even helped launch the career of Althea Gibson.

If we start listening, such stories are everywhere. Tennis star Nikola Djokovic refers to his “tennis mother” and “tennis father.” His actual parents had no background in tennis, very little money, and international politics made it hard for him to travel to tournaments, but two tennis professionals developed him. Djokovic [says](https://www.reuters.com/sports/tennis/shaped-by-hardship-djokovic-grateful-tennis-mother-tennis-father-2023-06-11/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of Jelena Genčić, “She was a true mentor. And she worked closely with my parents, who gave her space and permission to spend a lot of time with me, also when we were not training on the court. I used to go to her home, and we did many different things that were shaping my mind as a human being, but also as a professional, as a young player who dreams of becoming a professional.” Djokovic did not have an unhappy home or uncaring parents, but his progress as an athlete still reflects the love and attention he received from other interested adults.

These stories are not unique to tennis. The writer James Baldwin was encouraged in the arts by several teachers. The first was Orilla Miller, who taught at P.S. 24, and took Baldwin to movies and museums, in her free time, on her own dime. They talked about art and books. Miller was not perfect, but she saw something in Baldwin when he was a child and she encouraged him, despite differences in age and race and background. It changed his life. When he got to high school, he had other teachers who noticed his talents and nurtured them.

David Sutherland’s 2006 documentary *Country Boys* is all about “the role of caring adults in the lives of young people.” According to [PBS](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/countryboys/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), *Country Boys* is: “For everyone who remembers what it was like to be young, the story of two Appalachian teenagers becoming men.” As we watch the struggles of Cody and Chris, we are reminded of how important it is that adults invest in young people, whether they are family or not. It makes all the difference.

We do not have enough encouragement to care for other people’s children and invest in them, even if we have no children or even if we have children of our own. Encouraging people to invest in their own families should not slow us down from encouraging people to invest in young people, full stop. We have so many social crises. Young men are struggling. Marriage and childbirth rates are down. Medical Assistance in Dying is on the rise. Social trust is down. Political polarization is up. Life expectancy is down. In some circles, the main advice is to reinvest in your family—build strong families, families are the building block of society. We also need to emphasize investing in the lives of non-relatives in a serious way.

It is right and good to have “skin in the game” with young people, whether or not you are related to them. That will not solve all our social crises, but it would help us move in the right direction. Think about how often children, even from happy and supportive families, find their calling or advance professionally due to someone outside of the family. Young people succeed when they are invested in by adults, relatives or not. Yet we do so little to acknowledge or encourage that. We need more people like the director Ryan Coogler, who brought his former writing professor to National Board of Review awards and walked the red carpet with her. She was one of the first adults to tell him he should go to Hollywood.

Caring adults are not just good for children; they are good for parents. Such care requires people caring about other people’s children *and* families willing to engage outside of their families. Some laugh at the idea that “it takes a village,” but parents feel less anxiety about their children when they know a “villager” will look after them if they are not on the scene. The more links that exist between the old and young, child-having and child-free, the kinder everyone will be to each other on planes and in restaurants. People will also worry less about bringing children into “this world” if they know that other people will care about *and for* their children. Think about the anxieties that people have about what will happen to their children when they are gone or what will happen to them if they have no children.

Around Christmas a news story circulated widely about a Cardiff family that invited a man to Christmas dinner who [ended up staying 45 years](https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/when-a-family-welcomed-a-man-into-their-home-at-christmas-they-never-thought-hed-stay-for-45-years/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). The family gave him a home and helped him get a job and then took him to work every the morning. That is an exceptional story, but many beautiful things come into the world through people extending themselves for others to whom they have no particular natural obligation. We have *To Kill a Mockingbird* because Harper Lee’s friends gathered enough money for her to take a year off from work to write. T.S. Eliot [declined the “Eliot Fellowship Fund”](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/sep/02/ts-eliot-bloomsbury-fund?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that Bloomsbury authors organized for him, but the encouragement of his peers was obvious.

When we think about how to have a healthier society and stronger families, we need to remember the importance of caring for other people’s children, young and old. If we overemphasize family as the only path, people without children will consider themselves as having nothing to give and no way to contribute and children will miss out on help that they cannot get from parents and parents from help they cannot provide. Flourishing requires extending ourselves beyond familial obligations. We receive in return the fruits of a healthy society, including things of beauty like Arthur Ashe’s tennis game.
### The Mad Farmer on Claude, AI, and the Church
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-mad-farmer-on-claude-ai-and-the-church/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:33:25.000Z
While reading [a recent post on AI](https://x.com/mattshumer%5F/status/2021256989876109403?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that gained sudden white-hot virality, one line from Wendell Berry kept coming to mind. In his poem titled *Anger Against Beasts*, Berry reflects on man's will being schooled in having its way to "transcend the impossible in simple fury." This is *the* image underlying our technological discourse, and captures the pathos of the recent post––the furious acceleration of AI advancements is now on the cusp of transcending the impossible. In other words, *something big is happening*.

This bullish (alarmist?) take on AI––whether accurate or not––announced that it will soon be an autonomous worker, incapable of error. More than that, it is making decisions that reflect real *discernment*––with not only accuracy, but taste. Such an effective substitute for cognitive labor, it is feared, will obliterate nearly all thought work into obsolescence. While transcending the impossible has long been AI’s ambition, the earliest critique was simple: it just didn’t compute—it didn’t get things quite right. That is rapidly changing. The once clear line between AI-generated and human work is increasingly blurring.

But wherever you sit on the spectrum of concern, keeping our heads above the rising technological waters will not hinge on embracing or rejecting AI, but on embracing or rejecting our own limits. Perhaps the truest mark of humanness will no longer be perceptive finesse, but the recognition of our creatureliness—our uniquely human capacity to defy predictability.

Such creatureliness––contrary to perfection––is depicted in Berry’s poem *Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front*. After opening with a sterile picture of quick profits, annual raises, and everything ready-made, Berry encourages us with this:

> So, friends, every day do something  
> that won’t compute.

This is the essence of the Mad Farmer’s approach to the “everything ready-made” world. For us, as technology in general and AI specifically becomes more and more computationally sophisticated and removes unpredictability from our experience, one way to resist being swallowed by the machine is to embrace our freedom to *not* compute.

Berry gives a long list of things that do not compute––things that will seem progressively “mad” in the age of AI:

> Love the Lord.  
> Love the world. Work for nothing.  
> Take all that you have and be poor.  
> Love someone who does not deserve it.  
> Ask the questions that have no answers.  
>  
> Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.  
> Say that your main crop is the forest  
> that you did not plant,  
> that you will not live to harvest.  
> Say that the leaves are harvested  
> when they have rotted into the mold.  
> Call that profit. Prophesy such returns  
>  
> Expect the end of the world. Laugh.  
> Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful  
> though you have considered all the facts.

There is a quiet competence––an ambidexterity––to Berry’s Mad Farmer. He is comfortable moving in different contexts; he looks both near and far. He moves with a *sanctified shiftiness*––toiling, sweating, using the tools at hand, but then claiming a harvest that he never touched nor will ever see. He moves seamlessly between the present, yet somehow a thousand years ahead, embodying an agility under providence.

It is this beholdenness to providence rather than technique or outcomes that allows him to adopt an almost playful unseriousness that confounds the powers-that-be:

> Go with your love to the fields.  
> Lie down in the shade. Rest your head  
> in her lap. Swear allegiance  
> to what is nighest your thoughts.  
> As soon as the generals and the politicos  
> can predict the motions of your mind,  
> lose it. Leave it as a sign  
> to mark the false trail, the way  
> you didn’t go. Be like the fox  
> who makes more tracks than necessary,  
> some in the wrong direction.

As soon as corporations have collected every byte and algorithms have mapped the ‘motions of your mind’… lose it! Once they believe you’re squarely ensnared in their fetters of addiction, lay down false trails. Break the predictable patterns of digital life with a non-computational walk through the woods. Lie with your love in the shade. Wisely eliminate hurry. Like a fox unable to be lured by progress, Berry is giving us a parable of a life lived in the shadowlands between assimilation and fortification.

He wants us to see that both options are equally predictable. And in the face of unprecedented change, madness is gauged by predictability. True madness, then, is to avoid either predictable position. True madness looks neither like raging “against the machine” *or* putting all your hopes in an uploaded, cloud-based consciousness. Madness, instead, looks like a *holy bifurcation*. This is the kind of divided reality the apostle Peter wrote about––that Christians are simultaneously located in this age in place and time *and* in Christ. To be in Christ is to inhabit a mysterious *betweenness*, which––in a world of linear optimization––is the only true madness left.

Such a dual identity accounts for the Mad Farmer’s extra tendons, enabling him to move right and left, up and down comfortably. He has “considered all the facts”, not walled off in Benedictine oblivion. But he also fully expects the end of the world. Considering the compelling facts of the newest *gnosis* doesn’t lead him to ecstatic anticipation of a soon-to-be-ushered-in utopia. And yet, because he is neither impressed by the facts nor bound by their proposed future, he *laughs.* He doesn’t fit neatly into “user” or “non-user”; he leaves tracks in the wrong directions, each dead-end reinforcing his unpredictability.

We see this faithful flexibility throughout the Old Testament narrative as well. Glen Scrivener has called something like this the *Abraham Option*. In Genesis 14, Abraham refrains from engaging in an ongoing battle until one of his own, Lot, is taken. He then deploys his more than capable household army. He had raised them as competent soldiers, but soldiers who knew *when to fight*.

Scrivener notes that there were two things no one could ever say of Abraham:

1. That Abraham *never* engaged.
2. That Abraham *always* engaged.

Abraham was surely a conundrum to outside observers with his competence in both abstention and action. He was free to use the skills and tools of warfare, and free to reserve them for purposes he saw fit. Such is the freedom those in Christ wield with technology—freedom to be skilled users who reserve the right to opt out of a wholesale vision of techno-salvation.

Abraham’s contrary refusal to be bound by dichotomies stemmed from allegiance to a higher, God-centered salvation—echoing Berry’s call at the end of the Mad Farmer manifesto:

> Practice resurrection.

While this is the crescendo of the Mad Farmer’s campaign of contrariness, it is also precisely the underlying promise of AI and technology in general––a sort of manufactured resurrection, to bring your dreams to life, to have functional omniscience, to free up your time to live out your passion, to realize a life beyond comprehension.

But the power behind this digital resurrection is innate. AI, it is claimed, is now building *itself*. In this way, it is a sort of digital archetype for self-creation and salvation. The Christian resurrection, in contrast, is a uncontrollable resurrection that is *received*. There is nothing more unpredictable than the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead taking up residence in a human soul (Rom. 8:11).

Such unpredictability––being united to another who dwells in you––is what AI seeks to smooth over: to refine its functions and realize perfection not via the life of another, but by *itself*. But true perfection (i.e. *glory*) cannot be reduced to smoothness. In fact, Byung-Chul Han argues that beauty requires death. Smoothness is the absence of the negativity of death and is, therefore, the *antithesis* of beauty. Atrophied beauty, Han says, smooths out into something undead. This undead smoothness may have an appearance of life, but it does not embody resurrection.

True glory has a grain to it. The gospel of John brings together Jesus’ glory *with* his suffering. Indeed, the glory of his resurrection is inseparable from the suffering of his cross. The unpredictability of glory *through* suffering will never compute with AI. However, it is precisely in such mystery that God reveals himself to us.

Walter Rauschenbusch prayed against eyes blind to mystery “when even the thornbush by the wayside is aflame with the glory of God.” God revealed his self-existing beauty in the most absurdly unpredictable way: a thornbush aflame, yet unconsumed, with all the grit and grooves of glory. AI technologies train us to look for the smooth path, with the end of linear progress and perfection. The more we give ourselves to these technologies, we cloud our capacity to behold bushes aflame because “that’s not how bushes are *supposed* to behave”. We must train our eyes for unpredictability—such vision is sharpened by lives of contrariness that move beyond the predictable bounds of AI.

It may be the reality that soon AI far surpasses any human ability of accuracy and predictability. AI may actually replace countless experts and offer more sound advice than the most seasoned and skilled professionals.

However, if our aim is to be human, there may be no better starting posture than this from *The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer*:

> I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts,  
> and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing,  
> and reaped, as I knew, by luck and Heaven's favor,  
> in spite of the best advice.

The church is *the* community of contrariness in the world. Not because it is anti-technology, but because it is pro-unpredictable-mystery. Its sights are calibrated to resurrection, not optimization. Holy worship, sacred Scriptures, mysterious sacraments, confession and repentance––these textured elements do not compute with the smooth predictability of AI.

This contrary community cannot be pinned down by technology, but must be a congregation of image-bearing Mad Farmers who plant and till and reap in seemingly wrong directions by unpredictably glorious and mysterious means––Heaven’s favor––in spite of AI’s best advice.
### Marriage, Family, and the Intellectual Life: Charles and Tessa Carman
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/marriage-family-and-the-intellectual-life-charles-and-tessa-carman/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:33:26.000Z
The intellectual life is in some ways necessarily lonely--in his book on *The Intellectual Life: Its Spirits, Conditions, Methods*, the French Dominican Friar Antonin Sertillanges insists that the intellectual life requires solitude. He is not wrong. Researchers in history, for instance, spend hours, days, years alone in mysterious musty basements, poring over documents that unveil their mystery to only the most persistent elect. And then the practice of writing takes additional hours (and days and years) of discipline and solitude before the essays or books are ready to go out into the world. But not all Christians who live the intellectual life are professional scholars, first and foremost. And unlike Sertillanges himself, many are married and have children. Some[ might be lawyers](https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-to-have-a-day-job-and-an-intellectual-life) or pastors or doctors or missionaries or various professionals, or [stay-at-home moms](https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/parenting/the-stay-at-home-intellectual-mom?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), or [homeschooling mothers](https://thedispatch.com/article/motherhood-intellect-friedan-gender-children/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), or simply[ overwhelmed mothers](https://comment.org/motherhood-and-the-intellectual-life/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of small children. These factors definitely take a toll on the possibility of solitude.

In other words, for most people, there are also the practical considerations of the intellectual life and intellectual work, whether done on the margins of one's day or full-time. Writers and other intellectuals are people too—they too must eat, do laundry, keep children alive, perhaps even vacuum on occasion. We all are bodies, as well as minds and souls. *So how does this work, in particular, for households that include not just one intellectual but two?*

That is the basic question underlying this new interview series, which the interview below kicks off. All couples interviewed in this series are parents. How does this all come together? We can assume that both challenges and blessings emerge as a result. What are they? And how does this change at different stages of life?

\*\*\*

**Nadya Williams:** I'd like to start by asking each of you to tell us a little bit about your intellectual journey: when did you first consciously realize that you are called to live an intellectual life? What did you envision this looking like? How has it turned out so far?

**Charles Carman:** Looking back, a few moments occur to me, though I must admit that I didn't really consider the direction I was tending as intellectual. I was homeschooled through high school, the oldest of seven children. It was a wonderful time, and I was fortunate to have found (or to have been found by?) a young scholar pursuing a double masters in philosophy and theology. He took me under his wing, and his tutelage was a challenge that I was determined to pass. At times he took me to his courses at the seminary. I remember vividly the classes on Plato and Kant. The professor was amazingly clear and winsome.

You have to imagine what happens to a young man's mind when he's exposed to Plato's third man argument or Kant's analytic a priori at around the time he is learning to drive. My mentor suffered no fools, and entertained viciousness of any sort even less. In those years, I played soccer and football, and though no pro athlete, I was better than some. Yet the mental challenge and the demand for excellence I found in conversation and debate with my mentor drew me down the path of reading and pondering. All my closest high school mates went into the military, as I had originally planned to do, but then made a last-minute lurch toward philosophy and university. It took me some time to find my feet, and I have sometimes wondered what success I would have met, had I stayed the course and gone into the serious business of war.

Things continue to go better than expected. I consider myself fortunate in the opportunities I have had — going abroad (sometimes with my wife and family) to learn other languages, studying under many excellent instructors, having the leisure to think and ponder. One of the greatest gifts has been the crew of friends found along the way.

The intellectual may live a solitary life in a lot of ways. Between going to a party and sculpting, the artist too may spend more time in craft than among the glasses and music, I suppose. But I can't say the intellectual life has been at all hermetic in my experience: too many fierce arguments about metaphysics over a fire, too many play readings full of laughter, poetry readings chased with hours of reflection, too many last-minute gatherings and formal and informal dinners, too many cups of coffee and pinches of tobacco shared between co-conspirators, and too many letters, in balance with solitary hours spent staring into the middle distance or scribbling into the margin of the page.

**Tessa Carman:** I really don’t think of myself as an intellectual—only as someone who likes, maybe *needs*, to think through things, understand things, to deepen understanding partly through writing and conversation, and to make things: poems, stories, plays. Or just someone who loves books! As a kid I was interested at different stages in being an artist, teacher, and then writer, and I suppose that combination of things brings together the way-of-being-in-the-world that I’ve grown into ever since. I’ve always needed to figure things out. (I did have a brief stint in my teen years where I thought I had figured it all out already, so I just needed to write out all the answers in a book, covering social life, politics, etc. Thankfully that stage passed.)

Age fifteen was a significant time for me, since I read a lot of things that would shape me ever after—and also on topics that I continue to be occupied with: education, technology, fairy tales, theology, poetry, British novels, theater. I was being homeschooled at the time after being in small Christian schools since first grade, and I think I felt rather free because of that. So I read and read whatever I wanted.

I think my idea of my life turned out rather similar to whatever dreams I had in high school, amazingly enough! I wanted to continue to read and write and make stories, and I wanted to resist the vision of adulthood that I often received from well-intentioned adults: of a life where one grimly set oneself to the wheel of the workaday world, and didn’t really have time for adventures or thinking, just being all “realistic” and paying bills.

But thankfully, I found other people who were weird like me in college, and there was even a fellow who thought like no one else—beautifully, precisely, generously. He was a fellow traveler at the very least, and then he became someone with whom I wanted to build a home and a family.

Maybe this is easier for the feminine spirit, but I never liked an over-specialized or utilitarian view of school or reading, such that I wanted to study things because the world is interesting, and we have a duty to have many interests and relations with the world—and maybe that’s why I liked what I read of Charlotte Mason so much.

At college I majored in Politics, Philosophy, & Economics, even though I would have been an English major most anywhere else.

Marilynne Robinson says somewhere that she read political, economic, and philosophical works not despite the fact that she wrote novels but because of it. Who wants to read a novelist who doesn’t understand how some of the basic relations of human life work? I liked that attitude. And also that she liked to read things for herself instead of taking received opinion. We can’t do that all the time, but when we can, we ought, and when we can’t, we ought to be a lot more modest in our opinions.

**Nadya Williams:** What kind of intellectual work does each of you do now, and what role does it play in your day-to-day life?

**Charles Carman:** I teach in the humanities at Regent University. My time is split between papers, articles, reading, teaching, preparing new courses, mentoring students, and too many other things.

**Tessa Carman:** Charles is more so the professional intellectual since he’s a university professor, and I do the creative/intellectual work of helming the education of our kids, as well as teaching (mostly online right now), and writing whenever I can. We always have conversations going on. There are things that are more the other’s purview—for instance, Charles leaves me in the dust when it comes to metaphysics, and he can go way deeper with his philosophy guys—but we’re able to keep each other fairly in the loop of what we’re both thinking about, which always blends into other parts of life. Neither of us would have been able to deal well with being married to someone who wasn’t someone we could talk to!

**Nadya Williams:** What role has your intellectual life played in your marriage and family life? Do you find that it affects your interactions with each other and with your children? If so, in what ways?

**Charles Carman:** You may safely invite an intellectual to dinner and find comfort in the fact that he will eventually have to leave. Living with an intellectual requires circumspection. Now marry him or her, add a growing pile of children, and what follows would count as the best and strangest sort of scandal to shock the public.

To explain to one's child medieval cosmology (and tell them that there's truth in it, scientism be damned); to answer when a child asks, "What's red dye doing in our food?" with "It's poison," and they ask why on earth do we put poison in our food, and reply with a brief excursion into the history of industrial agriculture, leading the dialogue to the very edge of a longer discussion on the industrial revolution; to read aloud *The Lord of the Rings* to your 8 and 10 year old (with the 3 year old and infant in attendance) and fail to tell of Theoden King's parting without saltwater in my eyes; to introduce your children (the same 10 and 8 year old) to parliamentary style debate and rhetorical structure and figures of speech and find later those very weapons of war turned on you, the benevolent gift-giver; to hear the selfsame children speak to the clerk at the grocery store thus: "I am fairly confident I have a good idea where the two hidden turtles are; if I tell you, might we receive the promised lollipops?"; to work out some question of philosophy, theology, literature, politics with one's wife, which at times can get heated, in disagreement or agreement; to realize that spelling out a word is a hopeless method for keeping something secret from the precocious little puzzlers and making recourse to riddling metaphors which only urges them more forcefully to decipher out the meaning; to speak Latin with my children in public, and when asked what language I'm speaking to them, replying with, "Old Italian”; to read and hone each other's essays and poems with the kind of brutal honesty that deep intimacy offers; to read the fairy tales written by our eldest daughter, celebrating and praising how the logic of fairyland is coursing through her spiritual blood at inebriating levels; to enter the silent living room, on the way to refill one's coffee cup, and finding the 10 and 8 year half way through a book, while the 3 year old has open in her own lap a copy of *The Silmarillion*, turning the pages with a determined seriousness to do precisely what her siblings are doing; to watch Hitchcock's *The Man Who Knew Too Much* with all the kids, which if you haven't watched it yet is *some* movie to watch with a 10 & 8 year old (and a three-year-old who has learned that apparently the phrase, "He's dead" is something to say very casually when watching movies); to live in words and in woodworking and in house-holding and in common with friends week in, week out.

**Tessa Carman:** Well, I’m always thinking about books! And I’m always thinking about education, which is a really practical question not only for our children but ourselves. Education is really about how we humans can live well, how we ought to be formed, and how we ought to form ourselves and our societies—how we ought to live. So I suppose if one is concerned with how to live more deeply into Christ, and how to best take care of and enjoy and appreciate and understand the things God has made and has given us, that affects every part of our lives.

**Nadya Williams:** What are some challenges you have found to your intellectual pursuits so far? How did you resolve these, or are you still living through them? What expectations did you have for your intellectual life before you were married, and how do you think these have adjusted over time and with circumstances?

**Charles Carman:** I am fortunate to teach at a university where I enjoy the students and enjoy my colleagues and have some time to write. But broadly speaking, the intellectual life within a family requires patronage and land. We make it work, and it's a mystery to me how we do it at times. It takes a lot of sharing responsibilities and time with the children, a lot of patience and grit. I'm not sure what I expected, or if my fantasies were either very interesting or well-formed.

Without going into it all, the intellectual family is, like any other rich family existence, ill-fitted to the way the world is shaped right now. It requires a scrappy attitude and friends for whom you can carry burdens and with whom you can celebrate victories, at least.

**Tessa Carman:** I gained a lot of confidence in getting married! And when we had our first child, I felt more confidence about writing, too, especially stories. I wanted to write for my children, as well as for our friends.

I think the challenge is always how to live with due attention to one’s duties, and to creatively adjust to what life demands at the time, and finding time for contemplation. Every season is a little different. Looking back, I did imagine having a rich life of enjoying and discovering the beauty of God’s world with my family, and that’s exactly come to pass!

**Nadya Williams:** I'd love to hear your pie-in-the-sky dream: What do you each dream about in your intellectual lives in the future? How do these dreams work together?

**Charles Carman:** My pie has been the same since my second year in college. We live with our friends, within walking distance of each other's homes. We all have gardens and animals and things to build and do with each other. We are all patronized and competent such that we needn't worry about much labor but what we want to do. We write plays, poems, stories, books. We invite others to stay at our guest cabin. We host conferences and events. There is an amphitheater for community plays and folk concerts. There is a library building. There is a root cellar. Our children learn to ride horses and write in ancient languages. Our boys read of Charlemagne in the evening and hunt in the morning, our girls sew and dance and recite poetry.

**Tessa Carman:** We have some writing projects we want to do together—some translation work, perhaps a children’s book. It would be wonderful to research a book together at the Bodleian. I think our big dream is simply to continue to make things as a family and to learn more things—woodworking, home preserving, cooking, music making—that we can enjoy together. I’d love to direct a play with our kids in it. (Our girls have been working on a living room *Les Miserables* ballet—maybe one day they can take that on the road!)

Folk art and skills are inseparable, for me, from what’s deemed “intellectual” work. The agricultural and manual arts are intertwined with what we deem “the life of the mind.” We are embodied beings, after all, and we were made for the “low” or common things—making and breaking daily bread together—and the “high” or more uncommon things—singing psalms and taking the Eucharist. We were made to seek wisdom together, and books happen to keep alive that wisdom for generations. I’m grateful for friends that I can speak to or write in person, and also for those who’ve left behind their writings. We’re called to keep the flame alive, and to become flame ourselves.
### Should We Prioritize Evangelism in Missions?
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-case-for-prioritizing-evangelism-in-missions/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:33:30.000Z
> For more than fifty years—encapsulated in [a famous backroom debate between Billy Graham and John Stott](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/when-john-stott-confronted-billy-graham/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), but in reality stretching back further, to the beginnings of the neo-evangelical movement and Carl F. H. Henry’s [*The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism*](https://amzn.to/4sY4HMq?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)—evangelicals have wrestled with the nature and extent of the church’s mission.

Is the mission of the church narrow, focused primarily on conversion through sharing the gospel and seeking to persuade others to trust in Christ? Or is it broad, encompassing everything that Christians are sent in the world to do, through following Christ’s commands? How does the mission of the local church when gathered relate to the obedience required of Christians scattered about in their various vocations? Should evangelism take priority over social action, or are both evangelism and social action equal partners, or [as John Stott memorably suggested](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/missional-john-stott-a-review-of-christian-mission-in-the-modern-world/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), like two wings of a plane?

These questions have proven remarkably persistent, not least because they press into deep theological convictions, ecclesiological instincts, and contextual pressures that vary widely across cultures and eras. All four of David Bebbington’s oft-cited markers of evangelicalism (biblical authority, the centrality of the cross, the necessity of personal conversion, and social activism) converge in this debate.

## **Christopher J. H. Wright and the Turn to Integral Mission**

In the early years of this century, no figure has been more influential in arguing for a holistic (more often now termed “integral”) understanding of the church’s mission than Christopher J. H. Wright. Nowhere is this vision articulated more comprehensively than in [*The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative*](https://amzn.to/4a8h6VB?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), first published in 2006\. The book prompted extensive discussion, particularly regarding the Old Testament’s contribution to the biblical storyline, the relationship between the church and ethnic Israel, and the appropriate breadth of responsibility assigned to the people of God in reflecting God’s mission in the world.

Wright is a disciple of John Stott. He is a distinguished Old Testament scholar, and one of the primary architects of [The Cape Town Commitment](https://lausanne.org/statement/ctcommitment?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that emerged from the third Lausanne Congress in 2010\. His influence on global evangelical missiology is difficult to overstate.

I read the recently released [second edition of *The Mission of God*](https://amzn.to/4qaIWqe?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) with keen interest and genuine appreciation. Wright has clearly taken seriously criticisms of the first edition, offering further refinement, engagement with subsequent scholarship, and clarification of contested points. In many respects, this revised edition is stronger than its predecessor.

And yet, despite the book’s improvements, I remain concerned about the practical outworking of Wright’s vision in the day-to-day life of local church congregations.

## **Centrality, Primacy, and the Language We Choose**

Put simply, I believe when considering the church’s mission the language of primacy or priority for verbal proclamation of the gospel is warranted. Wright disagrees. He prefers the language of centrality rather than primacy, and he offers two principal reasons for this preference.

First, Wright worries that the language of priority easily implies that everything else is secondary at best, rendering evangelism the only *real* expression of mission while other forms of obedience are treated as optional or substandard. He cautions against taxonomies or any attempt to rank our good works, noting in a footnote that Jesus, in the Great Commission, did not say, “teaching them to obey whatever you consider to have priority among all that I have commanded you” (401). The comprehensiveness of Jesus’s command—all that he has taught—resists such hierarchies.

Second, Wright argues that the language of primacy assumes evangelism must be the starting point in every context. On the ground, however, mission often begins with physical, social, or relational needs. In such circumstances, any number of entry points may serve as the beginning of faithful witness. Wright therefore proposes the language of ultimacy rather than primacy. Mission resembles a wheel, he suggests, with multiple spokes addressing the complex needs of the world, all connected to the hub of the gospel. Verbal proclamation is vital, but not necessarily first in sequence.

## **Evangelism as Indispensable, Not Optional**

To be clear: Wright is emphatic that there is no genuinely holistic or integral mission without evangelism. On this point, we agree:

> “Mission may not always *begin* with evangelism. But mission that does not ultimately *seek for and include* bearing witness in some form to the good news of what God has done in Christ, the call to repentance, faith, and discipleship, has not completed its task. It is defective mission, not holistic mission.” (418)

I had the opportunity to discuss these matters briefly with Dr. Wright during the Fourth Lausanne Congress in Seoul in 2024, on a brisk walk from our hotel to the convention center. He expressed some frustration that this question remains a source of contention among evangelicals globally when, in his view, the decisive issue is ensuring that the gospel remains the motivation and central hub of all Christian mission. Given the diversity of gifts within the body of Christ, different believers and communities may appropriately emphasize different forms of service.

I do appreciate Wright’s insistence on evangelism as indispensable for integral mission as well as the cautions he lays out for those who believe evangelism should take priority. In the end, my concern is one of emphasis.

## **The Question of Emphasis and the Conditions of Failure**

In a vision of disciple-making that includes obedience to all Christ has commanded, are there certain responsibilities that carry a certain weight or that are required for all believers, regardless of their gifts and passions?

My position on the extent of the church’s mission aligns in important respects with what missiologist David Hesselgrave has called “restrained holism.” This approach preserves a traditional priority for evangelism while affirming the indispensability of social action. It recognizes that the church embodies and extends the kingdom of God across multiple spheres of life, especially as Christians live out their faith in their ordinary vocations. At the same time, it maintains a distinction between the mission of the gathered church—which remains more narrowly defined—and the wide-ranging obedience of believers in the world, while reserving a special priority for evangelistic proclamation.

The case for retaining the language of priority is compelling for at least three reasons.

## **Historical Drift and the Loss of Proclamation**

First, the history of the modern missions movement is sobering. A survey of missionary conferences and movements since 1910 reveals a repeated tendency for believers to drift away from evangelism every time the parameters of Christian mission broaden.

This outcome is not inevitable, and Wright is right to insist that Scripture, not history, must govern our understanding of mission. Still, historical patterns should alert us to recurring contextual pressures that result in a loss of evangelism. History may not repeat itself, but it seems often to lead to this particular rhyme. And when verbal proclamation quietly recedes, we risk losing precisely what Wright insists is essential to integral mission.

## **Exclusivity, Public Truth, and Cultural Resistance**

Second, in our contemporary context, the world almost always and everywhere pushes back harder on the exclusivity of Christ for salvation than any other part of our message. Full-throated gospel proclamation dares to announce something that many people in our culture are increasingly unwilling to hear: that we are not speaking of *my* truth or *your* truth, but of a public reality that holds for all people, in all places, at all times.

The gospel announcement is profoundly subversive. It strikes at the root of a dominant pluralism that allows Jesus to function as a private helper or personal savior but forbids the claim that his lordship is objectively and universally true. Wright himself affirms this understanding of evangelism, which is precisely why he presses the implications of “Jesus is Lord” into public and social life rather than confining them to privatized faith. He is right on this. Throughout *The Mission of God,* he upholds the uniqueness of the God of Israel, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He acknowledges the Scriptural teaching on Christ as the fulfillment of Israel’s story.

Our disagreement lies more on the strategic plane: how do we keep this daring proclamation at the forefront so that it does not, in practice, become merely one activity among many?

Wright addresses this concern in a footnote, summarizing a common argument this way:

> “The world doesn’t hate, oppose, or persecute us when we do good… It is only when we proclaim the gospel… that we encounter opposition. So that should be our prime focus in mission.”

He then pushes back on this line of argumentation:

> “It is an odd argument, first because Jesus and Paul and Peter (on good Old Testament authority) do urge us to do good works on the grounds that the world will see and (sometimes) approve and ask questions about our faith and our God. If the world approves when we do good, that is hardly an argument for withdrawing from some acts. Good works are one way of being the light of the world.  
>  
> “But, second, it simply isn’t true in many parts of the world. It is a sentiment that reflects a rather comfortable Western Christian context but is far from the experience of many Christians in other parts of the world and through history. Christians do suffer opposition when they do good in a way that exposes evil or challenges vested interests, when they combine compassion with seeking justice for the victims of oppression, and (in the case above) when they seek to protect creation from destructive, greed-motivated exploitation. Such Christian advocacy for creation can stir up political, legal, and even violent opposition. After all, Peter was fully aware of the possibility—likelihood indeed—that Christians would suffer for doing good (which in the context means concrete acts of good-doing, not just evangelistic witness) and urged them not to retaliate but to go on doing good.”

I do not dispute Wright’s pushback here, but I don’t believe he’s interacting with the heart of the initial critique. No one is saying that evangelism is the only good work that stirs up opposition. Neither is anyone advocating we retreat from ministries of mercy that receive approval from the world.

Rather, when certain activities that flow from Christian mission get celebrated (such as mercy ministry) and others (such as evangelism) are vilified, our emphasis on evangelism must increase, not diminish, lest societal pushback reshape our witness. I’ve heard Ed Stetzer illustrate this point with a simple analogy: imagine pushing forward with both arms—one representing evangelism and the other social action. When one arm encounters greater resistance, additional pressure is required on that side, not to displace the other, but simply to keep both in alignment.

## **Eternity, Weightiness, and False Bifurcations**

This leads to a third concern: evangelism is what makes our good works as Christians *salty*. It is the cup of cold water *offered in Jesus’s name* that distinguishes us from the almsgiving or mercy ministry of other religions, or those with no religion at all. Historically, this distinctiveness is often the first element to erode unless it is frequently stressed.

In our conversation in Seoul, Dr. Wright urged me to look further back than the modern missions movement for a better representation of holistic mission among evangelicals. He noted that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evangelicals did not bifurcate between gospel proclamation and social action. He is right.

But if we’re going to stretch back to the time of the Wesleys and Simeons and Wilberforces, we should also acknowledge that one would be hard-pressed to find any Christian prior to the mid-twentieth century who would have listed “creation care” alongside evangelism as one of [the five marks of mission](https://www.anglicancommunion.org/mission/marks-of-mission.aspx?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (as is now the case in the Church of England). I say that not to deny or diminish the Christian responsibility to fulfill the cultural mandate and steward creation wisely. My point is that in terms of New Testament attention, surely our emphasis is skewed if we lay recycling next to evangelism and say the language of “primacy” or “priority” for the latter is inappropriate.

Doesn’t the weight of eternal separation from God require a corresponding weightiness in how we think about our Christian responsibility as God’s people?

I realize that some may fear that stressing the eternal stakes will lead to an overemphasis on evangelism and a diminishing focus on seeking justice and showing mercy. But I believe the eternal weightiness of personal salvation should lead not only to a priority on evangelism but an intensification of the church’s social witness. After all, Scripture is clear that faith without works is dead, and that to neglect the weightier matters of the law draws condemnation.

I sometimes wonder whether the bifurcation between evangelism and social action in our era is not the result of evangelicals being so eternally minded that they neglect social responsibility, but rather the consequence of a broader diminishment of the weight of eternity across every area of life. Without that grounding, some evangelicals grow presumptuous and self-assured in their evangelistic fervor, even as their lives betray a complicity in injustice or resentment. Meanwhile, other evangelicals throw themselves into various forms of social action while losing sight of the eternal destiny of those they serve, quietly drifting toward a works-righteousness or a functional universalism.

I appreciate Wright for decrying both of these distortions as falling short of truly integral mission, and on that point we agree. The lingering question is whether the language of ultimacy—and the placing of all the good works Christians are called to perform, from creation care to evangelism to mercy ministry, on the same plane—leads in practice to greater holism, or whether it risks reinforcing the very bifurcation Wright is right to resist.

## **Conclusion: An Enduring Evangelical Tension**

This debate is unlikely to disappear, and maybe the tension can remain a fruitful one. The relationship between evangelism and social action remains a defining feature of evangelical self-understanding. For readers seeking an entry point into the conversation, [*Four Views on the Church’s Mission*](https://amzn.to/3NEnRaa?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)offers a helpful spectrum of perspectives, with contributions from Jonathan Leeman and Christopher Wright, as does [*The Mission of the Church: Five Views in Conversation*](https://amzn.to/49L0Z1e?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), in which Ed Stetzer, in dialogue with advocates of integral mission, presses the case for retaining a strong emphasis on evangelism.

Clarity about the church’s mission can help us order our emphases rightly. The church is a sign and instrument of the kingdom of God—a people united by faith in the gospel announcement of the crucified and risen King Jesus. Our mission, therefore, is not merely to do good in the world, nor merely to speak true words about salvation, but to go into the world in the power of the Spirit and make disciples by proclaiming this gospel, calling people to ongoing repentance and faith, and demonstrating the truth and power of that gospel by living under the lordship of Christ for the glory of God and the good of the world. The challenge before us is not to choose between proclamation and demonstration, declaration and display, but to hold them together in a way that preserves their proper order—so that neither eclipses the other, and the church’s witness remains faithful, compelling, and whole.
### Paul, Apostle of Grace: An Interview with Frank Thielman
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/paul-apostle-of-grace-an-interview-with-frank-thielman/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:33:32.000Z
Christians regularly read Paul’s letters as part of the New Testament. But perhaps we don’t know Paul himself very well. What might we be missing? Frank Thielman, Presbyterian Chair of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School at Samford University, has spent his entire scholarly career writing on the Apostle Paul, including [*Romans*](https://www.amazon.com/Romans-Zondervan-Exegetical-Commentary-Testament-ebook/dp/B072TP4R6P?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)(Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament) and [*Ephesians*](https://www.amazon.com/Ephesians-Baker-Exegetical-Commentary-Testament/dp/0801026830?tag=beesdivischo-20&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament).

His most recent book, [*Paul, Apostle of Grace*](https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802876294/paul-apostle-of-grace/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), aims to help not only academics but also pastors and Christians in the pews get to know Paul better. He reflects on these aims in his introduction:

> I hope, too, that all readers of this book will come away from it with an understanding of what motivated this remarkable human being. What drove him to endure often treacherous journeys of hundreds of miles to establish like-minded communities around the world as he knew it? What spurred him to recruit a network of coworkers who were willing to help him in this vast project? What kept him at the task even when it landed him in prison? What prompted him to produce a body of lengthy letters to these communities of such depth that millions of people still read them with profit today?

\*\*\*

**Nadya Williams:** You have been thinking about Paul for a long time now. Could you tell a bit about your overlapping intellectual and theological journey: what are the big questions that have been of interest for you in your reading, thinking, and writing? How does this latest project fit into these?

**Frank Thielman:** For a long time, I was interested mainly in the texts that early Christians read and the coherence of early Christian thought. That is still an interest, but for the last decade or so I have focused on the daily life of the first Christians. What were the first churches like, and how were they connected to the neighborhoods where Christians lived? How could Paul afford to pay for passage on numerous ships and coastal vessels? What was it like to sail long distances against the wind with no compass? Why and how did Paul work with networks of co-workers?

Although questions like these are interesting in themselves, they intrigue me mainly because trying to answer them is a reminder that God meets people where they are, in their day-to-day lives. Thinking about the daily lives of the first Christians and the practicalities of how they spread the gospel challenges me to get out of the library and into the real world with the good news about Jesus. Most Christians probably don’t need that particular challenge, but I do!

**Nadya Williams:** This is a really ambitious project--a theological biography of Paul's entire life and ministry. You say at the outset that "Writing a book about Paul's life is like putting together a puzzle of a thousand pieces, but a puzzle whose pieces can fit together in different ways." You ended up telling the story chronologically, which I thought worked well. What were some puzzle pieces (to continue with the analogy) that you thought were particularly important to highlight in the process?

**Frank Thielman:** Two puzzle pieces that scholars have often arranged differently than the way I positioned them in this book are the Jerusalem Council and the timing of Paul’s death. In Galatians 1–2 Paul describes two trips to Jerusalem after his conversion, the second of which has much in common with Paul’s visit to Jerusalem in Acts 15 for the Jerusalem Council. In Acts, however, that trip is Paul’s *third* post-conversion visit to Jerusalem. I believe Paul felt free to leave out what in Acts would be his second visit to Jerusalem because it wasn’t important for his purposes in Galatians. This, then, frees us up to position Galatians a bit later in Paul’s ministry (after the Jerusalem Council) and allows us to fill out our picture of the Council with information that Paul himself provides.

Paul’s death is another “puzzle piece” that scholars place in different positions. Does it fit inside the narrative of Acts, or does it go somewhere else in the puzzle? Many scholars place Paul’s death at the end of a theoretical period after the close of Paul’s story in Acts. On this common understanding of Paul, the apostle’s hearing before Nero led to his release from imprisonment and to a period of further ministry before his eventual re-arrest and death in Rome. This theory creates space in Paul’s life for the travels and personal references that he mentions in the Pastoral Epistles but that most scholars cannot plausibly fit into the Acts narrative.

In the book, I make the case that it is unlikely Paul survived his appearance before Nero, and that he probably died at the end of his two years’ detention in Rome (Acts 28:30–31). These are not new positions, but they are only occasionally adopted by those who think that the Pastoral Epistles are authentic Pauline letters. I try to offer a persuasive case in the book, however, that the Pastoral Epistles can fit within the framework of Acts once we understand that Luke felt free to describe time periods in general terms and sometimes left out or did not know details that Paul mentions in his letters.

**Nadya Williams:** On a related note to the previous question, were there any pieces of the story/puzzle you had to leave out, for reasons of space?

**Frank Thielman:** I actually love maps and plotting routes. One of my prized possessions is a copy of the huge *Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World*. It was always a good research day when I had to heave it open and figure out how Paul most probably got from point A to point B. Eerdmans was very kind to let me include several maps and did such a good job producing them at a reasonable cost. Ideally, though, I would love to have filled the book with maps and diagrams!

**Nadya Williams:** Because Paul's writings are now part of inerrant Scripture, so often our focus in reading his letters is on the theological issues he raises and on their applications. This is obviously important, but I particularly enjoyed your interest in this book on understanding Paul as flesh-and-blood too—someone with thoughts and motivations of his own, and likewise someone who had his own quirks, interests, concerns, and so on. Why do you think understanding Paul as a real person is important for Bible readers (and not just for historians)?

**Frank Thielman:** It is important for us to remember that God works in and through real people with the same kinds of struggles all humans face. It’s reasonably clear that Paul was sick for much of his life as a Christian (2 Cor 1:8–9; 12:7–9; Gal 4:13), that he traveled long, exhausting distances (2 Cor 11:25–27), that he got into legal trouble (2 Cor 12:23–25), and that he experienced high levels of anxiety, about his friends (Phil 2:27) and the churches he planted (2 Cor 12:28–29). One of the most moving passages in his letters is when he observes in 2 Corinthians that God has nevertheless used him, with all his weaknesses, to bring the life-giving good news to others (4:7–12; 12:9–10).

I hope that seeing Paul as a real person will encourage Christians who also struggle with their weaknesses. God can use each of us, whatever our handicaps and challenges, to communicate to others the life-giving good news that through Christ’s work on the cross and the power of the Holy Spirit, God has offered us forgiveness, transformation, and eternal life in his new creation.

**Nadya Williams:** Research invariably results in surprises even on topics we think we know well. What is something surprising or unexpected that you learned about Paul in the process of writing this book?

**Frank Thielman:** I was surprised to learn how Jewish Paul remained after he became a Christian. Most of my previous work on Paul had been on the apostle’s letters, but for this book I had to study the portrait of Paul in Acts carefully. In that portrait, Luke presents Paul as a faithful Jewish person throughout his life. For example, Luke tells us that at a turning point in his ministry, Paul cut his hair because of a vow he had taken (Acts 18:18). This seems pretty clearly to be a Nazirite vow (Num 6:1–21). He continued to consider himself a Pharisee, even after he became a Christian (Acts 23:6). He was willing to help four Jewish Christians who were themselves under a Nazirite vow to complete the requirements for their vow (21:22–26).

It is worth thinking hard about how such passages cohere with Paul’s statement in Philippians 3:7 that when he gained Christ, he considered all such things a loss. Perhaps his next sentence where he calls “everything” loss (3:8) shows us what he means. Christ must be pre-eminent, and everything—including Paul’s Judaism—is loss if it does not fall under Christ’s authority. This would not then mean that Paul’s Judaism and everything else had become loss in absolute terms. The loss is relative, and, viewed from the right perspective, he could continue to find value in his Jewishness (Rom 3:1–2; 9:4–5) and in many other things (Phil 4:8).

**Nadya Williams:** Now that this book is out in the world, what are you working on next?

**Frank Thielman:** I’ve just finished an article that fills out the argument I make in the book on the historical setting of Paul’s letter to Titus. Lord willing, I’ll turn next to a theological reflection on Ephesians. Beyond that, I’ll just have to trust that the Lord will guide me.
### Banyan Church
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/banyan-church/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:33:35.000Z
In western India stands a banyan tree known as Kabirvad, named after the poet-saint Kabir. It is often described as one of the largest banyan trees in the world, though such measurements do little to prepare a visitor for the experience of standing beneath it. Kabirvad spreads across more than four acres—an area comparable to three football fields laid side by side. Its canopy is held aloft by hundreds of prop roots that have thickened into trunks, creating a structure that feels less like a single tree and more like a living landscape. Paths curve between pillars of living wood, and what first appears to be a grove or forest gradually reveals itself as something stranger and more unified: a single organism that learned how to grow vast without collapsing under its own weight.

The banyan does grow upward—it has height, mass, and presence—but it does not depend on height alone. Its most distinctive growth is outward. Branches extend horizontally, sometimes for more than 50 feet, and as they lengthen, the tree sends aerial roots downward from the branch itself—often while the branch is still light, while expansion is still unfolding. The banyan does not wait for stress before it roots. It prepares for weight before the weight fully arrives, anchoring growth early so that extension remains sustainable. Over time, this pattern alters how the tree is perceived. The original trunk often becomes difficult to identify. Visitors ask where the tree “began,” and the answer is uncertain or contested. Yet nothing essential has been lost. Kabirvad did not endure by growing taller, more prominent, or more centralized. It endured by rooting wherever it extended. Every meaningful reach was accompanied by a descent. The banyan’s vastness is not the result of unchecked expansion, but of disciplined grounding—a form of distributed strength that allows life to take hold in many places at once, even at the cost of losing a clearly defined center.

The church, too, grows. And as it grows, it faces a question not unlike the one the banyan quietly answers: will expansion be matched by grounding, or will reach begin to outrun the conditions that make life sustainable? The issue the banyan raises is not whether growth is good. Growth, after all, is a sign of life. The question is what kind of growth preserves life rather than stretching it to the point of fracture.

In the church, growth is often spoken of with an air of inevitability and virtue. Attendance increases. Buildings expand. Programs multiply. Influence widens. These developments are usually celebrated without hesitation, and when they are questioned, it is often on pragmatic grounds—financial sustainability, staffing capacity, or organizational strain. Rarely are they treated as theological matters requiring discernment. Scripture, however, approaches growth more cautiously. Growth is never assumed to be self-justifying. It is something to be interpreted. At times it signals blessing; at other times it functions as a test of faithfulness. The biblical imagination remains alert to the possibility that expansion, if left unexamined, can quietly strain the very conditions that make shared life possible.

Bodies, after all, cannot stretch indefinitely without injury. Relationships cannot multiply without cost. Attention cannot be expanded endlessly without thinning. Care does not scale automatically. It must be transformed if it is to remain care at all. When growth outruns grounding, the result is not always visible collapse. More often, it is subtle erosion. The institution may appear healthy. Participation may remain high. Resources may increase. Yet the quality of presence begins to change. What once relied on shared life gradually depends on structure. What once required attentiveness is now handled by process. Growth succeeds institutionally even as it becomes pastorally hollow.

This is why the question of scale is never merely logistical. It is moral in the deepest sense. It concerns what kind of people the church is forming and what kind of care it is capable of offering. A church can become large without becoming deep. It can become influential without becoming attentive. It can succeed in ways that quietly leave people unseen. The banyan offers a different logic. Growth is not denied, but it is disciplined. Extension is matched by anchoring. Weight is distributed before it becomes unbearable. The tree does not wait until branches begin to tear before sending roots downward. Grounding is not a reaction to crisis; it is a condition of continued life.

If the church is to grow without losing its soul, it must ask similar questions—not after growth has already strained its limits, but while growth is still possible to guide. The issue is not whether expansion will happen, but whether it will be accompanied by forms of grounding that preserve proximity, attentiveness, and care. It is at this point that the Gospels bring the question into sharp relief—not through theory or strategy, but through the eyes of Jesus Himself.

The Gospels locate this tension not in theory, but in a moment of sight. Jesus looks upon the crowds and is moved with compassion, because they are “like sheep without a shepherd.” The problem He names is not ignorance, nor unbelief, nor moral disorder. It is exposure. Sheep without shepherds are vulnerable not because they lack doctrine, but because they lack care. This distinction matters. The crowds Jesus sees are not outsiders alone. They are people who have gathered. They have followed. They are present. Yet presence without shepherding leaves them unprotected. To be without a shepherd is not to be absent from religious life, but to be unattended within it.

The condition Jesus names feels uncomfortably familiar. Many church attendees today are faithful, committed, and sincere. They attend regularly. They serve when asked. They give generously. They believe rightly. And yet, many also experience church as anonymous. They are present, but largely unseen. Known perhaps by participation or attendance, but not by name, story, or struggle. This experience is not always the result of neglect or indifference. Often, it is the quiet consequence of growth that has outpaced grounding. As congregations expand, the distance between leaders and people increases almost imperceptibly. Care does not disappear; it diffuses. What once happened through shared life is now handled through layers of mediation. The structure remains intact, but proximity thins.

Jesus’ compassion, then, is not merely emotional. It is diagnostic. He recognizes what happens when people gather in large numbers without corresponding structures of care. Sheep may remain within the flock and yet feel unheld. They may be surrounded by activity and still feel exposed. This is not a critique of sincerity or success. It is a recognition of limits. Care can be delegated; shepherding cannot. Shepherding requires presence. Presence requires attention. Attention cannot be multiplied without transformation. When growth exceeds the capacity for relational care, the result is not immediate failure, but a quiet form of abandonment.

Jesus responds to this condition not by drawing the crowds more tightly around Himself, nor by intensifying His own visibility. He names the problem where it actually resides and begins to address it structurally: by ensuring that care will exist beyond His personal reach, close enough to be real. This response—still unfolding in the life of the church—leads directly into the question of shepherding itself: how many can one shepherd truly know, and what must happen when that limit is exceeded?

Every shepherd encounters a limit, though it rarely announces itself clearly or dramatically. More often, it arrives quietly. A conversation is postponed. A name is forgotten. A pastoral visit becomes a scheduled appointment rather than an interruption of daily life. None of this signals failure. It signals finitude. Scripture never treats human limits as a defect to be overcome. It treats them as a condition to be honored. Moses learns this through exhaustion, when Jethro names what God had already made evident: one man cannot carry the weight of a people alone without breaking himself or them. The solution is not greater endurance, but shared responsibility—leaders of tens, of hundreds, of thousands—care brought closer to those who need it.

The same pattern appears in the early church. As the community in Jerusalem grows, the apostles do not attempt to remain the sole point of care. When complaints arise over neglected widows, they do not tighten control or expand their personal reach. They ask the community to choose leaders from among themselves. Seven are appointed—not because they are fully formed, but because the need for care cannot wait for perfection. Authority is distributed while formation continues.

This willingness to entrust responsibility before maturity becomes even more striking in Paul’s ministry. Paul rarely stays long in any one place. He appoints elders quickly, sometimes in communities only recently converted. By modern standards, this seems reckless. Leaders are inexperienced. Structures are fragile. Yet Paul appears less concerned with immaturity than with absence. A young shepherd close at hand is preferable to a seasoned apostle far away. Formation happens not before responsibility, but through it. Here, weakness is not a liability to be concealed, but a condition through which strength emerges. New trunks are set into the ground early, while growth is still unfolding. They may not yet bear full weight, but they are given time to thicken, to deepen, to learn what it means to hold life. The alternative—waiting for perfect readiness—leaves branches suspended too long, straining against distance and delay.

Pastoral limits, then, are not barriers to growth. They are signals pointing toward its proper shape. When a congregation grows beyond the capacity of one shepherd to know, listen, correct, and care, the solution is not the addition of ever more layers of management. It is the multiplication of rooted shepherds—people with real authority, real presence, and real responsibility, even while they are still learning to carry it. This is where many churches hesitate. Systems feel safer than trust. Oversight feels more controllable than shared authority. Yet Scripture repeatedly suggests that life is not preserved by minimizing risk, but by distributing it. Shepherding that remains centralized may appear stable, but it quietly accumulates weight until something gives.

The shepherd’s limit, rightly understood, is not a threat to the church. It is an invitation—to release control, to share authority, and to allow care to take root close to the ground. Strength does not emerge by denying weakness, but by planting it early enough for grace to work through it.

As a church grows, something subtle but decisive begins to shift. It rarely happens all at once, and it is almost never named directly. Care is still valued. Shepherding is still affirmed. No one stands up and announces that relationships will now be replaced by systems. And yet, quietly, the center of gravity moves. What was once held together by shared life begins to be sustained by coordination. Conversations give way to calendars. Discernment is supplemented by policy. Judgment, once exercised in close knowledge of people and their particularities, is gradually distributed through structures designed to ensure consistency and fairness. None of this is wrong in itself. In fact, much of it is necessary. Growth demands organization. Complexity requires structure. But something changes in the texture of care.

Pastoral attention, which depends on proximity, does not scale in the same way programs do. A pastor can know a few dozen people deeply, perhaps a few hundred with intentional effort, but not thousands in any meaningful sense. Beyond a certain point, shepherding becomes indirect. Presence gives way to representation. Relationship yields to role. The pastor is no longer the one who knows, but the one who oversees those who do. Again, this is not a moral failure. It is a human limit. And yet, churches often behave as though this limit can be indefinitely postponed. When attendance grows, assistants are added. When assistants multiply, layers emerge. When layers strain, systems are refined. The work continues, often with impressive efficiency. But the original logic of pastoral care—knowing and being known, noticing and being noticed—thins.

At this stage, something particularly delicate occurs. The pastor may remain central in identity while becoming distant in experience. Church members still speak of being shepherded by a particular leader whom they rarely, if ever, encounter. Their actual point of care is a staff member, a volunteer leader, or sometimes no one at all. Shepherding becomes symbolic—attached to a name rather than embodied in relationship. Symbols are powerful. They unify. They inspire. But they cannot substitute for judgment. Systems can distribute responsibility, but they cannot replicate the discerning attentiveness that comes from shared life. Policies can ensure uniformity, but not wisdom. Metrics can track participation, but not vulnerability. When pastoral judgment is displaced upward while proximity moves downward, authority and care begin to separate. And when that happens, belonging becomes fragile.

This separation helps explain why celebrity so often emerges in large churches, even when it is neither sought nor celebrated. When proximity diminishes, imagination fills the gap. The shepherd becomes a figure rather than a presence. Admiration replaces familiarity. The pastor becomes known about rather than known by. This is not primarily a failure of character. It is a structural outcome. When one person is symbolically responsible for thousands, charisma carries what presence no longer can. The cost of this shift is rarely paid by the most visible leaders. It is paid by the ordinary members whose connection to the church becomes increasingly abstract. They belong to something impressive, but not always to someone attentive. They are gathered, but not necessarily seen. The church may be thriving by every measurable standard, and yet still produce sheep without shepherds.

At this point, a question presses forward, though it is seldom asked openly: how much growth is too much? Not financially. Not organizationally. But pastorally. At what point does expansion begin to undermine the very care it was meant to extend? Few churches ask this question voluntarily, and fewer still act on it. The incentives point elsewhere. Growth brings resources, recognition, and influence. Larger platforms promise broader impact. Stopping, or even slowing, can feel like disobedience, fear, or failure. To choose smaller centers for the sake of deeper shepherding often appears irresponsible, especially when demand remains high and opportunity continues to expand.

When large churches collapse, the explanation is usually personal—scandal, burnout, moral failure. Sometimes those explanations are true. But often the deeper cause is structural. Too much weight has been concentrated in too few places for too long. Care has been centralized beyond human capacity. When disruption comes, as it always does, there are not enough roots to absorb the shock.

It is into this reality that Jesus speaks—not primarily by critique, but by example. When He looks upon the crowds and names them as sheep without shepherds, His response is not to consolidate authority or build a single, ever-expanding center around Himself. Instead, He multiplies proximity. He sends others. First the Twelve, then the Seventy-Two. He authorizes them not only to proclaim, but to heal, to stay in homes, to eat with people, to speak peace in ordinary places. This sending is often framed as evangelism, but the Gospels present it equally as the multiplication of care. Authority is exercised close to people, in villages and households, through shared life rather than distant oversight. Jesus does not remain the sole point of access. His shepherding is not diminished by delegation; it is multiplied by it.

Strikingly, He entrusts real authority to those who are not yet mature. The disciples misunderstand Him, compete with one another, and falter repeatedly. The communities they form are fragile and incomplete. And yet, they are entrusted with weight before they are fully ready to bear it. Weakness is not a disqualification; it is part of the formation. By sending early, Jesus allows roots to grow before the branches become too heavy. He does not guard His visibility as though it were fragile. He guards the sheep from abandonment.

What emerges here is not a rejection of growth, but a different logic of it—one that prioritizes care over scale, presence over prominence, and shared responsibility over centralized control. The question is not whether authority will exist, but where it will live—not whether leadership will be visible, but whether it will remain close enough to notice. This contrast prepares the ground for imagining a church whose strength lies not in how far it reaches, but in how it is rooted.

Here the banyan tree returns, no longer as a passing image but as a constructive vision for the church’s life. Christ Himself is the ground-source from which all life draws. Churches stand as trunks only because they are continually nourished by Him. Over time, those trunks may also sustain one another—drawing strength across seasons, sharing shade and nourishment—without becoming permanently dependent. Life flows upward from the ground and outward through branches, not inward toward a single point of control.

This vision quietly challenges the way growth is often imagined. A banyan-shaped church does not measure success by how much it can retain—how many people it can hold, how much influence it can concentrate, how many resources it can accumulate. It measures success by how faithfully life is released once it has taken root. Resources are shared rather than hoarded. Leaders are sent rather than retained out of fear. Opportunities are handed over rather than guarded, because the church trusts that life does not end at its own borders.

Such a church recognizes pastoral limits early, not as threats but as signals. When growth stretches proximity, it does not respond primarily by layering management upon management. Instead, it multiplies rooted shepherds. Elders and pastors are not merely deployed as functionaries under a distant authority; they are sent with real responsibility, real trust, and real pastoral weight. New congregations are planted, and existing ones strengthened, not as satellites orbiting a central brand but as living trunks capable of bearing the load of care in their own places.

This kind of multiplication inevitably risks loss. Influence thins. Visibility fades. The original center becomes harder to identify—much like the ancient banyan whose first trunk disappears beneath a forest of growth. But this is not failure. It is fruitfulness. Life has spread far enough that it no longer depends on being traced back to a single figure or institution.

What makes such release possible is not strategy, but faith. It requires a discipline that might be described as holding on by handing over. In Christian discipleship, believers are taught to entrust their burdens, futures, and identities to God rather than clutching them anxiously. Faith is learned not through accumulation, but through surrender. The same discipline must shape the church’s common life. Churches are called to relinquish resources, leaders, and even opportunity while they are still strong—not only when decline or crisis forces their hand. Strength, not weakness, is the moment of giving.

The original trunk does not weaken by releasing what it could keep. It entrusts itself to the same source that sustained it from the beginning. Life does not finally depend on possession, control, or visibility, but on remaining rooted in Christ. What is handed over is not lost; it is planted.

Yet this posture cannot belong only to those who send. Those who receive must be formed by it as well. New trunks must be taught that they are not endpoints. They are beginnings. They, too, are banyan trees in formation—called not to accumulate indefinitely, but to extend life outward in time. Leaders sent out must be trained not merely to lead congregations, but to release leadership again. What is received is not meant to be held forever, but stewarded faithfully and then passed on.

This kind of ecclesial generosity produces a particular kind of resilience. When leadership transitions occur, when exhaustion sets in, when scandal or death interrupts ministry—as they inevitably do—the community does not unravel overnight. Shepherding has already been distributed. Authority has already been shared. Pastoral presence does not vanish with the departure of a single figure, because it was never concentrated there in the first place. Roots already exist beneath the surface. The banyan does not implode. It redistributes weight.

This is not an argument against large churches, nor a romantic defense of small ones. It is a reminder that pastors are not infinite, churches are not weightless, and growth is never cost-free. Every expansion places new demands on attention, discernment, and care. Ignoring those demands does not eliminate them; it merely postpones their reckoning.

The question before the church is not whether it will grow, but how—and whether its growth will remain grounded in shepherding rather than concentrated in symbols. Which leaders are willing to choose smaller centers for the sake of deeper shepherding? Which churches are willing to release what they could retain? Which pastors will accept limits not as failure, but as faithfulness?

Jesus’ compassion still speaks. Sheep without shepherds are not merely unconverted. They are already present yet unattended—gathered, sincere, and exposed. The church honors the Good Shepherd not by building ever-larger centers around a few visible figures, but by ensuring that no one is lost simply because the church succeeded at growing.

Roots before reach. Care before scale. Presence before prestige.
### Formed by Song: How Music Shapes the Christian Life
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/formed-by-song-how-music-shapes-the-christian-life/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:33:36.000Z
Few things express our individual experience like music. Take the popularity of Spotify Wrapped, with its 200 million users sharing their year in music, complete with:

- Listening Age – the age Spotify thinks you are based on your most played songs.
- Clubs – six personality-driven communities with assigned “roles”.
- Listening Archive – a chronological record of your listening history.
- Wrapped Parties – competitions with up to nine friends for unique awards.

Age, a specified role within an assigned community, even a time-stamped catalogue of our lived experience via song––these are basic components of *identity.* And, as Andrew Root claims, modern identity wouldn’t be complete without a way to *perform*. Wrapped offers yet another way to share your identity (and even compete!) with others––albeit an identity collapsed down to data on our musical preferences.

While this is largely a harmless and entertaining marketing hook, it highlights the profound connection between music and identity formation. But it also reinforces the broader trend which encourages the reduction of identity to mere metrics. Metrics that categorize us, give us a sense of belonging, and are easily shareable (thus the identity we post can be easily “confirmed” by others’ likes).

So while we should not seek to be defined solely by our musical preferences, we should certainly use them intentionally for our formation. Music *is* catechesis. If the goal of catechesis is disenculturation and identity formation, we must not overlook music’s powerful influence in shaping composite lives.

## **The Need for Composite Identity**

Ross Douthat has noticed, like many others, that mystery and enchantment have been rushing back into the world, so to speak. However, this increased enchantment is playing out in various forms of mysticism and a renewed search for *gnosis—*some hidden truth or structure to the world. Douthat contends, then, that the current need for the church is to defend not merely the spiritual, but the religious. By that he means a defense not only of the *experience* of the divine but more so the ability to *think rationally about it* in structured and communal spaces––balancing depth and action. In other words, what we need is a bolstering of the *interior life*. Such a life is what Augustine referred to as the “composite” life: one characterized by a blend of contemplation *and* action––a life that isn’t adrift in mystic daydreaming but moves to the sound of orthodoxy.

This kind of grounded, composite life is what is needed in the face of [culturally collapsed identities](https://mereorthodoxy.com/soul-care-in-a-collapsed-age). Gordon Smith argues that anything less than this and we will not be able to navigate the social, cultural, and religious dynamics of a secular age with any kind of intellectual and emotional resilience.

The composite life was precisely *how* the early church cultivated what Rodney Stark calls “permeable boundaries”––those theological and ethical guards that helped them remain distinct as the church while meaningfully engaging the pagan world around them. These boundaries deepened their contemplation and directed their action.

But such a composite, contemplatively-active life was not created in a vacuum; it is informed and mediated by the church. And the church has had a historic tool for mediating such composite lives; namely, *catechesis.* I have written recently on the [importance of catechesis for spiritual formation](https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-the-creed-lords-prayer-and-ten-commandments-ground-spiritual-formation-and-soul-care) and others have written more extensively and helpfully on the subject. But one thing that can inadvertently fade into the background while ensuring doctrinal precision is the role of music.

**Augustine’s Dual Purpose of Song**

In his famous work *Confessions*, Augustine lays out two purposes for the use of hymns and singing in the church.

**Consolation**

Augustine says hymns should be sung so that the people do not become weak, exhausted, and depressed. Examples from literature and film abound, depicting the beautiful power of music to be balm in our suffering. One of my favorites is from *The Shawshank Redemption*. Prisoner Andy Dufresne is allowed some freedom in exchange for helping the warden with his accounting. While in the warden’s office, Dufresne locks the door, places a record of Mozart’s *The Marriage of Figaro* on the player, and pipes the music throughout the entire prison. This is how Redd, another prisoner, describes the music:

> I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don't wanna know. Some things are best left unsaid. I like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can't be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man at Shawshank felt free

This is the power of music. It transported those prisoners to a place of freedom, comfort, and beauty. But the music of life––the sounds and shapes of beauty and comfort––is increasingly muted to us. Our incessant connection to technology and the resulting anxiety has positioned us against the world in a posture of aggression.

Hartmut Rosa masterfully addresses this growing hostility and suggests we need an entirely different mode of relating to the world: what he calls *resonance*. In his work by that title, Rosa––interestingly––gives music specific praise for being able to “activate” resonance. Rosa says music has a unique capacity to unleash physical, emotional, and cognitive vibrations in the listener. He goes on to argue:

> If my contention is correct that music negotiates the quality of relation (to the world) itself, then we can begin to understand the eminently important function that it is capable of fulfilling in modern society. Music affirms and potentially corrects, moderates, and modifies our relation to the world.

We desperately need a negotiated way of relating to the world. We are in gridlock between an uncontrollable world and our obsession with trying to assert control over everything. Music is a powerful means to modify and correct this misplaced relation to the world.

Specifically, in the context of the church, music has the Spirit-infused power to initiate this negotiation. It is in the church that we encounter the ascended Christ––the one through whom the world was created––through song, word, and sacrament. Indeed, it is in the church that we, in Redd’s words, “sing about something so beautiful it can't be expressed in words”; namely, the Triune God.

### **Exhortation**

Augustine understood that the singing of hymns provided theological and spiritual instruction. But how exactly does singing accomplish this pedagogic end? In Paul’s letter to the Colossians, he tells the church to “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Colossians 3:16).

Paul desires the church to instruct each other through singing. They are to sing psalms—the inspired, God-breathed songs of Scripture—as well as hymns and spiritual songs, terms that together encompass the church’s sung praise shaped by the Word and the Spirit. Each of these serves as a means by which the church is instructed. Such music isn’t *spiritual* because we’ve used certain instruments or notes; it is spiritual when it is part of genuine worship in spirit and truth.

Music has always played a spiritually significant role in the life of God’s people. The LORD commissioned groups in Israel to ministries of music. For example, the Korahites’ sole job description was to sing to the Lord. In 2 Chronicles 20:19, they “stood up to praise the Lord, the God of Israel, with a very loud voice.”

The Korahites’ singing wasn’t just for show; their ministry had a purpose. Singing serves to refresh and reorient our souls in ways that other forms of instruction simply don’t. Singing helps us love God not only with our minds, but also with our hearts and souls and strength (Mark 12:30).

God set apart a ministry of singers to drive theological teaching deep into the hearts of his people. Singing combines the instructive seeds of biblical truths with the soul-softening ministry of music.

Looking to church history more broadly, Augustine himself––the 4th century theologian known for his *Confessions* and *The Trinity*––is an interesting case study in the power of music. Augustine was significantly shaped by the ministry and friendship of Ambrose. Ambrose was a bishop who understood the instructive power of song. Following the council of Nicaea in 325, and up against the ongoing influence of Arianism which denies the full deity of Jesus, Ambrose employed *singing* as one of his most potent tools against heresy. His congregation *sang* their Trinitarian faith and thus deepened as *composite* souls—not only experiencing their faith, but also learning to defend it. The music was both melody for their souls and instruction for their minds.

This was the liturgical environment that Augustine inhabited––soaring scores of Trinitarian praise. Perhaps he would have always written *The Trinity*, but surely his love for and thinking on his Trinitarian God was deepened by such singing. The truths sang in worship penetrated Augustine’s heart and mind.

## **How Then Shall We Sing?**

How can we grow in this ministry of singing? How can we sing so that our minds are instructed and our souls softened?

The single, simplest, most important step is to sing with your church. This carries the double benefit of being *exhorted* while also being *comforted*, singing shoulder to shoulder with the people of God. Sing, no matter how awkward you may feel, no matter how bad it is (I am almost certainly tone-deaf). There is something unique about voices lifted in unison with praise to the LORD. Augustine said it was this corporate singing of hymns that “stir my mind to greater religious fervor and kindle in me a more ardent form of piety."

Another helpful practice is to read (and sing) the Psalms. Biblical counselor David Powlison says we should use psalms in at least two ways.

First, we should use the Psalms like classical music. This, Powlison says, is the technical, detail-oriented, word-for-word storing of psalms in the heart. When we do this, we can powerfully speak and sing the living Word of God into our hearts at a moment's notice.

Second, we should use the Psalms like jazz. When we tuck away the words of the psalms in our minds, or have them on the page in front of us, we’re free to improvise on them—adding refrains or adapting them to a certain melody—in order to drive them deeper into our hearts. One of my seminary professors began each class by having us sing psalms from the *Trinity Psalter*. That was by far my most formative class––and that singing is one of the only things I still remember from it.

One Scottish pastor suggested singing all of the Psalms in a year in addition to regular, systematic Bible reading. If we heeded his advice, we’d quickly become familiar with many of the Psalms and be able to “play” them like jazz as they mingle down into our hearts through melody.

The “how” is not complicated—sing with your church, sing in your home; sing hymns, sing Psalms. Let them all penetrate your heart and imagination as only music can do.

## **The Singing Savior**

No one knows our misplaced relation to the world like Jesus does. And no one knows the remedy for such distortion like the Savior himself. He alone embodied the composite life, and everything he does––whether in his contemplation or in his action––has eternal significance, and that includes his singing.

Jesus sang with others. At the Last Supper, Jesus and his disciples sang a hymn together (Matthew 26:30). This was most likely a portion of what’s known as the Hallel Psalms—Psalms 113–118\. Jesus, the Word himself, led his disciples in singing the very Scripture he embodied. The next day, Jesus died with a psalm on his lips. He endured the cross to the sound of music, so that we might sing those same psalms with joy as God’s children.

It’s worth noting that the Psalm of the cross––Psalm 22––goes on to say that he will sing the Father’s praise *in the midst of the congregation*. Jesus, our divine choir director, cried the lyrics of verse 1 so he could give us new life—including voices!—and lead us in song to the LORD.

The Savior of souls was a singing soul himself. The one who turns hearts of stone into hearts of flesh gave us the gift of song to drive that gospel reality and its instructive implications deep into our souls––carrying us from gray places on the chorus of heaven.
### The Strange Saints of A. Muia’s Desert Between Two Seas
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-strange-saints-of-a-muias-desert-between-two-seas/
Last updated: 2026-04-20T17:18:44.000Z
A. Muia. [*A Desert Between Two Seas: A Novel in Stories*](https://www.ugapress.org/9780820374383/a-desert-between-two-seas/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). University of Georgia Press, 2025\. $26.95\. 248 pp.

In the mid-third century AD, a Christian teenager fled into the Egyptian desert, seeking safety from religious persecution after his own brother-in-law betrayed him to the Roman pagan authorities. It turned out well for him at the end. He found a cave with a fresh water supply and a palm tree nearby—all he needed for food, drink, and clothing all at once. Eventually, a raven started bringing him his daily bread too. So he remained in his cave, in daily prayer and holy solitude, for the next one hundred years.

Legend holds it that the more famous Desert Saint, Anthony, befriended the very elderly Paul the Hermit towards the end of the latter’s life. Anthony buried him eventually as well. Even desert hermits need other people, it seems, at the vulnerable end of life stage. Even if the ravens can richly supply their other needs.

The [Desert Saints](https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/dispatch-faith/lent-asceticism-desert-fathers-christianity-2/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), from the days of John the Baptist, that horsehair-wearer and honeyed locust-eater, have always been an odd lot. Saints they are, no doubt about it—men and women bent on the unwavering pursuit of God. And yet, often their lives are filled with sins they combat and, in some cases, cannot escape. Anthony, for one, had spent his twenty years of solitude, locked inside an abandoned Roman fort, fighting with demons that would not leave him alone. It isn’t just other people who cause us to sin, after all. We ourselves bring our sinful nature with us wherever we go, and these sins are what Anthony’s demons represent.

But what about the role the desert itself plays in the story of the saints it beckons, welcomes, persecutes, torments, sanctifies, and eventually absorbs into its sandy depths? That is the question at the heart of A. Muia’s beautiful new novel about a different desert—and a different sort of saints. Set in the Sonora Desert of Baja, California, *A Desert Between Two Seas* spans a period of over a century, from 1820 to 1937\. Told in short staccato bursts, episodic stories, each one self-standing yet all of them connecting and extending each other, the tales revolve around two main characters, both a sort of modern-day desert saint.

At the opening of the novel, we meet the first of them: Fr. Espín, who is priest of the mission in Mulegé. He rescues a baby from his dead mother’s womb—literally cutting him out of the dead woman. The orphan, then, becomes his ward—a beloved son of the sort a priest could never otherwise have. The boy has a talent: he dives for pearls, bringing them back to his adoptive father, who decorates the local church with them. But one day the boy drowns while diving, and the devastated Fr. Espín cannot remain where he is. The locals in the mission do not blame him, yet he blames himself for encouraging the boy in such a risky activity that ultimately led to his death. And so, he departs into the desert: “At some hour in the night, he rose. He wrote no letter to the superior and blessed no one nor prayed. Abandoning all the sacred things, he slipped into the wilderness, a poor and exiled Cain with only the hand of God to recommend him.”

Is he a Cain, though? That is Fr. Espín’s view of himself, as he departs into the desert, like the Desert Saints of old. His very torment by his heavy guilt, though, already shows that he is no Cain, someone who killed a brother he hated in a fit of rage. Still, blood guilt demands atonement, and Fr. Espín wants nothing more than to atone for his sins in the rest of his life. But how?

Seeing himself as a curse upon the people whose care had been entrusted to him, Fr. Espín is seeking the solitude of Paul the Hermit and Anthony the Great. But just as too many ancient Desert Saints could not escape other people even in the farthest and loneliest depths of the desert, so Fr. Espín unwillingly finds himself beset by the company of others, time after time. Is it God’s hand bringing them to him at a time of need—his own and that of others?

The most poignant of all is the abandoned deaf toddler, born without ears, who is dropped off in his remote desert hut one day, twenty years after he had first taken care of the orphan boy at Mulegé. He takes care of this little girl, unexpectedly thrust into his life, remembering his love for the drowned boy before. To love a child is easy, natural, even for a hermit. As he picks her up for the first time, he remembers the feel of the infant boy in his arms decades earlier. But then one day the child’s mother, who had mysteriously abandoned her, just as mysteriously reappears to claim her back. Seeking to protect the child, Fr. Espín takes her along and escapes yet again.

But children have a habit of growing up—*Deo volente*. So it is that this little girl, Dolores, the bearer of sorrows, becomes the subject of the stories in the second half of the book, after her path diverges from that of the elderly Fr. Espín. Her life is not easy, and she too keeps moving around, a desert saint on the run from persecutions of men. And she acquires a reputation as a Pistolera, a violent shooter unafraid to protect herself. In one of the stories, a man who had known Dolores in the past talks about her with a woman now living in a house that once used to be that of Dolores: “She said the whole territory now talked of a woman who had killed three men or perhaps more. Such stories had a way of growing, and soon there might be ten or twenty men dead in the telling. It was said La Pistolera could hear nothing from the world of men but other forces spoke to her from beyond. Had he not heard the songs? Of pounding hearts and slain lovers and a great mane of hair that encircled the unwary.”

It is not surprising that Muia received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction for this novel. While her work is not Gothic in O’Connor’s distinctive way, her writing is undeniably spiritually haunted. The two main characters of this novel, the priest and the deaf Pistolera, are an unlikely pairing, yet are kindred spirits formed by the desert setting of their lives. Their suffering, while profound, is never predictable or clichéd. Neither hermits nor monastics at the end, they see something that remains invisible to all others around them.

Only this desert could produce such saints, Muia’s stories suggest. Men and women of sorrows, convicted of their sins, haunted by the barren desert around them—this desert capable of bringing death to many in myriad ways. Yet they remain forever in love with it too, almost in spite of themselves, feeling its rhythms in their very marrow. And at the end, the desert alone can give these weary saints their longed-for rest.
### Tradition Didn’t Kill My Faith. Amnesia Almost Did.
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/tradition-didnt-kill-my-faith-amnesia-almost-did/
Last updated: 2026-04-20T17:18:47.000Z
For most of my Christian life, tradition was treated as a liability. Not openly despised—just quietly sidelined. Creeds were “helpful, but optional.” Doctrine was “important, but secondary.”

What mattered most was sincerity, immediacy, and whether faith felt alive right now. The assumption was simple: if belief ever felt unstable, the solution was subtraction. Remove what felt inherited. Remove what felt fixed. Remove anything that sounded like it came from someone else’s century.

At the time, this didn’t feel like rebellion. It felt responsible. Honest. Humble, even.

What I didn’t realize was that in shedding memory, I wasn’t uncovering a purer faith. I was hollowing it out.

The problem was never that Christianity remembered too much. The problem was that we stopped remembering together.

American evangelicalism is very good at producing faith that feels personal. It is far less good at producing faith that lasts.

Many people who walk away from Christianity are described as victims of doctrine—crushed by rigidity, suffocated by authority. Sometimes that’s true. But just as often, the opposite is the case. They were never meaningfully formed by doctrine at all. They weren’t worn down by creeds; they were sustained by vibes.

Faith was something they felt, not something they received. Something they curated, not something they inherited.

That kind of faith can be exhilarating. It can also evaporate quickly. When belief isn’t anchored in shared memory, it becomes weightless. It floats—until it drifts into whatever current happens to be strongest at the moment.

In churches with thin memory, Christianity quietly reorganizes itself around personalities. Scripture is quoted but rarely received. Authority is denied in principle and exercised constantly in practice. Someone still decides what matters, what counts as faithful, what gets emphasized—but those decisions are no longer accountable to anything older than the present moment.

When tradition is pushed aside, it doesn’t leave neutrality behind. It leaves a vacuum.

And into that vacuum rush charisma, moral urgency, cultural pressure, and the unspoken anxieties of the age. Christianity doesn’t disappear; it just becomes more reactive. More brittle. More dependent on the stability of leaders and the agreement of crowds.

Ironically, this is how faith becomes most fragile. When nothing is fixed, everything is negotiable. When belief has no memory, it has no resistance to reinvention. The faith bends—not because it is generous, but because it has no spine.

I didn’t understand this until I watched how often faith collapsed not under persecution or intellectual challenge, but under exhaustion. People didn’t leave because Christianity demanded too much. They left because it demanded that they carry the whole thing themselves.

I didn’t return to the creeds because I wanted certainty. I returned to them because I realized I couldn’t keep pretending faith was a solo project.

Evangelicalism treats belief like a private achievement—something I generate through insight, sincerity, or moral resolve. If faith weakens, the assumption is that I need better arguments or stronger feelings. The burden always falls back on the individual.

Historically, the Church understood belief differently. Faith was never meant to be sustained alone. The creeds weren’t written to stifle thought or end conversation. They were written to ensure that what Christians confessed together remained recognizable across time and place.

When we say “I believe” together, we are admitting something deeply unfashionable: belief is not something we invent from scratch. It is something we receive. Something we are carried by when our own confidence runs out.

The Church remembers on our behalf. It holds words steady when our language falters. It confesses truths that do not depend on our clarity, enthusiasm, or emotional health.

Much of contemporary Christian conversation revolves around deconstruction. Sometimes it is careful. Sometimes it is careless. What it rarely is, is complete.

Deconstruction without memory does not produce freedom—it produces fatigue. When every belief must be justified from first principles, faith becomes unsustainable.

Tradition does not eliminate authority. It restrains it. It binds teachers and leaders to something older than themselves.

Tradition does not promise certainty. It promises continuity.

Christianity is not a self-improvement project or an experiment in relevance. It is a faith that remembers for us when we can no longer remember ourselves. Tradition didn’t kill my faith. For a long time, forgetting who we were almost did.
### Liturgies of the Wild and Non-Expressivist Religion
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/liturgies-of-the-wild-and-non-expressivist-religion/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:33:43.000Z
These are two of the most delightful paragraphs I'll read all year, I expect:

> When it comes time for the Eucharist—communion—I find myself compelled to take it. There seems to be no choice in the matter. I watch my body walk me up to the priest without delay. I’ve been waiting fifty years, I can’t wait any longer. It was a little hasty, and rather against protocol, but it just sort of happened.  
>  
> I have plans for the rest of the afternoon but have to cancel them. I drive through a red light on the way home, shouting to hooting drivers that *I’ve been to church and have no idea what is happening*! I lie in my darkened bedroom and let all I’ve described to you move through me. I feel different, and the feeling doesn’t pass. It was like wildness and discipline dancing with each other.

Lest I be misunderstood: No, I don't think you should be taking the Eucharist if you are not a baptized member in good standing of a local church. Shaw is quite right about the protocol.

Even so: I love the sheer joy he evokes, as well as the sort of surprised and delighted bewilderment of the sentence "I've been to church and have no idea what is happening!"

The church in question in this case is an Eastern Orthodox parish Shaw attended not long after his conversion. And it has become his home. The parish and, really, the Orthodox liturgy, is an anchor to Shaw's entire book, as it happens. I will likely return to the book in fuller form later, so I don't want to say too much more about the book as a whole yet.

Rather, I want to make an observation about how Shaw's Orthodoxy anchors the book. Specifically, I do not think an evangelical could write *Liturgies of the Wild*. This is why: It's that line in Shaw about wildness and discipline dancing with each other. The discipline seems to come largely from the set forms of Orthodox worship. Evangelicalism, by contrast, has virtually no set forms at all. Rather, as John Ahern argued here yesterday, evangelical churches tend to be characterized by a kind of lowest common denominator Christian theology that is decidedly *not* Catholic or Orthodox, but also isn't *really* Protestant in any kind of deep and rooted way.

To take an example from my college days at Nebraska, I was a theologically curious student who liked books and arguments and ideas. (I was an English and History double major, so no surprise there.) I had many questions. For example, I didn't know what to think of baptism. But if I asked someone from any of the dozen non-denominational campus ministries about baptism, the answer I'd get would be some variant of "Christians disagree about this, we try not to divide over it," followed by a very lame and generic account of credobaptism that would likely manage to say virtually nothing about the local church. When I asked my RUF campus minister the same question, the conversation was quite different: "Well, I'm an ordained pastor in the Presbyterian Church in America. So the simplest way I could answer that is to talk you through what our confession says. But I believe the confession because I believe it's a faithful account of Scripture. So if you want to work through the relevant biblical texts, I'd be happy to do that too." The specifically Protestant theology of RUF, and the theology of the Westminster standards in particular, anchored the conversation in much the same way that Shaw's Orthodoxy anchors his argument about stories, initiation, maturity, and so on.

Mostly evangelicals do not relate to tradition in this way, I think. But we could. As I read Shaw my mind reached back [to an old piece by David Henreckson at *Comment*](https://comment.org/a-regimen-of-grace/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Here he is modeling one way this could be done:

> At its best, Protestantism offers a simple regimen of grace. Perhaps we could benefit from adding a feast day or three to our liturgical calendars, but the singular focus on what matters most may be the tradition’s greatest virtue. Strip everything away, and one can see the grace at the heart of things. External aids are useful pedagogies. Sunlit stained-glass windows beam down colourful shadows of saints—sacred and secular. They can become their own visual piece of the liturgy.  
>  
> But as John’s Gospel reminds us so often, these signs and wonders should point us to Jesus. Jesus in an ornate golden basilica. Jesus in a pristine Gothic chapel. Jesus in a dilapidated Covenanter church. Jesus in the shadow of Mary. Jesus in the tone deaf. Jesus in the trespassing drunk. We simply need the eyes to see through the excess to the ordinary grace within.

There is a superficial way of telling the story of American Protestantism in which the Mainline is progressive and indifferent to orthodox (all too often true and accurate, to be clear) and evangelicalism is conservative and reliably orthodox. It is that second part of the equation I stumble over most.

In reality, it seems likelier to me that both the Mainline and Evangelicalism have ended up adopting an indifferent and apathetic attitude toward their theological forebears, such that both have ended up with a kind of lowest common denominator Christianity whose chief purpose is facilitating identity expression for its adherents. These days, that identity expression is closely tied to politics, of course, since politics is one of the primary meaning making spaces for many Americans today. My point here is simply that the particularities of ecclesial traditions is lost in the search for a theology conducive to maximizing individual expression. That is severe and perhaps overstated, but I do not think it is wrong in the broad strokes.

The problem with this is perhaps answered most neatly by Shaw: If you want people to be bewildered by church, then church needs to be weird in some way. It does not need to be weird in the way Shaw's Orthodox parish is. But if church seems to consist largely in confirming people in their priors—either by an explicit endorsing of their political vision, as if Jesus shared their *exact* politics or through a consumeristic liturgy that is nearly indistinguishable from a fusion of concert and TED talk—then I suspect that even when a sincere seeker stumbles into our church, as Shaw did in his book, that seeker will not find anything that helps them to actually encounter Christ and grow into Christian maturity. The life of the church impedes the life of indulgent self-expression. And as Wendell Berry said long ago, it is the impeded stream that sings.
### Moral and Spiritual Hunger in the Classroom
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/moral-and-spiritual-hunger-in-the-classroom/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:33:47.000Z
Teaching the first day of class could be a chore, but it’s become one of my favorites. This year marks my tenth of full-time teaching. Since most of my job is now administrative, I primarily teach introductory courses—often to first-years who (as I discovered once again this past week) have never taken a philosophy or theology course before entering my classroom.

The first day of class starts with the usual introductions and a Whitworth-themed bingo ice-breaker that forces students to get up and walk around and ask questions about their classmates’ hobbies and backgrounds. But I reserve much of the first class to frame the two central questions of the semester: “Is there a difference between a significant life and a meaningful one?” and “What makes for a good life?” Whitworth University

Whitworth does not require its students to sign a statement of faith, as do many other church-related universities. And so in recent years, I’ve come to expect a very pluralistic mix. There’s always a solid contingent of non-denominational students who go to local churches with names like “The Bridge” or “Elevate.” Perhaps there’s a smattering of mainline kids, but that’s a shrinking number for the obvious [demographic reasons](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/opinion/interesting-times-ryan-burge.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). And there is always a solid core of rigorously *un*churched students as well. I initially wondered whether my class—which dives deep into Plato, Augustine, virtue ethics, and questions about love of friend, neighbor, and enemy—would resonate equally across the whole religious spectrum.

There was no reason to worry.

A [new piece](https://www.chronicle.com/article/religious-colleges-are-booming-why?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) by Clark Gilbert in the Chronicle of Higher Education points to the consistent, long-term rise of interest in religious higher education. While there are obvious [examples](https://kristindumez.substack.com/p/knowing-and-being-known) of individual faith-based institutions imploding, there is [hard](https://www.christianitytoday.com/2025/01/christian-colleges-continue-enrollment-growth-record/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) [data](https://christianscholars.com/scaremongers-take-note-christian-higher-education-enrollment-recently-grew-by-1-4/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to be found [all around](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22%5F303.90.asp?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that smaller Christian, Jewish, Mormon, as well as historically-black colleges and universities are bucking the trend of declining enrollment. Or *can* buck the trend, I’d like to add.

The Chronicle piece takes up an argument that I’ve been making for [some](https://www.plough.com/-/media/files/plough/lookinside/l/liberatingartsen%5Flookinside.pdf?la=en&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) [time](https://christianscholars.com/mind-and-heart-addressing-the-crisis-of-formation-in-christian-higher-education/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com): faith-based institutions have the *capacity* and the *charism* to do something that secular and research-focused institutions [find more challenging](https://chadwellmon.com/2017/10/01/dont-look-to-universities-for-moral-clarity/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). We have at our fingertips traditions and texts and century-spanning questions that provide soil for moral and spiritual—as well as intellectual—formation. We have incentive to speak from our normative convictions about what makes for an examined, faithful, and good life. I would even say we have a moral obligation to do so.

Drawing on the [sociological work](https://iasculture.org/research/publications/death-character?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of James Davison Hunter, Gilbert writes:

> The risk is that without a shared mooring, morality gets reduced to nonbinding platitudes and “virtue on the cheap.” Still, the very fabric of strong democratic culture depends on strong democratic character. An anchoring in substantive values can be achieved, even in settings with diverse stakeholders, if leaders will engage in deliberate pluralistic bridge building.

Let’s go back to my classroom.

I tell my students very directly about the normative commitments that I bring to the classroom. I really believe that the Christian gospel is true. I tell them I believe that there are higher goods than material success, that there are many false loves—of money, power, and self-interest—that will get their tenterhooks in them during their time in college. I confront them with Socrates’ intuition that most of them are not leading truly examined and meaningful lives. I have them enact Plato’s Cave Allegory to the bitter end when the truth-teller is martyred by those who prefer to stare at projected images on a screen. I ask them to identify with the young Augustine’s tortuous journey through various sexual addictions and social attachments and broken hearts and mental health crises and dalliances with astrology and novel religious movements. I introduce them to Christian Wiman asking how the good God of the universe could also be responsible for creating the [cancer cell](https://harpers.org/archive/2020/02/the-cancer-chair/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). I have them write their own [eulogy](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/opinion/sunday/david-brooks-the-moral-bucket-list.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) at the beginning and end of the semester. I provide the big questions; they have to examine themselves to begin formulating answers. I don’t need them to arrive at the same normative or religious judgments as I do. But they have the chance to cultivate a deeper understanding of what frames a life of meaning, and the virtues that make such a life possible.

I’ve found that if I’m upfront about (a) my own commitments, while (b) offering an open invitation for them to interrogate their own commitments in light of our shared texts and conversations, the “problem” of pluralism evaporates. But why?

My own perception, at least, is that my young adults are spiritually (in the broadest sense of the term) ravenous. They are left hungry by what one former dean of Harvard called [“excellence without a soul.”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excellence%5FWithout%5Fa%5FSoul?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) Whether they can name it or not, they instinctively know that resume virtues are thin gruel compared to the hearty excellences of character that they hope will one day be mentioned at their funeral. And yes, I remind them regularly of the evasive, haunting reality that their death is certain and that a *good* death is not an easy feat.

I worry that many of us Millennial academics think too little of our students. After all, if you take the time to ask, you’ll discover that most of them have encountered deep loss already. (I invite them in week two to submit a note—anonymized if they prefer—explaining what losses and griefs they are bringing to class.) Many of them *want* to wrestle with life, death, and all the ultimate things. They recognize that they do not know how to disagree well with those who hold opposing views. They *want* to be given the freedom to put their devices away so they can be fully present in the classroom. Many of them feel called to a vocational identity and not just a career.

I said earlier that religious institutions *can* buck the trend of declining enrollment. They *can* be countervailing forces in a higher-ed economy where efficiency, ease, and excellence-without-soul are the main currency. But making good on our capacity and charism to offer something of enduring substance will take work—as well as a clear sense of purpose, and often strategic sacrifice. Whatever the sacrifice, however, there are both principled *and* pragmatic reasons to venture our institutions into something riskier but decidedly more abiding and meaningful.

Our students crave this. Do we?

[*originally published on Substack*](https://davidhenreckson.substack.com/p/moral-and-spiritual-hunger-in-the)
### The Plight of the Protestant Scholar
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-need-for-protestant-scholars/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:33:49.000Z
This February, [our fledgling Christian study center](https://www.thecoverdalehouse.org/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in Princeton, the Coverdale House, will begin reading through Luther’s *Large Catechism* with around 15 students. It’s a sort of Beta launch for our study center—Beta because we are doing it primarily so we can listen carefully for that “click” that happens when you get the perfect product-market fit. Each Monday evening, we’ll get together for dinner, a short prayer service of Psalms, other Scripture, and appointed collects, and then we get to dive into the primary text. It will be facilitated by two graduate students from the Religion Department, [Onsi Kamel](https://religion.princeton.edu/people/onsi-kamel?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and [John Walker](https://religion.princeton.edu/people/john-walker?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), and we’re delighted that the renowned [Phil Cary](https://philpeople.org/profiles/phillip-cary?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) from Eastern University will stop by and give us his expertise in April. So I fully expect to hear the “click” aforementioned.

We’re choosing Luther to start off for a number of reasons. For one thing, it is a beautiful summation of the gospel, written in simple and immediate language. It will be familiar and affirmative and accessible. But, for another thing, it will also likely shock us. Many of us Protestants in the room will be surprised to find Luther urging us to cross ourselves, Luther telling us to look to our baptisms for assurance of salvation, Luther, like a Desert Father, denouncing one of the “mortal” sins, *acedia*. We are, as it turns out, reading a historical document. It’s not modern, decidedly not modern evangelical. It will force everyone to engage with the text historically and carefully, and not merely as a mirror held up to one’s nodding self.

The Coverdale House has chosen to make part of its vision the furtherance of specifically Protestant scholarship. Of course, we want the furtherance of all Christian scholarship generally, but we see a special need to support historic, orthodox Protestant traditions in the academy. That may seem like an odd choice, so I’d like to explain why we have chosen to make it.

\*\*

There has been some disagreement recently about Protestant evangelicals in the academy. It’s over the degree to which [Protestant evangelicals lag behind their Catholic counterparts](https://firstthings.com/the-problem-with-the-evangelical-elite/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), as Aaron Renn’s recent *First Things* article argued. On the one hand, it seems pretty clear that Catholic intellectuals dominate the scene of Christian scholarship—not just in the area of theology, but in every area.

Kamel himself [gave a good example of this](https://adfontesjournal.com/web-exclusives/the-power-of-the-catholic-intellectual-ecosystem/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com): back in 2021, Ross Douthat interviewed Sohrab Ahmari on *New York Times’s* Ezra Klein Show. Though both relatively conservative Catholics, they talked about the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin and her rejection of the idea that sex is purely private. Ahmari and Douthat noted that Dworkin’s ideas in an odd way supported St. Augustine’s notion of *libido dominandi*. Kamel’s point is not that Douthat or Ahmari are particularly great scholars. In fact, that’s just it—they aren’t scholars at all, but journalists, and yet they are beneficiaries of an incredible intellectual ecosystem that can cultivate this kind of rich and capacious approach to traditional Catholic theology. They are the fruit of a strong Catholic intellectual ecosystem. Why is it so difficult to imagine this sort of thing happening outside of Catholic intellectual circles?

Kamel takes a few stabs at this question:

> First: not only have Protestants lost the institutions that were formerly home for us, but we also lack robust representation at elite levels in the secular academy. This, in turn, means there is less distinctly Protestant work to popularize. Because there is less Protestant work to popularize, public intellectuals are not reading Protestants on a regular basis; the void is filled by Catholics.

Now, this is a good answer, but there are other answers. One is that this is all a trick of the data: “Protestants” of the sort Kamel is talking about are [an exceedingly rare phenomenon as it is](https://firstthings.com/goldilocks-protestantism/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), compared with Catholics. If you mean by “Protestant” the mainline denominations, that is a dwindling crowd (one which is, in fact, facing demographic collapse). If you mean more confessional Protestant denominations (Presbyterian Church in America, Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, the Anglican Church in North America, etc.), this, although growing, is an even tinier crowd.

Still others would say that the evidence cited for the dominance of the “Catholic elites” over the “evangelical elites” in the academy [is anecdotal](https://americanreformer.org/2026/01/there-are-evangelical-elites-look-harder/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), and that the broader trends are, in fact, in the other direction: Catholics in large numbers are converting to evangelicalism, not vice versa. [The conversions that tend to get talked about](https://wng.org/articles/the-lure-of-rome-1767834305?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in the circles of higher education are only a cloistered countercurrent with outsized influence. So maybe all this doomsday talk about the dearth of evangelical Protestant scholars is overblown.

Yet another position might be this: why should any of this matter? Evangelicals, Protestants, Catholics should all be working together. Vying for the most elite or ambitious intellectual ecosystem is surely a bad look. We all can benefit from each other’s scholarship, so let’s build institutions together. Let’s major in the majors and minor in the minors; academia is already a tough place for Christian scholars as it is.

\*\*

What is left out of this discussion is an important asymmetry: Catholic intellectual institutions are allowed to be Catholic, to act Catholic, to assume Catholic theology is true, and to admit to assuming it is true. Take [Lumen Christi Institute](https://lumenchristi.org/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) at the University of Chicago, for instance. No one is unclear as to what it believes and where its theological convictions will lie. And that is its strength. The fact that it is an institution that owns its beliefs is what gives it energy and confidence.

On the other hand, evangelical and historic Protestant intellectual institutions generally aren’t encouraged to call themselves evangelical or Protestant. They don’t so much emphasize their theological distinctives as blunt them. They don’t attempt to argue that such distinctives are particularly important for the scholarly life. Institutions responsible for the formation of Christian scholars tend to emphasize only three quasi-theological topics: apologetics, vocation, and moral formation. But they tend, on the whole, to demur to go too much further. “Mere Christianity” is an oft-repeated slogan.

And why not, one might well ask? What do arcane and granular theological issues afford us? What does the view of the Eucharist, for instance, or what sort of liturgy one ought to have, or different views of atonement, really have to do with mainstream scholarly inquiry?

Yet here, again, is an asymmetry. I suspect that if you asked major Catholic scholars in a variety of disciplines, they would be shocked by the question. Ask the late Josef Ratzinger, or Eugene McCarraher, or Margarita Mooney Clayton, “Does the doctrine of the Eucharist affect how you do theology? history? sociology?” I am sure of what their response would be. Of *course* their view of the Eucharist affects their work. Of *course* the shape of the liturgy matters (after all, isn’t the law of faith the law of prayer?). This might be incomprehensible to many evangelicals Protestants, but that in itself tells you something.

The bottom line is that Catholic intellectuals tend to assume that *all* theology is relevant to *all* areas of intellectual endeavor. If it’s not obvious how, it’s still worth assuming it nevertheless until it becomes apparent. On the other hand, theology for the evangelical scholar tends to be a sort of God-of-the-gaps, an occasional mortar to stick in crumbling joinery.

The situation is not helped by the reduction of “theology” to the three issues mentioned above, at least in institutions responsible for forming Christian scholars—apologetics, vocation, and moral formation. After all, what is the point of apologetics when the actual content of the faith in question is underdetermined on all its most crucial points? What is “moral formation” if we don’t have a clear sense of how to arrive at agreement on moral issues, because we have avoided discussing the nature of the Church and her polity?

It won’t work, either, to say in answer, “But mere Christianity!” There is, in fact, a very good author who discusses why this is not an adequate response, by the name of C. S. Lewis, and he wrote a book on the subject which I can recommend, whose title I will leave you to guess. In it, he says that mere Christianity in relation to different theological traditions

> is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. …But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, not a place to live in.

Lewis is right, not only about people, but also about institutions in higher education. The hall is a place to wait in, not a place to live in. To be genuinely useful to scholars, institutions that equip Christian scholarship and form Christian scholars ought to do so with convictions.

\*\*

But won’t this lead to more division in the body of Christ, rather than less? I suspect not. If I look at my bookshelf, it has the names of many great Catholic thinkers, like Rémi Brague, Josef Pieper, Josef Ratziner, Henri du Lubac, and so forth. I am convinced that these people, by being serious about their Catholicism, have made me a better Protestant, not least because they have helped me to conform my mind to the pattern of Christ. Many Reformed, Lutheran, Anglican, and Baptist Christians I know have deeply benefited from Catholics being good at being Catholics. The whole academy has benefited, secular and Christian.

Yet there are riches within the magisterial Protestant tradition that desperately need recovering too. They are criminally underrated, although there are exciting projects [attempting](https://www.wtsbooks.com/products/reformed-catholicity-the-promise-of-retrieval-for-theology-and-biblical-interpretation-michaell-swain-allen-9780801049798?srsltid=AfmBOoqIEkpgxUqyFkHDEljoDtS1QAwSow7Qk1jcxncjRI-qKfE-8mM1&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) [their](https://www.anglicanism.info/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) [recovery](https://davenantinstitute.org/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Catholics need these riches. The secular academy needs them. It is for the good of the whole church that Protestants be good at being Protestant. Or, to borrow the words of John Henry Newman about his own Catholic faith, Protestants in the academy ought to become the cordial and deliberate maintainers and witnesses of the doctrines they are to support.

For that reason, the Coverdale House has a two-fold mission. First, the furtherance of all Christian scholarship, through formation of every Christian scholar. Second, the more specific furtherance of historic, orthodox Protestant scholarship (Reformed, Anglican, Lutheran, Baptist), especially that scholarship which seeks to recover and further a Protestant vision of the Bible, theology, worship, human experience, humane letters, and society as a whole.

\*\*

The Coverdale House is entering a time when we’re ready to begin operation. That takes support, and, if you feel called to support financially, there are ways to do so. We are particularly looking for partners who can be anchors for our first three years of operation. Please get in touch [through our website](https://www.thecoverdalehouse.org/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) if you would like to learn more.

[*originally published on Substack*](https://thecoverdalehouse.substack.com/p/the-plight-of-the-protestant-scholar)
### The Need for Father-Scholars
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-need-for-father-scholars/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:33:51.000Z
“It’s so boring.” This, apparently, is one of the main reasons Gen Z parents are [not reading to their children](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jun/02/gen-z-parents-reading-kids?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Only 41% of parents are reading to their children under five years old, down from 64% in 2012\. While that’s the data we have and it’s specific to Gen Z, it isn’t a stretch to imagine that books on the whole have less of a place in young families than they did in the past.

Growing up with my grandparents, I can remember many nights of my grandfather reading me to sleep with a hefty children’s Bible, James Herriot’s *All Creatures Great and Small* memoirs, *Hank the Cowdog,* and many more tales. I still have the children’s Bible and James Herriot books, with the tattered copies of Herriot sitting across from me on my bookshelf as I write this. I remember my grandfather laughing out loud at Hank the Cowdog’s overzealous shenanigans on the ranch and crying during moments of joy and heartbreak from the farm stories in Harriot’s memoirs. We shared emotions together and, naturally, stories; stories that are the imagination of my childhood and stories that formed both my literal and symbolic vocabulary.

These are the stories that parents find too boring to give their children and are replacing with screens. And it reveals the deeper problem that if parents find reading simple children’s stories to their kids too boring then of course reading for themselves would seem to be too boring as well. Nevermind the [positive effects of boredom](https://hbr.org/2025/08/you-need-to-be-bored-heres-why?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) for our lives and mental wellbeing, reading books is one of the primary ways we develop wisdom through submitting ourselves to time with sustained thoughts and stories and wrestling with them in our lives.

As good as podcasts and YouTube videos can be, the medium is passive. It doesn’t require us to lean into the world that books aim to construct for us the same way. Books are the best way for us to [exit the dopamine-addiction economy](https://mereorthodoxy.com/to-go-forward-we-must-go-backward) and develop free-thinking minds that enable us to view the world through the lenses of generations of wisdom we have received as an inheritance. Instead of getting second-hand knowledge from passive mediums that require nothing from us but a click, we should pursue first-hand wisdom from the active engagement with ideas and stories. It should be remarkable to us that it costs less than $10 to read Plato.

The question for many parents who see this issue and want to correct it in their families—and I have dads in particular in mind here—might not be “Is reading good?” but more practical. “What should I read?” “What is my reading for?” “How can I actually make time to read?” These are the questions someone would ask who might not yet consider themselves a “Reader” but are looking to opt-out more and more from the algorithmic slop-world they find themselves sucked into and begin reclaiming their life and family. It’s for this reason that I believe fathers, and young fathers in particular, should think of themselves in a new light: as a *father-scholar*.

## The Wisdom of The Father

I’m often struck by the fact that the book of Proverbs was written from a father to his son about his and the mother’s parental instruction. “Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction, and don’t reject your mother’s teaching, for they will be a garland of favor on your head and pendants around your neck” (Proverbs 1:8-9). The parent’s instruction is raising his children in the fear of the Lord which is “the beginning of wisdom” (1:7). The Lord who is, remember, *Our Father*. The father admonishes his son:

> “Wisdom is supreme—so get wisdom.  
> And whatever else you get, get understanding.  
> Cherish her, and she will exalt you;  
> if you embrace her, she will honor you.  
> She will place a garland of favor on your head;  
> she will give you a crown of beauty.”  
>  
> (Proverbs 4:7-9)

The father tells his son to do whatever it takes to get wisdom, and he will show his son how to do it through his instruction, which is guiding him in the fear of the Lord. Proverbs then goes on to cover nearly every aspect of life: work, marriage, parenting, relationships, authority, money, and more. This wisdom is not an academic exercise, but a wisdom that is in the details of life.

What I wonder to myself, sometimes, is how many fathers could write a book of Proverbs of their hard-earned wisdom to their children? Are the habits of learning, reflection, and articulation cultivated and honed in order to pass their wisdom down to their children, who will in turn pass it on to their children, and so on? I have to assume that if 41% of young parents find reading bedtime stories to their kids too boring, then cultivating the life of the mind for the good of the family and community must certainly not be a normal practice.

## Teacher and Scholar In One

The South African preacher, Andrew Murray, has a devotion in his 1887 book *The Children for Christ* called *Parental Self-Culture*. In it, he reiterates one of his main points throughout the book that children learn far more from their parent’s example than their words. Which means that the most important part of parenting is not any single tactic or conversation, but the parent’s character.

In *Parental Self-Culture,* Murray stresses that whatever we desire to teach our children, be it a habit or a character trait or a practical skill or any other form of knowledge, we must first teach it to ourselves. We have to develop the habits, characteristics, skills, and knowledge that we want to pass on to our children.

You might say that one of the most important tasks of parenting is self-parenting, and that includes acquiring the knowledge for ourselves that we wish our children to have before they leave our home for adulthood. As Murray writes, “I can effectually teach my children only what I really teach myself, and that I can only expect the truth that influences my own life really to influence theirs.”

Our influence in our children’s lives begins with the influences in our own. So to this, Murray says, “The first and most needful thing for being successful teachers of our children: teaching ourselves. Yes, parents, teach yourselves. If we are to train our children wisely, we must go through a new course of training ourselves. We have to put ourselves to school again, and to be teachers and scholars in one.”

That last phrase stuck with me: *teachers* *and* *scholars in one.* In order to wisely train our children in the wisdom that begins in the fear of the Lord, we must be both teachers to our children and scholars ourselves. Which is why I believe one of the great needs of our time is for fathers to see themselves as *father-scholars*; fathers who make it a habit of their life to gain wisdom in both knowledge and skills and pass it on to their children.

What should we, as parents, be studying? Does every dad need a degree (or another one)? Far from it. Being a father-scholar has nothing to do with academia. It’s not about appearing smart or reading esoteric philosophical tomes (unless you would like to). It’s for every father. According to Murray we should, “Take time to study God’s word. Study man’s moral nature, with its wonderful capacities, as the sacred trust committed to your care. Teach yourself to cultivate that nature to its highest fitness for God’s service: it will be the best preparation for teaching your children aright.” All of our study begins with God’s word. We should recommit ourselves to the practice of daily scripture and prayer and have a plan for doing so. Wisdom, as we have said, begins with the fear of the Lord, therefore all wisdom begins with scripture itself and all other learning is done in light of God’s wisdom in scripture.

From there, we have man’s moral nature and the capacities God has given us to steward and cultivate. To make this practical, one of my favorite ways of thinking about our capacities is how Reagan Rose from Redeeming Productivity talks about the [Seven Domains of Life](https://redeemingproductivity.com/9-productive-things-i-refuse-to-do/domains-of-stewardship-3/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

Those seven domains are:

1. Spiritual
2. Mental
3. Physical
4. Relational
5. Recreational
6. Vocational
7. Economical

These seven domains are the capacities God has given us to steward. And in each one, we have a moral nature for us to cultivate “to its highest fitness for God’s service.”

While I believe learning concrete skills with your hands is absolutely part of the father-scholar vision, I want to focus on the life of the mind. Setting aside the physical domain for now (only because it’s difficult, with some exceptions, to think of the physical domain in terms of reading, and it might be better here to commit to learning skills), someone could potentially read one well-chosen, quality book—preferably a classic when possible—in each of these six categories each year and be more well read than the vast majority of other people.

That’s only six books per year. One book every other month. Along with daily scripture reading, six books a year is an achievable goal, especially if you factor in audiobooks for those who find them helpful. Six books a year also makes room for bigger or more difficult books. It’s okay if a book takes two or three months to read; the time for that is baked in and could be offset by smaller books.

I believe the most important keystone habit to form in order to do this is to rise before your responsibilities. That means, whenever possible, being up before the kids, before work, before anything or anyone else needs you, and giving time to the Lord and your own development. There are situations where this isn’t possible, and so it might need to be the evening.

But for most people, the morning will be best, even if it’s difficult to set that habit at first. Like the French Dominican, A.G. Sertillanges, wrote in *The Intellectual Life*,

> The morning hours thus bedewed with prayer, freshened and vivified by the breezes of the spirit, cannot fail to be fruitful; you will begin them with faith; you will go through them with courage; the whole day will be spent in the radiance of the early light; evening will fall before the brightness is exhausted, as the year ends leaving some seed in the barns for the year to come.

This may not work for everyone, of course, but the point is that developing a consistent routine is one of the best ways to train yourself for this commitment, so you’ll want to discover what that is for you.

Doing this surely involves some sort of asceticism, even if only minimally. It might look like severely limiting your consumption of short-form video, TV, and movies. It might look like adjusting your bedtime and your nights out. It might mean not doing other things you could be doing so that you can make time for reading. That doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy things other than reading or even that some of those things can’t involve screens. There’s time and place for entertainment and leisure, but it does mean that with many things competing for your attention, you must give some level of priority to reading, and that involves limiting (or even eliminating completely) other forms of media and entertainment.

The Father-Scholar, ideally, is surrounded by other father-scholars who are cultivating the same virtues in their life and family. The best work comes when fathers are able to gather together and discuss what they’re learning and how they’re being formed, and to workshop ways to practically integrate what they’re learning into their lives, as well as developing appropriate community action when necessary. One example of how this could work would be a quarterly get together where men come together to discuss a book they’ve committed to reading over the past quarter. Basically, a modified book club, but one specifically aimed at the cultivation of the intellectual life for the formation of the whole person.

I imagine there might be dads who are where I described above, wanting to cultivate this sort of life but feel intimidated by all of the books that they *could* read and simply don’t know where to start. I’d like to suggest a starting point by making some recommendations in each of the six domains of life.

### **Spiritual**

The Spiritual category are books specifically for the benefit of your faith.

- [*Growing in Christ*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/growing-in-christ-prof-j-i-packer-ph-d/3dd55a2e36db8709?ean=9781433581212&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)— J.I. Packer
- [*Confessions*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/confessions-augustine-of-hippo/8dd14d796238717d?ean=9780140441147&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)— Augustine

### **Mental**

The Mental category are books that are for developing your thinking in a particular area. This can be a wide range of things. You can even pursue topical interests in this category.

- [*The Abolition of Man*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-abolition-of-man-c-s-lewis/f334b7cbddef6396?ean=9780060652944&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)— C.S. Lewis
- [*The Nicomachean Ethics*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/aristotle-nicomachean-ethics/c136780238a7c12e?ean=9780226026756&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)— Aristotle

### **Relational**

The Relational category is to help you grow in the various relationships in your life: spouse, parent, friend, leader, etc.

- [*How To Know A Person*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/how-to-know-a-person-the-art-of-seeing-others-deeply-and-being-deeply-seen-david-brooks/0fc356341ba7b8b3?ean=9780593230077&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)— David Brooks
- [*The Gift of Being Yourself*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-gift-of-being-yourself-the-sacred-call-to-self-discovery-david-g-benner/adfc6e5d38d224c6?ean=9780830846122&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)— David Benner

### **Vocational**

The Vocational category is to help you in your work. Some books might be highly technical and specialized, whereas others are more broadly about your life’s work.

- [*Every Good Endeavor*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/every-good-endeavor-connecting-your-work-to-god-s-work-timothy-keller/0dfbb6603c4caaa0?ean=9781594632822&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)— Tim Keller
- [*The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-7-habits-of-highly-effective-people-stephen-r-covey/e09925e0a88e809d?ean=9798212563147&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)— Stephen Covey

### **Recreational**

The Recreational category is designed for rest and delight. Put your novels, poetry, or narrative history here. You can (and maybe should!) prioritize classic novels, but you don’t have to.

- [*The Lord of the Rings*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-lord-of-the-rings-one-volume-j-r-r-tolkien/3e98724c486543b4?ean=9780547951942&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)— J. R. R. Tolkien
- [*Hannah Coulter*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/hannah-coulter-wendell-berry/173f40bc83390d48?ean=9781593760786&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)— Wendell Berry

### **Economical**

The Economical category is to help you be a good steward of your resources. Both personal finance and macroeconomics can fall in this category.

- [*The Psychology of Money*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-psychology-of-money-timeless-lessons-on-wealth-greed-and-happiness-morgan-housel/71d6d987ac1324f9?ean=9780857197689&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)— Morgan Housel
- [*Broken Money*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/broken-money-why-our-financial-system-is-failing-us-and-how-we-can-make-it-better-lyn-alden/eea8e90a34a3b090?ean=9798988666318&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)— Lynn Alden

## Conclusion

This is meant to be an entry point. There’s no need to artificially limit yourself to six books per year. But it’s important to see just how *doable* this kind of life actually is. Six books a year in these areas would be a major success for the vast majority of people. There is much, much more that could be said about the father-scholar, but I believe it all starts with the same invitation St. Augustine heard in his garden, *tolle, lege,* take up and read.

None of this is so that we may be perceived as smart, but so that we can cultivate wisdom. Even wisdom is not an end to itself, but is in service of love. By reading both *to* our children and *for* our children, we plant seeds of love that have the potential to outlast us and produce fruit that goes beyond the infinite scroll of a shallow life. By making reading a cornerstone of our life, we aim to become loving fathers who raise loving children through our example.

As Murray exhorts us again, “In the daily life of the family the parents must seek to prove that love is the law of their life.” We want our homes to be homes of love for our family. It starts when we submit ourselves to God’s wisdom in every aspect of our life and allow that wisdom to be the tangible ways we love our families. We will fail and fall off our commitment to the life of the mind and have to start again over and over. We are creatures. But may it never be said of a father that he didn’t pursue a life of love and wisdom because he was too bored. We read for ourselves. And we raise readers by reading to our children. Because in reading there is wisdom and in wisdom there is love.
### Preparing for Lent and Easter with a Cloud of Witnesses
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/preparing-for-lent-and-easter-with-a-cloud-of-witnesses/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:33:54.000Z
[*Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter*](https://www.plough.com/en/topics/culture/holidays/easter-readings/bread-and-wine?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Second edition. Plough Books, 2026\. $26.00\. 408 pp.

Perhaps because I am an adult convert to Christianity, I love reading conversion narratives. But sometimes I think that people who write conversion memoirs soon after their conversion are making a mistake. Wait a while—at least a handful of years! Then tell the story with the benefit of at least a few years’ hindsight about what the conversion really achieved in your life—the true, the surprising, the emotionally fraught sloughing-off of the old, and the sometimes no-less-laborious putting on of the new, as in the following reflection:

“Five years ago I came to believe in Christ’s teachings, and my life suddenly changed; I ceased to desire what I had previously desired, and began to desire what I formerly did not want. What had previously seemed to me good seemed evil, and what seemed evil seemed good. It happened to me as it happens to a man who goes out on some business and suddenly decides that the business is unnecessary and returns home… I, like that thief on the cross, have believed Christ’s teaching and been saved.”

So wrote the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy of his conversion, movingly detailing his realization of the changed disposition and life this conversion brought. Instead of mocking the thief on the cross in his own mind, he came to regard himself as his kindred spirit. The initial conversion came as Tolstoy finished writing *Anna Karenina*. Perhaps imagining his most famous protagonist’s own tortured life, which led to despair and suicide, led him to re-examine his own inner state. What are we here for? What is the meaning of our lives, small creatures that we are, here today and gone tomorrow? Tolstoy concludes his reflection: “But suddenly I heard the words of Christ and understood them, and life and death ceased to seem evil, and instead of despair I experienced happiness and the joy of life undisturbed by death.” While his conversion did not make a saint out of Tolstoy, it certainly made him want to be one.

In thinking of Tolstoy’s conversion and the new hope against despair that it gave him, I am reminded of Pope John Paul II’s [famous declaration](http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/angelus/1986/documents/hf%5Fjp-ii%5Fang%5F19861130.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) a century after Tolstoy in response to a world still filled with despair, as it has always been, it seems: “We are an Easter People and Alleluia is our song.” Easter is all about the destruction of despair, because Christ is risen. So it is appropriate to find Tolstoy’s reflection, quoted above, included in Plough Books’ beautiful collection, *Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter*, now out in an expanded second edition of 96 daily readings, taking readers from the beginning of Lent through Pentecost. If we are an “Easter People,” filled with hope and a joy the rest of this weary heavy-laden world cannot comprehend, then preparing our hearts for Easter over the 40 days of Lent, and then looking forward to Pentecost for another 50 days, is appropriate. Additional glimpses of beauty come from the poems that open each of the seven sections of the book into which the readings are grouped—Invitation, Temptation, Passion, Crucifixion, Resurrection, New Life, Pentecost.

But first, perhaps it is appropriate to ask: Why would anyone even need a collection of Lent and Easter readings? Isn’t it enough to simply continue reading the Bible daily through this season, as in all other times of the year? The answer, the collection suggests, is that in addition to the Bible, our brothers and sisters in Christ span two millennia—a magnificent cloud of witnesses, including in their mix such strange converts as Tolstoy, but also many other writers, saints, martyrs, poets, apologists, and more. And so, the book includes (to name just a few) Clement of Rome, Tertullian, Augustine, Hildegard of Bingen, Dorothy Sayers, Dorothy Day, Christina Rosetti, Jürgen Moltmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thomas Merton, G.K. Chesterton, Sojourner Truth, and the personal patron saint of some readers of *Mere Orthodoxy*—Wendell Berry.

Their voices, while not part of holy, inerrant, and infallible Scripture, have much to offer to us in encouraging our spirits and souls to flourish as true “Easter people.” Reading along with these voices of other saints should never replace our Bible reading but can deeply enrich our spiritual life in the Lenten season, giving us additional encouragement and glimpses of beauty. Indeed, even John Paul II’s quotation above is not strictly speaking his own but is a paraphrase from Augustine’s “[Exposition on Psalm 148](https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1801148.htm?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).”

As “Easter people,” we live on the other side of the Cross. And yet, Tish Harrison Warren’s opening reading in the book reminds that we are “Not All Right.” We are weary and broken, and we live in a weary and broken world. But then, Christians since the earliest days had known this. Reading 83 comes from the anonymous second-century “Letter to Diognetus,” but it could have been written yesterday. The author reflects, in encouraging a believer friend: “Christians are not distinguished from the rest of humankind by country, or by speech, or by customs. For they do not dwell in cities of their own, or use a different language, or practice a peculiar life.” But, the letter reflects, while they live in this world, they are certainly not of it—“In a word, what the soul is in the body, Christians are in the world. The soul is spread through all the members of the body; so are Christians through all the cities of the world. The soul dwells in the body, and yet it is not of the body; so Christians dwell in the world, and yet they are not of the world.”

“Christianity is, of course, not the only religion that has found the best explanation of human life in the idea of an incarnate and suffering god,” reflects Dorothy Sayers in “The Greatest Drama,” the reading for Day 52\. But what is different is how that original story ended. The course of historical events that our annual celebration of Easter commemorates, culminate with the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. And this is a sequence of events in which God himself plays a surprising role. “Any journalist, hearing of it for the first time, would recognize it as news; those who did hear it for the first time actually called it news, and good news at that.”

And this, perhaps, is the most valuable reminder that voices like Sayers’ can give us in the Lenten season. As a convert, I am still in awe of Christ, but with each year, the repetition of the sequence of holidays, from Christmas to Easter, the joy becomes just a little bit familiar. I am not alone in finding disquiet in this familiarity. A seasoned Christian in my church said in preparing for Advent a little over a year ago that the typical Christmas Bible readings that always are read in the season of Advent, year after year, were beginning to feel stale to him and some others. Could we bring more wonder into the familiar verses and stories all Christians know perhaps the best of all in the Bible? The solution we decided on was to incorporate more dramatic readings of the familiar passages, bringing them to life in a new way in worship. The Bible is a drama, and the story of Christ the greatest drama of all, Sayers resolutely declares.

I was reminded of this conversation as I was reading *Bread and Wine*. Familiar is good, but in the season of Lent and Easter, no less than Christmas, we can all use a jolt of amazement that comes from remembering how gloriously shocking everything about Christianity really is—and was to its earliest witnesses.
### Unreasonable Hospitality and the Ordinary Work of the Church
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/unreasonable-hospitality-and-the-ordinary-work-of-the-church/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:33:56.000Z
At the recommendation of a dear friend, I recently read [*Unreasonable Hospitality*](https://www.amazon.com/Unreasonable-Hospitality-Remarkable-Giving-People/dp/0593418573?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) by Will Guidara. Guidara’s book has recently been widely recommended in leadership and business circles, and at first glance, a memoir about fine dining and world-class restaurants might seem like an odd place for a pastor to glean insights about ministry. But as I worked through the book, I was struck by how often I found myself underlining, highlighting, and thinking through many of the lessons and applications.

Guidara’s central idea is, simply, *service is about doing a task well, but hospitality is about how people feel when they experience it.* Unreasonable hospitality, then, is the intentional choice to go beyond what is expected in order to make people feel genuinely valued.

That distinction alone is worth lingering over, especially in the life of the local church.

## Service Is Not the Same as Shepherding

Churches are often very good at “service.” We run Sunday School classes, organize volunteers, answer emails, publish bulletins, coordinate fellowship meals, hold committee meetings, and so much more. All of this matters. Orderly ministry, faithfulness in the mundane, and clarity in communication should not be optional features in the local church. Systems, committees, and effectiveness are nothing to scoff at.

But ministry can quietly drift into a transactional mode if we are not careful. People attend, volunteers serve, elders oversee, and everyone checks the box. The machinery works, but something vital can be missing.

Hospitality, as Guidara describes it, is not about efficiency or polish. It is about presence, attention, and care. That language resonates deeply with pastoral ministry. Scripture does not merely call elders to manage, but to shepherd. Shepherding is not only about guarding doctrine and administering discipline; it is about knowing the sheep, feeding them, leading them, and caring for them.

## Ordinary Faithfulness, Extra Attention

One of the most compelling themes in *Unreasonable Hospitality* is that the most memorable moments are often small ones. A visitor’s name remembered, a fine detail noticed, or a thoughtful gesture makes a significant impact.

That principle applies directly to the local church. Most visitors who walk through our church doors are not looking to be impressed. They are looking to have true Christian community. They are looking for signs that this congregation is not just a place they can attend, but a family they can belong to.

So, what are some of the ways a pastor can create these “memorable moments” in the life of the church? Mail a handwritten note after a new family’s first visit, have a follow-up conversation that remembers what someone shared with you last week, or perform a quiet act of mercy, carried out without fanfare or recognition. None of these things are spectacular, but all of them reflect the Chief Shepherd’s heart.

The New Testament repeatedly emphasizes that the church is built up through the ordinary means of grace, the Word, sacraments, and prayer. We love the ordinary means of grace, but consider why God sovereignly ordained these means. It’s because He loves His people. Unreasonable hospitality does not replace those means; it adorns them. It displays our love, not only for those great means, but for the people who Christ has given us to shepherd.

## Empowering the People Who Serve

Another major takeaway from the book is the way Guidara empowered his staff. Rather than scripting every interaction, he trusted people to make judgment calls in the moment. He prepared his staff to act with generosity, creativity, and care.

There is wisdom here for church leadership. Volunteers are not interchangeable parts, and officers are not merely functionaries. When we reduce ministry to scripts and systems alone, we unintentionally communicate that faithfulness is measured only by compliance.

When elders, deacons, and volunteers are encouraged to act wisely, compassionately, and personally within the bounds of their calling, the church’s work is carried out with discernment, care, and responsibility. Deacons notice needs and quietly meet them. Elders are proactive shepherds, rather than waiting for problems to surface. Members learn to see hospitality not as a program but as a posture.

This kind of culture does not emerge accidentally. It must be taught, modeled, and protected. But when it takes root, it demonstrates something amazing about the life of the body of Christ. Yes, the Lord Jesus is the Head of the Church, but we are the many members of it, and every member has a vital role in the church’s life for the mutual good of one another (1 Cor. 12:7).

## Hospitality Without Confusing the Gospel

There is, of course, a necessary caution here. The church is not a restaurant, and the gospel is not an “experience” we curate. We do not measure faithfulness by how impressed people feel, nor do we soften the demands of repentance and obedience in the name of welcome.

True Christian hospitality is not about entertainment or emotional manipulation. It flows from the gospel itself. God did not merely serve us; He welcomed us. In Christ, strangers are made sons, enemies are made family, and sinners are brought near. The gospel did not come to us because they were impressive guests, but because God is gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love (Ps. 103:8).

When hospitality is rooted there, it does not compete with discipleship. It supports it. It creates an environment where truth can be spoken clearly and received humbly, because love is visible and tangible.

## A Worthy Challenge

*Unreasonable Hospitality* is not a ministry manual, but it is a helpful mirror. It forces us to ask honest questions about how people experience the life of the church. Are we merely efficient, or are we attentive? Are we faithful in form, but distant in posture? Do people leave our church feeling processed or shepherded?

Much of pastoral ministry is gloriously ordinary, and I am so thankful that it is! But ordinary faithfulness, carried out with deep care and love, reflects something of the heart of Christ. That, I think, is a lesson worth remembering.

[*originally published on Substack*](https://mdadams.substack.com/p/unreasonable-hospitality-and-the)
### God and Country: An Interview with John D. Wilsey
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/god-and-country-an-interview-with-john-d-wilsey/
Last updated: 2026-04-20T17:19:10.000Z
**God and Country: An Interview with John D. Wilsey**

John D. Wilsey is Professor of Church History and Philosophy and the Chair of the Department of Church History and Historical Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is also an avid night-time hiker, voracious reader, and the author of several books on various aspects of American religion and politics, including [*God’s Cold Warrior: The Life and Faith of John Foster Dulles*](https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802875723/gods-cold-warrior/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and [*Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer*](https://www.eerdmans.com/9781467464413/religious-freedom/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*.* The following interview is based on his new book, appropriately timed for the year of America’s 250th birthday, [*God and Country: Upholding Faith, History, and National Identity*](https://www.lifeway.com/en/product/god-and-country-P005841765?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

\*\*\*

**Nadya Williams:** You are a Christian historian and you teach at a seminary. This means that you see theology and faith as very much connected to the study of history. And this connection is at the heart of this book—I came away from it encouraged to keep thinking in earnest about how to do history well as a Christian. Can you tell us a bit more about this vision? Why should Christians bring their faith and their theological thinking with them to their study of history?

**John D. Wilsey:** To think Christianly is to think historically. When we affirm the Apostle’s Creed, we are affirming historical events that occurred in real places, in real time, by real persons. Christianity is unique in that it is essentially based upon history, not metaphors, symbols, or myths. It is not even based on laws, parables, or wise sayings, although these help us understand the truths of the gospel with greater clarity. Followers of Christ, or “little Christs,” base their faith in a Person, the God-Man. Christians’ faith is built upon what that Person taught, did, promised, and fulfilled.

A lot of people think they don’t like history, but Christians instinctively love history because history is essential to the faith. So beginning from a reverence for redemption history, Christians may follow up with a similar reverence for extra-biblical history. Church history, American history, Japanese history, history of ideas, history of science, history of ethics, history of history—the relevance of these and other historical disciplines emerges in stark relief when we truly reckon with the profound significance history has on how we see reality—past, present, and future.

**Nadya Williams:** On a related note, you are concerned that many Christians in the pews who care deeply about theology and their faith may not care quite so much about learning their nation's history. You make the case in your book, though, that it is vital for American Christians to take the study of American history seriously--a topic obviously timely to talk about in the year of America's 250th birthday! Can you explain a little bit why you think it is so important for Christians to study their nation's history?

**John D. Wilsey:** Cicero wrote that to be ignorant of the past is to remain always a child. Nadya, I know you can particularly appreciate a reference to the great Tully! American Christians ought to study American history because they are part of the ongoing life of the nation. We are products of its past, for good and for ill. We are shaping America in the present for what it will be in the future—the future that our children and grandchildren will inherit when we are gone. American history is not some abstraction, some boring class we are forced to take. It is our societal and national life story. American history is our possession, and it is a precious possession.

Furthermore, going back to the Cicero reference—to cultivate a fully formed conscience, one must come to knowledge and understanding of the past. And what better subject of past time to come to knowledge and understanding of, than of one’s own nation? The question ought not to be, why should American Christians take American history seriously? The question is, why on earth would they not? We neglect history at our own peril, and at the peril of those who would come after us.

**Nadya Williams:** You devote a lot of this book to what you call "practical historical thinking." Can you explain what you mean by this?

**John D. Wilsey:** By practical historical thinking, I mean to differentiate ordinary intellectual considerations in gaining understanding of the past—what historians call the “5 Cs of historical thinking”—from moral considerations in historical thinking, that is, the application of virtue in thinking historically. Practical historical thinking involves taking change, context, causality, contingency, and complexity into account when studying a life lived, an idea expressed, or an event occurring at some point in the past. Such considerations are basic to grasping the relevance of the past, as well as its meaning, not only for our own day, but also for past time that is subsequent to a particular life, idea, or event.

**Nadya Williams:** At one point in the book, you give this advice that seems unusual at first glance: "If you are looking for a way to bring history to life, do a counterintuitive activity. Go to a burial ground and visit the dead." Can you tell a little bit about this exercise and how it might help us grow in historical thinking?

**John D. Wilsey:** Maybe it is because I have this weird trait in my personality, that I am fascinated by cemeteries and love to visit them, that I made this statement.

Visiting a cemetery provides one with an immediate sense of his or her mortality. One would have to be a nitwit of the first order to visit a cemetery and come away with no awareness of what the dead say to us as we mark their grave—“As you are now, I once was; as I am, you one day will be.”

Human mortality is one of the absolutes of nature. When we go to a cemetery, we are confronted by human mortality in a direct way, unlike any other place we can experience. So, it is a humbling exercise, and it is good to be reminded that, whatever talents, wealth, charm, or strength we have and no matter what contributions we make in this life, one day it will all come to an end. We are invited to think of another world, a world to which we will all go at a time not necessarily of our choosing. And in thinking of that other world, we can consider the way we are spending our time in the present.

But cemeteries also invite us to consider the past. A grave marker with a name, a birth-year, and a death year stand as a testimony to the presence, the nearness of the past to us. The grave marker tells us that this person who is no more, once was! She was a living, breathing soul at one point in the past. To see the grave of a loved one is a reminder that this person was once real, and not just a character in a story. To visit the grave of a famous person, like JFK at Arlington National Cemetery, is to see that this person we read about in books, or see in black and white filmstrips, who led an enormously consequential life—was a real person. Here are where their mortal remains lie.

Visiting a cemetery forces us to think about the past, to begin to think along the lines of the 5 Cs. More importantly, it forces to think morally about the past. Since these were living persons in the past, we are morally obligated to think about them virtuously.

**Nadya Williams:** How would you describe the relationship between this book and your previous book, [*Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer*](https://www.eerdmans.com/9781467464413/religious-freedom/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)?

**John D. Wilsey:** In a lot of ways, the two books are similar. Both advocate for a conservative disposition, that is, a perspective that is oriented toward the past, rather than the present or the future. In the conservative primer, I have a chapter on thinking historically as a conservative, and another on rightly ordered patriotism.

But this new book is more focused on arguing for a rightly ordered love of country that is founded on good historical thinking. I argue that one cannot be a good patriot if one is not a good historical thinker. So, while the conservative primer is broadly applied to conservatism and religious freedom, *God and Country* is narrowly applied to the question of patriotism.

The audience is a bit different, too. In *God and Country*, I am speaking to church leaders, Christian educators, and Christian people who are grappling with the meaning of patriotism in these heady days of Christian nationalism on one side and national iconoclasm on the other. Can a Christian be an American patriot without compromising their witness as a faithful Christian? I answer yes, because rightly ordered love of country is a form of neighbor-love.

**Nadya Williams:** You've now written not one but two books about faith, history, and how to love one's country well--while thinking historically. So I have to ask: how are you planning to celebrate America's 250th?

**John D. Wilsey:** We in our family are going to celebrate America this year by visiting historical sites around the country. We will visit some national parks, battlefields, cemeteries, and monuments. I have taken my family to see many of these kinds of sites over the years, but our children are now of an age where they can begin to cultivate a more sophisticated perspective on them.

We also love good American stories in film. I talk about a list of movies I have complied over the years that I call the “Wilsey Re-Education Program.” That appellation is tongue-in-cheek of course, but it is meant to serve as something of a critique of film after the death of the American monoculture. Movies like *Glory*, *Gettysburg*, *Patton*, *The Wind and the Lion*, *A Night to Remember*, and *The Last of the Mohicans* are part of the Program. In our family, we love these movies and will watch many of them to observe the 250th anniversary of our nation’s independence.

You could say that we are going to do things that a Dad would conjure up in his imagination! We’ll thread up the movies and eat junk food. We’ll pile in the car and road trip around the country to visit historic sites. My children are getting older, and there are fewer and fewer opportunities to do this sort of thing with them. I aspire to faithfully steward the best of American tradition for their sake, and for the sake of their children—my grandchildren—so that they can enjoy the inheritance that I received from my ancestors.
### Deep Fakes Come for Billy Graham
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/deep-fakes-come-for-billy-graham/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:33:59.000Z
Recently a church member sent me a link to a Billy Graham sermon on YouTube to get my take on it. I obliged. The voice sounded like a young Graham from what I could tell, but something didn’t smell right. Maybe it was the patterns of speech, the cliches, or the voice inflection. Granted, I’m too young to have heard many of Graham’s sermons, but this was one he *never* delivered.

For one, “Graham” referenced a 2016 Vatican statement “[*Ad resurgendum cum Christo*](https://www.vatican.va/roman%5Fcuria/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc%5Fcon%5Fcfaith%5Fdoc%5F20160815%5Fad-resurgendum-cum-christo%5Fen.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).” Was Graham even alive in 2016? (Yes, he died in 2018). But he certainly wasn’t still preaching then, was he? (No, his last official crusade was in 2005).

*Strike one.*

In the sermon “Graham” then urged listeners to “share your thoughts in the comments below.”

*Strike two.*

As the sermon neared its end, “Graham” said, “this video on screen is for you.”

*Strike three; you’re out.*

Game over. Clearly, an audio deepfake. I scrolled through the comments to see if anyone called this out for what it was: a deception, a sham, all in the name of Jesus. Turns out this YouTube channel, *Faith in Action*, was filled with Billy Graham “recordings.” Were they all deepfakes? Was this whole channel AI-generated? And what about the commenters who heaped fulsome praise on Graham’s sermon? Did they not catch the clear clues? Were they bots too? Scanning the comments revealed another dead giveaway. The YouTube channel “replied” to what seems to be every comment with the stock phrase: “God bless you!

This is, to be sure, a relatively benign and elementary example of deepfake technology. And it should not be all that surprising, considering that Twitter/X has been dealing with increasing bot traffic for years. But the quality and believability of audio and video deepfakes is rapidly improving. And they are being put to much more nefarious and sinister purposes than trying to monetize people’s love for Christian heroes like Graham. The point is the same no matter the deepfake’s form: the whole edifice is built on artifice, a deception that will wreak further havoc on trust, truth, and reality. Think of the church member who sent me the link, who thought it was a sermon from a beloved source. Instead, it was AI slop. But somehow it was still good enough to pass the sniff test for hundreds of thousands of viewers (or maybe bots?). This church member is by no means alone; in a few weeks, the video had over half a million views.

This is just a small portent of things to come. What happens as deepfakes increasingly flood our information ecosystem? What happens to our sense of truth and how we know it? What happens to our sense of reality and how we experience it? And, more pointedly, what happens to us?

At the beginning of the 21st century, Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman coined the term “[liquid modernity](https://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Modernity-Zygmunt-Bauman/dp/0745624103/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?crid=24IZN41PY9P57&keywords=liquid+modernity&qid=1706928221&sprefix=liquid+modernit%2Caps%2C572&sr=8-1&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)” to describe the modern condition, where stable sources of meaning and traditional human categories are melted down at the twin altars of the autonomous self and technological progress. What now, twenty-five years hence? Social deconstruction and technological development continue apace. So much so that liquid modernity is turning to vapor, being aerosolized by the digital revolution’s fragmenting forces. We all feel it. We might even say that, in some way, deepfakes take the dynamics of the digital ecosystem to their logical conclusion. AI deepfakes are part of what is vaporizing our sense of what is real and true. Ted Gioia even [predicts](https://www.honest-broker.com/p/our-shared-reality-will-self-destruct?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that “our shared reality will self-destruct in the next twelve months.”

But could this moment also be a catalyst for the resurgence of in-person relationships and gatherings? Reality gets its revenge eventually, doesn’t it? The church can stand in precisely this moment, as she embodies a different way of being.

It is true that the church could fail miserably if ministers capitulate to AI sermons and outsource pastoral care to bots; if congregants view pastors more as social media influencers than soul-doctors; if the church is seen as just another content provider.

But on the other hand, the church could make a surprising resurgence if the incarnate Christ is the pattern and paradigm for all the church does. The church can be the place not of deepfake Jesus, but of real Jesus.

The inefficient Jesus who couldn’t simulcast his sermons or livestream his resurrection, but slowed down to the very human speed of walking.

The messy Jesus who couldn’t live behind a glowing glass rectangle in a frictionless digital ecosystem, but swung a hammer, healed with touch, mud, and spittle as he opened mouths, unstopped ears, blessed the children, and raised the dead.

The bloody yet living Jesus who couldn’t escape suffering and death, but absorbed them into himself in his crucifixion and defeated them in his resurrection.

The church exalts this real, living Jesus, the Word made Flesh, who dwelt among us and dwells among us still through the simple yet sacred, mundane yet mysterious means that he has bequeathed to his church for the making and keeping of Christians: Word and Sacrament.

If there is any institution, belief system—or better yet, Person—that can withstand the vaporizing forces of digital modernity, it is the church, Christian doctrine, and Christ himself. For 2,000 years the church has been gathering in person as an embodied communion to hear Christ speak in his living Word, to receive Christ in his living body, and to share in living together with other members of Christ’s body to whom we are united. The church brings you to an encounter with the person of Christ—not a simulacrum, not a screen, not a string of ones and zeros. Not a deepfake; just what is most deeply real, living, and true: union with the living God, with whom we can know and be known, love and be loved.

Our human desire to know and be known is so strong that we seek to fulfill it in all sorts of distorted ways, which are getting amplified in the AI age. But all along we have one who intimately knows us—the God who became one of us, and to whom we are mysteriously and truly united by grace through faith on account of his perfect work. We personally and intimately experience this in the life of the church in its ministry of water and word, bread and wine. Here we are brought into the Divine Life, where humanity is fully alive, fully aligned with truth, and fully real. And we don’t need a Billy Graham deepfake for that.
### Saint Paul's Parade
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/saint-pauls-parade/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:34:03.000Z
*Thriambos:* first a hymn to Bacchus,  
long-honored lord of wine-soaked mirth.  
The word then seized as *triumph—*  
golden sons of empire  
toasting sodden spoils of war.  
Lofty god-king Jupiter, ruler of the sky,  
links arms with drunken twice-born  
Liber Pater of the vine.  
Green-adorned, their brows,  
laurel-wreathed with oak and reed,  
marble temple garlanded  
for victor’s ruddy feast.  
Shadows writhe there at their feet,  
the masses cluster close,  
hungry jaws yawning agape,  
unsated grave below.  
Fresh-baked bread, so free of charge,  
to whet the appetite—  
but murder dances in mob’s eyes,  
so parched for wine-dark flow.  
Murmurs, then euphoric cry  
‘round Rome’s vast vaunted host:  
Mud is mingling with the blood  
of stumbling almost-ghosts.  
Captives from these lands new-won  
stagger up to Jove,  
his thunderbolt so great and fell,  
inexorable woe.  
Wicked swordpoint sings behind,  
blades they gleam ahead;  
gleeful slaughter keening low,  
gods’ portion of the dead.  
But peer beyond, ye huddled horde—  
A new man treads the road,  
the sacred way up to god’s face,  
his wooden cross in tow.  
Side-lanced and scarred, the lowly one,  
outrageous claim to make:  
King of these crowds, the sky, the vine,  
slayer of the snake.  
And as Word walks, worn sandals thin,  
a figure’s close behind:  
Once-zealous foe, wise learnéd Saul  
trails He who struck him blind.  
“What is this sight we fearsome ones  
see with our stone-carved eyes?”  
Trembling Jove now shields his son,  
astonished by the light.  
“He doth not shine in hammered iron  
nor doth he carry spear,  
yet power beams out of His feet,  
from wounded hands once-pierced.”  
Marble tower starts to shake;  
its columns creak and groan,  
and the greatest of the great  
great Jupiter begins to moan.  
“These rays are bright, so very bright  
for eyes though dull mine be.  
I cannot bear to look upon  
this mighty man so meek.”  
Bacchus, too, is wincing, taut,  
his gaze resting behind  
that holy echo of his life,  
on Paul the death-destined.  
“How could a one so rich in wealth  
just cast it all aside?  
No earthly man would choose a fate  
to share with the enchained.”  
Lush green wreaths on graven heads  
wither now, brown-edged,  
and Saint Paul walks, his hands unbound,  
eating the true bread.  
He drinks the wine, grateful to die  
for He who claimed his life:  
That lowly God-man, Lord of all,  
who once did strike him blind.  
Plebes and pats both gnash their teeth,  
their *panem* spewed in spit,  
yet Paul the one who marches on  
just answers with a grin.  
His eyes stay fixed, fastened upon  
the risen Lord of life, and he laughs  
at death that waits for him—  
the death that shall not stick.
### White Hot Hate
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/white-hot-hate/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:34:06.000Z
*I wrote this essay several years ago, reflecting on Dick Lehr’s* White Hot Hate *and the narrowly thwarted 2016 bombing plot against a Somali immigrant community in Garden City, Kansas. Since then, public rhetoric about immigrants—and Somali communities in particular—has re-entered American political life with renewed force, sometimes echoing language and suspicions that once circulated largely at the margins.*

*This rhetoric has been especially heated amid ongoing federal investigations into large-scale fraud schemes in Minnesota that first drew major attention in 2022\. Prosecutors have charged nearly one hundred defendants in connection with alleged fraud involving state and federal programs, many of them Somali Americans. Against this backdrop, at a December 2, 2025 Cabinet meeting, President Trump declared, “We’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” referring to Somali immigrants.*

*I have resisted revising this essay to track these recent developments in public rhetoric directly. One reason is that* White Hot Hate *itself resists being reduced to a simple explanatory frame. It tells a story whose moral weight does not depend on aligning villains neatly with a single party, region, or ideology. Instead, it shows how dehumanization takes root when fear, grievance, and belonging are narrated apart from real neighbors and shared places.*

*That story, sadly, has not lost its urgency.*

In recent years, much public life has been organized around competing stories of threat and innocence. Facts are still invoked, but often as weapons—tools for defending “our” side rather than for seeking shared understanding. In such an atmosphere, neighbors become abstractions, and fear readily masquerades as moral seriousness.

Christians, in particular, are not immune to the ways perceived threats can narrow our moral vision, drawing us into stories where vigilance can easily slide into self-righteousness. When we narrate the world primarily through cataloging the sins of our enemies, we risk missing the slower, harder work of discernment—work that requires attention to place, persons, and the ambiguities of human motivation. Our struggle is not against a sociologically defined group of “progressives” or “conservatives,” whoever our ideological foes may be. It is against the lordless powers, against the evils that corrupt our shared human life and mock the lordship of Christ. “We aren’t fighting against human enemies but against rulers, authorities, forces of cosmic darkness, and spiritual powers of evil in the heavens” (Eph. 6:12, CEB).

Fact-checking can be an important step in the process of discernment in our confusing, polarized age. But even more challenging may be how to tell and hear a different story than the one our tribe has been primed to hear. For this reason, I found Dick Lehr’s *White Hot Hate: A True Story of Domestic Terrorism in America’s Heartland* (HarperCollins, 2021) to be a suggestive and even profound narrative.

It dives much deeper than an ordinary “media account” on an event that evokes both the terror of human evil and the wonder of human compassion and connection. And, in its strongest moments, it transcends a “tribal” way of telling a story about goodness and evil in our midst.

At first glance, *White Hot Hate* would appear a very unlikely candidate to tell such a complex story. The basic story-line might sound like a “blue versus red” narrative made for Hollywood: Fueled by the fear of immigrants fanned by Donald Trump in his presidential campaign, along with right-wing media figures like Alex Jones, members of a local militia in Garden City, Kansas gathered the provisions and did the calculus of how to carry out an attack on the local community of Muslims, who had immigrated from Somalia. They set their sights on November 9, 2016, the day after the presidential election. In all likelihood, this group (“the Crusaders”) would have carried out the attack if not for Dan Day, an unemployed Garden City man, who eventually worked with a small group of FBI agents to infiltrate the Crusaders and bring down the plot.

So, Lehr is an east coast journalism professor, and this is a book about right-wing extremism in the state of Kansas. What could go wrong? Having grown up in Kansas and later spent five years in the Boston-area as a graduate student, I could think of quite a few things. I half expected the book to be like a series of cartoons that reflected the common (mis)perceptions of Kansas, as a land led and dominated by Democrat-hating, gun-toting extremists. This storyline was already hinted at through accounts by the national media (e.g., CNN, New York Times) over the course of several years. Looking back, these accounts were factually accurate and, on the whole, quite even-handed, albeit brief. But a brief fact-checked article can still fit into an overly simplified story.

The book *White Hot Hate* tells a different story.

On the one hand, Lehr refuses to sugar-coat any aspect of this horrific bomb plot or the plotters, whose plan to bomb mosques and apartment complexes housing Somali refugees would have caused more carnage than the Oklahoma City bombings. A large part of the book’s dialogue is taken, word for word, from over one-hundred hours of secretly recorded conversations among the Crusaders. This dialogue is jarring and hard to read, both because of the highly de-humanizing language (the group referred to the Somali immigrants as “cockroaches” to be “exterminated”), and because it is soaked in obscenities.1

On the other hand, drawing upon numerous interviews and his own historical research, Lehr also brings a great deal of detail to this story and humanizes all involved—the Somali immigrant community, the community leaders in Garden City, the local Garden City residents, and even, in some ways, the plotters themselves. None of this detail excuses the horrific evils involved. But it does make clear that this battle is not simply (or mainly) one about “red versus blue” or “east coast versus Midwest” or “conservative versus progressive.” It is much more messy, and much more human.

Lehr’s story-telling is detailed and compelling. Two features of the book, in particular, extend insights far beyond media accounts of the bombing-plot: its highly variegated portrait of Kansans, and a surprisingly divergent role for the Christian faith in the unfolding of these events.

Lehr opens the book on June 12, 2016, the day of the mass-shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, committed by a shooter who claimed to be acting on behalf of ISIS. On that day, in Garden City, Kansas, Patrick Stein called Dan Day, screaming in rage that someone has got to stop the Muslims. Sure, Trump could talk about stopping Muslims at the borders. But someone needed to “exterminate” them. Patrick had set up a meeting later in the day to develop a plan.

On the same day, Adan Kenyan, a Somali businessman in Garden City, received a strange letter from the city on official letterhead. It was difficult to understand. But the ultimatum was clear: “You have thirty (30) days from the date of this letter to discontinue retail use at this location.”

For the last nine years, Adan Kenyan had lived in Garden City and had helped the growing Somali immigrant population settle in — through relational networks, help for those in various forms of need, and through his business, “The African Store.” His store sold various food items such as spices that were imported from East Africa, as well as clothing, rugs, and pillows that Somalis customarily preferred. He would frequently make the twelve-hour drive in his van to acquire these imports. The African Store became a kind of community connection center for the Somali immigrants.

Although Adan Kenyan and other Somali immigrants had experienced suspicion and discrimination, they also had experienced numerous forms of welcome from business and community leaders in Garden City, as well as other local residents. The initial move to Garden City had been urged by business leaders involved in the meat-packing plants. These were jobs with long hours of redundant work, which was physically demanding. Yet Tyson foods, in particular, made special accommodations to attract the Muslim workers to Garden City, as they were known as faithful workers in these challenging jobs. Tyson allowed workers two prayer breaks for each eight-hour shift, with prayer rooms, rugs, and compasses (so that Muslims could pray toward Mecca) at the slaughterhouse. They also installed foot-washing stations for ritual washing. For the last nine years, the Somali immigrant community grew rapidly in Garden City, and Adan’s store provided both products and the space for community connection.

Having fled civil strife in Somalia, many in the immigrant community were coming to love Garden City. "This town is so nice," noted Somali meat-packer Ahmed Ali to [an NPR journalist in 2017](https://www.npr.org/2017/02/19/516016940/a-thriving-rural-towns-winning-formula-faces-new-threats-under-trump-administrat?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). "The people in this town, they are so great people. We love them, and also they love us." Lehr paints a similar portrait of the Somali immigrants as Kansans, who in years preceding 2016 had come to love and invest in this particular land and place. It is precisely because they had come to love western Kansas that they felt unease in 2016, not only because of the letter to Adan Kenyan, but with the sweep of anti-Muslim sentiment that swept the country after the Pulse Night Club shooting.

Lehr paints this portrait without ever romanticizing the great losses and hardships involved in immigration, and without ever sugar-coating the systematic and personal evils within the story. It’s an immigrant story that is not a story of “foreigners,” but of the Somali diaspora, who also became Kansans as well, bringing new life to their community.

Moreover, most non-Somali Kansans in Lehr’s story defy the expectation that Garden City was dominated by white nationalist sentiment. Besides the initial accommodations provided through Tyson, the mayor and other Garden City community leaders made a habit of reaching out in welcome, holding ongoing conversations with Adan and other leaders within the Somali community, and seeking to develop ways for connection and mutual learning. Eight days *before* the Pulse shooting, for example, community leaders and a local doctor organized an evening to celebrate Somali food and culture, complete with “I love Somalia” t-shirts. Attendance from the Somali community and from the white western Kansas community was large, with members of both groups wearing traditional Somali dress, amidst the joyous sounds of East African music and long-cooked meats and sauces of Somali food.

The beauty of this response from lifelong Kansans makes all the more poignant his account of the malicious, racialized culture which found a home among some of the western Kansas militias, including KSF (Kansas Security Forces), from which the small group of Crusaders were drawn. Well before the Pulse shooting, KSF and other local militias were highly suspicious of the Muslim immigrants, speculating that they are a training-ground for ISIS. Lehr points out that ISIS is almost non-existent in Somalia, and narrates their history in a way that shows how this speculation was a projection, a fear of the “dangerous immigrants” who were “invading” the country.

Most remarkable to me was how KSF was brought together through social media — uniting those with like-minded suspicions who were geographically proximate, all the while refusing and avoiding *any* interaction with the Somali community, often just a few blocks away from KSF meetings. In this racialized, conspiracy-based culture, *neighborhood* disappeared — indeed, *place itself* seemed to disappear.

This may be a key part of how polarization moved to radicalization: the like-minded become connected through ideology, while others who are geographically proximate remain total strangers. Members of the Somali community could be just feet away from KSF members, yet the book does not note a single conversation between KSF members and these neighbors. While city leaders would often make a practice of dropping by the African store to buy some rice or other supplies, for militia members, the Somali community was always at a distance, held behind a skeptical gaze.

This *contrast* between the different responses among local Kansans in Garden City is not only a way to complexify the story of the bomb plot. In Lehr’s account, it is key for understanding the anger and rage of the Crusaders themselves. Early in their quest to spy on the Somali community, it was the *welcome* that many locals gave the immigrant community that infuriated the militia members the most. After hearing a report from a member of the militia who was tasked to attend (and spy) at the June 4 event, the fury of the militia’s leaders was, above all, against the mostly white leaders and other locals who welcomed the immigrant community. One leader of the militia joked that, before “we blow the top of their heads off,” we should put a sign around their necks that reads: “I SUPPORT ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION. I GO AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION ON A DAILY BASIS. I DO NOT HAVE ANY CARE FOR MY FELLOW CITIZENS IN THE STATE OR THE TOWN THAT I REPRESENT.”

Although often brief in scope, Lehr’s account of different forms of the Christian faith in this Kansas drama is striking as well. Some might expect that those at the forefront of welcoming the immigrant community and celebrating their culture would be “secular,” relatively unattached to faith. This was far from the case. For example, Dr. John Birky, a committed Christian, had been a primary organizer and promoter of the June 4 event to celebrate Somali culture and life. But that was one just one small moment in a larger pattern of hospitality consistently offered by Dr. Birky, both before and after the events of 2016\. Over time, Dr. Birky played a key role in building trust and belonging for the Muslim community, in his service to them as a trusted, culturally sensitive medical doctor; a local friend who would host and be hosted for meals with the Somali families; and ultimately, as a passionate advocate in local politics which eventually overturned the local order for the closing of the African Store.

Dr. Birky was transparent that his Christian faith was at the core of his motivation. When asked by a newspaper reporter about his rationale for building friendship with the local Somali community, he did not draw upon the more general, civic language of “celebrating diversity” or “pursuing justice” (as fitting as those may be). He offered words that don’t fit squarely within a “culture war” narrative at all:

“Jesus said that the first command is love God, and the second command is love your neighbor,” Dr. Birky later told a reporter. And, he noted, the neighbor whom Jesus had cited in his teachings was someone “of a different culture.”

On the other hand, key planners of the bombing also offered avowals of the Christian faith. Patrick Stein often made references to the “Constitution” along with the Christian faith in justifying his plan to “exterminate” the local Muslim community. Stein’s *earnestness* for the white nationalist cause was striking; he naively dismissed any news that seemed to downplay the “Muslim threat,” and sought to frame his role in the bomb plot as a form of martyrdom. Expecting that he would likely be killed in the attack, he studiously told his parents and his two sons that he was giving his life for the cause, and would likely not make it into 2017\. In a message that is jarring to read, he wrote:

> “I might come home in a pine box,” he typed…“Brother, I have never been more serious, more prepared, more ready and willing to defend this country, the Constitution, and the citizens at all cost,” he said. “I do all of this in the name of Jesus my God and for my kids and grandkids and future generations.”

A third expression of the Christian faith shows up in a form that, like the first two, may be surprising to observers: the local who became an informant for the FBI, Dan Day, and his teenage son, Brandon. Day was hardly the “hero” that the Blue-versus-Red culture war scenario would have expected. A western Kansan local, he loved his guns, was a stern supporter of second amendment rights, and opposed President Obama.

Yet, after being invited to a militia meeting, he was shocked to learn about their wild suspicions of the local Somali community. Shortly after, he was approached by two local FBI agents who were concerned about the increasingly fiery rhetoric used by local Militias. These agents convinced Day to accept the invitation to join the militia, in order to record the conversations and infiltrate the group.

This called forth considerable sacrifice for Day, which repeatedly brought him to the questions of faith. Day had recently lost his job, and his family struggled to make ends meet financially. Yet, even as Day’s participation started to take twenty, thirty, forty hours a week, the FBI could not offer significant financial incentives. That would risk scuddling the later trial against the bombers, due to “entrapment.” Amidst physical and emotional exhaustion, Day seriously considered pulling out. How could he justify all of this sacrifice and this deception, even if it was for a good cause?

In a conversation with his dad that proved decisive for him continuing to serve as an FBI informant, Brandon Day spoke about his faith (he was considering converting to Catholicism) and how he had researched the theology of the issue at hand. Using the deception of Rahab in the book of Joshua as an example, Brandon presented a nuanced account of how and why a self-sacrificial act of deception could be one of bravery and faithfulness to display the power of God. For the sake of their Muslim neighbors, this deception — so painful, emotionally and financially, to his family — could be an act of faithfulness. After a season of further prayer, Day came to a point where he received “peace” about continuing his deception to support the FBI plan to foil the plot, for the sake of God and neighbor.

An internet search will retrieve numerous news stories about the Garden City bombing plot. Many of them would likely make it through a “fact-check” exercise with little problem. But without hearing a more intricate, layered story of what took place in Kansas in 2016, we are likely to simply have our own prejudices of “us” against “them” reinforced.

I am grateful for how *White Hot Hate* offers a narrative with breathtaking detail about the mundane yet terrible idolatries of race and nation in our midst, yet it avoids being reduced to a jeremiad against a predictable social-cultural foe. Jeremiads which double-down on simple, cartoon-like portraits of cultural enemies have become popular in recent years, some becoming bestsellers. They simultaneously horrify the readers, and reassure them of their righteousness, since their opponents are cast as a dangerous threat.

The lines of dehumanization traced in *White Hot Hate* remain as wrong—and as dangerous—as ever, precisely because dehumanization so readily slides toward violence. This is part of what makes Lehr’s account resist a “blue versus red” telling: the decisive moments do not arise from ideological purity, but from concrete acts of neighbor-love in particular places. Yet Lehr’s story presses a quieter and more unsettling question. *When such lines are being crossed in Kansas, in Minnesota, or Maine, who will be the one to come alongside a Somali neighbor?* It may not be the loudest voices on social media, locked in familiar cycles of shouting and counter-shouting. It may instead be the NRA member who votes Republican, or another unlikely figure, who nevertheless decides that there is a line that cannot—and must not—be crossed.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s arresting insight bears repeating: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.” *White Hot Hate* refuses to let us forget this; Lehr’s account unsettles any easy alignment of tribal identity with particular moral roles.

Yet it nevertheless exposes horrific evil for what it is. In doing so, the book calls us not merely to denounce dehumanization in the abstract, but to be formed as the kind of neighbors who—sometimes at real cost—stand with those whose humanity is being denied when the line is crossed and the moment demands a response, whether or not that response aligns with our tribe.

## Footnotes

1\. Language of this kind once seemed confined to extremist subcultures. By 2026, it has increasingly been echoed—and at times legitimized—by figures and institutions that shape mainstream public discourse in the United States.
### A Christian Vision for Ordered Welcome
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-christian-vision-for-ordered-welcome/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:34:09.000Z
Scripture doesn't give us the easy answers we want to questions of mass migration, immigration, borders, enforcement, and more. If we are following Christian teachings, then neither the 'build the wall' crowd nor the 'abolish ICE' protestors are likely to get what they desire. Instead, we get something that's much tougher to live out. The government has the right to enforce borders, though it must do so through just means. The church has an obligation to care for the immigrant, but a compassion offered within the greater context of society. Both of these things are true, and both must inform how Christians think about our moment.

## **Borders**

The Bible clearly teaches that God orders human life. Nations are not accidents. Boundaries are an understandable line of demarcation. Scripture speaks plainly about God appointing peoples, lands, and times (Genesis 17:8, Numbers 26:52-53, Deuteronomy 32:8, Acts 17:26). This ordering is a temporary arrangement, but that doesn’t make it insignificant or meaningless. It becomes part of how God restrains chaos and makes everyday life possible after Babel.

Authority and law stand as facts of life within all relationships, the family, the workplace, society, the church, and more. The Bible doesn't see them as bugs in the system that need fixing. They are actually part of how God keeps society functioning. Indeed, this is the actual point behind St Augustine’s much-discussed “ordo amoris.” The point of the ordo is not to identify who you are obliged to love versus who you have no such obligation to, as some have suggested.

Rather, the point is that finite human beings cannot love everyone in equivalent ways. We need ways of distinguishing between the obligations I owe to my child or spouse, to my next-door neighbor, and to the person living six hours away. I am called to love all of them. But I can’t love them all in the same way. Political boundaries do for political society what things like marriage vows or church membership do for families and churches: They help to identify and define mutual obligations of care and protection. National boundaries are, of course, negotiable and relative; they are not declared or made by God. They are creations of human communities. And yet we do need *some* kind of border to help us define a political society’s life in the same way that pastors are helped by having defined membership processes in their churches: The prudential boundary helps define the relationship and guide how we act within it.

Scripture is also equally clear about the command to love the sojourner. Not to ignore, not to tolerate, but to love. God tells Israel to remember its own vulnerability, its own history of displacement, and to let that memory shape its treatment of those who arrive from elsewhere. The call is explicit and repeated. There are no footnotes or exemptions. Indeed, the Christian church, often described as a pilgrim people in Scripture passing through a country that is not their home, should see a picture of their own life in the life of immigrants who, like them, are passing through a place that is not their home.

The Bible never treats borders as sinful. It also never treats hospitality for the alien as optional. Faithfulness lives within this tension.

## **The Sojourner**

The sojourner in Scripture is not invisible. He is to be named, counted, and recognized within the community. He lives among the people and under the same law. He works, worships, and seeks justice within the same social order.

The biblical vision refuses people hiding in the shadows, afraid to come forward. It's about bringing the vulnerable immigrant into the light where they can actually be protected and held to the same standards as everyone else.

This matters. When people exist entirely outside the law, they do not become safer. They become easier to exploit, and thus may be more vulnerable at times than when dwelling in their former country.

## **Law and Mercy**

Our fellow citizens sometimes speak as though law and compassion oppose one another. Scripture does not.

Paul describes governing authorities as servants of God tasked with restraining evil and maintaining order. Law names expectations. It limits the abuse of power. It gives the vulnerable something to appeal to when they are wronged.

When laws are not enforced, you don't automatically get a kinder, more compassionate society. You usually get one where the worst people take advantage of both the vulnerable and the anonymous blob (the British term for the deep state). It becomes predatory. Traffickers flourish. Unscrupulous employers take advantage of people who have no recourse. Migrants themselves become more vulnerable precisely because they lack legal standing, or they simply adapt to the culture of lawlessness that already exists.

The failure is not enforcement at the moment (although some Democrats admit it was in the recent past). The failure is the refusal to hold enforcement and compassion together.

## **Cruelty**

None of these grants permission to dehumanize the sojourner. Scripture is unyielding here.

Israel was not condemned for having borders. God condemned the crushing of the vulnerable, for exercising power without restraint, for forgetting the image of God in the stranger. Enforcement in Scripture is never an excuse for humiliation or harm. Justice is measured not only by outcomes but by process. Dignity matters.

This is where many evangelicals, myself at times, have forfeited moral credibility. We have defended family separation. We have minimized conditions in detention centers. We have spoken about order as though it absolves us from mercy. Then, when our own churches are disrupted, we suddenly discover the language of sanctity and protection.

It rings hollow.

## **Jesus Will Not Let Us Simplify This**

Jesus refuses to let us draw tight conclusions here. The parable of the Good Samaritan makes that clear. Neighborliness is not limited by legal status.

At the same time, Jesus does not deny the reality of political authority. His acknowledgment of Caesar is not an endorsement of tyranny, but neither is it a dismissal of governance. Earthly authority exists, and it has real, though limited, responsibilities.

The kingdom of God does not erase political structures. It judges them. It calls them to justice and mercy. But it does not pretend they are imaginary.

## **Different Callings**

Much of our confusion comes from collapsing roles that Scripture keeps distinct.

The church is called to radical welcome. It feeds the hungry, shelters the vulnerable, and offers care without first demanding credentials. It cannot stop doing this without ceasing to be the church.

The government has a different task. It governs. It sets policy. It enforces the law. It cannot welcome without conditions and remain the government of a defined political community.

When the church tries to govern, it becomes coercive. When the state attempts to play church, it swings between sentimentality and brutality, if not also waste and utilitarianism. Faithfulness requires honoring both callings without confusing them. Christians can welcome the stranger and advocate for just immigration enforcement. These are not contradictions unless we insist on making them so.

## **Faithfulness**

Borders and laws are legitimate. Enforcement carries moral responsibility. Immigrants bear the image of God. They deserve dignity, protection, and fair process. Furthermore, hospitality works within order, not in defiance of it. Compassion without structure eventually collapses. Structure without compassion becomes cruel.

Scripture does not permit us to choose one and ignore the other. For too long, many of us have done exactly that. We have spoken loudly about order and quietly about mercy. Or we’ve marched in the streets demanding less law enforcement, with little to nothing about securing the borders and managing migrant flows.

If we want credibility, the work ahead is harder. We must insist on both order and mercy, and we must mean it, not only when it costs others, but when it costs us as well.
### Confessional Protestantism in Ecumenical Winter
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/confessional-protestantism-in-ecumenical-winter/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:34:11.000Z
Brad East’s *First Things* essay “[Goldilocks Protestantism](https://firstthings.com/goldilocks-protestantism/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)” provocatively argues both that historic, classical, and/or magisterial Protestant traditions are in decline, and that all such churches will soon either become anti-traditionalist, biblicistic, non-sacramental churches with non-denominational styles of worship, or have the high church liturgy, icons, incenses, and practices of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. Perhaps East’s most surprising claim is that he would not know where to begin if were to set out to find an expression of classical Protestantism in contemporary in Abilene, Texas or West Texas in general.

As a native of Amarillo, Texas myself, who spent my childhood and college years as a Southern Baptist in West Texas, then belonged to and served in confessional Presbyterian (PCA) churches for nearly a decade, before becoming Anglican (ACNA) almost six years ago, I have followed this conversation with great interest, and some disappointment in East’s characterization of the traditions I have belonged to. Writing in [*Mere Orthodoxy*](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-greatly-exaggerated-death-of-protestantism), Daniel Williams notes that confessional Protestantism has always been numerically small, from the time of the Reformation through 1950’s America until today. Further, despite East’s suggestion that he would not know where to begin finding a confessional Protestant church today, Williams notes there are indeed several such churches well embodying that tradition in Abilene itself.

A difference that might be easy to miss by onlookers is that confessional Protestant churches, such as the bodies represented by NAPARC (“North American Presbyterian and Reformed Churches,” etc.) never once imagined their liberal, Mainline counterparts to be healthy heirs or sound representatives of the magisterial Protestant tradition. For instance, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church for nearly a century has had an eminently clear sense that they are an extremely committed, embattled few offering a prophetic counter-testimony to the prestigious institutions they separated from, and hence they have worked fastidiously to plant churches, seminaries, publications, and to create an alternative culture to that of their Mainline Protestant counterparts. And though there are exceptions, a schismatic spirit by no means encompasses the complexity of these churches in their self-understanding and aims. Commendably, at its founding the Presbyterian Church in America spoke about itself as a “[Continuing](https://rts.edu/resources/for-a-continuing-church/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)” church, and has continued to do so.

Crucially, when East’s opening line invites readers to “imagine a world without Protestantism,” he appears to primarily mean by “Protestantism” only a vibrant, liberal Mainline with a significant cultural influence on mainstream American society. If so, that does not require much imagination at all, since it has already been in steep demographic decline for several decades, and there are no signs of a coming rebound. Long gone is not only the America of Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr, but even that of Jimmy Carter.

The real concern in East’s piece appears to be that the recent “resurgence of interest in magisterial Protestantism: its theology, history, and resources,” creates an illusion: the commendable labors of a committed few to retrieve the best of Protestantism’s past is ultimately doomed because “Protestantism” has no future, given the statistical demise of the Mainline Protestant churches. But Protestantism’s future does not inexorably lead to traversing the Tiber, the Bosporos, or the non-denominational horse trough.

East regards the classical Protestant synthesis combining early Christian creeds, lower-case “c” catholic liturgy and devotions, alongside distinctive emphasis in Reformation theology such as justification by faith, and a commitment to Holy Scripture as the primary authority in the church’s life (for instance, classical Anglicanism, as represented by the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and Thirty Nine Articles) as inherently unsustainable, destined towards either devolution or re-direction towards other Christian traditions. He writes “there is a structural instability at the heart of the Reformation vision that undermines any attempt to strike a durable middle path between catholic and evangelical Christianities.”

It is worth asking whether East’s “Goldilocks” moniker is charitable to his interlocutors; is it a ‘steel-man’ engagement with the best of the Protestant tradition? For instance, confessional Presbyterians are hardly saying “too much,” “too little,” “ah, just right” when they keep the creeds but reject icons. Whether one likes it or not, they are extremely consistently following Presbyterian theological commitments, such as the Regulative Principle of Worship. Aware of my own potential for self-deception, I nonetheless believe that my own Anglican formation has been something deeper than a consumer at a buffet wanting a little bit of this and not too much of that, nor merely the vicissitudes and historical contingencies of sixteenth century politics that culminated in the Elizabethan Settlement. Though to outsiders confessional Anglican Christianity might appear superficially incoherent, my own sense is that it is deeply consistent and integrated, whose real depths it takes more than the fleeting zeal of a convert to reach, but is a worthwhile pursuit if done with persistence and patience over many years.

East further notes that those such as myself who undertake projects of theological retrieval within classical Protestant traditions are such a numerical minority compared to non-denominational churches that we are relatively insignificant. I do not wish to claim the ‘righteous remnant’ mantle for any specific group I am part of. But taking my cues nonetheless from Elijah in the time of bowing knees to Baal, I never assume that what is good, beautiful, and true will become widely popular in the present evil age. Cultural Christianity in America had its blessings and problems, but ‘Protestantism’ that is deeply in touch with the Protestant tradition is by no means only viable in an established or Mainline context. For my part, as an ordained priest in the Anglican Church in North America, I understand my own relatively small denomination as in continuing a Mainline-like presence in certain specific places, but our denomination as a whole pervasively understands itself as a frontline mission in a post-Christian society, since the super majority of orthodox Anglicans worldwide live in the Global South, and the synthesis of catholic liturgy and Reformation theology that East claims are unsustainable are deeply-held commitments of [global Anglicans](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/not-new-communion-anglican/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), even in contexts of real [persecution](https://www.christianitytoday.com/2025/09/enemy-jesus-love-muslim-christian-conversion-sudan/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

However, with East, I too want to invite readers to “imagine a world without Protestantism,” but neither because confessional Protestantism is doomed, nor because all of its participants will inevitably become Roman, Eastern Orthodox, or non-denominational, nor because of a wishy-washy ecumenism that dispenses historic Protestant convictions. I want to invite readers to imagine and long for the future Christ prayed for in his High Priestly Prayer shortly before his death, asking that all who are in Christ may be one (John 17.21).

But to do so, we must ask: is it inherently self-contradictory to participate in both confessional Protestantism and Jesus’s prayer for the church to be one? Can one retrieve a tradition birthed in a time of division, even one that at its best sought renewal and continuing witness rather than rupture and novelty, while one also sincerely prays for the church to be one?

Robert Jenson, about whom East has written much, began the preface of his *Systematic Theology* with a remarkable declaration about ecumenism:

> Theology is the church’s enterprise of thought, and the only church conceivably in question is the unique and unitary church of the creeds. Therefore, theology may be impossible in the situation of a divided church, its proper agent not being extant—unless, of course, one is willing to say that a particular confessional or jurisdictional body simply is the one church. To live as the church in the situation of a divided church—if it can happen at all—must at least mean that we confess we live in radical self-contradiction and that by every churchly act we contradict that contradiction. Also theology must make this double contradiction at and by every step of its way.

Jenson, rightly, insists that “no degree of theological convergence” in ecumenical dialogue “can by itself suffice to reestablish communion once broken. An Act of God is needed.” Jenson imagined his own writing as an act of waiting for that act of God, a work “deliberately done in such anticipation of the one church,” thus he sought to draw on a broad array of Christian traditions, though self-aware he did so as one shaped by and situated within Lutheran traditions.

It is not impossible, but highly unlikely, that Jenson’s context in liberal Protestantism will forge too many more thinkers like Jenson. He was not only in conversation with contemporary critical biblical scholarship but he had a profound knowledge of and love for Holy Scripture and its authority, and he read it as a sympathetic student at the feet of the church’s theological tradition. This led Jenson to immense moral clarity and a vigorous statement of traditional Christian teaching on topics such as abortion and human sexuality. Jenson was right; we need an act of God, we should pray for it, and we should write and act out the double-contradiction that is the work of theology today.

But the confessional Protestants that East believes are disappearing or doomed are actually the most promising and interesting source for the very kind of ecumenical dialogue Jenson devoted his life’s work towards. Jenson’s mainline Protestant context might be in rapid decline, or rather thinly committed to historic Christian beliefs and practices, but their confessional counterparts arguably hold enormously generative potential for the future of ecumenical work.

The foremost divides in Western Christendom for some time fell along Protestant and Roman Catholic dividing lines, from the sixteenth century well through the Troubles in Northern Ireland. But today all Christians with even the most basic (creedal) orthodox theology and shared vision of human sexuality, the sanctity of life, and more find themselves as co-belligerents in a struggle with an inhumane and secularizing Western society and progressivist religion. There is far greater good will towards one another for that reason alone than there was in the past five centuries, culminating in cooperation such as *Evangelicals and Catholics Together*. Gone with the vanishing Protestant Mainline is the milquetoast ecumenism wherein “[doctrine divides, service unites](https://ecumenism.net/archive/jesson%5Fdoctrine%5Fdivides.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).” Here to stay is an emerging ecumenism where the things held in common run to the core of one’s commitments in life and in death.

But alongside robust unity on the foremost theological commitments of the church there will also be new challenges to visible and institutional unity in the ecumenism of confessional Protestants, unlike their Mainline analogues. Even within Protestantism, unity remains difficult between, say, Missouri Synod Lutherans and confessional Presbyterians on a host of topics and practices ranging from Christology and the Eucharist to images of Jesus and polity. If each fragmented Protestant group each becomes even more deeply entrenched in their confessional traditions which contradict one another, how will those commitments not preclude ecumenical dialogue with one another, let alone with Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox conversation partners?

Apart from everyone in the world becoming Anglican — not the worst possible outcome, in my humble opinion — any advance towards visible and institutional unity will necessarily require a willingness to distinguish between first-order, second-order, third-order, and so on commitments. But even before that, and well prior to any compromise and cooperation, an urgent priority must be simply to have better mutual understanding of one another. We need to cultivate the humility of a teachable spirit, learning how to more sympathetically and charitably learn about one another’s traditions. This is incredibly difficult, agonizingly slow work.

It takes years of dedication to learn one’s own theological tradition well; can we reasonably expect one another to expend comparable effort learning about one another’s traditions we disagree with? Yet, such labor is worthwhile because even if we remain separated brethren, we will nonetheless be able to dispel the historic caricatures that have plagued the sad divisions of Christendom. We will also ensure that there is greater clarity as to what precisely our abiding differences actually are, as well as illuminating where our agreements truly lie. However, about the fundamental commitments of the Christian faith — among them, the doctrine of the Trinity, Christology, the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, there will be profound consensus that could not be assumed by the old Mainline, liberal Protestantism.

I long for the church to be one, and continue to regard the beliefs and practices of the confessional Protestant tradition as contributing distinctive gifts towards that end that can renew the church catholic today. When people see me in my clergy collar out in public and ask me what kind of church I belong to, I love to quote the creed and say Christ’s “one holy, catholic, and apostolic church,” before telling them I am Anglican. Precisely in that order, I am grateful for riches in the Reformed and catholic tradition to which I belong that can help me pray for the act of God that Robert Jenson said we need.

One such prayer is from Archbishop William Laud, in the ACNA’s 2019 *Book of Common Prayer*:

> Gracious Father, we pray for your holy Catholic Church. Fill it with all truth, in all truth with all peace. Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it is in error, direct it; where in anything it is amiss, reform it. Where it is right, strengthen it; where it is in want, provide for it; where it is divided, reunite it; for the sake of Jesus Christ your Son our Savior. Amen.
### Isolation and Community in Rural America
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/isolation-and-community-in-rural-america/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:34:13.000Z
In 2026, America’s loneliness problem is no longer surprising news. It’s now been nearly three years since then U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy warned us about “[Our Epidemic of Loneliness](https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)” and described the effects of “lacking social connection” as being [as harmful to our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day](https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Of course, tech gurus and marketing professionals have been ready as ever to fill this relational vacuum with ready-made remedies like social media and the proliferation of chat bots. We may be alarmed by the growing penchant for chatbots to fill the gaps in people’s lives as [friends](https://www.npr.org/2025/12/29/nx-s1-5646633/teens-ai-chatbot-sex-violence-mental-health?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and even in some cases [spouses](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/chatbot-marriage-ai-relationships-romance/685459/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), but we are often tempted to see these trends as exceptions that a few folks might struggle with. It’s easy to ignore or rationalize our own loneliness until it is too late.

No corner of America has a corner on loneliness. Loneliness finds us in the anonymity of cities and in the small-town cliques and vast expanses of rural America. Now that we have the world in our pockets, it’s easy to scroll through the seemingly happy, friend-filled lives of peers and wish those lives were our own. Regardless of whether those backlit images match reality, the image is enough. Comparison has done its work. We retreat to the numbing comfort of our glowing screens and Netflix subscriptions.

This is the world we have inherited. It is, to some extent, the world we have all helped make. I don’t say this to assign blame. It’s hard to imagine a person—though perhaps a handful are out there—who is not both a victim of and complicit in these trends. The question I’m wrestling with for myself and for the rural communities I serve as a pastor and inhabit as a person, is what, if anything, is to be done? When the world encountered the COVID-19 pandemic, we fought back against the virus in myriad ways. What are we doing in rural communities like those I know and love to fight back against the encroachment of an epidemic that shows up not on petri dishes but in broken hearts and lost lives?

That’s a question I’ve been thinking about a good bit over the last year. It’s a question two novels have helped me think about in new ways. As is often the case, sometimes fiction tells the truth best.

## **Two Takes on Isolation**

An initial glance at John J. Thompson’s [*The Ballad of the Lost Dogs of East Nashville*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-ballad-of-the-lost-dogs-of-east-nashville-john-j-thompson/7d7b6f0d52618185?ean=9798991686204&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (Gyroscope Productions, 2024)and Michael Perry’s [*Forty Acres Deep*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/forty-acres-deep-michael-perry/7be68eacdc0f48f5?ean=9798985663808&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)(Sneezing Cow Publishing, 2022)reveals few similarities between these two fictional accounts of life in modern America. From their vastly differing covers—one animated and colorful the other a snow-laden photograph with ominous billows of black smoke—to their subject matter, geographic location, and even girth (Thompson’s novel comes in at a thick 329 pages while Perry’s slight volume is only 122), the books seem to have little in common. In fact, if both hadn’t shown up on Byron Borger’s [Hearts and Minds Bookstore](https://www.heartsandmindsbooks.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) email last summer, I would never have put them together or even found them at all. (Once again Byron’s excellent work as a bookseller came through for me!)

Thanks to a nudge from Byron and a week of oceanside serenity last July, I read these books—one a comedy, the other a tragedy—in conversation with each other. The result has been a swirl of ideas and emotions that I have not been able to forget. There is something in these pages for a lonely nation.

## **Loneliness Kills**

If there is one constant other than snow in Micheal Perry’s *Forty Acres Deep* it is isolation. The entire novel stands as a tragic testament to rural isolation, an isolation made not just possible but even likely by the hardships of modern agriculture and the breakdown of small-town life. From the book’s first pages—when we learn that the main character, Harold, has been keeping his wife’s dead body at their farmhouse for a month, we know we are in for a bumpy ride.

His wife had died from an overdose of sleeping pills following the loss of a baby and the depression that followed. Harold had found her the morning after, and had “wrapped her in blankets and placed her on the porch” where the frigid temperatures would hold her, like a Siberian mummy, for the next month. As far as Harold is concerned, “He had no idea what to do. He knew he didn’t want help.”

Unable to come to terms with his emotions, and completely isolated (we don’t hear of a friend or a church community throughout the entire book), Harold focuses on day-to-day events, like caring for the chickens and—most urgent of all—fighting the snow. In the deep winter that Harold faces, snow is more than an annoyance. Snow is weighty—both emotionally and physically. The weather is a factor in Harold’s isolation and despair. The lane to his farm is virtually impassable, but the most immediate problem, as he sees it, is the roof of his pole barn. If too much snow accumulates on the barn’s roof, Harold would lose the barn and everything in it. This would be another devastating blow, because even though he hadn’t milked a cow since another of his barns burned, “he still thought of himself as a farmer.”

Throughout the book, the reader gets the impression that Harold wishes he could stop thinking of himself as a farmer. Farming hasn’t been good to him for a long time. “He quit crops when grain futures became a roller coaster he didn’t want to ride. Forever climbing if you farmed a desk, forever falling if you farmed the dirt.” These realities led him to sell his plow and planter and lease his land to a larger operation. Now he makes a meagre living with his backhoe doing side jobs—often for city transplants with remote jobs and bucolic dreams. With mounting debt and pressures, this isn’t much of a living, but he was scrapping by, as long as he didn’t lose the barn. “Losing the barn meant losing the farm.” Much of the book’s central chapters are devoted to Harold’s efforts to keep his two kerosene torpedo heaters running inside the barn in the hope that the snow on the tin roof would melt enough to loosen and slide off.

In the end, Harold’s efforts to save the barn turn out to be a project akin to saving himself. Both feel like hopeless tasks. When a person is walking alone on the edge of a precipice, one wrong step is all it takes.

\*\*\*

Barring Harold’s dark humor and a lone reprieve from deepening isolation, Perry’s short novel is as dark as the black smoke billowing over the northern mid-west plains on its cover. But there is more in these hundred pages than pointless morbidity. Perry is making a point. He gets what life is like for folks in rural America. As an example, take Perry’s two-paragraph riff on modern hunting with all its game-cam inspired posturing: “The noble hunter downloading all the help he could get. Most bucks were nicknamed and their racks scored before they got whacked.” This sounds a lot like what hunting has come to look like in the corner of rural America I call home.

Perry gets the hardships of farming too. He knows that life has been hard for a long time for small-time American farmers. Debt, changing federal policy, and growing distance and even disdain for the actual work of farming had made farming extremely difficult for many. Farmers and their children have been leaving agriculture in droves. As sociologists Tim Slack and Shannon M. Monnat note in their book *Rural and Small-Town America: Context, Composition, and Complexities* (University of California Press, 2024), whereas nearly forty percent of the American workforce was employed in agriculture in 1900, by 1970s the percentage was only 4 percent. By 2000 the number had dropped to 2 percent. Even if one only considers U.S. counties that are completely rural, farming only accounts for 10 percent of employment.

Those that stay find often find the deck stacked against them. The toll of increasing debt, decreasing income, and isolation is significant. According to the [National Rural Health Association](https://www.ruralhealth.us/getmedia/98f1009e-5418-4c06-910c-cdbb965cdb2e/NRHA-Policy-Brief-Increases-in-Suicide-Rates-Among-Farmers-in-Rural-America.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) “the suicide rate among farmers is 3.5 times higher than the general population.” It is no wonder that Perry ends his book with a page titled “Where to Get Help.” Perry speaks directly to farmers. “Agricultural professions have among the highest suicide rates.” After listing some national suicide hotlines, he brings his advice closer to home: “Your state department of agriculture and local extension offices will have even more regionally specific source of mental health assistance….Tell someone. Please don’t try to plow it under.”

## **Loneliness Overcome**

John J. Thompson’s novel *The Ballad of the Lost Dogs of East Nashville* is as warm and hopeful as Perry’s volume was snowy and tragic. A comedy in the Shakespearian sense, Thompson’s volume starts with isolation and misunderstanding but ends in the joy of matrimony and wrong-made-right.

Thompson’s tale follows the life of his central character Jerry Wesley through Vietnam, alcoholism, and the loss of both his family and his dreams. After his wife left him and barred him from visiting their two young children, Jerry moved to East Nashville in 1975\. He initially found work as a mechanic and then as a tour bus driver. The latter job fit his loner personality and penchant for all-night drives well.

It was during one of these trips that Jerry heard a rock and roller talking about sobriety. This overheard conversation became the catalyst for Jerry’s own sobriety journey. By the time the book opens, Jerry is 68 and has been sober for 38 years. Along the way he had also found Jesus and gotten involved “at the local aspiring megachurch.” But his desire for church dissolved as the priorities of the church shifted in the 1990s. “As the church became more political, Jerry became less and less interested on Sundays.”

His church wasn’t the only thing that seemed to shift under his feet. His neighborhood was not static either. “East Nashville had gone through quite a shift….Back in the mid-eighties the general opinion was that the neighborhood had taken a dive, and in the nineties crime rates continued to rise and property values continued to fall.” Then, in the spring of 1998, the neighborhood was decimated by several tornados. Amid the devastation, Jerry encountered a silver lining he had not anticipated. As he visited neighbors he had passed for years but never gotten to know, he discovered a wealth of relationships right outside his front door. “He had never felt more connected to his neighborhood or his neighbors.”

But it wasn’t only neighborliness that followed in the path of the twister. Whether it was the influx of insurance money, or the low cost of housing, East Nashville changed in the years following the twisters as gentrification settled into the neighborhood Jerry had long called home. “In just a few years East Nashville went from being a ‘no man’s land’ to being thought of by many as one of the coolest places in the country.”

The remainder of the book details Jerry’s efforts to navigate the complex pressures that accompanied gentrification in a neighborhood that was now home to folks from a wide array of backgrounds. It is Jerry’s love of music and his long-hidden chops on the guitar that lead to the book’s breakthrough moment when Jerry decides to play guitar, not in his front room as usual but on his front porch. This was only a relocation of a few feet, but it made all the difference.

When Jerry plays outside, two young musicians who live next door discover his ability and convince him to take part in a jam session with them. Something shifts when they play together. Soon they play regularly. They play at Jerry’s house, on his porch, and, eventually, in a local park. Along the way they pull in a variety of musicians from different walks of life. There’s Brother Louis, who, in addition to his powerful voice, brings the experience of being a black man in East Nashville to the band. Ceasar, the band’s accordion player, had migrated to the U.S. and paid for amnesty in 1986 under Ronald Reagan’s Immigration and Control Reform Act. Since then, he developed his landscaping business into one of the most successful in Nashville.

Together, the Lost Dogs, as the band comes to call themselves, do more than make beautiful music. They launch an experiment in community engagement and free music education that captures the heart of folks in their city and beyond.

\*\*\*

In the end, Thompson’s tale is beautiful. It’s also just possible enough to arouse longing in the reader. One can’t help but wonder, what if something like this happened in my community? What if neighbors could come together to create something beautiful? What if talented folks could use their talents, not simply to buttress their bottom line, but to help others in their community join in, not as passive spectators but as folks with real contributions to make?

Like Perry, Thompson has axes to grind. He gives some pretty direct commentary on the state of the church, immigration, latent racism, and celebrity culture to name a few. Some readers may find him a bit too didactic at points. But the vision he crafts of local folks coming together in a specific community with its own history, problems, and potential is inspiring. While East Nashville may be especially suitable to discovering musicians, one can’t help but wonder what hidden potential and life-giving community one might find in one’s own town if one were to move out of the house and onto the front porch.

Perhaps this is exactly what a lonely nation is desperate for.

## **Addressing Loneliness**

As different as these books are, they are united by the unavoidable human need for community. Both Harold and Jerry are middle aged men with blue collar backgrounds. Both have struggled with their personal demons and the forces of the wider culture that seem almost demonic in their ability to isolate us from the places we call home and the people who live near or with us. Perhaps most telling of all, both books foreground homes and front porches. For Perry, the porch is where death lurks in frozen vigilance. It’s a symbol of the isolation that has stalked Harold all the way home. For Thompson, the front porch is a gateway to his community. It is alive with potential, filled with the voices of friends and the sound of music.

As different as these porches are, I think both help make a significant point about the modern epidemic of loneliness. Perhaps in our efforts to address loneliness, we need to be more literal, more concrete. Perhaps the only way to address loneliness is by giving loneliness an address.

It seems to me that our efforts to take on loneliness in general only lead to more loneliness in the particular places we call home. If the problem of loneliness doesn’t have an address—if we aren’t talking about loneliness in *this* community and *this* place—we will only name a problem without ever getting any closer to solving it.

That’s why we need front porches, sidewalks, local churches, in-person reading groups, recreational sports teams, and a wide array of local institutions. Each of these undertakings root us in a specific place. Each addresses loneliness by bringing folks together in a specific town, village, or zip code.

**\*\*\***

Many of us might agree with this in principle. But it takes action to make these things happen. Sometimes it takes moving from our screen-lit living rooms to our front porches.

This is seldom easy.

I’ll be the first to admit that there’s a temptation that accompanies local efforts like this, especially if we live in small, out-of-the-way places. We may long for the kind of community that we encounter in Thompson’s version of East Nashville, but, as we often think, nothing like that could happen here. Our rural community isn’t dense with musicians. We don’t have access to folks with connections to studios, media outlets, or celebrities. Furthermore, you might add, if I played music on my porch no one would hear me because the nearest neighbor is a quarter mile away.

While there’s truth to some of these sentiments, I think there’s more potential for community in our small towns and rural areas than we are willing to admit. There are folks who want to play music. There are folks who want to discuss books or try their hand at writing. The question is who is working to build networks to connect these folks?

We need more front porches. We need more folks who are willing to put themselves out there, not as celebrities looking to make a buck, but as fellow practitioners inviting others to join us in the things that have made life more enjoyable, more meaningful, and more human for centuries. We need local churches, and local groups of writers, local rec. sports teams, and local institutions where we know folks not just by their names but by the street on which they live. We need these things not just in hip neighborhoods like East Nashville but in small towns and rural areas. It’s not about creating something that we can scale, market, or give an interview about for a national publication. It’s about meeting and connecting with the neighbors God has given us.

This is how we counter the loneliness epidemic of our times. Loneliness thrives in the abstract anonymity of our times. Fighting loneliness requires that we actually address it.
### Why and How to Give Up Your Smartphone
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-and-how-to-give-up-your-smartphone/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:34:15.000Z
I regularly teach an introductory philosophy course on the theme of the good life. The course explores various conceptions of the highest good in human life. During the course, I invite students to take a five-day “Digital Media Holiday.” The experience is consistently eye-opening for them. One student who went on to make permanent changes to his digital habits described his previous relationship to his phone as *spiritually degrading*—and that he had been largely unaware of this effect it had on him.

My wife and I are millennial professionals who have never owned smartphones. Our motivations have evolved over the years, from inertia, to conscious decision, to protest against the hegemony of the tech companies, to bearing witness to an alternative way of life. But our resolve has never flagged. We suspect that many others would enjoy the same freedom we enjoy, but don’t believe it’s possible.

But it is possible. And it might be the change you need to make this year.

It’s easy to forget just how recently and rapidly our culture became smartphone-dependent. The first-generation iPhone was unveiled in 2007\. We now know that the cultural adoption of smartphones happened faster than any other communication technology in history. In 2011, about a third of American households had a smartphone. By 2016, [that number was close to 80](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)%. Accompanying the rapid spread of ownership was rapid change in how the device functioned. Facebook’s ‘like’ and Twitter’s ‘retweet’ buttons were introduced in 2009, instantly creating the phenomenon of the ‘viral’ social media post. (Previously, if you posted on social media you were just interacting with friends.) Then downloadable third-party apps were introduced as an addition to the software installed by the manufacturer. Soon these apps included push-notifications, a feature that was shortly added to social media platforms as well.

In other words, it was not just the rate of ownership of these devices that was exploding but the amount of time and attention their owners gave to these devices. “By the early 2010s,” writes Jonathan Haidt, “our phones had transformed from Swiss-army knives, which we pulled out when we needed a tool, to platforms upon which companies competed to see who could hold on to eyeballs the longest.” Haidt calls these years ‘the Great Rewiring’, especially of childhood—but of course the rewiring happened at all levels of society.

Around 2016, awareness began to spread that not all was well. Andrew Sullivan, [in a piece titled ‘I Used to be a Human Being,’](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/09/andrew-sullivan-my-distraction-sickness-and-yours.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) wrote about the effect that being constantly online was having on him:

> I tried reading books, but that skill now began to elude me. After a couple of pages, my fingers twitched for a keyboard. I tried meditation, but my mind bucked and bridled as I tried to still it. I got a steady workout routine, and it gave me the only relief I could measure for an hour or so a day. But over time in this pervasive virtual world, the online clamor grew louder and louder.…it felt as if I were in a constant cacophonous crowd of words and images, sounds and ideas, emotions and tirades—a wind tunnel of deafening, deadening noise.

But the growing social crisis was not widely acknowledged until the waning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Netflix’s 2020 documentary-drama ‘The Social Dilemma’ exposed the nefarious workings of social media algorithms. The public started hearing, with growing frequency, phrases like “the teen mental health crisis,” “the epidemic of loneliness” (so dubbed by [the U.S. Surgeon General in 2023](https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)), “information silos” and “political hyperpolarization,” “gaming addiction,” and so forth. Moreover, journalists began to uncover the shameful fact that smartphone apps had been engineered to be addictive. Facebook, for example, used the science of addiction to make their software more addictive, especially for teens. (The Wall Street Journal’s original reporting on this is known as ‘[the Facebook Files](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039?gaa%5Fat=eafs&gaa%5Fn=AWEtsqf9ZZgx7JQJ4IHSk1BI0FOSICLFmgOXGkqxkfgc3MTTkalGRxL008v9Rtq0mk4%3D&gaa%5Fts=69713201&gaa%5Fsig=X-KpH4byEp7Z6roYxXJWCV3ifkB8YXp2Co2mcyyHT5B1jcWk4HC2RFs1HttWrzg3A5V3%5FUkAwQ2RIXHbsUiNqw%3D%3D&ref=mereorthodoxy.com).’)

It was becoming clear that American society—indeed, society around much of the globe—had been subjected to a social experiment at the hands of the tech companies, and that the unwitting experimental subjects were a lot sicker than they were before. And yet, from the perspective of the tech companies, the experiment was a resounding success. Not only had we become dependent on their drug, but we had begun to forget what life was like outside of the laboratory. Generation Z, the generation that populates the courses I teach, haven’t known anything else. This is what life is supposed to look like, what life must look like.

## **An Animating Vision**

Given what we now know about the impact of smartphones, why has there been no large-scale movement away from them? Why have the ranks of smartphone-abstainers continued to shrink? The obvious answer is that people have become acclimated. But even those who recognize that such acclimatization has left them worse off haven’t put up much of a fight. Our lives seem irrevocably structured around our phones now, and we see no viable alternative to the status quo.

What we need is a concrete program for cultural revolution. Any such program includes two elements: an animating vision, and a practical strategy. I address the first in the present section, and the second in the next.

By an ‘animating vision,’ I mean a positive conception of what a better life would look like. This brings us to the question of the course I teach: what, after all, is the good life?

For my own part, I have been asking the question compulsively since I was a teenager, though I didn’t always know where to look for a Christian answer. In college, as I studied the Christian intellectual tradition, I found a wealth of resources. I was especially drawn to what I learned about Christian monasticism (monks or nuns living together in order to prioritize a common life of prayer). After I graduated, I had the opportunity to spend a month at Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey (outside of Portland, Oregon), living in the cloister alongside the monks there. I worked in their book-bindery with them. I made fruitcake with them. I gardened with them. I ate with them. I prayed with them.

Here is a day in the life of a Cistercian monk: You get up before dawn and chant the Psalms together. You take Mass. Then you work for a few hours—communally, gently, at a deliberate pace. You gather at midday to pray together. In the afternoon there is free time to walk in the woods or read or engage in private contemplative prayer. Then you dine together, complete the day in prayer together, and retire. (Sundays look the same minus the work.) That’s it. There is no competition, no one is chasing a career goal, and no one is going anywhere. And yet all the monks share a strong sense of calling and purpose.

The philosopher Zena Hitz spent several years as a monastic. Four years in, she wrote this about the cloistered life: “Part of the power of religious life in community is its use of time. There are hours of prayer, work times, study times. …. When I had a bit of free time, I had no money to spend, no place to go, and the internet was off-limits. I walked in the woods, wrote letters, played cards, read books, had a conversation. It was a life of focus, without daily regret.” Such was my experience, too, over a much shorter period.

Water from the Cistercian well was the freshest I have ever tasted. I wanted to be freshened by that same water in my life back in the world. For most people in our society, when asked to come up with paradigms of living well, I doubt the lives of Cistercian monks would come to mind, but for me they do. Based on their example, a vision of the good life started coming into focus for me. It goes like this: to live well is to offer loving attention and care to things that are worthy of it, such as: meaningful work, the wonders of nature, the beauty of good music and poetry and art, one’s intimate friends, the needy who come across your path, and above all the presence of God, who is the greatest good.

Moreover, the good life is doing this (offering loving attention and care to the things that are worthy of it) with the same people over time. It is essentially communal, thrice over: your expressions of attention and care are shared activities; their foci are often other members of your community; and these members of the community can reciprocate, offering slow-paced, loving attention and care back to you.

Thus, on my understanding, the good life is sharing with others a common life that is centered on the good. This is thriving in life, not just surviving.

This monastic-inspired picture of the good life is my animating vision when I am making decisions about my life, including whether and how to adopt emerging technology. I ask myself: *would that help me get to the place where I’m sharing with others a common life that is centered on the good? Or would it disrupt such a life?* Whenever I have applied these questions to smartphones, I have judged that they would disrupt rather than facilitate such a life.

## **A Practical Strategy**

But this brings me to the second plank in my revolutionary platform: the practical strategy. Now, it is widely believed that you simply cannot live without a smartphone. Even the happiness researcher Arthur Brooks, who blames smartphones for much of our culture’s malaise, has written, “In a world of electronic payments, digital documents, and remote work, a truly smartphone-free lifestyle is not possible.” He, along with many others, has offered advice for how to mitigate the deleterious effects of your smartphone without ditching it altogether, advice that includes deleting social media, disenabling notifications, switching your screen to grayscale, and so on.

These are good suggestions, and I encourage you to implement them. But they do not address the deep perversity of the smartphone: the glittering screen that follows you wherever you go. This just isn’t good for us. The good news is that we can dispense with the little digital interloper: life without a smartphone *is* possible. But dispensing with it will leave uncomfortable gaps in your lifestyle that need to be filled in or put to some use. To that end, I offer four practical strategies: *plan ahead*, *build a community*, *prioritize silence*, and *stick out*.

### **Plan Ahead**

Smartphones provide convenience, whence their stickiness. Life without a smartphone is less convenient. But not overwhelmingly so. The trick is to anticipate what a smartphone allows you to do on the spur of the moment, and to prepare for those actions ahead of time.

My family by no means rejects digital technology. I own a flip phone that can make calls and send text messages, including group messages. My wife owns a ‘Lightphone’, one of several minimalist phones designed to replace a smartphone. I have a laptop. GPS is installed in my car. We have a digital camera.

When I ask people why they need their smartphones, notwithstanding the capabilities of the various devices I just listed, I get a variety of answers. But the same suite of contexts comes up over and over. I’ll go through a few of them and explain how I make do. It may strike you as ridiculous that I employ such cumbersome methods with so many different devices to accomplish all that a smartphone can so easily take care of! But I assure you, gentle reader: *this is the path to freedom.*

#### How to Travel

When I am traveling domestically, I study Google Maps ahead of time. I often draw myself a map that includes exactly what I need, and I find that the exercise of creating the map goes a long way in orienting me to my destination. (I also like to have a paper road map on hand.) I look up detailed information about the public transit I will use. When in my car, I can use my GPS. Before I head out, I use Yelp to identify good dining options and then include them on my hand-drawn map.

My wife travels internationally more frequently than I do. On such occasions she acquires an international SIM card for an old iPhone that a friend loans to us. She gets to enjoy the extra functionality of a smartphone while navigating an unfamiliar place, but when she gets home she can put the device back in a drawer, alongside her passport and other exclusively travel-related items.

For ground transportation, we sometimes take taxis, and we sometimes call an Uber from a laptop, using wifi at an airport or hotel or coffeeshop.

#### **Tickets for Events**

Venues increasingly expect visitors to use their phones to display digital tickets. I am in the habit of calling a venue a few days ahead of time to ask how they can accommodate me. Although my sample size of venues is not large, I can report that most venues still have a mechanism in place for printing paper tickets for those who need them. A few don’t; in these rare cases, I have either pulled up my ticket on our travel iPhone or have relied on another member of my party to get me in the door.

#### **Payment**

I use credit cards and checks, and I try to carry some cash. I can transfer money directly from my bank account to another person’s account using Zelle.

#### **Two-Factor Authentication**

I can receive text messages with access codes, and this method always works. When my employer started implementing two-factor authentication via a smartphone app, I alerted the IT department that I didn’t have a smartphone, and they were able to supply me with a ‘token’—a matchbook-sized device I carry in my bag that displays an access code when I request it.

#### **Entertainment**

On our home stereo we listen to vinyl and CDs. We can stream media on our laptops. Recently I began listening to audiobooks from my laptop while I commute (a habit for which my wife teases me, encouraging me instead to purchase an inexpensive mp3 player). When driving with my eight-year-old, we will sometimes listen to audiobooks on CD or I will set him up with headphones so he can listen on my laptop. Many podcasts can be downloaded and then listened to in the same fashion.

So we can ‘consume’ media. But we are also wary of filling every moment with stimulation. It can be hard for us, even without smartphones, to say no to the internet’s constant bids for attention. But we strive to make noise the exception, and quiet the rule.

### **Build a Community**

The good life is essentially a shared thing, as I have indicated. Alas, so is technology. Why do parents keep giving children smartphones? Because all the other kids have smartphones, because this type of information technology provides the framework for their social lives. Digital technologies are misleadingly thought of as *tools*, when it is more apt to think of them as *infrastructures*. Opting out of the culture’s information technology would mean withdrawing from social life—unless one can plug into an alternative community that uses an alternative infrastructure.

Acting against the dominion of smartphones must be a collective action, then. This point has not been lost on educators. Beginning a few months ago, many schools across the country do not allow smartphones ‘from bell to bell.’ We as a culture made this drastic and somewhat illiberal move because we recognized that the alternative was harming our children. But what about us adults? If smartphones are also not good for adults, can we take collective action?

For now, any such action has to be coordinated among a few people. For my family, this looks like gathering regularly with two other families who share our concerns about smartphones. At least once per month, we gather for several hours to craft together a communal environment that is tech-free, play-based, embodied, and intimate. We also run into these people in a variety of contexts outside our “standing hang,” as we call it. And we try to participate in a range of communal activities, sometimes with these same people and often with others, where phones play no role: gatherings for worship and prayer, book clubs, gallery openings, interactions with neighbors from our porch or theirs.

Of course, not everyone we interact with is already on board. I make it a point to talk about digital technology with parents of our son’s friends. I explain to them that we don’t allow our kids unsupervised time on smartphones or other internet-connected devices. The conversation can be awkward at first, but generally goes well. We initiate similar conversations with babysitters and grandparents, reminding them to stay off their smartphones while spending time with our son.

Not that I always have to initiate the conversation: my flip phone is a conversation starter.

### **Make Silence a Priority**

My consistent experience is that the more stimulation I have, the more stimulation I want, and the less stimulation I get, the less I need. When I will myself to sit still in my restlessness for an extended period, the restlessness eventually dissipates and I am drawn into peaceful attentiveness. Cheap stimulation loses its allure.

Often, the happiest parts of my day are the fifteen minutes before I begin work and the fifteen minutes after I put my son to bed when I do absolutely nothing. I settle, I take in my surroundings, and I do nothing. In so doing I am following [the wonderfully prosaic instructions of the Orthodox bishop Anthony Bloom](https://store.ancientfaith.com/beginning-to-pray-metropolitan-anthony-bloom/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com):

> I think we must do exercises in stopping time and in standing in the present, in this ‘now’ which is my present and which is also the intersection of eternity with time.  
>  
> What can we do? This is the first exercise. … You sit down and say ‘I am seated, I am doing nothing, I will do nothing for five minutes’, and then relax, and continually throughout this time (one or two minutes is the most you will be able to endure to begin with) realise, ‘I am here in the presence of God, in my own presence and in the presence of all the furniture that is around me, just still, moving nowhere.’ There is, of course, one more thing you must do: you must decide that within these two minutes, five minutes, which you have assigned to learning that the present exists, you will not be pulled out of it by the telephone, by a knock on the door, or by a sudden upsurge of energy that prompts you to do at once what you have left undone for the past ten years. So you settle down and say ‘Here I am’, and you are. If you learn to do this at … moments of your life when you have learned not to fidget inwardly, but to be completely calm and happy, stable and serene, then extend the few minutes to a longer time and then to a little while longer still. … Once you have learned not to fidget, then you can do anything, at any speed, with any amount of attention and briskness, without having the sense of time escaping you or catching up with you.

I say that this practice often provides me with the happiest parts of my day. Before it was routine, however, I feared that the opposite would prove true. After all, if there is no deeper goodness hidden underneath the hubbub of life, sitting in silence means staring into the abyss of nothingness and despair. If, on the other hand, God’s loving presence fills the void, then nowhere else will we find our deepest rest and fulfillment.

### **Stick Out**

As I see it, smartphones were created by professional manipulators to make it harder for people to live a flourishing life. Yet society expects me to have one on my person at all times. This is absurd and outrageous; I should have the freedom not to have one. Increasingly, society recognizes vegetarians as reasonable and conscientious and seeks to accommodate them. I submit that society should accommodate us smartphone abstainers on similar grounds.

In order to bring about the change I wish to see, I (gently, graciously) put the burden on whatever institutional representative I am interfacing with to accommodate me. For example, when instructed to open an app or scan a QR code, I simply report that I don’t have a smartphone and I ask, what shall I do instead? I have been met with surprise, curiosity, even amusement, but very rarely with a slamming door. And perhaps I will have helped normalize this type of interaction, rendering said institutional representative more prepared for the next person of my ilk who comes along.

## **First Steps Toward Revolution**

I suspect that most of my readers who have made it this far are thinking, “I am more open to the idea than I was before, but I don’t see myself ditching my smartphone tomorrow.” Fair enough. But you don’t have to dive in right away. You can test the waters a bit.

The first step is to attempt the Digital Media Holiday I offer to my students. Here are the specifics. For five consecutive days, including both weekdays and a weekend, abstain entirely from the following:

- Social media
- Digital entertainment (TV shows, movies, YouTube, TikTok, etc.)
- Podcasts
- Video games
- Chatbots
- Non-essential text messaging (e.g., conversing by text rather than in person / by voice)

During the five days, ask yourself: what is truly worthy of my attention? Try to cultivate activities that direct your attention thusly.

Then, after the five days, ask yourself whether you want to return to any of the digital media you abstained, and how often and in what form. At the very least, you will have found new freedom to re-enter the digital world intentionally and purposefully.

Or, you may find that you never want to go back.
### This World Is Still Not My Home
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/this-world-is-still-not-my-home/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:34:18.000Z
Many of us raised in a certain type of evangelical church grew up singing the popular gospel hymn, “This World is Not My Home.” The first line of the song declares: “This world is not my home, I’m just a passing through.” The song speaks of a desire to move on from this present world, looking forward to arriving at “heaven’s shore.”

The gospel hymn has received no shortage of criticism from Christian thinkers. For example, New Testament scholar N.T. Wright [speaks critically of the song](https://ntwrightpage.com/2020/06/14/undermining-racism-complete-text/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), accusing many evangelicals of being Platonists. After all, God created this physical universe, and intended humans to live in the world he made. Should we not commit to the material nature of this present world since God fashioned the world as good? One might dismiss the song for misreading Genesis and the whole narrative of Scripture altogether.

[Roger Olson writes](https://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2023/07/this-world-is-not-my-home-im-just-a-passin-through/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) about how some of his teaching colleagues use the song as an example of bad theology. The lyrics of the song are low-hanging fruit for those who want to criticize certain forms of American dispensationalism or disengaged pietism.

I do not know much about the history of the song or how its lyrics were written, or what the author’s intentions were. Nevertheless, I can appreciate some of the concerns the song’s critics are raising. If we think this world is ultimately destined for the trash bin, some Christians can be tempted to have an indifferent attitude to the present world around us, disregarding the needs of the least of these and casually destroying the natural environment. Singing bad theology can have practical consequences. So, Wright and others are raising their red flags. However, in spite of its detractors, I want to provide a different way of understanding the song particularly from a post-colonial, Asian American perspective that retains its spiritual value for the well being of a diverse, global church.

In Celine Song’s masterful film *Past Lives*, she beautifully conveys the depth of the existential realities surrounding friendship, love, loss, and immigration. The film tells the story of Nora Moon and Hae Sung, a girl and boy living in Korea who deeply care for one another. We are introduced to them walking side by side from school every day, sharing moments of playfulness and sorrow. Even though they are children, they possess a mutual, rich affection full of innocence and joy. The young girl’s family decides to move to Canada to further the parents’ professional goals, and the two young friends abruptly part ways leaving them both feeling unsettled.

While Nora grows to find a stable life in Canada, she does not fully fit into her new North American culture. Twelve years later, Nora and Hae Sung serendipitously reconnect through social media. Even though they are separated by significant geographical distance, they continue to talk to one another through emails and video calls, disclosing the inner parts of their hearts. Throughout their conversations, they speak in Korean, and Nora is able to recover some connection back to her homeland with Hae Sung. The viewer catches a glimpse of the couple recapturing something dear to them that they once lost. However, the physical separation takes an emotional toll on Nora, with neither one of them intending to immediately move to be with the other given their current professional aspirations. At Nora’s request, she and Hae Sung abruptly disconnect from communicating. They are both left grieved and longing for companionship. Soon after, Nora meets an American writer, and they eventually get married. Hae Sung also enters into a dating relationship in Korea. Another twelve years pass, and Nora lives in New York in a committed relationship with her husband, but Hae Sung is going through some turmoil with his girlfriend. He chooses to visit New York where Nora resides, with the intention of seeing her. They reconnect once again—this time in person—and they are both overjoyed to see each other face to face after twenty-four years. Nora processes her complex feelings towards both Hae Sung and her Korean heritage as she is married to a white American living in New York. On his final night in America, Hae Sung and Nora share a conversation about their own intimate relationship and what might have been. Hae Sung departs to Korea leaving Nora crying in her husband’s arms.

Langdon Gilkey points out that art can have a prophetic role; it can open up the truth behind and within the ordinary. *Past Lives* beautifully weaves together themes of love, longing, culture, and home. While it is not an explicitly religious film, it discloses something profoundly theological about the human condition: we are creatures who long for home but live perpetually in exile, grieving what has been lost. It is a story that deeply resonates with many of us who were raised between two cultures, two homes—we might even say two worlds. Those who have been geographically displaced understand and feel the struggle of navigating relationships from your place of origin and the place in which you presently find yourself.

My parents journeyed from India to the United States where I was born. The first time I was on an airplane I was less than five years old. My family traveled almost annually between south India and the United States. For my cousins in India, I was practically a white man— speaking in English, spoiled by luxuries, unaccustomed to their ways of life. Despite their slurs, I still recognized that coming to India was coming back to the place that could well have been my permanent home. Indeed, in a sense, it was my home—it was my land of origin. The reason that my last name is Varghese, or I enjoy spicy foods, or my skin is brown is directly related to the place where I am from. My oldest childhood friend lived in India; it was there among the guava and jackfruit trees that I first learned how to play and develop social bonds.

All the while, I knew that I was perceived as a Westerner in India. To be sure, I happily claimed my Western identity, embracing the privileges of individual choice and free expression against age old taboos and traditions. Indian culture with all of its customs and prohibitions often felt too restrictive and overbearing. I loved the great thinkers of the Western tradition: Plato, Augustine, and Shakespeare. On the other hand, my white friends in America affectionately called me, “brownie.” My classmates related to me as someone who brought spicy Indian food to lunch, could not have romantic entanglements prior to my parents’ arrangements, and had a strange last name. Occasionally, my ethnic identity was confused with being Hindu. Was I ever really one of them? After all, from my side, I found the lax moral standards of American culture perplexing and shameful. I did not understand or appreciate the lack of respect for elders or family ties and the careless sexual mores. Surely, there ought to be limits to one’s individual self-expression. Indian culture endowed me with an appreciation for hospitality and community that was substantially deficient in the West.

In my younger years, I considered my participation in both cultures a strength. I could draw from the best of both worlds, so to speak. While there is a way in which that continues to be true, after becoming a father, I have come to see my displacement has also rendered me divided, leaving my children with a fractured heritage. I am not quite Indian or American—I am a deplorable tertium quid. If I was raised solely in south India or the United States, my family, my values, my home would all be unified.

To complicate matters, I married an Indian raised in a British school who migrated to the United States for college. Our children have grandparents and cousins scattered around Asia, North America, and the United Kingdom. When I consider many of my white, American students who were born and raised in one place their whole lives, I feel that they possess something I don’t: a unified experience and identity—a unified heritage. For many of them, going “home” means something particular, concrete, and stable that they can visit in this present world. Spending one’s time over the holidays is bound to a fixed place.

Certainly, my parents coming to the United States has given me a lot—privileges of opportunity that it is difficult to imagine being without— but it has also taken something from me. This is undoubtedly a feature of the modern world. As I watched *Past Lives*, it struck me as a story distinctly of late modernity. Technology has made the world smaller, but it has also left us feeling more disconnected. Moving across the globe, and consequently rupturing our communities, has never been easier and yet our souls bear a heavy cost.

My feelings are not unique. It has been well-documented that missionary kids and third culture individuals struggle with social belonging and feelings of homelessness. Chloe Donahue [explains ](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366548564%5FGrowing%5FUp%5Fas%5Fa%5FThird%5FCulture%5FKid%5Fand%5FIts%5FImpact%5Fon%5FIdentity%5Fand%5FBelonging?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)what Ruth Useem meant when she coined the term “third culture kid,”:

> The third culture is without a single geographical location, language…nationality, or ethnicity. These constructs are often the foundation through which people…find belonging… Thus, the TCK experience is inherently dynamic, mobile, and forever shifting… likely causing similar dynamics in a TCK’s sense of identity and belonging.

Consider comments from third culture individuals themselves: “There are little things that you’ll pick up everywhere you live, whether it’s values or traditions that you take with you everywhere you go, so you’re not 100 per cent entirely at home anywhere” or “I suppose the truly odd thing is that I very often have a feeling of homesickness, yet it seems like a paradox, as I’ve never had a home, and I don’t know where it is that I’m yearning for!”

Such voices represent the sentiment of many of us whose families have voyaged around the world. The question of belonging and finding a home is a frequent theme among TCKs.

However, it is at this locus of unsettledness that a third culture person finds a point of connection with the people of the covenant in Scripture. Shifting geographical locations and the accompanying transient ways of life are central to the story of Israel. N.T. Wright himself emphasizes the motif of exile in biblical theology; it is the “central drama” Israel was acting out. The Jews returning from Babylon back to their land were permanently displaced—had they ever truly come back home? Immigrants and their children recognize something of themselves in the story of a people who have been wandering, searching for peace.

The church in the world today can expect to encounter more people like this. The authors of one study [purport ](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6589340/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)that “children of immigrants represent one in four children in the United States and will represent one in three children by 2050,” and that the “children of Asian and Latino immigrants together represent the majority of children of immigrants in the United States.”

The fact is that from its very inception in the book of Acts, the church has always been global. We would do well to remember that the church ministers to people across ethnic and national lines, especially since the church emerged as a multilingual, transnational diaspora.

What the third culture person experiences with regard to an unsatisfied search for home, Christian writers (from St. Augustine to John Bunyan) have been addressing for centuries on a spiritual level. C. S. Lewis famously describes the inner, aching hunger of the human heart; a desire for that which it not knows what. He identifies it as *Sehnsucht*—an overwhelming, ineffable longing. Lewis points out that the good and beautiful things we experience in this temporal world are not ultimately intended to satisfy, but instead point to the higher reality for which we are searching. Lewis writes of temporal beautiful objects, “For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited.” For Lewis, the pleasures of this world may awaken desire, but they cannot altogether fulfill it. In his famous quote from *Mere Christianity*, Lewis writes, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” For Lewis, we are invited to participate in the life of God thereby filling the particular hollows of our hearts.

Simply put, many of us in the church, especially those with third culture experiences, possess a palpable desire wherein we are searching for our place of belonging and rest, and we do not principally find it anywhere in this world. One occasionally gets the impression from some modern theologians that Heaven will be a kind of earthly utopia where poverty, social inequality, and environmental abuse will be eradicated; if we band together and work hard enough, we might just be able to achieve it on this planet.

Peter Kreeft provides a helpful corrective, “We denizens of this third rock from the sun are all homeless aliens, refugees, strangers in a strange land, orphaned, bereaved and exiled… ‘This world is not my home, I’m just-a-passing through.’ If we have forgotten that today, we have forgotten an essential theme of our whole story.” I think Lewis and Kreeft are correct, and I can think of no other way to make sense of the biblical identification of the people of God as sojourners for whom Christ prepares a new place (1 Peter 2:11; John 14:3; Revelation 21:5).

In the final moments of *Past Lives*, Hae Sung turns to Nora as he prepares to say goodbye and he sparks their wonder about whether this present life is not the final act, but is instead a glimpse of a life that is yet to come where their fragmented relationship will find its fulfillment. The film’s somber conclusion gestures toward the deeply Christian intuition that whatever bonds we may have, they remain incomplete in this present age. The story echoes Christ’s eschatological exhortations, “The kingdom of heaven is like…”

Critics of the 20th century gospel hymn would do well to remember that for many of us, as we have journeyed around the globe, we feel ourselves in a liminal state, still looking for our home. Before dismissing the hymn as naïve American theology, we might ask what kind of spiritual burden it sought to relieve. “If heaven’s not my home, then Lord what will I do?” carries with it the resonances that even as we are unsettled, we do indeed have a home that we are longing for and that we will one day experience, and without which we are left homeless. Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in that which transcends creation—the ultimate reality which lies beyond this world.

Alister McGrath writes, “Dissatisfaction can set us firmly on the road that leads to the discovery of a personal God.” In the perpetually shifting sands of this present age, our Father in whom there is no shifting shadow remains our fixed beacon of hope. While Wright’s critique rightly guards against a disembodied spirituality, the gospel hymn expresses a genuine and even necessary Christian insight—one that resonates powerfully with those who live nomadically. For many immigrant believers, the song gives voice not to Gnostic escapism but to the ache of displacement, and the yearning for a home that this world cannot provide—a celestial city whose building and maker is God where we will enter into our eternal rest.
### 12 Theses on Church Buildings
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/12-theses-on-church-buildings/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:34:19.000Z
## I

The church is not a building but a people—but the church is a people who must *gather.* Thus, for a church to exist, it must have a location to gather in. And since meeting outdoors limits the gathering (weather, sound, distractions, etc.), this usually means some kind of building. More pragmatically, as many young church plants can testify, often the wider community won’t take you very seriously until you have a building to meet in.

## II

The health of a church is not necessarily connected with the quality of its building. A healthy, growing church can meet in a basement, and a dead, apostate church can gather (*as many do*) in ornate cathedrals.

## III

Conversely, beauty and artful design are not inherently signs of compromise; simplicity and frugality are not necessarily signs of maturity. Heretics can sit in metal-folding chairs; saints can sit in hand-carved pews.

## IV

The kind of building will be determined by the size of the congregation (*how much space do we need?*), and the financial standing of the church (*what kind of building can we afford?*). In the New Testament, churches would sometimes meet in someone’s home (Rom 16:5), and sometimes in larger facilities, like the Hall of Tyrannus (Acts 19:9-10). The church in Jerusalem (prior to the martyrdom of Stephen) was in the thousands and so gathered regularly in the Temple court (Acts 2:41-47).

As Christianity began to grow, churches began constructing[ buildings devoted exclusively](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dura-Europos%5Fchurch?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to their church gatherings. The Bible does not dictate how big (or small) a church must be and therefore does not dictate how large or modest a church building should be.

## V

A church should never jeopardize its ministry by over-extending itself financially to build. The church that has to fire their pastor to pay for their building renovation has made a foolish bargain. The Bible says nothing about the kind of building a church gathers in, but the New Testament has much to say about how we are to financially support the teachers of the church (1 Tim 5:17-18; 1 Cor 9:6-12), missionary work (1 Cor 16:5-11), and ministries of benevolence (2 Cor 8-9).

## VI

The most important event in the church is the Sunday gathering, and the most important part of the gathering is the preaching of God’s Word. Faith comes by *hearing*…not by beautiful spaces, not by liturgies, not by music, not even by prayer or sacraments (Rom 10:17).

Thus, whatever architectural or aesthetic designs are made, they must never hinder or come at the expense of the audible and clear proclamation of the gospel. This also means that if a church must prioritize any part of its building, it should be the sanctuary.

## VII

Evangelicals tend to not think much about a church’s architecture and aesthetic beyond purely functional questions. It may be tempting for evangelicals to roll their eyes at Christians of yesteryear who invested enormous sums of money in making stone cathedrals: *Why was this not sold for 300 denarii and given to the poor?* But it is an extreme hermeneutic of suspicion to assume that every beautiful church was constructed through avarice and worldliness. (Disregard the fact that these same evangelicals may not think twice about their church spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on A/V equipment).

Buildings are expensive, but they also are investments that can bless the kingdom of God for generations to come. If we spend money to make our homes, our parks, our hospitals, our hotel lobbies, our sports arenas into beautiful places, why would we not (at a bare minimum) do the same in our places of worship? What does a community and culture communicate about their values if their college campuses are extravagant while all of their churches are impoverished? If Christians of previous generations built beautiful cathedrals, it is possible they were foolish or vain to do so. Or, one could argue that if there was any place to make beautiful and sublime, it would be the place where we gather to “behold the King in His beauty” (Isa 33:17).

## VIII

Human beings are embodied creatures, which means that we are not exclusively driven by raw information. We are not brains on sticks that only need to download data to arrive at conclusions. We are also affected by our environment. The nature of the space you are in will affect your experience in that space. If you eat a delicious meal that has been plated artistically in a restaurant with tasteful ambiance, you will find yourself enjoying the meal significantly more than if you had eaten the same food in your car on a styrofoam plate.

You will find it easier to contemplate the glory of God standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon than you will in the fluorescently-lit DMV. It isn’t because God is more present at the Grand Canyon, but it is because we are creatures who are easily affected by our surroundings. The ornate and costly designs of the[ Tabernacle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMEQ-WlsWsc&t=12s&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and[ Temple](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt6lQAe8ues&t=30s&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) were not to draw God to the location, like iron-filings to a magnet. They were there to help draw the attention of the worshipper up as he approached the fearful, awesome, beautiful God. The gold, the designs, the[ sheer size](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0yqZJBUEHk&t=11s&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of the structure—all were used as aids in helping the worshipper discern the holiness and beauty of the God he had come to worship. Thus, our surroundings can either aid, or hinder, our worship.

## IX

A church should create a space for corporate worship that emphasizes—rather than detracts from—the central point of worship: God. This will look different in different contexts and will be limited by what the congregation can afford and deems is wise. The goal should be that when a guest or congregant walks into the sanctuary they realize that they have entered a place unlike any other space in the hustle and bustle of normal life. They have come somewhere that leads them to reverent silence and contemplation as they prepare to commune with the living God (Eccl 5:1-7).

This is generally why churches have been built with vaulted ceilings (to draw your eyes heavenward and make you feel small), contain Christian symbols and art (to remind you of the ancient faith you are participating in), and have avoided elements that make the sanctuary feel trivial or profane. This doesn’t require frescoes and Corinthian columns. Neil Postman, writing about the consequences of trying to worship via a TV-set, writes perceptively about the need for sacred space.

He explains:

> Almost any place will do, provided it is first decontaminated; that is, divested of its profane uses. This can be done by placing a cross on a wall, or candles on a table, or a sacred document in public view. Through such acts, a gymnasium or dining hall or hotel room can be transformed into a place of worship; a slice of space-time can be removed from the world of profane events, and be recreated into a reality that does not belong to our world.

## X

A church building should strive for a “non-distracting excellence.” Distractions could come from a sanctuary being shabby or ugly, or being overly opulent and extravagant. A simple elegance that doesn’t draw undo attention to itself, but reminds the worshipper of the historic faith they are participating in and the exalted, glorious God they have come to worship, is the goal.

## XI

The seeker-sensitive movement pushed hard against the traditional design of the church in favor of a church building that looked more like a shopping mall or college campus or movie theater. Sometimes, those decisions were made out of financial limitations (see point 4 and 5), but other times they were intentional. The thinking goes: *if we want to reach the modern person today, we need to make the space more familiar to them, less austere and other-worldly.* But this is truly bizarre when you consider it. David Wells, in his excellent work *Above All Earthly Pow’rs,* explains:

> “This is probably the first time…that churchgoers have wanted their buildings to be mistaken for corporate headquarters or country clubs.This is no small development, for church buildings, in pedantic or grand ways, have always tried to express the fact visually that these are places of *Christian* presence and places where God in all his greatness is worshipped. Their architecture and their symbols have pointed back to what happened at the Cross and in the Resurrection. Churches are a reminder of the pilgrim status of the people of God as they journey toward a different land…This is why, in the past, churches have wanted to be visually different from corporate headquarters and country clubs whose purposes are, by contrast, thoroughly this-worldly. They have wanted to reflect this other Story rather than to disguise themselves as something else.” (pg. 282)

## XII

One of my favorite apologetic arguments to use with non-believers is the argument from aesthetic experience (see Peter Kreeft’s short explanation of that[ here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixDtZTcOuGs&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), but applied specifically to Catholicism). Creating beautiful places of worship helps bring that argument into the analog world of experience at the most important of locations: the church. One of the reasons that many young evangelicals in elite spaces today are converting to Catholicism—and specifically[ *traditional*](https://www.thefp.com/p/the-young-catholic-women-bringing?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)Catholicism—is because the institutions of Rome and its esoteric liturgy convey the grandeur, antiquity, and majesty that modernity has lost.

A stone cathedral is the apotheosis of this grandeur. In contrast, the window-less mega-church “worship centers” are emblematic of the commercialization and triviality of the modern church experience as a whole. Young people are hungry for a serious, ancient faith that does not pander to the spirit of the age, but carries its own gravity and awe.

In sum, this will look different in specific contexts and cultures, and will always depend on what a church can afford without compromising its ministry. But American evangelicals today should think about what their church building is communicating and whether or not it is currently emphasizing, or detracting, from the primary object of our worship: God.
### An Excerpt from 'Magician and Mechanic' by Michael Horton
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/an-excerpt-from-magician-and-mechanic-by-michael-horton/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:34:23.000Z
The following excerpt from Michael Horton, [Magician and Mechanic: The Roots of “Spiritual but Not Religious” from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution](https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802877123/magician-and-mechanic-the-divine-self-vol-2/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) *(Eerdmans, 2026) is published with permission from Eerdmans Publishing.*

This is the second volume of a trilogy. See Mere Orthodoxy’s forum on Volume 1, with reviews by [*John Ehrett*](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-long-orphic-shadow) *and* [*Nadya Williams*](https://mereorthodoxy.com/orphics-in-our-midst)*, and* [*Michael Horton’s response*](https://mereorthodoxy.com/michael-horton-replies-to-nadya-williams-and-john-ehrett)*.*

*\*\*\**

This volume contains considerably more evidence of the impact of the twelfth-century monk Joachim of Fiore. The Axial tendency to return the soul to the One through ascetic practice (purgation, contemplation, union) was a ladder laid on its side, as a historical process. From now on, Joachite eschatology was the most influential current in early modern history. Figures as diverse as Columbus, Quaker George Fox, and a host of radical puritans and pietists who shaped the modern age agreed. This eschatology is the main engine of modern utopianism. Indeed, the transition from a locative premodern condition to a utopian “axiality” reaches heretofore unknown heights. Perhaps only in ancient Gnosticism was the divine self ever more reflective on its own transcendence and unwilling to live in the present. The historical sensibility of the Renaissance *magus* is something unprecedented in previous “leaps of consciousness.”

Outside Judaism and Christianity, the dominant view of time was cyclical, from a golden age of innocence to a point of gradual decline and catastrophe until the rebirth of a new utopian age. The emanation-return schema of Orphic cosmology rendered history merely a moving picture of eternity. “The end is like the beginning” was the motto that Hermeticism symbolized by a snake eating its tail. In contrast, biblical faith breaks the circle into a line from promise to fulfillment. It is always a “new thing” that God will accomplish in the future (e.g., Isa 43:19), a new covenant (e.g., Jer 31), something that “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined” (1 Cor 2:9). According to early Christian teaching, some of these prophecies are fulfilled in Christ’s first advent and others will be in his second, but all of them turn on Christ. Like other apocalyptic figures in the book of Revelation, the “thousand years” (Rev 20:7) is symbolic of the entire age of Christ between his two advents. For now, he is conquering the nations, not through the secular sword but by his word and Spirit, until he returns in final judgment and salvation to consummate his everlasting reign.

Adopting a literal interpretation of the millennium, however, the leaders of a second-century movement called the New Prophecy—Montanus together with his assistants, Prisca and Maximilla—claimed to be inspired prophets ushering in a new Pentecost centered in their native Phrygia. Opposed by churches in the East and the West, Montanism was declared a heresy, and in 431 the Council of Ephesus officially rejected the idea of a literal millennium before Christ’s return. At about the same time of this council, Augustine defended a symbolic interpretation of the “thousand years” in Revelation 20\. Representing completion, the thousand years symbolizes the whole period between Christ’s two advents. According to this interpretation, which was shared by leaders in the Christian East, this era is marked by tribulation for the saints yet progress of the gospel to the ends of the earth. The next apocalyptic event is Christ’s return, the resurrection and last judgment, followed by the everlasting Sabbath.

However, the twelfth-century Calabrian monk, Joachim of Fiore, redrew the eschatological map. Similar to Montanism’s announcement of a new Pentecost, Joachim taught that a utopian “age of the Spirit” was about to dawn in the middle of history before the return of Christ. The age of the Father (law; the order of the married) was superseded by the age of the Son (grace; the order of the clergy). And the age of the Spirit (immediate gnosis; the order of the monk) will replace the church and its ministry. The new covenant (age of the Son), advancing through the ministry of the visible church, will be as obsolete as the age of the Father. Joachim was familiar as a monk with the three stages of ascent from purgation to contemplation and union. At the first stage, one depends on authorities and an elaborate system of physical rites, but then recognizes them as pictures of higher truths. Finally, one transcends reason as well, surrendering to the mystical ecstasy of union with God.

Yet, what is utterly new in Joachim is that he places this ladder on its side, fusing the vertical ascent of the soul with the historical orientation of Christianity. This direct union with God, apart from any mediation, will not only be the experience of a few spiritual athletes, but the whole world will be a vast monastery. The movement from the purgation (age of the Father) to union (age of the Spirit) is a growth from childhood dependence on authority to the maturity of autonomy based on the inner light.

Joachim predicted this new age, which began with St. Francis, would reach its apex in the year 1260\. Rather than look for Jesus at the end of the age, attention was drawn to a golden age under the leadership of an angelic pope and a final world emperor. However, this would not occur without the active participation of the godly. After a terrible persecution, they would triumph over a false pope and emperor. For many, the questions “Where can I find fullness?” and “Where is history going?” received a single answer in Joachite prophecy. People are not victims of cruelty, playthings of despots and death, or passive spectators to the decline of civilization and the church simply waiting for Jesus to return. Rather, they have a decisive role to play in the triumph of the saints here and now.

Aquinas criticized Joachim’s view of the Trinity as heretical tritheism, as the Fourth Lateran Council had in 1215, which was followed in suit by the Synod of Arles in 1263, but Dante placed the abbot in the sun heaven of his paradise along with Lombard, Aquinas, and Bonaventure. Already in the late medieval period, Bauer notes, Hermeticism was absorbed into the “millenarian prophecy inspired by Joachim of Fiore.” Especially in Franciscan circles, “the alchemists enveloped their theories of matter in prophetic spiritualism.” Bauer adds that

> in 1317, Pope John XXII—the same pope who would later rule against Francis-can poverty—outlawed alchemy, in his decretal *Spondent quas non exhibent*. Although the alchemists launched a counteroffensive against Avicenna’s and the Thomists’ attacks, the philosophical debate about the efficacy of alchemy henceforth assumed distinctly theological implications about the borderline between religious orthodoxy and heterodoxy.

Alongside the Epicurean and Platonic revivals, we discover in Renaissance Florence a resurgence of Joachite prophecy in the person of Girolamo Savonarola. Though it survived and even flourished in some places through the Spiritual Franciscans, the Joachite eschatology exercised a significant impact from Christopher Columbus to Isaac Newton.

As we will see, Joachite prophecy was particularly formative in Anabaptist circles. The expectation of an age of the Spirit, leaving behind the visible church and its ministry of preaching and sacraments, fit well with spiritualist emphases. By the seventeenth century, millennialism had suffused the European imagination, in both Roman Catholic and Protestant lands, and had contributed significantly to utopian ideals of universal progress and enlightenment. Combined with Hermeticism, alchemy now becomes a historical process of transmuting base metals into gold. Roger Garaudy observes that of “the first revolutionary movements in Europe, all were more or less imbued with the ideas of Joachim of Fiore.”65 Contrary to the usual lamentations, history was not growing old; it was about to reach its apotheosis. “Here history is theophany,” notes Frank Graziano, “the mood is constructive, and the actions are decisive, with human efficacy guided by divine will as the cosmic plan unfolds. God and his creation collaborate in the progression, perfection, and culmination of history; enterprise becomes eschatology.”

The march of history and the perennial tradition are metanarratives that pre-suppose an ideal—a golden age in the future or the past—by which historical advancement and decline are judged. These narratives often presuppose an origin and a *telos* that plot everything in between as either development or decay, an inexorable cultural evolution toward utopia or dystopia. Both presuppose a model of cultural evolution in which modern definitions and antitheses of science and magic, reason and religion, are given a normative status. As Burkert points out, the study of ancient cults is “a battlefield between rationalists and mystics since the beginning of the nineteenth century.” Indeed, the battle between these meta-narratives is bound up with modern and antimodern sensibilities.

The march of history orientation strikes most of us as a straightforward explanation of the facts. Its basic outline unfolds in familiar chapters, leading from the childhood of religious dogmatism and superstition to the maturity of autonomous reason and science. Whether valorized or vilified, “modernity” is not merely a convenient periodization or description of common features but an ideological construction. The very idea of progress from authority to autonomy belongs to the history of modernity itself rather than standing outside it like a natural fact. In other words, the concept of “modernity” is a utopian script that has been written by Orphic bricoleurs, bound up with the enduring impact of a fertile dogma: the “divine self.”
### Ryle's Vision of the Christian Life
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/ryles-vision-of-the-christian-life/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:34:25.000Z
Andrew Atherstone. [*Ryle on the Christian Life*](https://www.crossway.org/books/ryle-on-the-christian-life-tpb/?srsltid=AfmBOorpnS%5FY44uD7Eh9C3eSP%5FdB7phhukn9Lob0xf9Me4CqdfQtRRjh&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*.* Crossway, 2025\. $21.99\. 208 pp.

Over the past few decades, Crossway’s [Theologians on the Christian Life Series](https://www.crossway.org/articles/theologians-on-the-christian-life-series/?srsltid=AfmBOoqmKAvAv-9FV6wkKEwZJM2kIodSO65E6-VQr6iR-J5Suc8bkS%5Ft&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) has been a wonderful gift to the church. The books in this series are neither biographies nor bare expositions of the theology of the figures treated therein. Rather, the series considers how the life and theology of key figures from Christian history can inform in our own time and place the practical challenges of the Christian life. The series has included entries on such universally known titans as Augustine, Calvin, Luther, and Bonhoeffer alongside more specifically Reformed luminaries such as J.I. Packer, John Owen, Herman Bavinck, and B.B. Warfield. The latest entry in this series, Andrew Atherstone’s *Ryle on the Christian Life,* offers a compelling introduction to the vision of the Christian life advocated by the first bishop of the Anglican diocese of Liverpool, J.C. Ryle, who lived from 1816—1900.

But who was J.C. Ryle? Ryle is most widely known today as the author of the book *Holiness: Its Nature, Hindrances, Difficulties, and Roots*. In this book he centrally argued that “real practical holiness does not receive the attention it deserves”—as much a problem in the twenty-first century as it was in the nineteenth. A numerically small but extremely devoted segment of the Christian reading population is aware of Ryle’s other writings, since the puritan-promoting publisher [Banner of Truth Trust](https://banneroftruth.org/us/store/theauthor/ryle-j-c/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) has kept many of Ryle’s most notable works not only in print but in handsome editions. However, I will assume throughout this review that the majority of readers have little to no familiarity with J.C. Ryle.

## **What Can We Learn from J.C. Ryle about the Christian Life?**

### **Ryle on Suffering**

Ryle is arguably at his very best on the topic of suffering in the Christian life. Far from a detached academic in his ivory tower, nor an apathetic Stoic pontificating about the virtues of suffering, Ryle knew firsthand what it was like to barely survive heart-rending, unbearable suffering. He endured numerous periods of serious illness. His first wife Matilda suffered postpartum psychosis, then died a year later after prolonged illness and coughing up blood. Their daughter Georgina suffered from mental illness and was confined to an asylum. Ryle and his second wife Jessy had further children, but one of them (an unnamed daughter) died at birth in 1853\. Jessy died of kidney disease after ten years of marriage, leaving Ryle a widower for the second time at age thirty-eight, “with five children between the ages of two and thirteen, and ‘altogether more disconsolate and helpless than ever.’” Ryle then married Henrietta and their marriage lasted twenty-seven years, before Ryle had to bury his third wife, in 1889\. Ryle buried an eight-year-old grandson in 1897.

Each of these afflictions is sufficient in itself to devastate even the most fortitudinous men. Over and against atheistic nihilism, Ryle preached “that only biblical Christianity could satisfactorily explain the prevalence of pain and disease in an otherwise remarkable world.” Pastorally, Ryle wrote that “suffering is a part of the process by which the sons of God are sanctified… A suffering Savior generally has suffering disciples.”

Though God is not to be blamed for any instance of evil, God can use hardships in powerful ways; “prosperity is a great mercy; but adversity is a greater one, if it brings us to Christ.” Far from shirking from the doctrine of divine sovereignty, “Ryle’s appreciation of suffering was closely linked to his understanding of divine providence… there is no such thing as luck, chance, or accident, in the journey of our life… the very hairs on \[our\] heads are all numbered. Sorrow, and sickness, and poverty, and persecution, can never touch \[us\] unless God sees fit…. They are immortal, till their work is done.”

### A Champion of the Reformation

J. C. Ryle championed the foremost theological insights of the Protestant Reformation for a context in Victorian England which had either largely forgotten or turned against the puritans. After the advent of industrialism, post-Enlightenment philosophy, rising secularism, and not a few social crises, the theological foundations which the Church of England had stood upon for centuries began to seem either unintelligible, or perhaps no longer good and beautiful. Atherstone’s opening half-dozen chapters treat some of the foremost emphases of evangelicals across the centuries, such as Scripture, sin, salvation, the transformation of the heart, sovereign grace, conversion, obedience, and more.

One reason that J.C. Ryle is instructive today is because many of the theological emphases in catholic Christianity in all centuries, and especially for churches descending from the Protestant Reformation, are all too rare in mainstream Christian preaching and teaching. Atherstone summarizes that “foundational to Ryle’s understanding of the Christian life was not just the existence of sin but its enormous depth and awful consequences, from which humanity could be rescued only by a great Savior.” Crucially, however, Ryle was not a mere proponent of individual salvation, though it was an emphasis of his. Ryle had a robust ecclesiology and urged his listeners to attend to the means of grace. He was also captivated with the person and work of the Holy Spirit and led a union of daily prayer for the outpouring of the Spirit worldwide.

### The Practicality of Ryle

Since Ryle is best-known for his book *Holiness*, I will not devote too much attention to it in the present review only for the sake of brevity. But Atherstone capable summarizes this monumentally significant pillar of the Christian life, and notes how “military metaphors were one of Ryle’s favorite ways to illustrate the nature of the Christian life,” particularly as a struggle against sin as we strive for holiness (Heb 12:14). As Sinclair Ferguson once [commented](https://banneroftruth.org/us/store/christian-living/holiness-2/?srsltid=AfmBOoqTfpXfWA8tv0K5Ozj99lJshH2fM--J0pdNJO5FuHnV62nw2ryw&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) about Ryle, “you need to understand something really well in order to explain it simply, and that is true of Ryle.” Ryle was not afraid to give people very practical advice about how to cultivate virtue, confiding “tell me how a man spends his evenings and I can generally tell what his character is.”

### Ryle the Preacher

Though I knew beforehand that Ryle was a powerful preacher, Atherstone taught me just how helpful Ryle could be not only as a preacher himself but also a critic of bad preaching and an instructor of preachers. Ryle did not hold back on his sense of the state of preaching in his day: “It is my firm believe that if five out of six of our Church clergy would burn all their sermons tomorrow, and resolve to preach in a new style, it would be an immense blessing to the Church of England.” In saying this, Ryle was not seeking the advent of modernistic or anti-traditionalist preaching. Rather, his constant concern was that biblical, orthodox Christianity must be proclaimed—and proclaimed in an intelligible and engaging way that drove people to seek Christ. Hence, Ryle did not hold back when he heard preaching that was “another gospel” (Gal 1:6), devoid of scriptural truth, so academic no one could understand it, or so boring no one wanted to listen.

In 1876 Ryle delivered lectures at St. Paul’s Cathedral entitled “Simplicity in Preaching,” about which Atherstone observes:

> By then he had been preaching for thirty-four years to agricultural laborers in Hampshire and Suffolk, so he knew from personal experience the ‘enormous difficulty’ of communicating the gospel in that context. He reckoned it easier in many ways to preach before undergraduates and professors at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, or barristers at the Temple Church and Lincoln’s Inn, or members of Parliament, than before an ‘agricultural congregation on a fine hot afternoon in the month of August.’ According to one laborer, Sunday was the most enjoyable day of the week: ‘I sit comfortably in church, put up my legs, have nothing to think about, and just go to sleep.’ Simplicity was essential if the preacher wanted to be understood.

Ryle was aware Latimer’s sermons would not suit modern taste, but Ryle chided the typical modern sermon as “too often a dull, tame, pointless, religious essay, full of measured round sentences, Johnsonian English, bald platitudes, timid statements, and elaborately concocted milk and water.” Ryle was no abstract theoretician; he had practical tips such as “beware of colons and semi-colons. Stick to commas and full stops, and take care to write as if you were asthmatical or short of breath.” When he was a young curate, his intellectual manner was “miles over the heads” of local farmers and their families, before “I crucified my style, and became plain John Ryle.”

I am foregoing that advice in this review, but it is truly helpful advice for crafting sermons: As many monosyllabic words as possible, and short sentences that both little children and elderly people can follow, but filled with content from the depths of Scripture on the inexhaustible glories of the God of the gospel, driving us all to perceive our need for Christ and his all-sufficient glory and grace.

Ryle's Devotion to the Formularies

Atherstone throughout the book repeatedly highlights Ryle’s commitment to the Anglican formularies: the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, and the Two Books of Homilies. For instance,

> Ryle was primarily a popularizer who aimed to distill biblical wisdom from the Puritans and repackage it in pithy form to attract busy Victorians. His gift was for succinct summary and memorable illustration. He was also at pains to show that these were not novel ideas but mainstream Church of England teaching as expressed in the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion.

Amidst controversy about the exclusivity of Christ for Salvation, Ryle noted that texts such as Acts 4:12 are “directly quoted in Article 18 of the Thirty Nine Articles… Ryle therefore insisted that it was the obligation of every Church of England minister to teach this doctrine.” Or, when some dismissed any notion of election whatsoever, Ryle argued from Scripture and “simply quoted Article 17 of the Thirty-Nine Articles—one of the official formularies of the Church of England—which teaches that the doctrine of predestination, or election in Christ, is ‘full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort’ to Christian believers. He rejoiced in Article 17 as the best statement of the doctrine outside the Bible.”

In terms of churchmanship, “as an Anglican clergyman, bound by his subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles, Ryle deemed it his public duty to uphold this teaching. As a pastor concerned for the spiritual health of his Suffolk parishioners, he also emphasized that final perseverance was a matter of great practical importance.” Or, perhaps most significantly:

> The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, the Church of England’s confessional statement, provided a crucial framework for Ryle’s understanding of the Christian life. He first studied them as a schoolboy when competing for the Newcastle Scholarship at Eton College in the early 1830s. They ‘insensibly prepared my mind to receive Evangelical principles, when my heart first began to turn to think of religion,’ he recalled. The Articles distilled Reformation doctrine into very succinct form and deeply shaped Ryle’s theological world. He celebrated that they offered an incomparable combination of theological ‘fullness, boldness, clearness, brevity, moderation, and wisdom.’

Sadly, today there is often confusion about what Anglicans believe, or if Anglicans even have a discernible theological tradition. Ryle exemplifies someone who not merely assented to the Anglican formularies but demonstrated how our confessional heritage as Anglicans and historic observances of the classic Prayer Book tradition can not only be intelligible, but is actually compelling and profound resource for curing what ails us in late modern society.

### Ryle the Tract Writer

Ryle was adept at communication. Though Ryle’s Anglo-Catholic rivals became known as “the tractarians” for the *Tracts for the* *Times* wherein they advocated their ideas, in his own time Ryle was called “the prince of tract writers,” since “the tract, second only to the sermon, was widely utilized by Victorian Christians of all stripes to campaign and communicate.”

However, as Atherstone notes, “it was a popular and powerful but inherently transient form of literature. Some of Ryle’s original tracts are now extremely rare, even from print runs of tens of thousands, and others have disappeared altogether.” This is probably a point worth reflecting upon for contemporary evangelicals who are eager to adopt digital technology or create digital content in order to reach as many people as possible. That may well be worth doing and may even seem unavoidable in many cases. But it is worth contemplating the afterlife such massive efforts of time and money will have, and discerning how we can build enduring institutions, traditions, practices, and literature that will outlast ephemeral tracts and even more ephemeral digital content.

### Ryle the Shepherd

Ryle helped prepare people for death and to stand before God in eternity, especially since “death was ubiquitous in Victorian society.” In Ryle’s “*Expository Thoughts on the Gospels* he observed that the gravestones in every English churchyard indicated that only a small proportion of the population lived to be fifty years old, and many never reached adulthood at all.” Ryle noted that people extremely prone to distract ourselves from death and away from soberly thinking about eternity, because “we live in an age when the multitude are increasingly absorbed in earthly things, in railways, and docks, and commerce, and trade, and banks, and shops, and cotton, and corn, and iron, and gold.” How much worse is the potential for self-distraction since the advent of digital technology? Crucially, Ryle was unashamed to declare to modern people the scriptural teaching about hell that the church catholic has historically confessed:

> At Exeter Hall, Ryle announced, ‘I am one of those old-fashioned ministers, who believe the *whole* Bible—and everything that it contains.’ He condemned the new doctrines as ‘smooth-spoken theology’ and affirmed, ‘I believe that there is a real hell.’ Rather than keep silent, Ryle insisted that it was an act of Christian compassion, and also his ministerial duty, to speak about hell. ‘I see danger ahead, and I would fain warn every man to flee from the wrath to come. I see peril of shipwreck, and I would light a beacon and entreat every man to see the harbour of safety.’

But alongside preaching about the sinfulness of sin and the terrors of hell, Ryle was most keen to impress upon his hearers the hope of heaven extended to us in Jesus Christ, especially as a consolation for those bereaved of loved ones who followed Christ:

> Some of us know by bitter experience, Ryle lamented, that the days after the death of a loved one ‘are the slowest, saddest, heaviest weeks in all our lives. But blessed be God, the souls of departed saints are free from the very moment their last breath is drawn. While we are weeping, and the coffin preparing, and the mourning being provided, and the last painful arrangement being made, the spirits of our beloved ones are enjoying the presence of Christ.

Similarly, in 1868 he wrote to give hope to the bereaved who found Christmastime particularly sorrowful:

> Do tears rise unbidden in your eyes, when you mark the empty places round the fireside? Do grave thoughts come sweeping over your mind, even in the midst of your children’s mirth, when you recollect the dear old faces and much loved voices of some that sleep in the churchyard… Do you feel lonely and desolate as every December comes round? …those whom you laid in the grave with many tears are in good keeping. You will yet see them again with joy… the lonely time will soon be past and over. You will have company by and by.

Perhaps thinking of his own daughter who died at birth in 1853, Ryle wrote that “the youngest babe that ever drew breath shall not be overlooked or forgotten… we shall once more see our beloved friends and relatives who fell asleep in Christ, and left us in sorrow and tears—better, brighter, more beautiful, more pleasant than ever we found them on earth.” Finally, when his own death loomed, Ryle declared “nothing can break my union with Christ… doctors may have given over their labours. Friends may be unable to minister they wants. Sight may depart. Hearing may depart. Memory may be almost gone. But the loving-kindness of God shall not depart. Once in Christ thou shalt never be forsaken…. Reader, may this be your portion in life and death! And may it be mine!”

## **Three Critical Questions About Ryle’s Approach to the Christian Life**

And yet, there are at least three critical questions worth asking about Ryle’s approach to the Christian life.

### Ryle on Conversion

Ryle’s approach to conversion is both salutary but also can easily become distorted and unhelpful. Ryle, rightly so, routinely made direct evangelistic summons to faith and repentance to enormous crowds. He taught that conversion was absolutely necessary, because “no one, however wise, wealthy, noble, or beautiful, will ever get to heaven without conversion.” For instance, Ryle’s description of an unconverted congregation hits uncomfortably close to our own context today:

> Observe how listless, and apathetic, and indifferent, they evidently are about the whole affair. It is clear their hearts are not there! They are thinking of something else, and not of religion. They are thinking of business, or money, or pleasure, or worldly plans, or bonnets, or gowns, or new dresses, or amusements. Their bodies are there, but not their hearts. And what is the reason? What it is they all need? They need conversion.

In a Victorian society where most people were either baptized or at least extremely familiar with Christianity, it was indeed true that there were regularly people at church who were unconverted. That is still the case in twenty-first century America, as it is in every age. However, it is important to recognize that we inhabit a significantly different context from Ryle.

Non-believers today are far less familiar with the Bible or church or Christianity than they were in Ryle’s context, and without compulsory church attendance, people are far less likely to attend church for social advantage or entertainment than they might have been in Ryle’s day. Today, we simply cannot take for granted that unconverted people believe that God exists, that Christian morality is helpful, that they will face judgment after death, etc. Far more work needs to be done to make the gospel intelligible to a not only non- but also post-Christian context today.

Differently, and perhaps more significantly, hearers incessantly are summoned to be converted, those who are already converted can sometimes succumb to unhelpful scrupulosity or excessive introspection. For instance, Ryle declared “repent, and be converted. Rest not, rest not, rest not, till you know and feel that you are a converted man.”

Of course, we should urge everyone to personally appropriate the Christian faith! Ryle was correct to summon nominal Christians to actually repent and believe the gospel. However, conversion is not necessarily a feeling, and even those who are converted will at times feel a closeness to our Lord in Gethsemane or his cry of dereliction from the cross. There is a time and place in the Christian life to cry out like Martin Luther [*Baptizatus sum!*](https://in.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/road-goes-ever-on/why-you-should-remember-your-baptism/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)\[“I have been baptized!”\]in the face of temptation and struggle and attack from our spiritual enemies, appealing not to inward subjective feelings but to the outward and ordinary means of grace whereby Christ himself promised to unite us with himself.

### Ryle the Polemicist

Though at the end of the day I have more in common with J.C. Ryle than his Anglo-Catholic sparring mates, some of his intra-Anglican polemics are baffling to me. Within the Church of England, Ryle’s puritan-adjacent theology and trenchant opposition to the Oxford Movement won him few admirers among High Church Anglicans. Yet his free church and non-conformist critics hardly appreciated his nineteenth-century Low Church Anglicanism.

For instance, Ryle lamented the return of altar rails. However, “the black rubric” in the 1662 Prayer Book had long before clarified that kneeling to receive the Eucharist as a posture of humble reception and does not necessarily imply pre-Reformation eucharistic beliefs and practices. Differently, on vestments, Ryle affirmed their continued use. A puritan-inclined critic once lambasted Ryle in a magazine for preaching in a surplice, to which Ryle responded in a letter to the editor that “if I were a hearer, I would far rather listen to a lively, searching, ringing Gospel sermon from a man in a surplice than to a dull, dreary, mumbling stupid homily from a man in a black gown.” Simultaneously, the Anglican diocese in Liverpool was at one point reaching less than 7 percent of its urban mission field. Ryle commendably promoted more lay ministers but said “they must not be like the clergyman who ‘never feels at ease unless he has Prayer-book in his hand and a surplice on his back.’”

I happen to wear a surplice at all of the services our church performs, and routinely have my Prayer-book near me pretty much wherever I go. Far from a hindrance, I see both things as profound aids to evangelism and pastoral care in the secularizing, disembodied culture of liquid modernity that is desperate to connect with something transcendent and historic. The goal posts have moved several times since Ryle once replaced a stained-glass window depicting Christ out of concerns about idolatry. Ryle derided that before the Reformation there was a “conspicuous absence of all knowledge of true Christianity,” and “gross darkness overspread the land.”

### Ryle the Generalizer

How does that sweeping generalization hold up under the scrutiny of historical research such as [Eamon Duffy’s *The Stripping of the Altars*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-stripping-of-the-altars-traditional-religion-in-england-1400-1580-eamon-duffy/14f2989137351828?ean=9780300254419&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)? One does not have to be John Henry Newman to recognize the need for further nuance to precisely characterize what exactly the Reformation did, and did not, remedy. The dividing lines between more Evangelical/Low Church vs. Anglo-Catholic/High Church parties no longer fall precisely where they once did. I do not regard those conversations as settled, or not worth pursuing.

But too often in history they have involved more heat than light. Given the tremendous, massive amount of things that Ryle and the tractarians tried to respond to as each sought to renew the seriously decrepit state of the Anglican church in the nineteenth century, one cannot help but wonder if they could have accomplished even more as co-belligerents against their primary and common foes rather than routinely clashing over interminable questions about Anglican identity.

## Conclusion

Yet, for those intent upon renewing Christian worship and witness, Andrew Atherstone’s *Ryle on the Christian Life* is a well-written introduction to the foremost and generative contributions of J.C. Ryle that we would do well to recover today.
### Elites and the Evangelical Class War
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/elites-and-the-evangelical-class-war/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:34:28.000Z
Picture, if you will, the lush campus of an international research university, firmly ensconced in one of the least religious areas of the country. It’s the mid-2010s, and the Collegiate Gothic thoroughfares are bustling. On that campus are three Christians, each engaged in distinctive forms of on-campus ministry:

1. A thirtysomething man in a dingy polo shirt stands at the corner of one of the busiest campus intersections, holding a bullhorn and displaying a ten-foot banner proclaiming *EVOLUTION IS A LIE*. Over and over, he declares the realities of sin and judgment, so loudly that his proclamations can be heard even from several blocks away.
2. A well-dressed, sixtyish pastor, hailing from a prominent New York City church, sits on a university-provided stage across from a former dean of the university’s law school. They are there to discuss the academic’s recent book, a theological-philosophical argument for Spinozistic pantheism over against traditional Christianity and secular materialism alike. Before an audience of several hundred students and faculty, the pastor delivers a distinctively Christological critique of the volume.
3. A middle-aged man in a business suit stands along the edge of a busy roadway. He says little, but at his feet is a box of Gideon New Testaments, and he’s handing them out to anyone, student or townie, walking past who will accept them. (He even gives one to a runner sprinting by.)

With these three now in view, one might ask a provocative question: which of these Christians was best in witness in a hostile culture? Or, to borrow from sociologist James Davison Hunter: *which one was most faithfully present?*

\* \* \*

As should be obvious, all of these stories are true. I personally witnessed them all between 2014 and 2017, while I was a law student in New England. The New York City pastor in question is, of course, the late Tim Keller—debating philosopher Anthony Kronman over his book *Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan.*

In the last few years, Keller’s legacy has been increasingly contested by the evangelical movement’s rightward fringe. Journalist Bari Weiss [recently wondered](https://x.com/bariweiss/status/1848731778132943145?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) on X—quite reasonably—“Who is the intellectual successor to the beloved, late Rev. Timothy Keller?” And Protestant public intellectual Aaron Renn [answered](https://x.com/aaron%5Frenn/status/1848735125556650319?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)—in my view quite correctly—that “There isn’t one. Evangelicalism is fracturing and its institutions are in a ‘catabolic’ phase."

The upshot of this critique is that Keller’s well-known brand of cultural engagement—civil, cerebral, unthreatening, accessible to *New Yorker* readers—may be ill-suited to the needs of the American Christian moment. [Renn has argued](https://firstthings.com/the-three-worlds-of-evangelicalism/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), for instance, that somewhere around 2014 the outlook for public Christianity darkened considerably. Under present conditions, “\[s\[\]ociety has come to have a *negative* view of Christianity. Being known as a Christian is a social negative, particularly in the elite domains of ­society. Christian morality is expressly repudiated and seen as a threat to the public good and the new public moral order.” Perhaps now, any Christian claims at all—even Keller’s winsome versions—cannot get a fair hearing.

Christians have extensively debated and discussed Renn’s “negative world” thesis (just like its predecessor, Rod Dreher’s bleak characterization of the cultural status quo in *The Benedict Option*). But importantly, this sort of argument is not merely an outward-facing critique—a statement of oppositionality to a hostile culture. It is also, implicitly, an *internal* critique of tendencies within evangelical Protestantism itself: that is, the framing suggests that *those Christians engaged in ministry in hostile public spaces are more likely to make theological and philosophical concessions to maintain their social position.* After all, as Renn puts it, “\[c\]ultural-­engagement leaders have been treated by elite secular society in a way the culture warriors never were. They have a cultural status to lose\[.\]”

A fault line therefore emerges within the broad evangelical movement: the compromisers versus the convictional. (Of course, [the argument can be run in the other direction](https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-maga-fication-of-the-rosary-120a00a6?ref=mereorthodoxy.com): perhaps the “convictional” are those who’ve simply embraced a nihilistic, ahistorical triumphalism, rather than those who are helping to negotiate Christianity’s survival within at least some mainstream institutions). In any event, both “sides” of this divide understand themselves to be radically opposed to the “other.” That much is clear.

But what, exactly, *is* this dividing line? The church has always deployed a variety of cultural-engagement strategies. Surely, differences in ministry philosophy do not alone explain the intensity of this intra-evangelical conflict. Something else seems to be aggravating the issue.

A few years ago, [I published a piece on ](https://www.patheos.com/blogs/betweentwokingdoms/2022/11/a-typology-of-conservative-protestants-in-an-anxious-age/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)[*Patheos*](https://www.patheos.com/blogs/betweentwokingdoms/2022/11/a-typology-of-conservative-protestants-in-an-anxious-age/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) entitled “A Typology of Conservative Protestants in an Anxious Age.” Since then, it’s wound up being one of the most-read things I’ve ever put out, and its terminology has taken on a bit of a life of its own. That piece contained a four-quadrant chart, with its axes based on (1) sympathy for “classical liberalism,” and (2) social class. Among those committed to broadly “liberal” principles are the “pluralists”—*Christianity Today* and other elite-skewing individuals and organizations—and “patriots” (roughly, much of the conservative/evangelical voting base, lacking access to elite spaces). Among those more interested in nonliberal visions of Christian social order are “tweeds” (those primarily concerned with intellectual retrieval within a social order that is critiqued mostly in the abstract), and “pugilists” (those less interested in theory than in radical political action here and now).

What I continue to find useful about this typology is that it captures a nuance of the unfolding debate that’s mostly gone unexamined: the fact that the conflict currently fracturing evangelicalism is not *merely* about doctrine and practice, but also about economics, access, and cultural prestige. *It is about social class and status.*

Essentially the same point is foregrounded by prominent apologist Larry Taunton, as quoted by journalist Megan Basham in her recent bestseller *Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda*:

> I’m fully convinced that much of this conflict that we’re seeing isn’t actually political at all. I mean, it has political outworkings, but it isn’t actually about policy. It’s sociological . . . Because \[elite evangelicals\] see themselves as very much above the quote-unquote populists. And populism is just a grassroots movement. It’s just ordinary, decent, hardworking American people who are black, white, Hispanic, Asian, all across the political spectrum.

Evangelicalism’s civil war is, at bottom, a *class war.*

\* \* \*

I use the term “class war” advisedly: this internecine struggle is a battle over *access to financial and cultural capital* (that is, the necessary means for implementing one particular ministry strategy over another), but it is also, clearly, more than that. The intra-evangelical conflict is conceived by both sides as a *zero-sum process* in which one side *must* prevail over the other.

This is no exaggeration. Witness, for example, [a writer pronouncing](https://americanreformer.org/2024/01/2016-all-over-again/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in *American Reformer* that, as far as “those in the upper crust of the evangelical world” are concerned, “it’s necessary for us to stop their influence, remove them from power one by one, and replace them with better elites.” And then consider *New York Times* columnist David French [declaring that](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/11/opinion/harris-trump-conservatives-abortion.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) “MAGA Christians,” characterized by “viciousness and intolerance” must be stopped once and for all. What makes the current conflict a class war, and not merely a strategic disagreement, is that both sides understand themselves to be irreducibly adverse to the other.

Lest I be accused of bothsidesism, let me put my own cards on the table: I am generally sympathetic to a form of the “critique of evangelical elites” that began somewhere around 2020\. Specifically, I have criticized the critical subordination of Christian doctrine to social-scientific theoretical models whose premises would seem to necessarily deny the truth-value of Christian doctrinal claims, as epitomized by some evangelical leaders’ uncritical embrace of books like *Jesus and John Wayne*. If theology is to count for anything much at all, it cannot take its cues from academic fields that deny its distinctive independence. And I would hope that “evangelical elites,” whomever they might be, [would recognize this](https://americanreformer.org/2021/10/the-embarrassment-reflex-evangelicals-and-culture/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

What follows is, for the most part, an argument primarily aimed at those who also find themselves within this “populist” faction. Missteps are being made; indeed, I would argue that the “class war” framing needs to be fundamentally revised. Specifically, a zero-sum understanding of this debate is both *nihilistic* and *cannibalistic*. It is *nihilistic* in that, for all its talk of the “common good,” the populist faction risks functionally denying the realities of cultural difference, cultural translatability, and forgiveness. And this approach is *cannibalistic* in that it attacks the very structures of individual and cultural formation that are required in order to produce a generation of “new elites” in the first place.

\* \* \*

In the fall of 2019, my wife and I went to New York City to see the play *Heroes of the Fourth Turning* during its initial off-Broadway run. *Heroes* has little action: it is a dialogue between four conservative Catholic young people, all previously students at a small religious college, debating politics, theology, and the future of Western Christianity in the shadow of the 2016 presidential election. In watching *Heroes*, my wife and I had the uncanny experience of seeing our own “tribe” credibly represented onstage. Never before had we seen anything like it: playwright Will Arbery—son of two professors at Wyoming Catholic College—clearly has a keen ear for the sorts of discussions he depicts on stage, because those are the kinds of conversations I and my friends have all had for years.

Midway through the play, one of the characters characterizes abortion as murder. Neither my wife nor I were struck by the line. But instantly, there was an audible gasp in the auditorium, as if an unspeakable taboo had been violated. It foregrounded exactly where in the country we were sitting: the sort of person who goes to artsy, off-Broadway plays is not exactly the sort of person for whom “the life of the unborn” is a winning slogan.

Surely, this audience knew in the abstract that pro-life arguments existed. A more aggressive pro-life message could be tuned out (and undoubtedly would’ve been. If these characters had been fundamentalist caricatures, they would’ve sparked little response. What I think was so jarring to that audience was the juxtaposition of Arbery’s characters’ apparent intellectual sophistication with their profoundly conservative positions on abortion: the shock of learning that s*omeone who presents like this, believes that*.

Ministry context, including and maybe especially geographical context, necessarily shapes the tenor and tone of that ministry. In a place like New York City, a great deal of theological-philosophical-moral groundwork must be laid: basic Christian ethical commitments (the life of the unborn) positively *stun* when articulated as serious intellectual positions. Acknowledging this difference really does require a difference in rhetorical style: a message that may meaningfully speak to a primarily blue-collar audience will probably not be the same message that meaningfully speaks to an audience of (say) college students. (Students just ignored the man on campus proclaiming *Evolution Is a Lie*. They filled the room to see Tim Keller.) This is not to make a categorical value judgment regarding either approach—but simply to insist that context *does* necessarily inform tactics.

Recent years have complicated this, because the internet has made context collapse a daily reality. With a single click, one can instantly toggle between city-based megachurch pastors allegedly “soft-pedaling” social issues, and pastors in the Mountain West fulminating against the cultural ills of Western society. When juxtaposed *side by side*, it is easy to critique the former for taking too light a touch (or from the other direction, of course, to decry the latter’s insensitive and brutish “fundamentalism”). But the two audiences to whom they speak are not the same. Surely, it is broadly permissible to speak to a group in the manner that best reaches them—else, would Christian mission work be possible at all?

This position is, of course, predicated on the assumption that *one can in fact meaningfully speak to both audiences*. And it is precisely that point that seems to be increasingly called into question: one implication of the “negative world” framing (though perhaps not intended by Renn) is that a sort of *incommensurability* has emerged between Christian claims and those of mainstream mass culture. This is a state in which, as Alasdair MacIntyre once wrote, “rival premises are such that we possess no rational way of weighing the claims of one as against another.” So, for instance, one finds the argument that in contemporary debates, Christian morality counts for *nothing* against the demands of secular autonomy.

There’s truth to this tension. But it is facile to leave off there. If (as the Christian tradition has historically asserted) Christian truth claims reflect reality as it most truly is, then one should rationally expect to find “traces” of fundamentally Christian insight scattered throughout the ostensibly secular mainstream. And find them one still does. There are Richard Reeves’s arguments, in his recent book *Of Boys and Men*, for the enduring value of maleness as such. There is Christine Emba’s recent case, in *Rethinking Sex*, for the relocation of sexual desire and consent within a more complex constellation of moral commitments. There is [Julius Krein’s analysis](https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/08/the-other-realignment/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of the possible rediscovery of humane political economy, almost *sub silentio*, within the Democratic Party.

Whatever philosophical incommensurability between Christian and secular positions exists within the “negative world” is not, strictly speaking, [an absolute gulf](https://www.athwart.org/the-forgotten-post-liberals-theonomists-integralists/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Indeed, that incommensurability may be primarily located at the discursive level—that is, an unreceptiveness to positions advanced in a specifically Christian idiom—which, ironically enough, would suggest that “winsomeness” still has a place. Perhaps the “negative world” is not *quite* as negative as it appears?

More problematically, the implication of a “hard incommensurability” position is that the white-collar cultural bloc—those to whom, for instance, Keller ministered—can be essentially abandoned to itself, left to rot in its own defective premises. This is poor strategy and poorer theology. To make this analytical move is to transpose a political campaign tactic into the domain of Christian missiology (and even ecclesiology): *we’re never going to win that group, so we might as well just give up and concentrate our strategies elsewhere*.

Understood narrowly as an allocative tactic, this may be warranted: it may not make sense to invest *as many* resources in the tilling of rocky soil. But understood as an *ecclesiological principle*, it is badly flawed: Jonah, after all, was called to labor in hostile Nineveh, with no *ex ante* guarantee of success. So too, the book of James expressly contemplates that the church may contain individuals of both higher and lower social position—and yet within the church’s fold, they are treated the same. The church is not a proper site for class war, because all her members—elites and laborers alike—stand in equal need. And that is because the church’s destiny is to enfold all of human existence—not to become merely an interest group among other interest groups, warring for a share of scarce resources.

Over-reading the “negative world” thesis to entail a hard, or absolute, incommensurability between Christian and non-Christian domains—an incommensurability justifying the tactical abandonment of “elite” ministry contexts—amounts to essentially denying the possibility of any substantive “common good” at all. It is to imply that there is no shared principle or theological vocabulary that can meaningfully speak to blue-collar Christians and white-collar secular liberals alike. The “common good” is reduced to a political project to which one pays abstract lip service, rather than something realized coherently in the lives of ordinary people. And with this reduction of the “common good” to the private good of those self-identified with the visible church, that same visible church is pushed into a self-consuming nihilism, rendered impotent to speak to those beyond its own borders. *All the church can do* is culture war.

This implicit nihilism represents a moral problem with the class-war paradigm. But there is a pragmatic problem as well: the fact that the class-war approach cripples the emergence of the very “new elites” that elite evangelicalism’s critics crave.

The evangelical class war is a battle for status, not merely resources. And for the most part, that status is conferred on the basis of *something elites bring to the table* beyond merely their own elite status. The much-maligned David French did not become an “evangelical elite” simply by fiat: he reached prominence because of his long track record as a litigator, especially in free speech and religious liberty cases. The Gospel Coalition grew to prominence as a colloquium of *pastors* characterized by ministry effectiveness. This is not the acquisition of power for power’s sake; it’s the exemplification of excellence at some specific thing or other. Endlessly *talking about* “wielding power” or the “need for new elites” is actively inimical to that very end: *first* one excels in some area, *then* one obtains influence.

The price of “new elites” is the production of a group of individuals who work in some isolation from the pressures of class warring—individuals who are primarily interested in issues for their truth-value, not their utility, and allowed to pursue their conclusions without regard to whether these conclusions serve some predetermined end or other. (Recall that the most powerful critiques of the 1619 Project were not those aired in conservative media (or those spearheaded by political leaders), but those produced by (liberal) historians at some of the nation’s leading universities. Intellectually honest liberals can still recognize pamphleteering when they see it.) It is this intellectual autonomy that produces the sorts of figures who lead.

Who, among today’s critics of “elite evangelicalism,” could take Tim Keller’s place on stage, across from Anthony Kronman, and credibly and persuasively critique Spinozism before an indifferent-to-hostile audience? Names do not readily suggest themselves.

Ultimately, to the extent that the critique of “elite evangelicalism” is pursued as a class war, it undercuts its own long-term effectiveness. The war becomes everything. And that is a slender reed upon which to build a Christian future.

\* \* \*

Where to go from here?

Begin with this: in the evangelical civil war, both sides have, implicitly, accepted the premise of the question with which this essay began: that there is one, and *only* one, way to be faithfully present under contemporary cultural conditions. This is the root issue. And yet it is precisely that premise which, I think, should be called into question. The logic of class war—of existential zero-sum struggle between different evangelical factions—should be dropped. The now-developed “critique of elite evangelicalism” goes astray when it is understood as a warrant for class war *rather than as a necessary internal critique of theological drift.* The goal need not be the *overthrow and replacement* of those currently serving in elite/white-collar ministry contexts; where such figures have made improper concessions to cultural norms, they should be corrected as erring brethren rather than written off as subversives or enemies.

And ultimately, it must be recognized that shared terrain persists, even within the horizon of the “negative world.” That ground may be harder now to locate, and especially hard to *articulate* in mutually acceptable terms. But that is what it means, after all, to speak of a “common good” that transcends and pervades all things. If it blinds itself to this unifying center, evangelical populism will tear itself apart—even more than it already has.

[*originally published on Substack*](https://jsehrett.substack.com/p/elites-and-the-evangelical-class)
### The Promise of a Christian Small Magazine
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-promise-of-a-christian-small-magazine/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:34:31.000Z
## I. To Live in Interesting Times

In one sense, the years immediately following the close of World War II were amongst the most harrowing of the century–the Nazi threat was ended, but an open question remained of what new horrors would be visited on the world by the new weapon unveiled by America in the shocking and devastating horrors visited on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945.

What Camus said of the disease ravaged city of Oran at the end of his post-war novel *The Plague* could be said of the post-war world as well:

> None the less, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.  
>  
> And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linenchests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.

What precisely were the questions threatening that world?

One question, of course, was whether America would use such weapons again.

Another obvious question followed: What would happen when other nations inevitably developed their own versions of the bomb, as the Soviets did only a few short years later thanks to some highly effective espionage work targeting the Manhattan Project?

The final days of World War II showed us not only the depravities that mankind was capable of, but also suggested that our growing technical acumen might make previously unimaginable evils suddenly imminent and plausible. It was a harrowing time.

Discovering the full extent of the Holocaust would permanently change the philosophical trajectory of major thinkers such as Phillipa Foote and Iris Murdoch, for example. And the advent of the bomb would provoke American evangelist [Billy Graham to claim in a sermon](https://youtu.be/L2cw76aV5pk?si=phAWSAu%5FReoAzXC5&t=230&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that our quest to create “frankenstein monsters that will destroy civilization” was simply the latest instance of mankind turning their back on God and pursuing their own wisdom set against that of God.

What is striking, however, is that alongside the deep despair that pervaded the era is a surprising sense of openness as well. One side of cataclysm is the realization that humanity is deeply perverse and possesses a capacity for wickedness that could break any of us were we forced to behold it truly. As Camus said, the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good.

The other side, however, is a sense that something horrific has exhausted itself, that there is now little to lose, and so perhaps we need not only fear evils we had not previously thought possible, but we can also dream of futures we had not dared to hope for thus far.

That is the note one detects in the recollection of editor Judith Jones as she recalled her time in post-war Paris for her biographer Sara B. Franklin. For Jones, having grown up in a highly status conscious New York family the escape to Paris felt thrilling. The pressures of upward mobility forced on her by her vain and ambitious parents fell away when she left America. And what did she find in Paris? She found… everything:

> These people, Judith saw right away, were different from those she knew back home. Friang, Ceria, and their friends were clear-eyed about the world. Their ideals remained intact, but the war had scrubbed them of any naivete. They were curious. They read. They argued. Their hunger for ideas seemed endless. They seemed so alive. Judith knew she’d been right to come to Paris. “Well,” she told me decades later, “a world opened up!”

To encounter a new idea can sometimes feel like that: a world opens up.

And when you pause to consider what exactly she found in Paris and to recall that she was an aspiring writer and editor, it is not hard to understand the thrill. She is describing a particularly potent and idyllic form of one’s grad school days when the books and arguments and ideas all seem to come non-stop, when conversations are charged and snap with an energy and joy that was likely all the more potent coming as it did in a city only recently freed from the Nazis. It was the intellectual ferment of the place–a new world seemed possible, not because people were naive or utopian or foolish, but because we had passed through a great evil, come out on the far side, and… now what? That would be heady enough, of course, to a young American only recently released from a hyper-status conscious New York household. Now add the appeal and romance of the City of Light on top of all that?

One might say that Jones found herself living in interesting times.

That’s a phrase that has come up more and more lately, of course. For many it is used as a glib joke about how the speaker would rather prefer to go back to the boring times that came before Trump, before Brexit, before COVID, before mobs stormed the nation’s capital, before land wars in eastern Europe broke out anew, before resurgent anti-semitism in the west, and before the massacre of innocents in Gaza and Israel. (We can easily forget, of course, that those times *did* include rampant abortion in America, rapidly escalating wealth inequality, financial corruption, and no shortage of American misconduct abroad as well as often quite cruel neglect of traumatized veterans at home. Our times now are worse, I think, but we should not cover the Clinton, Bush, and Obama years in a romantic sheen either.)

“Interesting Times,” of course is also the name of [the best new podcast to launch in 2025](https://www.nytimes.com/column/interesting-times?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)–Ross Douthat’s show for the *Times* in which he interviews the people whose response to our current moment is not dismay or regret but… excitement. The thinkers Douthat has interviewed include [technologists who are unsure if the continued existence of humanity is good](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/podcasts/interesting-times-a-mind-bending-conversation-with-peter-thiel.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), [other technologists who have a wonderful plan for your child's genetic code](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/07/opinion/genetics-children-noor-siddiqui.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), and a variety of [other political activists](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/opinion/right-wing-masculinity-culture.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of [all sorts](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/opinion/hasan-piker-interesting-times-ross-douthat.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) who are not sure if error has any rights and seem to think bringing back the various charnel house horrors of the 20th century, be they from [the far right](https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-to-interview-political-revolutionaries) or far left, might actually be a cool idea.

If there is a hopeful word I can speak amidst all of that, it is this: The example of the post-war years is a reminder that we are not the first to live in interesting times. The post-war years saw similar intellectual ferment for similar reasons: new technologies ([in this case paperback books](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-revolutionary-effect-of-the-paperback-book-36209689/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)) and economic policies (the GI Bill) made books and ideas and the intellectual life *far* more accessible, which also meant that radical ideas became far more accessible.

And, of course, the powers that be in the post-war world were often ready and willing to promote quite horrific violence to advance their own ends. The evils of the Soviet system are extensive and horrifying, of course, but then it is perhaps worth remembering that the “good” side of the Cold War had only recently incinerated several hundred thousand civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to say nothing of the almost equally murderous (and largely forgotten) [fire bombing campaigns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing%5Fof%5FTokyo?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that came before the atom bombs. Graham’s anger and rage he expressed in that forgotten San Francisco sermon were not for nothing.

Thus the post-war intellectuals found themselves in their own version of “interesting times.” Eventually it would become clear that the leading philosophers of Europe at that time were generally not any more morally serious than many of our own day’s leaders. The same philosophers Jones encountered so eagerly during her time in Paris would go on to [tacitly defend gulags](https://slate.com/culture/2003/09/la-double-vie-of-jean-paul-sartre.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (and later [condemn laws against having sex with minors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French%5Fpetitions%5Fagainst%5Fage-of-consent%5Flaws?ref=mereorthodoxy.com#Signatories%5Fto%5Fthe%5FJanuary%5Fpetition)). Indeed, if you are rightly scandalized by the sexual abuses committed by today's leaders, just wait till [you read](https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/4/16/reckoning-with-foucaults-sexual-abuse-of-boys-in-tunisia?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) about [Michel Foucault](https://spectator.com/article/france-s-reverence-for-intellectuals-shielded-michel-foucault-from-scandal/?edition=us&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Nor are the similarities between the decades after World War II and our own day limited to the sexual abuses commonly committed by our elites. Then, as now, political liberties were sometimes under threat in the west. And then, as now, no one quite knew what the shape of the world to come would be–or even if there would be a world to come, given the threat of nuclear war.

## II. The Work of a Magazine

In such an environment, the purpose of a magazine is to articulate within itself the picture of a world that might be. If successful, a magazine ends up being an anticipation of the world that eventually comes to exist.

Thus *The New Republic* played a part in the creation of the New Deal, although in the end they found Roosevelt's proposals too moderate. *Partisan Review* defined the post-war left. *Encounter* showed how to be both of the left and anti-totalitarian. *National Review* birthed the conservative movement, which eventually culminated in the Reagan presidency, an administration that defined America’s political life for nearly 40 years.

Small magazines are a bit like a sandbox for imagined social projects, sometimes even entire social orders. Thus we come to the work of an institution like *Mere Orthodoxy*, which is a small Christian ideas magazine and media organization.

## What world do we want to open up?

If one sort of world opened up for Jones in Paris, many other sorts of worlds are opening up for people today. There are far-right worlds that bear a disturbing resemblance to the far-right worlds of the interwar period when alienated young people across Europe lamented their situation and went searching for someone to blame. There are far-left worlds that bear their own disturbing resemblance to a kind of latter day Bolshevism. And there are many other variants in between those extremes. 

Our task is to articulate one such world and then work to see it come to fruition. So what is the world that a small Christian magazine ought to imagine and articulate and contain within itself?

## A *Christian* World

At risk of stating the obvious, it is a *Christian* world. And so certain things are taken as axiomatically true:

The good life is bound up in practices of love and generosity and mercy.

The good life includes time devoted each week to public gathered worship with other Christian believers, united around Scripture, sacrament, and prayer.

The good life generally (though not always) involves marriage, a life of covenant fidelity, love, and devotion to one’s spouse, and begetting, raising, and caring for children.

The good life is shaped and guided by [the teachings found in the Apostle’s Creed, Lord’s Prayer, and Ten Commandments](https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-the-creed-lords-prayer-and-ten-commandments-ground-spiritual-formation-and-soul-care).

The good life is not measured through the accumulation of wealth, the acquisition of power or influence, the obtaining of personal peace and affluence, the cultivation of one’s authentic self via self-expression, or the mere maximizing of lifestyle choices.

In all these ways, the world that a Christian media organization seeks to define within itself and articulate to the present world is one radically at odds with the dominant powers and principalities of our day, proposing quite different understandings of justice, greatness, and the shape of a worthy life than what is typically proposed by others.

Yet we must say more. For if we stop there one can come to the conclusion that the world we articulate is essentially one in which life is lived in church, such that we either relegate the rest of life to the category of “necessary evil” or simply seek to withdraw from the rest of the world as it exists outside the church so much as we possibly can while constructing a kind of parallel society that is suitably safe and reserved only for other people who believe as we believe. This is not the way forward. For the world a Christian magazine will define is not only a *Christian* world, but is also a Christian *world*, not merely a church.

## A Christian *World*

This is what I needed Martin Bucer to teach me when I first encountered him as a college student studying at the University of Nebraska.

That is probably not where you expected me to go.

So let me explain: When I came to college, I had seen enough bad behavior in the world and bad behavior in the church that I thought something radical was needed to sustain healthy common life. And so, like many my age (I matriculated at the university in 2006), I gravitated toward a kind of soft radicalism that was downstream of Stanley Hauerwas, though it would be some time before I would read Hauerwas himself. (I likely would have done far better to just skip most of what I was reading and go straight to Hauerwas, but alas.)

The solution, I thought at the time, was for a Christian community of character to arise that would set itself against the many communities of violence and mistrust that existed in the world (and sometimes in professing churches!) and articulate an alternative vision of life, governed by the plain teachings of Jesus found in the Gospels, particularly the Sermon on the Mount. This was the moment when “radical” books were flooding the market and many an eager, zealous young evangelical read books like David Platt’s *Radical* or Shane Claiborne’s *Irresistible Revolution* and wanted to do something great for God, in the mold of Jim Elliot or William Carey.

There were problems, however.

In the first place, having grown up in a cult in which the only genuinely healthy expression of Christian faith I saw was not at church but at home with my parents, I had to ask why I hadn’t found God in the church but had found him outside it. What nearly drove me to apostatizing was a local church. What kept me from that for many years was a home and then an ecumenical residential Christian community, both of which exemplified Christian belief and character far more faithfully and consistently than anything I had ever found in the church. For someone dabbling in Anabaptist-style radicalism that placed such heavy emphasis on the church as the locus of the good life, that was a problem.

There was a second problem too, which stemmed from the first: A great deal of the life a person lived did not take place inside the church. Moreover, a great deal of people in the world would never pursue a life as enmeshed with the work of the local church, both for reasons of calling and other reasons too.

It was as I sat with these questions and struggled with them that I signed up for a reformation/renaissance survey course at the university taught by a reformation historian at the University of Nebraska named Dr. Amy Nelson Burnett. I did not know it at the time, but Burnett is one of the preeminent reformation historians in the world with a particular expertise in early modern Protestantism in Germany and Switzerland. As she told the history of the Reformation in her lectures, one name kept coming up along the margins of the story–Martin Bucer.

When Luther disputed Eck in Heidelberg in 1521, Bucer was there as a Dominican monk. Several years later as radical reformers came to Strasbourg and sought to draw the city into the anabaptist cause, Bucer was there to oppose them. In 1531 when Philip of Hesse sought to bring together the early Protestant leaders around a common confession and called those leaders to his castle in Marburg to meet, Bucer was there. In 1539 when John Calvin was kicked out of Geneva and needed a place to shelter and work, he went to Bucer. In the 1540s when for a moment it appeared that a concord within the German church might be possible, it was Bucer and Melanchthon who met with Catholic leaders at Regensburg. And in the early 1550s when the reform movement was taking root in England and young leaders were seeking guidance, one of the men they turned to was Martin Bucer, who had moved to England after Strasbourg had been retaken for the Roman church in the First Schmalkaldic War.

I found myself feeling a bit stunned that someone could have been so active in so many key moments in church history and I, a child of the church who had been taught a fair bit of church history, had never heard of him. So I asked Professor Burnett to supervise an independent study paper on Bucer, not knowing she was the preeminent authority on Bucer in North America. And so began a continuing conversation I have had with the great Alsatian Dominican turned Strasbourg reformer.

The thing I saw almost immediately, because you cannot read Bucer for five minutes without seeing it, is that he had a deep concern with the public expression of Christian faith. For Luther, the chief problem was how sinful people can be made right before God. But for Bucer the chief problem was Christian love, particularly love of neighbor: why did the church so often fail in it and what could be done to call Christians back to it?

Bucer's proposal was not that the true Christians should withdraw from every form of civic society aside and devote themselves to a sufficiently "pure" church made up only of those who voluntarily asked to be baptized as adults. If he wanted to go that way he could have done–he was in constant communication with anabaptist reformers making precisely that move; he was friendly with many of them and loved and respected many. But he thought they were wrong to withdraw from the state church and civic life and he opposed them consistently throughout his career.

But his solution was not an opposite sort of error either, in which he adopted a simplistic sort of theocratic aspiration to dominance in which the church held civic society together via the threat of the sword. It couldn’t be, given that Bucer only narrowly avoided such coercive punishment from Christian authorities on multiple occasions in his life. Indeed it is striking that Bucer's Strasbourg did not to my knowledge execute *anyone* over religious beliefs during the entirety of his time in the city. Their record is not perfect on this front, for they did banish several Anabaptist leaders from the city and they imprisoned a small number. But when set against Zwingli's Zurich, much of Catholic Europe, Elizabeth I's England, or even Calvin's Geneva, Bucer's Strasbourg looks positively liberal by comparison. So what was Bucer's project, then? It was simply this: Bucer felt that the creation of Christian society was a matter of Christian love. He sought a Christian society–cultural Christianity one might even say–because he desired to see his neighbors loved and cared for and healthy, and he sought ways of making that society quite remarkably broad by the standards of his day.

But this turned my entire way of thinking on its head: My idea had been that cultural Christianity was harmful and wrong because it was artificial; it was not genuine, saving faith in Christ and so it was fake. What we needed were pure churches of genuine faith and obedience that focused on their lives of love and generous outreach to the world while remaining wholly separate from the world. Put another way, I only knew two options: The radical option which presupposed a purified church *or* a totalitarian cultural Christianity that sought dominance over any dissenters. It had not occurred to me, until reading Bucer, that there were other options.

Bucer helped me to see that my evangelical separatism was not synonymous with Christianity, but was simply one theory as to how Christianity expresses itself publicly. The theory Bucer set forth as an alternative, imagining an integrated Christian society in which the church was an essential part of civic society but not the sum total of it was something I hadn’t yet encountered. Crucially, for Bucer the upshot of his project was not Christian domination, the purging of wrong belief, or the coercive punishment of heretics. He mostly saw a Christian society as a desirable tool for aiding people in knowing God and for lifting up the poor and disadvantaged.

Bucer did not make me an establishmentarian, to be clear. Indeed, over time I have come to think that much of Bucer’s political vision is highly reconcilable with a form of political liberalism. But what Bucer did make me was a person who saw that Christian society could be good, that Christianity is expressed not only in the church, but in the broader world, and that Christians can become engaged in civic life *as Christians* and as a form of submission to Christ’s command to love neighbor.

And so a *world* is spun out from there–a world in which employers treat their employees equitably and justly, in which practices of mercy, forbearance, and generosity are normalized across society and regarded as morally good and even normalized in law, and in which the life of Christian discipleship does not merely drive us toward attending church on Sundays or toward evangelization and practices of personal piety, but also drives us toward engaging our professions in certain ways, using our finances in certain ways, and using whatever power we are entrusted with in certain ways. (It is striking to note how this vision would eventually win the day across much of Europe and even make its way across the Atlantic to America. Carved above the north doors of the Nebraska State Capitol you will find the words "Wisdom, Justice, Power, Mercy / Constant Guardians of the Law.")

Bucer’s view of a Christian society was unlike anything I found in the radical tradition, but it also was not at all the naked public square I had known growing up in America in the 1990s and 2000s. In short, Bucer gave me a way of imagining a world that seemed possible, good, and Christian.

## III. Presence

One of the things that becomes rapidly apparent if you spend much time reading about the post-war era is that orthodox Protestants were broadly withdrawn and unengaged in the defining questions of the day. If you read a book like [*Cold Warriors*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/cold-warriors-writers-who-waged-the-literary-cold-war-duncan-white/bdc07a31f92919c2?ean=9780062449832&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), which considers the writers and editors and thinkers at the heart of the Cold War fight, you will not find many orthodox Protestants.

You’ll find a number of thinkers with complicated relationships to Christian belief–John Updike, who Jones edited, comes to mind, for example. You’ll find plenty of Catholics. You’ll also find mainline Protestants with complex relationships to traditional orthodoxy—Brunner and his denial of the virgin birth, Niebuhr and [his indifference to the supernatural](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1986/03/27/niebuhr-supernaturalism/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), and so on. But the orthodox Protestants are largely missing. What remains are various sorts of modernist Protestants, orthodox Catholics, lapsed Christians of all sorts, and a variety of religious non-believers.

The fame obtained by Francis Schaeffer during the tail end of that era is perhaps itself telling: Schaeffer shot to fame simply because he actually read the people defining the post-war intellectual world. He was not a specialist in any of these thinkers. He had no advanced training in relevant fields. He did not have any associations that gave him credibility or a platform. And he did not always read them particularly well. Indeed, in some cases he probably hadn’t *read* them at all. Schaeffer had very little money, limited access to books, and was dyslexic. What he learned of the post-war existentialists, for example, was as much a product of conversation with students from Zurich as it was his own reading, whatever he could manage given the many limitations he was facing.

I say that not as a criticism, to be clear: We now take for granted that it is easy to access certain books and thinkers. But for a poor American missionary living in a remote part of Switzerland in the 1950s and 60s who had a significant reading disability, it was not at all easy to access those thinkers. I am not aware of any scholarly work trying to determine if or how Schaeffer would have accessed these texts, but from everything I know it is most likely that Schaeffer would have encountered much of the post-war intellectual world via second-hand conversation with students as well as whatever books he could acquire from Zurich, where his oldest daughter attended college. Really, the best way to read Schaeffer is not even to regard him as an intellectual himself, so much as someone who attempted to relate to intellectuals in the same way that someone like Hudston Taylor related to the Chinese. In other words, Schaeffer was less an intellectual himself and more a very sensitive and shrewd missionary to readers of the intellectuals. 

So what does it imply about evangelical engagement with intellectual life at that time that a man with all of those limitations and challenges could stand out as one of the most obvious evangelical interlocutors for that world?

There were other Christian thinkers doing better work, to be clear, but the closest thing I can think of to an orthodox historic protestant who had a significant platform at that time and who wrote on the day's defining debates regularly would be C. S. Lewis, who was often unfairly dismissed by academic colleagues because of his popular level writing, and T. S. Eliot. Once you move past them, you’re basically left with Catholics and various sorts of modernist mainliners.

The evangelical energy was almost entirely concentrated around revivalism and the creation of parallel institutions that explained themselves *precisely* in terms of their choice to stand outside the mainstream and *not* participate in much of civic society. Put another way, virtually all the evangelicals had become a kind of bourgeois iteration of radical Christianity rather than anything like Bucer's model. Recall, for example, that when Schaeffer spoke at Wheaton in 1968 on the films of Bergman and Antonioni (to an audience that may have included both John Piper and Mark Noll, both of whom were Wheaton students at the time) he was speaking about *avant garde* filmmakers to students whose college’s honor code forbade them from attending movies at all.

Go back and re-read the chapters of *A Severe Mercy* when Sheldon and Davy Vanauken return to America after their conversion to Christianity at Oxford. Recall their bewilderment at the American church scene, where their only options seemed to be mainline churches that weren’t sure that Jesus actually rose bodily from the grave *or* evangelical churches that seemed more interested in policing one’s consumption of alcohol than in extending Christian love to the world.

I say all of this to make a simple point: While I think the evangelical intellectual world we now have for today’s interesting times is far more vibrant and healthy than it was during the last such era, we began from a deficit and have struggled to know how to engage in civic life and mainstream intellectual conversations. The problems Noll addressed in his much discussed book on the scandal of the evangelical mind are not problems that are solved in a year or even a decade.

So go back to Judith Jones and Paris and the post-war ferment and enthusiasm of the City of Light. How should orthodox protestants be present in that world? Well, to begin, we *should* be present in it.

Ultimately, the conversations they were having concerned questions of meaning and evil and belonging, all of which are things our God has spoken to and with which he is concerned. So why would we not be present? We belong there as much as Sartre or Camus did. Yet many Christians, when beholding that world, shrink back. The intellectual world of elite media culture seems foreign and remote and inaccessible and hostile. Better just to keep one’s distance, they think.

Other Christians adopt a different sort of posture. They wish to be present in that world, but they do not want to understand that world. They love it as a gathering place of potential converts, but no more. So they do not talk about the books or ideas or debates that that world speaks of. Instead, they simply spend their time asserting that true Christian doctrines are actually true and demanding that anyone who engages with them would engage on their terms, asking questions and thinking about issues that many people outside the church simply do not care about. This is the method of your typical campus street preacher, for example. But your average university student hasn’t thought about whether or not the Bible is God’s Word, for example.

If the condition for your talking to them as a student is that you argue with them over that proposition, you are most likely to receive indifference in response, not because the student hates the Bible or has a pronounced hostility to Christianity, but simply because they have no prior framework for understanding why that question matters at all. This, of course, is simply what it means to live in a post-Christian society: the animating questions of our moment certainly involve Christian themes, but they are not posed in Christian terms nor are their immediate topics specifically Christian in nature. So to enter the conversation, one must be comfortable with that and willing to speak with people about the things they actually care about and in terms they actually understand.

The problem for a Christian magazine in this moment is, at least in part, how to articulate a Christian world in a way that is actually engaging, accessible, and imaginable for a typical person living in a post-Christian society. And the added difficulty here is that we don’t necessarily have obvious guides to help us or pre-made frameworks to adopt.

The mainline is dying and now has an even more indifferent relationship to orthodoxy than it did in Niebuhr’s day. The evangelical world in certain places is far healthier–certainly the Christian study center movement is immensely encouraging, there are many exemplary scholars working in Christian colleges, and there is also a lot of great work happening in the book publishing world. The flourishing of an organization like the Veritas Forum or the Trinity Forum is also encouraging.

But none of these are magazines. So if you frame the challenge before us in Bucer’s terms—how do we cultivate a Christian ecosystem of communities and institutions that seek to advance distinctly Christian wisdom and ends in their respective spaces, thereby advancing a broadly Christian view of society that honors God and advances the common good?—you will find that we still have an enormous amount of work to do. This is not because the work being done by book publishers, colleges, study centers, or groups like Veritas is bad, but because it takes a plurality of like-minded institutions working in a plurality of unique spaces to advance that singular project.

What particular value does a magazine offer to such a project? Four things come to mind.

First, magazines require a readership of at least some size to survive. Reader-supported magazines need enough readers to support them financially. But even magazines largely dependent on donors still require a broad enough readership to appear worthy of support to a donor. This means that magazines inherently have a larger audience than what can be found in academic publishing, let alone what you can have in a single classroom or lecture hall in any kind of geographically bound institution, such as a college, church, or study center. A magazine, then, by virtue of its broad reach can be a unifying thread that links together a variety of different groups and people who might not otherwise find each other, even if they actually are broadly aligned and unified in what they care about and value.

Second, magazines and other online media projects can create a plausible structure on the internet in which certain ideas come to appear more plausible or worthy.

Put another way, a YouTube channel or a podcast or an online magazine can, through its work, define a certain sensibility about the world and commend that approach to its audience. Such endeavors become a tool for their readers or viewers, such that when they have a question or want to think more deeply about an issue, they find themselves turning to that media outlet for help. Once again: Magazines are world-makers and at their best they help their audiences locate themselves within a certain kind of world.

Third, because magazines need a large audience (relatively speaking) to survive, magazines also must necessarily have a certain generalist sensibility.

There is peril in that, of course. Knowing a little bit about a lot of things can easily become knowing enough to be dangerous but not enough to be wise. Being a good steward of a magazine is, in many ways, about learning how much you do not know and being willing to ask others for help in your ignorance. A figure like Christopher Hitchens is a cautionary tale for magazine writers and editors everywhere: It was Hitchens’s broad reading and remarkable command of language that made him a joy to read on so many topics. But it was his arrogance and unacknowledged ignorance of theology that made him such an appalling writer on religion.

And yet there is much to say in praise of generalism as well: Many writers regard a certain inaccessibility and privileged knowledge as a marker of their giftedness. The fact that their work is difficult is seen as a sign of its goodness. There are cases where that instinct is not entirely wrong, I think. For example, I can recognize both that Oliver O’Donovan is immensely difficult to read and also that if I stretch myself and challenge myself as a reader, I will be rewarded by the time spent with him.

Yet there is also a certain decadence and vanity that can slip in for writers who dismiss concerns about accessibility and readability. Pope Benedict XVI did not take this attitude. I recall once reading an anecdote about how he thought about his own writing that captures what made him such a marvelous communicator. When he finished writing a homily or lecture he had to give, he would read it aloud to his sister–she was college educated, but had no training in theology. If he read it to her and she found it difficult to follow, he concluded that he had failed and needed to try again. It was not that he needed to dumb his work down–a phrase that in some ways exemplifies the writerly vanity I am condemning. Rather, if his work was not accessible to an intelligent and educated woman like his sister, then the work would not accomplish what he hoped it would do, which is to direct others to Christ. C. S. Lewis had a similar rule, of course: He believed that if he could not express an idea in a way that was sensible to a typical British working man then he was not yet ready to write about that idea. (The preeminent contemporary example of this virtue would be Timothy Keller.)

The generalist magazine, then, helps pastors, academics, and other writers to communicate their ideas in ways that will make them more fruitful and effective in serving their readers and enlivening their readers to the delights of the world, the goodness of God, and the needs of their neighbor.

Fourth and finally, because magazines have a broader audience and because they write on a variety of topics in a way that is both learned and accessible, they are best positioned to fruitfully do the thing I already mentioned as their purpose: to imagine a world that we might endeavor to build.

Reality itself is always messy and uneven and even chaotic. The golden days are never quite so golden as they are later made out to be, but neither are the bleak times quite as bleak. When we are reckoning with actual churches and businesses and governments, good stewardship always require a certain measure of compromise and accommodation to what is possible. But over time this necessary and good accommodation to the plausible can lead us astray. Setting aside what is ideal in the name of what is possible can become setting aside the good itself because goodness comes to seem impractical.

Magazines, as a common endeavor devoted to ideas and conversation, are a bulwark against that spirit of accommodation. At their best they equip people with a vision of the good that guides and directs them in their day to day work, which inherently involves compromise and accommodation. But by keeping a vision of the good at the center, by imagining a world that just *might* be possible magazines help their readers to take small incremental steps toward the good, balancing the need to compromise with the weightiness of truth, righteousness, and justice.

Martin Bucer lived in both of these worlds. He lived in the world where compromise with Lutheran Christians and even some Roman Christians seemed plausible to him as a condition for cultivating Christian society, where friends fell into error, catastrophe struck and destroyed his best laid plans, and where he was constantly navigating complicated situations that forced him to compromise. But he also lived in a world where he knew that Christian love was *genuinely* possible, where the poor did not need to remain forever poor, where kings did not need to be corrupt, and where church authorities did not need to be greedy and vain. And by remembering that that world was possible he was able to labor faithfully in the world that was. Enabling others to follow in that way is the work of Christian media.
### Who Is Rich and Who Is Poor?
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/who-is-rich-and-who-is-poor/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:34:34.000Z
Sixteen years ago, my wife and I winnowed all our earthly possessions to eight suitcases, turned down a pair of six-figure incomes, and became missionary physicians in rural Africa. In doing so, I thought I was choosing a life of modest poverty. Instead, I discovered I was an amazingly rich tycoon.

Prior to arriving in Burundi in 2013, my understanding of poverty had come from growing up in the US. “Poor” was when we didn’t have the money to pay for something essential—like the month’s rent or an unexpected major vehicle repair—or when we couldn’t go somewhere for vacation. We understood in theory that we weren’t poor like some people in the world, but we certainly weren’t rich. Being rich meant having more than us.

This understanding of poverty and wealth was upended for me in a small brick-walled room in rural Burundi. During a morning chapel service for the hospital where I work, a Burundian pastor shared Jesus’ words that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. I was just starting to learn some of the local Kirundi language and caught the next phrase: Twese, turi abatunzi. All of us, we are rich people.

Who was in the room besides me? Nurses, nursing aides, and cleaners, whose individual monthly salaries were perhaps 150 USD at most. In deeming them wealthy, the pastor wasn’t talking about spiritual riches—he meant it in a very material sense. Everyone in the room had a steady salary and some had advanced training, making them comparatively richer than many people in their home villages. Therefore, what Jesus said about the camel and the eye of the needle applied to them too.

In determining who is rich and who is poor, we subconsciously compare ourselves to those above and below us. We do this whether we are in an American suburb or in a rustic hospital room in East Africa. There is always someone richer and always someone poorer than us. This relative understanding of wealth and poverty can make Scripture’s teaching on the subject confusing. Who then is rich and who is poor—and how do Christ’s commands to generosity apply to each of us?

\*\*\*

To answer these questions, we must first properly understand our own affluence. It doesn’t need to be a subjective matter. In 2024, the World Bank [reported](https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/poverty-prosperity-and-planet?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that 44 percent of the people in the world live on $6.85 or less per day, about $200 a month. If that is your income, then almost half of the global population is poorer than you. UNICEF [reports](https://www.unicefusa.org/stories/saving-lives-one-toilet-time%23:~:text=Around%25252060%252520percent%252520of%252520the,instead%252520of%252520using%252520a%252520toilet?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that 60 percent of people globally don’t have a toilet at home that can safely manage human waste. If you own any kind of car (or could if you wanted to), you’re richer than nine-tenths of the world.

[Dollar Street](https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) fleshes this out with profiles of families living on the global wealth median. One family of three in Kenya lives in a one-bedroom house with electricity and an outdoor water tap. Another family in India rents a one-bedroom house with indoor plumbing, a motorcycle, and a two-burner cookstove. These families are richer than half the world.

In comparison, the US Census Bureau reported in 2023 that only [10 percent](https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/heres-income-you-need-be-top-50-american-households?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of US households earned less than $1,581 per month. That means that for those of us Christians living in the US, we are far richer than most of the world and most of our brothers and sisters in Christ globally.

Admittedly, living considerably below the median in a rich country like the US can be legitimately difficult and frightening, even if you are well above the global median. The suffering involved in that doesn’t need to be denied. But at the same time, when we forget or refuse to reckon with our comparative wealth, our acts of generosity as Christians can either shrivel up or become too narrow.

\*\*\*

Additionally, when we don’t recognize our affluence, we ignore (on a practical level) that wealth comes with inherent spiritual dangers. We glimpse such perils in Deuteronomy 8, when the Israelites are warned that multiplied riches could lead to forgetting God (vv. 10–14), and also in Proverbs, where we see the temptation to trust in riches (11:28). Even the celebrated wealth of Solomon ends up feeling like a cautionary tale, as the increasing splendor of his kingdom is accompanied by idolatry and harsh treatment of his subjects (1 Kings 11:5; 12:4).

The most direct statements about the spiritual dangers of wealth come from Jesus, like the camel and needle image shared by my Burundian pastor. Jesus says you cannot serve both God and wealth (Mark 6:24). He tells of the rich man in Luke 16, who had already received his comforts in his earthly life. In a parable, Jesus says the thorns that choke the word of God are the worries of the world and the deceitfulness of wealth (Matt. 13:22).

And wealth is indeed deceitful. We find ways to reason our way out of obedience. When we read passages like Mark 10, where Jesus tells the rich young man to go and sell everything he has, we question whether this command is for all of us. Because there are obviously other people among Jesus’ followers who retain their property, we quickly reassure ourselves of our right to keep pursuing comfort. We check out before truly hearing Jesus’ ending words: “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!” (v. 23).

“It is at least as difficult for affluent Christians to surmount the spiritual challenges of our affluence as it is for our poverty-stricken brothers and sisters in the rest of the world to survive their poverty,” [wrote](https://www.amazon.com/Missions-Money-Missionary-revisited-Missiology/dp/1570756503/tag=christtoday-20?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) author Jonathan Bonk. Like the expert in the law who asked “Who is my neighbor?” so he could know whom he wasn’t obligated to love, we tend to filter the Bible’s words about poverty and riches to make sure that the responsibilities of the rich belong to someone else. There is always someone richer in the world, we say—and at the same time, we don’t hear how the Bible’s words to the rich could be directed at ourselves.

Over a century ago, G. K. Chesterton [said](https://www.amazon.com/Orthodoxy-G-K-Chesterton/dp/0898705525?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that despite our efforts to look for the largest possible needle and the smallest possible camel, we can’t avoid reckoning with Jesus’ words. This reckoning is not easy. As Jesus reminds us in the same passage, it is only possible through God’s grace.

\*\*\*

Living as an African missionary doctor instead of a doctor practicing in America, I may be less materially wealthy than I was before, but it doesn’t feel like it. I have a car and a refrigerator, and I put away money for retirement. My family has insurance that gives us access to American health care when we need it. We go on vacation sometimes. Even with all this, we have enough to give away too. I’m so rich. Realizing this was a shock, but it was ultimately also a gift.

Perhaps you are called, like the rich young ruler, to give all that you have to the poor. But if not, then the way forward is to recognize your wealth (in either a global or a relative sense) and to realize that what the Bible says about riches and rich people applies to you.

A few individuals in the Bible show us how a wealthy person is to live in this world before God and fellow human beings, which Bonk calls “the righteous rich.” Job responded consistently to the needs of the poor around him (Job 31:16–28). Nehemiah convinced his fellow noblemen to stop participating in a financial system that burdened those who were poorer in the community (Neh. 5:1–12). And Boaz makes room for the disenfranchised to safely glean in his fields (Ruth 2).

It may have been figures like these that Paul had in mind when he wrote to Timothy, “Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God. . . . Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share” (1 Tim. 6:17–18). Why? Because “in this way, they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age, so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life” (v. 19).

Like Job, Nehemiah, Boaz, and the wealthy in Paul’s time, I find myself in the company of the rich. I have mercifully learned that my provision and my security come from my Creator, and what he has given me is mine in order to love him and others. I am far from doing this well, but understanding that I am rich has made me more truthful and more generous—more truthful because I own that what the Bible says about riches applies to me, and more generous for the same reason.

It is not easier, though. On a typical day, I may be walking hurriedly to the hospital and get stopped by an old man asking for money for bus fare. He wants to go see his sick son, and no one else will help him. Two hours later in the clinic, as I type a note on my laptop, a student may tell me that my patient didn’t have five dollars for her essential medications. At the end of clinic hours, my nurse may turn to ask me for a loan to build his house, since bank loans have so much interest.

\*\*\*

These are my local opportunities for generosity. But there are other questions for us too: Understanding our wealth on a global scale, how do we understand Paul’s command to do good “especially to those who belong to the family of believers” (Gal. 6:10) when millions of our brothers and sisters in Christ are among the poorest of this world? How do we choose which of the many overwhelming needs to give to?

The presence of tension and uncertainty in our day-to-day decisions about how we use our wealth does not mean that we are doing something wrong. We need to continue wrestling with difficult questions despite feeling uncomfortable, because tensions, when lived creatively, can lead us from fear to abundant life. In fact, my wife and I have concluded that the absence of tension would be the surest sign of having left the will of our Savior.

The command to generosity is universally applicable to all believers, no matter where we fall on the social ladder, but how we obey this command will look differently for each of us. For example, a friend of mine wanted to embrace generosity, but felt panicked by the sheer number of organizations she could support in the name of following Christ. So she decided to look to her church and see what causes, missionaries, and institutions she could commit to alongside her local congregation.

Indian Christians in the impoverished Mizoram region set aside a handful of grains each meal for Jesus, their unseen guest. The resulting accumulation from a million Christians was sold at a discount to the poor, and the proceeds funded the work of the church.

In my own setting, a typical rural Burundian family is among the poorest in the world, many earning only $27 a month. But I have seen my Burundian brothers and sisters give generously even when mired in considerable financial needs themselves.

This past week, a group of local construction workers who make less than $2 a day were figuring out how to pay the surgical fees for a young man they met in their work at the hospital. They don’t think of themselves as rich but rather as “richer than this guy,” and so they are assuming the responsibility of the rich in this moment. The same workers will later bring their request for a salary increase to my teammate, who will need to remember that he is not a poor missionary but rather a very rich man, also called to be generous.

However we live it, each of us is called to a life of costly giving. But we are not alone in this. Our Father opens our eyes to see our own wealth which gives us ears to hear the call to generosity. Heeding that call then reminds us that security and provision are truly found in our Lord. And having given what is costly, we find that it was the Holy Spirit who empowered us all along. We find our lives in Christ (Matt. 10:39). And we realize that these are the greater blessings that come in the wake of self-giving.
### How the Creed, Lord's Prayer, and Ten Commandments Ground Spiritual Formation and Soul Care
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-the-creed-lords-prayer-and-ten-commandments-ground-spiritual-formation-and-soul-care/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:34:40.000Z
I have learned that an essential part of cultivating a flourishing garden is recognizing one simple fact: all plants are not created equal. Some thrive in direct sunlight; others wither under its heat. Some exhibit incredible resilience in the face of neglect; others are temperamental to the slightest environmental changes. Tending to each successfully requires acknowledging its distinct nature.

This is a reality that extends far beyond the garden: before we can ask how best to assist in the flourishing of something, we must ask “what *kind* of thing is it?” In other words, nature determines nurture.

There is a chasm of dissonance between our obsessive attempts to practice “self-care” and our fundamental misunderstanding of what kind of thing we truly are. Our confusion about our nature has led to less-than-flourishing results. This confusion, Samuel James says, follows a certain internet shaped logic––the logic of self-creation and self-curation. James argues that a self primarily cultivated through the profile page cannot conceive of a transcendent order to their identity. Simply put, possession of the *imago dei* is unthinkable for those who have created themselves.

It should be no surprise, then, that we experience increasing exasperation around self-care; we have an innate desire and need to be nurtured, but we have no clue what we *need* because we have no clue what we *are*. Our misunderstanding of what kind of thing we are (e.g. our *own* thing) has led to creating environments that are counterproductive to our flourishing. Options for nurturing self-made persons are untenably open-ended. And as our uncertainty swells, society is happy to assist us in our self-owned endeavor, providing us with various resources laid out by Alan Noble:

- **Tools** (the internet, antidepressants)
- **Spaces** (cities, the suburbs)
- **Laws** (no-fault divorce, free speech defenses of pornography)
- **Values** (efficiency, individualism)
- **Practices** (self-expression, consumption)

And these are not arbitrary resources. Tara Isabella Burton identifies four essential pillars of identity that religion has always provided: meaning, purpose, community, and ritual. Even in the absence of religion these pillars must be filled by *something*. Consider how Noble is highlighting the inherently religious shape of these societal resources:

| **Burton’s pillars** | **Noble’s societal resources** |                                                                              |
| -------------------- | ------------------------------ | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Meaning              | Laws                           | The rules that interpret and make sense of our world                         |
| Purpose              | Values                         | The end which our laws are designed to obtain                                |
| Community            | Spaces                         | The spheres where we live out our laws and values                            |
| Ritual               | Practices, Tools               | The techniques we employ within our spaces to mark and reinforce our meaning |

We have an intrinsic need to find meaning, purpose, community, and rituals. But these societal resources outlined by Noble work together to construct and pass along a certain “social imaginary”––a cluster of implicit assumptions which skew this pursuit and hold us captive to a secular picture of flourishing.

One of the church’s purposes, then, is to nurture believers in accord with their nature in the context of a worshiping community (see Ephesians 4). This task begins with *reimagining*––or learning for the first time!––what *kind* of thing we are.

## **The Nature of the Church**

The church is, by nature, a *creature of the word*. When Calvin said the Word is the soul of the church he was commenting on the inextricable relationship between the two; the word is what gives life to the covenant assembly. Bavinck adds that without the word there would be no church.

The word creates the church. The LORD’s voice calls his people out of slavery to be a *qahal*––an assembly, a congregation. James 1:18 describes the members of this called-out assembly (*ekklesia*) as being brought forth *by the word*. Similarly, 1 Peter 1:23 speaks of our being born again *through* the living and abiding word of God. Salvation for Moses, James, and Peter is, as John Frame describes it, a *verbal* work of God—not merely informational but covenantal. God saves by speaking: presenting and applying the person and work of Jesus Christ in a verbal capacity––the *euangelion* (verbal news) of his sacrificial death and resurrection.

Not only does this word create us, but it creates us as *responsive* persons. After discussing the (re)creative power of God’s divine speech-act in both creation and salvation, Scott Swain goes on to point out that God’s various purposes for speaking create various *obligations* for the hearer: what is proclaimed must be *known*, what is promised must be *trusted*, what is commanded must be *obeyed*, and what is threatened must be *feared*. Moses informed the *qahal* after giving them the law (prefaced with the *good news* of God as Redeemer) that their response was to be worshipful obedience (Ex. 35:1).

Thus, the sole source of our faith and practice is a word that is *outside* of ourselves and that we must respond to through faith. In other words, *we are not our own.* Therefore, we cannot—and should not!—set out to determine our own means for nurture. Because the church is a creature of the word, it must be nurtured by that same word. When God speaks, He does so with all of who He is; God is present in the very words He communicates.

Because of this, Swain says, God’s communication *from him* is communion *with him*. And it is this communion that provides the habitat—the garden—of nurture for the believer. It is Aslan’s breath-fueled song that brings the world into bloom. Peter goes on to say that the same living word that birthed us is the very word that continues to nurture us (1 Pt. 2:1-3).

A creature of the word must be nurtured by the word. Historically, such word-centered nurture has taken a concrete, catechetical form that modern self-curated spiritualities cannot replicate.

## **The Nurture of the Church**

Vanhoozer contends that knowing the story of the word––the narrative of Jesus’ life, cross, resurrection, ascension, and session––is the proper context for determining our health as humans.

But this word knowledge cannot be reduced to mere information. Scripture, Vanhoozer argues, is not an inert object to be studied; reading the Bible is not an “I-It” relation, but an “I-Thou” affair. Therefore the nurture mediated by this living word must be aimed at what Richard Lovelace termed “live orthodoxy”. Encountering this word should not make us mere “brains-on-a-stick” but should cause our dry bones to rattle with life like those in Ezekiel’s valley.

However, Lovelace was well aware that sound doctrine does not guarantee heart renewal. His classic work *Dynamics of Spiritual Life* includes a helpful survey of the dead religion which hastened the Great Awakenings. In his study of such historic revivals and genuine movements of the Spirit, Lovelace outlined a model for cyclical and continuous renewal, complete with a list of elements which must be present in any individual or community who desires to experience this kind of Spirit-infused nurture:

- **Preconditions of Renewal**
    1. Awareness of God’s Holiness
    2. Awareness of the depth of our sin
- **Primary elements of Renewal**
    1. Justification
    2. Sanctification
    3. Adoption
    4. Union
- **Secondary elements**
  1. Mission – *both word and deed*
  2. Prayer – *both individual and corporate*
  3. Community – *both micro and macro*
  4. Disenculturation – *being freed from the social imaginary*
  5. Theological integration – *having the mind of Christ*

Lovelace’s elements can be organized under the common categories recognized for holistic Christian nurture:

![lovelace graphic](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/04/ghost-upload-1776705595194-990851-lovelace_20graphic.png)

While Lovelace’s comprehensiveness is helpful, left on our own we will inevitably gravitate toward one end of the spectrum or the other––toward *orthodoxy* (right thinking) which by itself can foster dry intellectualism, or *orthopraxy* (right doing) which by itself can foster detached activism. If nurturing “live orthodoxy” is our aim, we need a Spirit-designed shape to help bring balance and integrate these two with *orthokardia* (right desiring).

Historically, these three have been bound together with a certain approach. Packer and Parrett observe that even a quick survey of the Reformation-era catechisms, as well as later Puritan publications, reveal a shared structure: they nearly all contain certain “ingredients”; namely, expositions on the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer. Similarly, in his *Enchiridion* Augustine notes three primary areas that the Christian must be formed in, following the biblical formula of *faith, hope,* and *love*. In addition to this threefold formula, Augustine taught those interested in the faith the *narratio––*the full sweep of biblical narrative.

We can see how this threefold formula, along with the biblical narrative, encapsulates the necessary elements of nurture and renewal, each being either the environment conducive for or the means to specific areas of nurture:

![lovelace graphic 2](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/04/ghost-upload-1776705596112-401365-lovelace_20graphic_202.png)

Many scoff at such an antiquated “program” of nurture via catechesis. After all, the Creed, Prayer, and Commandments can’t be purchased (a means Burton says we are encouraged to employ in order to obtain meaning, purpose, community, and ritual!). They aren’t marketable and nor do they appeal to our immediacy-trained imaginations. They will not give you the body you desire or grow your follower base. They are, however, ancient touchpoints that are becoming increasingly appealing to a transcendence-seeking culture.

Consider how these are able to provide answers for those seeking identity via Burton’s pillars:

| **Burtons’ pillars** | **Threefold Catechesis (** *\*plus biblical narrative* **)** |                                                                               |
| -------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------ | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Meaning              | Apostles’ Creed                                              | The overarching story that makes sense of our lives                           |
| Purpose              | Lord’s Prayer                                                | The hope our hearts can aim toward; the communion we were created for         |
| Community            | Ten Commandments                                             | The guide for how we are to live with and love others                         |
| Ritual               | Biblical narrative                                           | The primary, Spirit-inspired tool that marks our lives and reinforces meaning |

In this way, Scripture, the Creed, the Prayer, and the Commandments offer a robust starting line for pillar-shaped nurture in line with our nature as creatures of the word. So yes, consider having direct contact with these three resources. Recite the Creed alongside your local church, pray the Lord’s Prayer corporately and privately, study the Ten Commandments and seek to live them out in direct application of the grace of the gospel. Resources like Packer’s *Growing in Christ* are helpful.

But I am not advocating for a merely flat, curriculum-bound approach to these three. Rather, each should be viewed as an entire way of life.

The Creed should invite us into the renewed life of the mind with its vast peaks and valleys of doctrine as we seek to have the mind of Christ and obey the Lord’s invitation to “Know me” (Jer. 29:13)

The Lord’s Prayer should welcome us into a lived experience with our Heavenly Father—one marked by the real-life poetry of hearts conforming to His will. \*It’s worth noting at this point that the Lord’s Prayer was taught by the real person of Jesus Christ in the midst of real life to his very real and close friends. That relational context should factor heavily into our Christian experience.

The Commandments should continually broaden, challenge, and reshape our ethics of what it means to love God and neighbor in the specific time and spaces we inhabit with their unique needs.

Now, if this approach feels like a let down––like an underwhelming reach back to an outdated practice, that disappointment may be a symptom of our self-made era which only confirms our need for something *not our own*. Self-created means of self-nurture are much more innovative and exciting. However, the novelty quickly fades and we’re left just as empty and aimless as before. Nature determines nurture, and our nature as *imago dei* bearing creatures of the Word cannot be meaningfully nurtured and renewed by modern, self-curated means.

We see the futility of modern attempts at nurture when creatures of the word replace holistic, catechetical-shaped, word-centered nurture with the influence of wellness gurus, or the grit of self-mastery programs, or the technologies and techniques of Silicon Valley.

The Creed, the Prayer, and the Commandments are not spiritual techniques to implement or courses to be pounded out and checked off of a discipleship curriculum; they are entry points into the ongoing areas we need nurturing––Christian doctrine, Christian experience, and Christian ethics. Viewed as windows, we can come to each as a starting point, a means through which we see a vast and sacred theological, experiential, and ethical landscape––one inhabited by Jesus himself, and in which we learn to run freely as nurtured children of our God.
### In This House of Death: What Does Sanctity of Human Life Month Mean in 2026?
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/in-this-house-of-death-what-does-sanctity-of-human-life-month-mean-in-2026/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:34:42.000Z
A successful academic in her thirties is harboring a traumatic teenage past. Unexpectedly, she has the opportunity to spend the Christmas holiday alone in her old childhood home, now a vacation rental, in a small town in the middle of nowhere in Idaho. Sixteen years earlier, she had fled town without saying goodbye, shaking its dust off her feet, happy to be set free. But now she is eager to come to terms with her past—and perhaps re-examine her future. Such is the premise of Abigail Favale’s moving recent novel, [*Our Lady of the Sign*](https://ignatius.com/our-lady-of-the-sign-olosp/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). It almost sounds like something that could be a plot of a Hallmark Channel film, but it is anything but that—even if there is the requisite Hallmark-style tension in the air, as the protagonist must choose between her teenage love and her current boyfriend.

A Catholic academic and public intellectual, Favale has written beautifully over the past decade about gender and embodiment, including in her book [*The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory*](https://ignatius.com/the-genesis-of-gender-ggp/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). In all of her writing, Favale comes back to this theological truth: We are bodies and souls both, and this matters for how we treat ourselves and others as persons. In *Genesis of Gender*, Favale considered societal expectations of men and women and how some of the stereotypes have played destructively into the feeling of some that they have been born in the wrong body. But to be a woman is more than simply liking pink dresses, just as to be a man is more than liking physical exertion and climbing trees. Besides, there are plenty of women who like to do the latter as well, and it is not a sign of misgendering. Who we have been created to be as men and women is important and requires acknowledging the wisdom of our Creator. To mutilate the body in gender-altering surgery is to deny not only the integrity of the body but also of the soul.

And now in her novel, Favale approaches a related question: What does sanctity of human life mean in our present world, where abortion no longer means leaving your home, and pills can end the life of a child in utero at home, unseen by anyone other than God? As abortion in America today increasingly moves from the clinic into the home—from public space to private—it is time to confront this question more earnestly. In a world where the sanctity of the body is now regularly violated in myriad ways yet dubbed medicine—from gender reassignment surgery to physician assisted suicide to, of course, abortion—we have to remember that not all physicians see their task as that of saving lives. The numbers, in this case, speak volumes, and January is a good month to revisit them.

In 1984, President Reagan declared January a Sanctity of Human Life Month, also designating the third Sunday of the month as Sanctity of Human Life Sunday. That year, per [CDC data](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00001467.htm?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), there were 364 legal abortions in America per 1,000 live births. The fruit of *Roe*, passed just over a decade earlier, on January 22, 1973, was clear. True, these numbers aren’t as bad as, say, the Soviet Union, where the 1980s featured an [astounding 2.08 abortions](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-01-13-mn-27580-story.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) per every live birth. Still, the American numbers from the 1980s do not suggest a pro-family culture—quite the opposite. Many Americans born in the 1980s, in other words, have siblings in Heaven of whose existence they have never heard.

The work of the pro-life movement in the decades since then has targeted one main goal: to overturn *Roe*. That is at last what the Dobbs decision achieved in 2022\. Except, the result has not been what the pro-life movement had hoped for. The numbers since 2022 tell [a stark story](https://www.dailywire.com/news/despite-dobbs-more-babies-are-still-being-aborted-in-the-united-states?ref=mereorthodoxy.com): “The data produced by the Society for Family Planning [estimated](https://societyfp.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/WeCount-Report-10-June-2025-data.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that through June 2025, there were 98,630 babies aborted every month. That was an increase from the monthly rates of 2024 (95,250), 2023 (88,180), and 2022 (79,620). The group estimated that 27% of the abortions for the available 2025 data were through telehealth, meaning they were facilitated by abortion pills sent through the mail.”

The promise is simple and remarkably convenient: the pills are prescribed in a telehealth appointment—meaning, without ever encountering a medical practitioner in person, but just via a screen. No need to leave the house to go talk to a doctor. The doctor has no relationship with the patient, no knowledge of the patient except on the chart and for this brief fifteen-minute segment. The “medication” prescribed is then mailed to the expecting mother, to be taken in the comfort of her home, unseen and unknown by anyone. A few days of heavy bleeding and cramping follow, and then a promised return to normalcy. I can only dream that treatment for strep throat or ear infections could be this easy and convenient—too often, one can’t get a doctor’s appointment for days, and then there is the struggle of waiting to pick up the required medication at the overwhelmed pharmacy. But in the case of abortion-at-home, it’s like “Groundhog Day” in spirit—just rewind and repeat the day to achieve the desired outcome—in this case, one lacking a baby.

But abortion at home (or anywhere), Favale’s novel suggests, it’s not quite so simple, because (again), we are both body and soul. The violation of the pregnant body to kill the body of another within has consequences that are no less spiritual than physical. It is with these consequences that Favale’s protagonist, Simone, wrestles, as she acknowledges at last the devastating effects of her teenage abortion sixteen years earlier—an abortion administered by pills at home by her own mother, a doctor eager to see her daughter not “throw away” her life over an early pregnancy.

In Favale’s novel, the house where this happened has absorbed the secret. The silent witness has become, as a result, the house of death, haunted by the bloodshed it has witnessed and ready to demand more. Of course, any house today can become such a house of death, even if things do not literally start going bump in the night as a result of demonic possession. Yet there are undoubtedly spiritual repercussions to violence against our bodies and those of others, and things of the spirit are, by definition, often things unseen. But no less significant, the “Groundhog Day” approach to life, the premise of terminating pregnancy to rewind the clock back to a childless life, is a cruel lie. It is a lie that kills more than the baby in utero—but a lie that haunts for decades women who have accepted it as truth.

Indeed, as Favale’s novel shows, this is a lie that affects especially women, although as Simone reflects further on the significance of her teenage abortion, she realizes with a start that it was a tragedy that wasn’t hers alone—even if she held it in private. One of the tragedies of invisible abortions in the silence of one’s own house of death, in other words, is the disruption of relationships that inevitably ensues. The expecting mother who kills her unborn child in quiet is left suffering alone, but this suffering will affect her relationships with others—including the father of the child, who might not know. This is not what our relationships were made for, but if we treat them as if this is the best there can be, perhaps to accept [sex as immoral](https://fairerdisputations.org/is-sex-moral/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) would be a logical conclusion.

How do we respond, especially as the President who had courted the votes of the pro-life conservatives has now [so obviously abandoned any interest](https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/trump-pro-life-leaders-at-odds-in-recent-developments/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in protecting life as to receive [a stark letter](https://erlc.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/1.16.26-ERLC-Letter-to-President-Trump-1.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) this month from the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission? During this Sanctity of Human Life month, I want to affirm the truth of human personhood. Human life is priceless and precious. It is an argument most easily and logically made from the Judeo-Christian theological stance—that every human being, regardless of race, ability, gender, or any other characteristics, is precious because made in God’s image (Genesis 1:26-27). In Favale’s novel, sitting in church for the first time in a long time, Simone is startled as she hears the priest say, “What will this child be?”

The question stays with her, pricks her conscience, refuses to let go. But for those who are skeptical of religious arguments for the sanctity of human life, I would also recommend [*Embryo: A Defense of Human Life*](https://www.amazon.com/Embryo-Defense-Robert-P-George/dp/0385522827?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*,* an attempt by the political theorist Robert George and philosopher Christopher Tollefsen to present a defense of human life at all stages, birth to death, without resorting to religious arguments. To treat people as disposable is, in secular terms, not good for our society—not good for the wellbeing of any one person.

Second and no less important, Favale’s novel brings to the fore the importance of considering relationships when thinking about life—and not only romantic relationships, to be clear. A pregnant woman does not belong to herself, just as her baby does not belong only to her. Life begins in romantic relationship between a man and a woman, and supporting healthy marriages in our society benefits us all—from the womb to the grave.

But no family is an island. This is where the work of local pregnancy resource centers continues to be indispensable. Offering counseling and material support for women in crisis pregnancies, centers also provide parenting classes and mentors for them, holding firmly the truth that we all thrive in companionship with others, and true friendships are rooted and local. And, on a related note, this is where churches, often heavily invested in the work of local pregnancy resource centers or coming alongside them, also can do the beautiful work of life-giving relationship building. It is these relationships, at the end, that equip those who might have chosen the house of death to choose the joy of life.
### You can't clear cut political society.
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/you-cant-clear-cut-political-society/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:34:45.000Z
Evangelical protestants on the right have for ages wanted to cut down the forest of secularism that they believe blights the American landscape. Secularism gets in the way of Christian politics and breeds vice, or so the story goes. There’s some truth in that; secularism has its vices, and Donald Trump, the most secular Republican president since Lincoln—and perhaps the most secular ever—has shown little interest in supporting traditional evangelical-supported restrictions on abortion, gambling, marijuana, abortifacient contraception, and a host of other reforms historically coded as “Christian right.”

Trump’s brand of transactional politics and his political presence unquestionably feeds the newfound interest—especially among low-church evangelicals—in political theology. But this new founded interest in the topic has not come with other needed political virtues, such as patience or the wisdom to judge what is possible or sustainable in a given moment.

Sustainability isn’t something evangelicals do well. A movement based on—if David Bebbington is to be believed—conversionism, activism, a specific soteriology, and biblicist hermeneutics is not really prepared to create institutions, much less sustainable ones. Even the more highbrow evangelical or evangelical-adjacent communions—the ACNA, the PCA, and OPC—are ecclesiastically and intellectually led almost entirely by converts. Multi-generational anything is rare in 2025; multi-generational churchmanship outside of Catholic, Eastern, or Lutheran churches is nigh unheard of. Evangelicals, it seems, can’t sustain anything. How then could they be expected to sustain Christian politics? Why this matters especially today is evangelicals are interested in destroying the forest of secularism, they have reason to think that they can, and yet they still have not learned how to build for generations or to make decisions today in view of what is prudentially possible and sustainable long-term.

Kentucky agrarian writer Wendell Berry made sustainability a calling card of his own approach to a distinctively Christian moral economy, and his passion for a sustainable ecology, economy, and social structure is a useful mirror for Christian political theology. In a speech given in 1994, Berry explained how the conservation of forest communities reflected America’s own profound callousness towards forests. If American secularism is like a forest, then Berry’s own remarks on the role of forests within an ecosystem can offer us a great deal of wisdom and guidance.

Certainly, forests present occasional obstacles to farming, and they need to be managed. A healthy farm could not be maintained in an overgrown and untamed wilderness. But neither, Berry warned, was it ever wise to clear-cut a forest. Farmers, especially poor farmers, often turned to clear-cutting the forests surrounding their farms for a one-time payday. That payday, significant as it might be, actually robbed the farmers of a sustainable income that might have been theirs by more careful management of the forest community. “More than likely,” Berry lamented, “only the prime log of each tree is taken,” which meant that other usable branches and potential board feet of tree and smaller logs for firewood were all left on the ground to rot. “The tree thus carelessly harvested will most likely leave the local community and the state as sawlogs, or, at best, rough lumber. The only local benefit may well be the single check paid by the timber company to the landowner.”

That alone is a lesson for what can happen when forests are carelessly culled. But it actually got worse for the farmers Berry had in mind when he gave his address. Not only was a great deal of usable lumber wasted, but even the price paid for the lumber that was harvested turned out to be less than expected. Why? Because it was not just one farmer clearcutting his forest. Rather, the “prevailing assumptions and economic conditions encourage(d) or require(d) them to sell all their marketable trees at the same time.” In other words, prevailing cultural and economic pressures encouraged all the farmers in the area to sell their forests, which created an oversupply of timber and drove the price down for everyone. So even the *actual* benefit they got from clearing the forest didn’t bring much benefit at all. The farmers were left with little to show for the decimation of their forests.

Over the past decade, evangelical protestants have undoubtedly done their best to cull the forest of secularism in America’s public life. They’ve done this with no small amount of encouragement from others. Many thinkers outside of evangelicalism have recognized a similar need for such pruning and even pruning by Christians. Tom Holland, Ross Douthat, Glen Scrivener, and Paul Kingsnorth have all made some version of this argument as have, arguably, Rod Dreher, Rusty Reno, and Archbishop Charles Chaput. One could even argue that the endorsement of “cultural Christianity” by figures as disparate as Elon Musk and Richard Dawkins is a tacit acknowledgement of this point. There is nothing wrong with Christians pruning secular society. Yet pruning requires skill to be done well, it requires knowledge of trees and biological ecosystems. Done badly, culling a forest can actually make a forest worse off, rather than healthier.

Not only that, but if we shift the analogy slightly and think of the evangelicals as the farmers in this analogy, then there is a pressing question of what evangelicals have gotten for their efforts, and who they have sold their socio-cultural cut lumber to, and for what price? At present, the chief buyer for the wares of Christian labor have been the electoral machinations of the Republican Party, and particularly Donald Trump. Trump’s price—near-absolute loyalty and a refusal to prioritize historic evangelical regulation of vice—has been steep.

It is unclear what evangelicals have gotten in return. The magnificence of the *Dobbs* decision has been marred by the Trump administration’s insistence on increased federal access to abortion drugs [like the abortion pill mifepristone](https://apnews.com/article/abortion-medication-mifepristone-e5a89a12e98fc4c529d487daba81606a?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Additionally, in December of 2025 the Trump administration [ordered the rescheduling of marijuana](https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/18/trump-pot-reclassification-cannabis-stocks-medicare-cbd.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), in what [the BBC called](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8z684r6vlo?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) “the most significant shift in US drug policy in decades.” That shift, it should be noted, is entirely away from the position taken historically by Evangelicals. Trump’s commitment to traditional sexuality—tenuous at best—has likewise been shown to be negotiable.

One of the reasons given for evangelical support for Trump is that there is a new crop of young right wing men that need to be witnessed to. That’s true, in that there is a specific demographic of right wing men who are not traditionally churched. It is not true, however, that Trump has in any way helped the church reach these men or that the church’s endorsement of Trumpism has better equipped them for that task.

One response—and it’s a fair one—would be that Trump isn’t doing church; he’s doing politics. That response only works, however, if churchmen doing political theology are careful to distinguish conservative politics from Trump’s politics. Those pastor-scholars are out there, but they are few and far between. The fact of the matter is that most evangelical protestants, especially outside of Reformed and Angelical traditions—doing political theology have made little to no effort to distinguish themselves from Trumpism. That these figures—First Baptist Dallas pastor Robert Jeffries, and others—do a ham-fisted populist version of political theology does not make them any less effective in influencing their flocks.

For nearly a half-century, evangelical protestants maintained the forest of their influence assiduously. They sold their influence sparingly—if suspiciously—while also dealing with buyers—Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, John McCain, Mitt Romney—who to their credit were charitable enough to buy at fair prices. Forests need to be pruned; sellers need to find buyers.

But in the past decade, evangelicals have seemingly sold the whole forest to Donald Trump, in a way that has left the land sicker and at a price that seems to have been better for the 47th president than for evangelicals. There is no guarantee that Trumpist politics will endure. When they fade, what will be left for evangelicals? In all likelihood, they face a future much like the farmers Berry wrote of, who had fewer goods to sell and had to do so in markets where they had no power to speak of.
### On Communicating Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/on-communicating-truth-goodness-and-beauty/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:34:48.000Z
*This is a lightly edited manuscript of a talk I gave in Washington DC earlier this month*.

In the past I sometimes taught a high school writing and literature class for a homeschool coop back in Lincoln. In the first week of class, I gave my students an assignment I lifted from Robert Farrar Capon’s book *The Supper of the Lamb*, which is a kind of basic theology of creation dressed up like a cook book. Capon’s book is written as a guide that ostensibly will help you grow as a home chef by over time learning a complex and elaborate recipe in which you prep a whole lamb that will feed eight people four times. In reality he is teaching you a love of the world God has made through a series of short culinary meditations.

The book begins with an exercise in which he demands that his readers spend one hour slicing an onion: He provides instructions for how this should be done and more commentary than you would imagine possible on the intricacies of a single onion.

So in the opening week of my class, I assigned my students the task of spending one hour slicing a single onion and then writing a few paragraphs for me about the experience. To this day I am somewhat amazed that I never got a single confused or angry email from a parent, but I never did.

Why would I do such a thing? Partially, I suppose for mischievous reasons to see what a group of teenage homeschool kids would do in response to being made to do such a task. But there were better reasons also closely related to Capon’s own purposes in the book: Learning to cook in the way Capon imagines it, including learning to prep that absurd lamb recipe, requires more of a person. It actually requires something deeper and more challenging of you–you need to not simply memorize a recipe or gather ingredients or chop them up and heat them up. You actually need to understand a bit about cooking–techniques, the interplay of ingredients, and what happens to *x* if you do *y*. It requires the combination of close attentiveness to particulars *and* a sufficiently broad and deep knowledge that you can feel your way through a complex task.

What it requires, in other words, is less an ability to do a single mechanical task or a series of mechanical tasks, and more a capacity to understand ingredients, understand techniques, understand the interplay between them, and out of that complex knowledge assemble something beautiful.

So I want to start my time today by making a distinction now between those two things: abilities and capacities. When I speak of an ability, I mean the sort of thing that one can do with minimal thought or engagement, the sort of thing that can be explained via a short bulleted list.

To remain in the kitchen, quickly dicing a carrot is an ability. Browning some ground beef is an ability.

To expand to other categories, when I ask my ten year old son to put his laundry away, that is an ability.

It is not that these things require *nothing* of us: If I am going to dice a carrot I need to know wear the carrots are, where the knife is, how to cut with the knife, etc. If my son is going to put his laundry away, he needs to know where the laundry is and where it is supposed to be.

So one does need some rudimentary skill when dealing with abilities. But they do not ask much of us.

Capacities, by contrast, are something that cannot be simply distilled to a bulleted list in the same way. If I asked you to prepare a meal for eight people using the food on hand in the cupboards and refrigerator, you can’t simply look at a list of seven steps and complete the task. You need to acquire a certain sort of copiousness about yourself which allows you to be given what many would see as a daunting task and discern how it can be done.

To again consider my children, if I asked my son to “help your mom around the house while I am away” or I asked him to go talk to his sister before going to bed to patch things up after a fight they’d had earlier in the day, those are not simple “abilities.” One can try to render them as such, of course, but we all recognize the insincere offer of help, the forced apology, and we regard them as something diminished or lesser. To do these things is not an ability, but a capacity, for they can only be done when we acquire certain generalized characteristics, even in very minimal or basic ways, that allow us to do these things.

When we talk about communicating persuasively with other people or expressing an idea in a beautiful way or helping someone perceive the good in a more profound way, we are working in the domain of capacities, not abilities.

I am starting here because I think there is a danger we can fall into very easily in talking about how to communicate truth, goodness, or beauty with neighbors who have different ideas of the good life than we ourselves do. We live in a fairly superficial, distracted cultural moment. You do not need to sit in solitude with your thoughts anymore–a myriad of distractions are always readily at hand. And this reality creates a certain superficiality that defines much of our world now. We have become people who lack a certain depth of character, depth of spirit, depth of soul. And yet developing capacity is in many ways another way of saying acquiring depth.

Because of this, it has become easy for us to largely forget the whole notion of capacity and instead think that everything we do in life can be reduced to abilities, provided we consult with the right person–or LLM. Thus the rise of AI therapists, to take but one example.

So when we talk about doing the things we are thinking about right now given all of that cultural background, it is very easy to get lost or frustrated because when we try to reduce the capacities required to do such things down to mere ability we find that it doesn’t work, that these things cannot be reduced to mechanical steps or bullet points, anymore than the sublime beauty of a certain moment we might encounter in life can be distilled down to a photograph or a series of numbered steps.

In other words, the problem before us is not one of technical mastery. And that is hard for us, I think. We are tempted, perhaps especially in a place like DC, to evaluate ourselves as persons in terms of our place within our economic system. So we are primarily producers and our value is bound up in our ability to master technical skills enabling us to solve discrete problems which lead to greater production, efficiency, wealth, and so on.

That isn’t the issue though. We are called as Christians toward a certain mode of life I can’t give you a step by step guide to do the things we are talking about today. What I can try to do is tell you about the kind of person who is able to do these things and commend to all of us–myself very much included because I also struggle for depth–the characteristics and ways of living that allow a person to acquire such capaciousness. So that is the frame I want to work within as we have this conversation. With what remains of the time, I want to do two more things:

First, I want to think for a bit about the characteristic excellencies that help someone mature and deepen in their encounter with the Christian faith and their ability to communicate it. There are three characteristics, or you might even call them virtues, that I want to commend to you:

## Attentiveness

Some years ago a friend of mine, then a PhD student in New Testament at a program in the UK, shared a story with me of an encounter he had at a theological conference. He was at his hotel in the downstairs area getting breakfast when an older woman sat down at the table next to him. She was attempting to get her breakfast, but her elderly hands were struggling to open the packet of oatmeal. My friend offered to help. So he opened the oatmeal packet, gave it back to her, and they began to talk. The woman was deeply interested in his work–asking him questions about his dissertation, the scholars he was reading, and so on. The woman was clearly quite knowledgeable in the field and asked perceptive, probing questions that forced my friend to think more carefully about the project.

But what most impressed my friend was not actually the caliber of her questions, as great as that was. What he noticed first of all was that at no point in the conversation did this woman appear to grow distracted, bored, or as if she was searching for a way to exit the discussion. If you attend enough professional or academic conferences, you soon begin to recognize a certain sort of interaction you will have several times at each event: You’re speaking to a person, but they aren’t really looking at you or even listening, actually. Rather, they are distracted. Perhaps they seem anxious. Tellingly, they will glance over your shoulder every so often, as if scanning the room for more worthy or advantageous conversation partners.

This woman my friend was sitting with did none of that. She was fully absorbed in the conversation, even as it was plainly of no real advantage to her. After breakfast the two went their separate ways and it was only then that someone went up to my friend and asked him what he had been talking to Katherine Sonderegger about for so long. And that is how my friend realized he had been in conversation for the past hour with one of the greatest dogmatic theologians of her generation.

I share the story to illustrate a point: Attentiveness is a kind of resource we have and our dispensing of that resource is indicative of the health of our heart. When we spread our attention thinly, we become superficial. When we direct our attention only to what can materially benefit us, we become selfish and egotistical. But there is another option: We direct our attention to that which is worthy of it–and there is much in the world that answers that description. Sunsets and birds and trees and even the sound of the wind can all be worthy of our attention. So too is your neighbor. And the reason your neighbor is worthy of your attention is not because of what they might offer you, but simply because they *are*. They share in the gift of being itself which God gifts to us as his sons and daughters. And so they are interesting and worth attending to–and this applies as much to the homeless person you pass on the street without a thought as it does to your boss at work or the wealthy and successful businessman at your church.

## Patience

Attentiveness can be sustained only by patience–one way of defining the act of patience is to say that it involves hopefully enduring some form of suffering which we judge to be less than the good we hope to obtain if we will wait and endure until it is obtained. Minimally, then, patience is what allows us to continue to be attentive.

But Augustine also argues that patience has a restorative quality to it. In his treatise on patience—and isn’t it telling that so many early church fathers wrote entire treatises on the virtue of patience?—Augustine says,

> For this is just, that we who from our first felicity of Paradise for contumacious appetence of things to enjoy were dismissed, through humble patience of things that annoy may be received back: driven away for doing evil, brought back by suffering evil: there against righteousness doing ill, here for righteousness' sake patient of ills.

So patience transforms us. For our purposes here, your ability to discern and communicate what is good, true, and beautiful will be enriched and deepened through the practice of patience. So it is not just that patience allows you to keep attending to the good things you are already watching. It is also that the practice of patience will open your eyes to new good things to which you can then attend. The slave trader turned abolitionist preacher and hymn writer John Newton once wrote, “When I hear a knock at my study door, I hear a message from God. It may be a lesson of instruction; perhaps a lesson of patience: but, since it is his message, it must be interesting.”

## Hope

Finally: We do not know how God will work or what he will do through us. But we know that God *is* at work and that he routinely is pleased to use *us* as means for accomplishing his ends. So when we are attending to his word and his world and when we are learning to love both and when we are attacked by things which we must patiently endure as we seek to attend to the world, we do this with a spirit of hope because we know that God is full of love and compassion, that he desires that no one would perish, that he hates injustice, and that he sometimes will use us to further his purposes in the world. We do not know when that will be or how he might do it, of course, but we trust that he will because we hope in his promises.

Second, I hope to offer three specific bits of counsel that are hopefully at least somewhat more immediately actionable for us as we go about our work.

## Shun perfectionism.

People are finite, fallible, and sinful. That includes your peers you are working with and trying to communicate with *and* it includes you and me. What this means is that our attempts to convey and apply what is true are hindered both by our own limitations and shortcomings and by the same from our neighbors. There are two particular applications here for this point that need to be made:

- First, that people are broader and stranger than you think and are capable of surprising you–when we treat people as vehicles for ideological projects we miss this point.
- Second, that you are not going to ever arrive at pristine coalitions or bills, and that even triumphs will have elements of failure within them. These are simply the conditions of our life in the world–and, by the way, apply to all vocations, not just the work of government. You can confront this reality and respond to it in anger because it disappoints you, frustrates you, or challenges you. Or you can confront this reality and let it make you more merciful, humble, and forbearing.

## Live on the razor’s edge.

I am taking this from Tim Keller who offered this exact council to his parishioners in the Redeemer family of churches in New York. The point is that seeking to live in this way in a mixed society of belief and unbelief inherently requires accepting a certain measure of ambiguity and complexity, as well as the genuine chance of failure.

The difficulty here is that if you do want to practice patient attentiveness and reckon with politics as they actually work, then these are the table stakes. There is no possibility of perfection, nor any chance of the immediate and complete realization of perfect justice. All we are left with is the complexity and tension of life in the world as it is. If you would be faithful in such a world, then you will necessarily live on the edge, because there is simply no other way of life that avoids these intractable difficulties. Far better to accept this and entrust yourself to God’s kindly care while availing yourself of his means of grace then to do anything else.

## Identify points of contact.

Finally, identify the points of overlap or common concern with colleagues, neighbors, peers, etc. Recall the story of Paul in Athens. Who are the unknown gods that your peers worship in ignorance? Recall also that, as Augustine taught us, evil is nothing; it lacks substance. For that reason, a person virtually never *desires* evil itself. Rather, they err by confusing something that is evil *for* the good *or* they err by failing to value something appropriately.

This reality creates a variety of opportunities for Christians. In the domain of politics, where many of you work, it means there are many places where you might find common cause on a given issue with a surprising partner or ally. In the domain of relationships and church life, it means that there are ample entry points for talking about Christ and the Gospel, if only we would have our eyes open to them, and it means that no stranger is so far removed from you that they must remain permanently at a distance. For those who attend to the words of Christ and devote themselves to his way of life, another life is possible. Thank you.
### Suffering as Spiritual Formation
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/suffering-as-spiritual-formation/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:34:53.000Z
## **I: The Formative Nature of Suffering**

When we speak about spiritual formation, we usually focus on intentional practices: Scripture, prayer, sacrament, community, obedience. What is striking, however, is that one of the most powerful forces of formation in the Christian life is not an intentional discipline at all—and yet it is unavoidable. I am speaking of suffering.

Suffering is one of the most transformative realities in human existence, and yet it is often marginal in the literature on spiritual formation. Perhaps that is because it cannot be scheduled, controlled, or optimized. It resists technique. It comes to us unbidden. And yet, again and again, Scripture and Christian experience testify that suffering is among the primary means by which God deepens, clarifies, and reforms his people.

I have sometimes quipped—speaking informally—that suffering is “sacramental.” I do not mean that in a technical sense. I mean that suffering is a tangible, material, experiential reality through which spiritual truth is disclosed. It mediates insight. It unveils reality. In that sense, suffering functions as a kind of apocalypse—not catastrophe, but *unveiling*. It reveals what is true: about God, about us, and about what ultimately matters.

## **The Ubiquity of Suffering**

We must begin with a simple, unromantic observation: suffering is universal. After Adam’s fall and prior to the triumphal return of the Second Adam, suffering is inescapable. That is why the problem of suffering—the question of theodicy—reappears in every generation. Not merely because it is philosophically interesting, but because it is existentially unavoidable. Every person either knows suffering already or will.

This is one reason the book of Job is so important. Some scholars have suggested that Job may be among the earliest written books of Scripture—though this cannot be proven. What we can say is that Job stands strangely outside Israel’s normal historical markers. It is set in a kind of cosmic frame, involving heavenly councils and satanic testing, in a way that is almost unique in the canon.

Now consider the significance of this. What if one of the first acts of written revelation God gave to his people was a book about incomprehensible, inexplicable suffering? If so, the lesson is sobering and clarifying: suffering is inevitable, and God is good—but these two truths do not resolve into a neat system. Indeed, God explicitly condemns Job’s friends at the end of the book for attempting precisely that.

As Karl Barth observes in *Church Dogmatics* IV/3 (§70.1–2), the book of Job demonstrates that suffering cannot be fitted into a coherent explanatory scheme without distorting God himself. Barth describes the friends’ counsel as falsehood in its “classical and sublimest form”—the falsehood of piety. Their theological propositions are, in themselves, largely correct. Yet they speak these truths timelessly and clichédly, abstracted from the concrete encounter between God and the suffering man before them. As a result, their speech becomes “a counterfeit which only resembles the truth.”

The God of the friends, Barth insists, is not an active and living God but one confined within a moral system—orderly, predictable, and ultimately unfree. “But this unfree God is not the God of Job.” Consequently, Job cannot recognize himself in what they say, nor can their theology account for the man actually confronted by God in suffering. Speaking “from the standpoint of heaven,” non-historically and within a closed explanatory framework, they turn truth itself into untruth. Their "stereotyped speeches" fail because they do not deal well with the encounter between God and man in suffering.

Yet suffering is not meaningless. In Job, God “wins” his wager with Satan—Job remains faithful. But Job also learns. He learns that God is sovereign even over suffering, that divine wisdom far exceeds human comprehension, and that God is worthy of trust even when his ways appear unjust. Most strikingly, Job’s suffering leads to deeper encounter: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you” (Job 42:5).

This pattern recurs throughout the history of God’s people. Those who suffer in faith often testify, in retrospect, that they would not change their suffering—not because it was pleasant, but because of what God did through it. Many speak of a nearness to God during trials that they have never otherwise known.

This is not universally true. Suffering does not automatically sanctify. As Augustine insists in *The City of God*, what matters most is not the nature of the suffering but the nature of the sufferer—what use the suffering is put to (*City of God*,I.8). Suffering reveals character. It exposes what we love. It can school us for eternity (I.29), loosening our grip on temporal goods and reordering our desires.

### **Suffering in Scripture: Christ as the Pattern**

If we want to understand suffering as formative, we must begin with Christ. Hebrews 5:8 makes the startling claim that Jesus, “though he was a Son, learned obedience through what he suffered.” This is mysterious. It does not imply moral deficiency in Christ, but it does indicate suffering’s pedagogical function.

If this is true of the Son, we should not expect another path for those who are united to him. Formation, after all, is conformity to Christ. And Hebrews makes this explicit in chapter 12, where suffering is framed as the loving discipline of a Father who treats us as sons. This discipline is “for our good, that we may share his holiness.” Formation is discipleship, and discipleship includes not only practicing the disciplines but being disciplined by God.

Paul develops this theme with remarkable clarity. In Philippians 3, he recounts the losses he has endured and declares them worth it for the surpassing value of knowing Christ. He goes further: he expresses a desire to “share in Christ’s sufferings” in order to become like him. Suffering is not incidental to Christlikeness; it is one of its primary means.

The same logic appears in Romans 8\. We are heirs with Christ, Paul says, “provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.” There is a real connection here. Earlier, in Romans 5, Paul describes suffering as a process that produces endurance, character, and hope—hope grounded not in stoicism but in the love of God poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

Peter echoes this in 1 Peter, a letter written almost entirely under the sign of suffering. The whole letter is effectively about embracing suffering as Christians, following in the footsteps of our savior, knowing that our pattern will be his—suffering unto glory; humiliation unto vindication. Here in the opening lines Peter brings up the various “trials” which grieve us. These, he indicates, are also a form of testing—they reveal the genuineness of our faith. But this test doesn’t just reveal, it refines—resulting in praise and glory at Christ’s appearing. Suffering, biblically understood, is not merely diagnostic; it is transformative.

### **Suffering as Clarification and Deepening**

One of the most evident effects of suffering is its capacity to deepen a person. Those who have suffered often carry a particular gravity: their counsel bears greater weight, their compassion has greater density, and their words are fewer, but truer. By contrast, those largely untouched by suffering tend to offer counsel that may be technically correct yet existentially thin.

Why is this so? Because suffering clarifies.

Consider [post-apocalyptic stories](https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802872715/how-to-survive-the-apocalypse/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). There are many compelling examples—*A Quiet Place*, *Children of Men*, *Station Eleven*, *The Last of Us*. My favorite is *The Road*. To read or watch it as a father is devastating. In McCarthy’s world, civilization has collapsed. The landscape is dark and dangerous, stripped of comfort and distraction. And yet, precisely because everything extraneous has been removed, what is essential comes into sharp focus. For the unnamed protagonist—simply “the man”—every concern is subordinated to a single priority: the preservation and care of his son.

This is one of the enduring strengths of the genre. Post-apocalyptic narratives force a ruthless concentration on what matters most. They depict worlds denuded of distraction, where the fundamental questions of love, responsibility, and hope can no longer be deferred. I would argue that suffering performs a similar function in our lives. It quiets the noise. It brings ultimate concerns to the foreground. What matters now can no longer be postponed.

Scripture speaks of glory (*kābôd*) in terms of weight. Suffering teaches us what is weighty. It exposes first- and second-commandment failures. It reveals whether we have elevated something in creation above God, or whether we have fashioned a god according to our expectations—one who exists to secure our desired outcomes. In suffering, we discover whether we trusted God himself, or merely a version of God who guaranteed certain goods.

We are thus compelled to come to terms with the holy God who tolerates no rivals, and who yet most fully reveals himself in the suffering of the cross (John 12). Any vision of God that cannot endure the pressure of suffering is an idol—and idols must be broken.

The secular worldview insists that this world is all there is. Suffering confronts that claim with urgency. It presses eternity upon us. The [Puritans](https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/build-not-your-nest-here?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) understood this well. They saw suffering as a purifying reminder that we are strangers and pilgrims, loosening our attachment to this-worldly things and sharpening our desire for heaven.

Paul says it plainly: “The sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed” (Rom. 8:18). Suffering, when endured in faith, teaches us to build our nest not here but in Christ, to desire the better country, the city whose builder and maker is God—where suffering will finally be no more.

## **II: Suffering in Ministry**

If suffering is formative for the Christian life in general, it is even more so for those called to represent Christ publicly. Ministry, by its very nature, places us at the intersection of Christ and a fallen world. And that intersection is marked by suffering.

Scripture is remarkably clear on this point: those who identify with Christ should not be surprised when they suffer. In fact, we should expect it.

Jesus makes this explicit at the very beginning of the Sermon on the Mount—a text foundational for spiritual formation. In the Beatitudes, Jesus does not say *if* you are reviled and persecuted for my sake, but *when* (Matt. 5:11). Opposition is assumed. And yet, he says, we are to rejoice—not because suffering is good in itself, but because it locates us within a larger eschatological horizon: “your reward is great in heaven.”

Jesus reinforces this expectation in the Upper Room Discourse. As he prepares his disciples for life without his physical presence, he prepares them for hostility. “If the world hates you,” he says, “know that it has hated me before it hated you.” And then the clarifying principle: “A servant is not greater than his master.” Identification with Christ necessarily entails participation in his rejection.

### **1 Peter: Suffering as Witness and Vocation**

Nowhere is this theology worked out more pastorally than in 1 Peter—a letter addressed to believers who are suffering precisely because they are Christians. Peter frames suffering not as an interruption of discipleship but as one of its primary modes.

In chapter 2, Peter describes enduring unjust suffering as a “gracious thing” in God’s sight. Why? Because it allows believers to walk in the footsteps of Christ himself. Christ “also suffered for you, leaving you an example,” entrusting himself to the one who judges justly (1 Pet. 2:19–23). Suffering, here, is not only endured; it is *imitative*. It conforms us to Christ’s pattern of trust and non-retaliation.

Peter presses this further in chapter 3\. Christians are not to return evil for evil, but to bless those who oppose them. They are not to fear those who attack them for bearing witness to Christ. Instead, they are to honor Christ as Lord in their hearts—and, *in that very context*, to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within them (3:14–15).

This is worth underscoring. The most famous apologetics proof-text in the New Testament is not about abstract argumentation. It is about embodied witness under pressure. Christian apologetics, at its core, is not merely intellectual; it is cruciform. Enduring unjust suffering with integrity puts accusers to shame—not primarily by outwitting them, but by exposing the moral and spiritual depth of Christian hope (3:16).

Peter then draws the conclusion explicitly: “Do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you.” Again, surprise is inappropriate. Suffering is expected. And yet Peter says more: “Rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed” (4:12–13). Such believers are called “blessed,” because “the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon them” (4:14).

This entire argument leads directly into Peter’s exhortation to elders in chapter 5\. Shepherds, too, must expect suffering. They must entrust themselves to God, resist the devil who seeks to devour them, and remember that this pattern of suffering is shared by the whole family of God across time and place. Ministry does not exempt one from suffering; it intensifies it.

### **Suffering as Public Testimony**

Why does Scripture place such weight on suffering in ministry? Because trusting God in suffering glorifies him before others. It displays the worth of God. The supernatural joy and comfort and peace which can withstand the worst the world can unleash.

We see this vividly in the life of Stephen. Saul—who would become Paul—was present at Stephen’s trial and execution (Acts 8:1). Luke tells us that as Stephen was violently opposed, his face appeared “like the face of an angel” (6:15). As his accusers raged, Stephen, “full of the Holy Spirit,” gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God (7:55).

Stephen bears witness not only by what he says, but by how he suffers. And as he is stoned, he prays for his executioners, echoing the prayer of Christ himself (7:60; cf. Luke 23:34). This Christlike suffering does not halt the mission of the church—it accelerates it. Those scattered by persecution go out preaching the word (Acts 8:4). Even Saul himself is eventually confronted by the risen Christ and converted (Acts 9).

Paul never forgets this. He understands his own suffering as part of the same pattern. Christ tells him from the outset that he will suffer for the sake of the name (Acts 9:16). And Paul repeatedly interprets his afflictions not as failures of ministry but as instruments of its advance. His imprisonment, he tells the Philippians, has served to advance the gospel by emboldening others to speak the word without fear (Phil. 1:12–14).

This leads Paul to make one of the most counterintuitive claims in the New Testament: suffering for Christ is a *gift*. “It has been granted to you,” he writes, “that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake” (Phil. 1:29). This, Paul says, is part of living a life “worthy of the gospel of Christ” (Phil. 1:27).

Ministry, then, is not conducted exclusively in favorable conditions. Faithful witness endures pressure. Suffering is not alien to that witness; it can be an occasion for some of the most profound witness. When ministers endure suffering with faith, hope, and love, they make visible the reality of the gospel they proclaim. And it is precisely this cruciform faithfulness that God so often uses to advance his kingdom.

## **III: Suffering *for* Ministry**

Up to this point, we have considered suffering as something disciples should expect and endure as they represent Christ in a fallen world. But Scripture presses the question further. Suffering is not only something that *happens* to those who follow and represent Christ; it is something God intentionally *uses*—and at times even *appoints*—for the sake of our peculiar ministries.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the life and theology of the Apostle Paul. Paul speaks frequently of his sufferings (2 Cor. 4; 6; 11; 2 Tim. 3:10-12; etc.), but he does more than recount them. He interprets them theologically. He understands his afflictions not merely as obstacles to ministry, nor simply as the unavoidable cost of faithfulness, but as instruments through which God shaped him into the kind of minister he was called to be.

We have already noted one effect of Paul’s suffering: it emboldened others. His endurance under persecution strengthened fellow believers and advanced the gospel. But Paul also testifies that God worked directly through his afflictions to preserve the integrity of his ministry and his own spiritual health.

This comes into focus in 2 Corinthians 12, in the well-known passage concerning the “thorn in the flesh.” Paul, by his own admission, was richly gifted: an unparalleled missionary, a theological mind of exceptional depth, and a recipient of extraordinary revelations. God had entrusted much to him. And God also acted to guard him as one so gifted.

We are not told what the thorn was. What we are told is that Paul desired its removal. He prayed earnestly that God would take it away (12:8). God did not grant that request. Paul comes to understand this not as neglect or severity, but as divine wisdom: the thorn was given to keep him from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations he had received (12:7).

God’s response reframes Paul’s understanding of ministry: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (12:9). The issue was not weakness itself, but how strength can obscure dependence upon God. Through this experience, Paul learns to boast—not in his gifts or successes—but in his weaknesses, “so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”

As a result, Paul adopts a distinctive ministerial posture. He embraces “weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities” so that Christ can be exalted in his ministry, in his own mind (12:10). “When I am weak,” Paul says, “then I am strong” (12:10). Through these, Christ’s power is displayed.

There is a clear pastoral lesson here for those preparing for ministry. God’s withholding of visible success or immediate fruit is not necessarily a failure of calling. It may be a form of protection and preparation. Weakness in ministry is not something to flee, nor are delays or setbacks reasons for despair. Nor should we measure our faithfulness by comparison with others. We do not yet see the whole of what God is doing—either in us or through us.

One of the wisest prayers a future minister can offer is this: *Lord, do not let my platform outpace my character*. A large platform received too quickly often proves spiritually dangerous. The public failures of gifted leaders who rose rapidly should caution us against equating visibility with readiness or faithfulness.

But Paul’s theology of suffering for ministry does not end with restraint. Suffering also prepares us. Prior affliction equips ministers to serve others with depth, patience, and genuine consolation. To see this, we must turn earlier in 2 Corinthians, to one of Paul’s most concentrated reflections on ministry—chapters 1 through 5—where suffering becomes not merely a personal burden, but a means through which God brings comfort, reconciliation, and life to others.

### **Suffering as Preparation for Service**

In the opening chapters of 2 Corinthians, Paul offers one of the richest expositions of faithful ministry in the New Testament. Ministry, he insists, is conducted in sincerity, not as peddlers of God’s word, but as those who speak in Christ and rely entirely upon God’s action (2:17). Ministers do not commend themselves; they depend on the Spirit who alone gives life (ch. 3). For this reason, faithful ministers renounce manipulation, refuse to tamper with the word of God, and reject every form of cunning. They proclaim Christ, not themselves (4:1–5).

Confidence in ministry, for Paul, does not arise from personal strength or visible success, but from trust that God works through ordinary means—the preached word (4:6, 13)—and through extraordinary weakness. We are, as Paul famously puts it, “jars of clay,” fragile vessels through whom God displays his surpassing power (4:7ff). Ministry is therefore conducted with an eschatological horizon in view: ministers fix their eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen; not on what is temporary, but on what is eternal (4:18; 5:1ff). All of this is ordered toward one end: that God may be glorified as people are reconciled to him.

What is especially striking, however, is how Paul *begins* this entire discussion of ministry. Before he speaks of integrity, proclamation, or reconciliation, he speaks of suffering and comfort. God, Paul says, comforts us in all our afflictions *so that* we may be able to comfort others with the very comfort we ourselves have received from him (1:4). This comfort is inseparable from participation in Christ’s sufferings (1:5). Paul goes so far as to say that his afflictions are “for your comfort and salvation,” and that even his consolation serves the same end (1:6).

In other words, Paul understands his suffering not merely as a personal trial, nor simply as the cost of apostleship, but as preparation for ministry to others. As God meets him in affliction, Paul is formed into an instrument through whom God can meet others. The grace he receives becomes the grace he mediates.

This is one of the profound reversals of the gospel. God so thoroughly overturns the curse that suffering intended for harm becomes a source of healing. The very places where the servant of Christ has been wounded become the places from which ministry most powerfully flows—if we allow Christ to meet us there. Those who have been comforted by God in their affliction become, in turn, agents of comfort, offering others the same medicine by which they themselves were healed.

Paul concludes this dense section with an eschatological frame that gathers everything together. Though we are wasting away outwardly through what he calls “momentary affliction,” we are being renewed inwardly, even now, in preparation for “an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (4:16–17). Suffering, then, is not the end of the story. For those in Christ, it is often the place where God is doing his deepest preparatory work—shaping ministers who are fitted not only to proclaim the gospel, but to embody it.

Your suffering is not the end. In the providence of God, it may well be a beginning.
### When We Become the Product: Heidegger, Han, and Digital Enframing
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/when-we-become-the-product-heidegger-han-and-digital-enframing/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:34:58.000Z
Digital technology increasingly teaches us to see human life as a store of value: measurable, calculable, and ready for market. This is true for all of us.

[Freya India](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vvwXlPoJh38?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) points out that girls often commodify themselves as products, whether on Instagram or dating apps. OnlyFans is not a huge step forward from what already existed before it. And all of this is voluntary, encouraged, and framed as entrepreneurial. Men likewise see themselves as a commodity, a human resource. In fact, around 60% of Gen Z want to be influencers, according to a [2023 Morning Consult study](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vvwXlPoJh38?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

We are all products, commodities. Digital technology thus not only trains us to see ourselves and the world around us as standing-reserve ordered for economic gain; it increasingly makes us the product of exploitation itself.

We become the product.

Martin Heidegger began to see this late in his career. In his “The Question Concerning Technology,” he spoke of how technology’s essence lies in enframing. This enframing structures how the world presences itself to us, and how we eventually see ourselves as just one more resource ready at hand to be exploited.

Yet this latter observation would be taken up by one of Heidegger’s spiritual disciples, Byung-Chul Han. For Han, enframing serves as one reason why a young girl would value herself as a commodity, or why a young man would see his worth by the size of his paycheck.

## **Enframing (Gestell)**

“Enframing,” explains John Richardson, “is the most refined and perfected ability to presence things; it does so by settling them precisely within the scientific and technological schemata.” He continues, “We take for granted that everything is what it is just *as* it is determined by science’s considered account of it, and by its functional role in our organization of things. Each of us defers to those larger, social schemata, and through them participates in their ultimate presencing of things.”

Heidegger is concerned about how our basic mood towards the world changes how it becomes present to us. In ways similar to Hannah Arendt in her *The Human Condition*, Heidegger sees a changing world around us as something that truly changes us. Both get there by different paths. But a similar point remains: The way we enframe the world, both by setting it in order and by scientifically describing it, changes how the world shows up for us.

Mary Midgley called this the myth of science. Since scientific description works well in physics, we assume that this level of certainty can be applied to all spheres of life; and since it “works,” we assume that this mode of reasoning really does answer all of our questions.

For example, Heidegger points out that while the Rhine River may have powered trade over the years, older technology adapted to the shape and power intrinsic to the river. A bridge crossed the river; it did not reorder it. Modern hydropower, by contrast, structures itself over the river and stores its energy as electricity. The river is *challenged forth* (*Herausfordern*) to yield power. It now appears primarily as a standing-reserve of energy.

That stored energy can then be released for further exploitation of resources, through power drills or machinery that requires electricity to extract value from the earth. The change here is not merely one of scale. It is a change in ordering. Modern technology orders nature in advance, determining how it must presence itself before any particular use takes place. Earlier techniques, by contrast, often had to conform themselves to natural power in order to work properly. Just think of the windmill.

The way in which we order nature around us, store its energy, and summon resources from the earth through stored power (for example, electricity) changes not only the scope of modern technology but also how we see the world. A mountain is a huge obstacle—until it is something we can blast through. A river is powerful—until we harness its force, count its power in units (watts), store its energy in batteries, unleash it in oil extraction, or redirect that same stored power toward tanks and war. Power becomes an abstract thing, a unity of supply, stored, and not something that naturally lies around us, as part of our way of being in the world.

None of this is new *per se*, but the way in which we see natural resources is new. We increasingly see everything as a resource that stands by to be used, ordered, and exploited. We even call employees *Human Resources*. Workers appear as standing-reserve, ready to be summoned and deployed to set things in order for corporate use.

This is the kind of thing Heidegger points out in his essay on technology. But what makes his argument compelling is not a historical thesis; we can always challenge historical narratives. Rather, his argument is that the essence of modern technology lies in enframing (Gestell), a term that describes not what something *is*, but how it presences itself to us at all.

He already saw that using the Rhine in order to produce power changed how it became present to us. But then we even create tourist guides to the river that describe the same sort of enframing. It becomes all-enframing.

Thus, the essence of modern technology, according to Heidegger, lies in enframing. This ordering of all things for use changes how objects are presenced to us—and how we are presenced to ourselves.

And further, Heidegger points out that modern technology cannot be neutral, not merely because of how we use it, but because it is a *mode of revealing* (*Entbergen*). Technology discloses the world to us in a particular way, determining in advance how things can appear as meaningful. Modern technology, through its mode of calculation, reveals the world as things to be counted, used, and exploited for economic ends. But that is not always how the world has presented itself to us.

## **The Essence of Modern Technology**

For any reader of Byung-Chul Han, resonances should already ring in their ears. Han borrows Heidegger’s definition of Being and Stimmung (mood), although with his own twists. He sees something akin to enframing happening in the digital age. In his 2022 work *Non-things*, for example, Han spends a considerable amount of time interpreting Heidegger.

For Han, thinking precedes concepts. It flows from “Being in its totality” and an affective medium, called mood. Being, for Han, often refers to the way we are in the world and the way things become meaningful to us. Additionally, our mood or attunement to the world is a cause or underlying reason for our thinking.

But if we lose our basic attunement to the world as it used to be and substitute it for a world of digital information that lacks stability and otherness, then, Han thinks, the world discloses itself to us in ways approximate to the digital. “The human being, as ‘Dasein’,” explains Han, “is always already thrown into a specific world \[*bestimmte Welt*\]. The world as a totality is pre-reflexively disclosed to humans. Dasein, as being-*attuned*, precedes being-*aware.*”

And our attunement to this digital age makes us *like* the information we handle. The smartphone, for example, means that we have “the world firmly in my grip” and it “has to accord with my desires.” This total availability of all things, all of the time in the way we want all of the time, turns us towards ourselves. We become narcissistic as a rule. This inward-focus means we turn away from others and the concrete *things* of life. Information as a non-thing captures our imagination, makes us see the world as a standing reserve, ready for our frictionless use.

We also participate in the digital economy. As Byung-Chul Han explains in his *Burnout Society*, we are exploiters and exploited at one and the same time. We are entrepreneurs of ourselves; our fuel is soul; our product is flesh. OnlyFans illustrates one way in which some young women are enframed by our technological age. Our flesh becomes a stand-reserve, ready to be exploited for gain.

But this logic extends well beyond such extreme cases. Social media influencers—and even ordinary users—market their lifestyles as products. We simply live this way in the digital age. We sell marriage lifestyles, travel lifestyles, BookTok lifestyles, and more besides. We host profiles on LinkedIn to market our success, experience, and life as assets, ready to be sold to companies prepared to deploy us as human resources in the service of capital production.

While the smartphone is not the only digital technology that presences the world to us in this way, it is an important one. “The smartphone,” explains Han, “is a ‘*Ge-Stell,*’ enframing, in Heidegger’s sense: a *Gestell*, the essence of technology, unites in itself all forms of *placing* \[*Stellens*\] that make available, such as ordering \[*Bestellen*\], presenting \[*Vorstellen*\] or producing \[*Herstellen*\].”

While Heidegger did not live to see digital technology reach this zenith of exploitation, his pattern of thinking helps us see how enframing in digital technology changes how all objects and persons are made intelligible and show up for us.

This basic insight gives us important language to criticize, and perhaps to escape, the harmful effects of this way of experiencing in the world. Knowledge is a kind of power. It is the power to see otherwise. Or in Heidegger’s words, “Questioning builds a way.”

## **Mood**

Byung-Chul Han wrote his dissertation on Heidegger and mood (*Stimmung*). Han’s writings are therefore saturated with Heideggerian concerns about Being, even when this is not immediately apparent. Yet those who cite Han often fail to register this influence. (I include myself here; for years, I missed this obvious point.) They treat his observations about society as if they arise from a neutral standpoint. They do not. Han does not understand Being as one might in the Western tradition of Plato, Aristotle, Paul, and Augustine.

As a reader of Han, I am largely comfortable with this. Heidegger’s and Han’s shared focus on *Stimmung* (i.e., mood or attunement) does illuminate human experience. Yet a key divergence appears here. For early Heidegger, the fundamental mood is *Angst*, the anxiety that discloses our finitude through being-toward-death. Later, he explores other moods (e.g., boredom). For Han, the fundamental mood is friendliness (*Freundlichkeit*). This difference is not minor. Heidegger’s account still bears traces of Western metaphysics, even amid his critique of the tradition. Han’s alternative shows him far more at home in Zen Buddhism.

What unites them, however, is *Gestell*. Enframing explains why, in our technological age, we increasingly experience one another not as neighbours but as objects which are available, usable, and commodifiable. Gestell orders the world in advance so that beings appear as standing-reserve. Under this ordering, persons show up as resources to be managed rather than others to be encountered. Late-stage capitalism is not merely an economic phenomenon. It is metaphysical.

Here, we can make two important observations. First, technology’s *Gestell* names the dominant mode of revealing; second, *stimmung* names how we are attuned within that revelation. Enframing informs our moods *before* it shapes our arguments. We do not first choose to objectify; we find ourselves already disposed to do so. This technological ordering of reality produces characteristic moods such as anxiety, restlessness, boredom. Yet Han advocates for another mode of attunement. He proposes a cultivated friendliness meant to soften the system’s violence. This appears to be a way of salvation from our technological age. Han advances what Heidegger gestured at in his argument for salvation from *Gestell*.

Han’s response is to call for friendliness toward the other (and toward ourselves) not as a sentiment, but as a mood. This is a genuine insight. Yet it falters unless sin is interposed into the analysis. Han cannot accommodate this rupture. His friendliness assumes a world in which attunement can heal what is broken. I suspect Han rightly diagnoses our age’s pathologies, and he might even have discovered a saving power (the mood of friendliness). But I cannot help but see this attunement as another illusion that masks being’s disclosure.

It may be that older patterns of metaphysics give us the resources we need to more adequately find rescue from [the machine](https://mereorthodoxy.com/to-be-a-christian-is-to-sanctify-the-machine). For example, Aristotle’s notion of entelechy provides another frame for consideration. If Gestell names how the world presences itself and *Stimmung* describes how we are attuned to this disclosure, entelechy reminds us that we are ordered toward a natural end. From this vantage, our basic attunement may share something of moods like *Angst*, boredom, or friendliness, but we would remain directed toward the fulfillment of our nature. On this admittedly creative reading, natural telos might function analogously to mood, not as an affective state, but as a prior orientation that shapes how the world presences itself to us

Scripture sometimes defines human *telos* as glory. Paul, for instance, tells us that by patience in well-doing, we should seek glory and honour (Rom 2:7). Glory here names the realized form of human life oriented toward the good. And this orientation might mean that the world shows up for us as a theatre of God’s glory, as John Calvin put it. Our mood, then, could be construed as an attunement toward glory.

Canadian philosopher George Grant recognized that human nature provides limits, limits that we may find impossible to bypass. In this general sense, we might think of glory’s disclosure as another way to conceive of what it means to live within our enframenet, or perhaps as our salvation from it. In short, by modifying concepts found in both Heidegger and Han, we might say that *Gestell* underlies the essence of modern technology; *Stimmung* names our attunement; and glory bespeaks an end toward which our lives must be ordered if we are to resist becoming merely standing-reserve.

## **Conclusion**

Digital technology enframes us and our world. Digital media so pervades our lives that it changes how we understand ourselves and others. We begin to see the world as a dataset. Every object becomes a potential background for a digital photo, something we can use to promote a lifestyle brand.

At work, human resources tells us that we are resources ready at hand, to be placed within a tightly ordered economic engine. Everything is tidy, ordered, and ready for use. This is simply how the world now appears to us. It presences itself as a set of objects that can be arranged for productive gain.

By dominating nature through technique, we become the kind of person that technique can dominate. We end up seeing ourselves as a resource ready for economic exploitation. We sell our time at work in units. We see ourselves as human resources for a corporate body. Influencers become entrepreneurs of themselves, selling their own lifestyles for personal gain.

Behind this reality lies a complex set of reasons. Here, I only bring up a perspective that may show us how digital enframing hides the most important things in life from us. Further, the modernist collapse of metaphysics into physics leaves us without the resources to see the problem for what it is. Our way of living in the world as machine-humans who calculate everything makes it hard for us to cross the chasm from flesh to soul. As many have observed, modern technology resembles ancient magic. With the right formula, nature yields. Technique promises mastery through calculation, until we become as much like the machine as the machine itself is.

Heidegger helps us to see that this technological mastery makes the world show up for us in machine-like ways. We forget that we are truly human, and the tragic part is, we do not even see it. Heidegger, in this one narrow sense, helps us to explain why we see ourselves as products in the digital age. And while he is joined by a cohort of philosophers of technology (McLuhan, Ellul, Mumford, etc.), I know of only one author who integrates this perspective intentionally into an analysis of our technological age: Byung-Chul Han.
### A Framework for Faithful Ministry Leadership
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-framework-for-faithful-ministry-leadership/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:35:02.000Z
*“Values underlie all we think, say, and do.”*

— Vice Admiral John Scott Redd, (Ret.) U.S. Navy

Every leader in ministry eventually comes to the same quiet realization: it’s not the pace of the work that wears you down — it’s the weight of it.

The weight of decisions that shape people’s lives.

The weight of holding vision steady when resources run thin.

The weight of shepherding a congregation through uncertainty, conflict, and change.

In those moments, what sustains a leader is not technique, charisma, or clever strategy. Its values — the deep, guiding convictions that give direction when the map disappears.

[Vice Admiral John Scott Redd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John%5FScott%5FRedd?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), a career naval officer and devoted follower of Christ, understood that truth. Out of his own study of Scripture and service, he developed **VECTOR**, a model for leadership that captures six enduring principles: **Vision, Excellence, Character, Teamwork, Organization, and Respect.** For Redd, VECTOR wasn’t theory — it was a compass. The word itself, drawn from navigation, means *direction and strength.* It describes the path a vessel must take to reach its destination, even through shifting winds.

For church leaders, VECTOR is just as relevant. These same six principles offer a biblical foundation for shepherding God’s people with clarity and grace. But principles alone are not enough — they must become *practice and behaviors*. That’s where [**Admired Leadership**](https://admiredleadership.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)behaviors add a living dimension: they identify the observable, teachable behaviors that set great leaders apart — those who not only inspire, but transform the people they lead.

When the heart of VECTOR meets the habits of admired leadership, a pattern of Christlike leadership emerges — one defined not by authority or image, but by service, humility, and daily faithfulness.

The following reflections explore each of the six principles through that lens — not as abstract ideas, but as pastoral practices. They describe what it looks like to lead with the heart of a shepherd and the steadiness of a seasoned captain — guiding the flock, building the team, and keeping the course when the waters grow rough.

## **Vision: Seeing What Others Cannot Yet See**

Leadership begins with spiritual sight — not eyesight, but insight: the grace to see past what is and glimpse what could be. Every great act of ministry begins when God plants a vision in the heart of a leader before anyone else can see it.

Moses saw a promised land while wandering the desert. Nehemiah envisioned a rebuilt Jerusalem when the walls still lay in ruins. Jesus spoke of a kingdom long before His disciples could imagine it. Vision is the divine intersection of purpose and obedience — the sacred act of seeing with faith.

In ministry, vision gives meaning to sacrifice. It’s what keeps people hopeful when budgets tighten or attendance dips. The admired shepherd doesn’t impose vision; they *invite others into it*. They tell the story until their people can see themselves inside it. They answer questions patiently, communicate clearly, and speak hope without exaggeration.

Vision is sustained through encouragement, not criticism. Shepherd leaders practice what admired leadership calls *feed-forward* — helping others see what could be better next time rather than dwelling on what went wrong last time. It’s truth wrapped in hope, grace applied to growth.

Above all, clarity is compassion. A congregation cannot thrive in confusion. Defining direction and removing ambiguity is a pastoral act of care. Vision, then, is not fantasy but stewardship — tending the future so God’s people can flourish within it.

## **Excellence: Doing the Right Thing the Right Way**

Excellence in ministry is not about polish; it’s about reverence. It’s treating every sermon, meeting, and act of service as worship. The admired pastor understands that excellence is not perfectionism — it’s devotion.

Excellence begins in motive: doing the right thing in the right way for the right reason. It’s visible in preparation, consistency, and care for detail. The admired leader models high standards not to control others but to dignify their calling.

Accountability, then, becomes encouragement. Instead of performance reviews driven by fear, the admired leader walks beside others with grace and truth, asking, *“Where are we now? What’s in your way?”* These simple questions turn evaluation into discipleship.

Excellence also requires humility — the willingness to be sharpened by feedback, to learn from mistakes, and to let others’ strengths fill your gaps. Daniel served with “an excellent spirit” in Babylon because he was teachable even in tension. So too, the church leader who blends conviction with curiosity reflects Christ’s own heart — the one who “did all things well.”

Excellence is not about impressing; it’s about honoring. When we give our best, we mirror the God who first gave His best to us.

## **Character: The Foundation of Credibility**

Character is credibility made visible. In ministry, as in every field, skill may open doors, but only integrity keeps them open. The admired leader knows that credibility is currency — and once spent carelessly, it is hard to regain.

True character reveals itself in the unseen moments: how you speak to your spouse after a hard Sunday, how you respond to a critic, how you handle temptation when no one is watching. It’s what you do when the spotlight moves on.

Admired leaders treat small things as sacred — returning calls, keeping confidences, showing patience under pressure. They understand that the way we treat “unimportant” people says everything about who we really are.

They resist the corrosive habits of cynicism and politics. They don’t flatter, manipulate, or posture for approval. They walk humbly, speak truthfully, and trust God to guard their reputation.

Paul’s instructions to Timothy and Titus still guide the church: be sober-minded, self-controlled, faithful, and kind. Such traits cannot be fabricated; they must be forged through years of private obedience. Character is invisible armor — it protects a ministry far more than charisma ever could.

## **Teamwork: Turning “I” into “We”**

The heart of ministry is shared work. A church divided cannot stand; a staff or board fractured by ego cannot thrive. Admired leaders turn individual talent into collective strength.

They listen more than they speak. They seek counsel before direction. They build cultures where collaboration is normal, not novel. They recognize that the Spirit distributes gifts not for competition but for contribution.

The admired leader credits others freely and thanks them often. Gratitude is their default language. They share information and celebrate others’ wins. When tension surfaces, they confront directly but kindly, seeking restoration rather than victory.

Paul’s image of the body of Christ reminds us that every part matters — the unseen ligament as much as the visible hand. The admired leader makes space for each person’s gift to serve the mission.

Teamwork in ministry is not merely organizational; it is spiritual. It’s the practical expression of unity — the visible evidence that love is greater than pride.

## **Organization: Turning Vision into Structure**

Vision without structure becomes exhaustion. Even the most inspired calling requires systems that sustain it. Organization, as Vice Admiral Redd taught, is not bureaucracy; it is stewardship — the means by which God’s work is done decently and in order.

Moses learned this through Jethro’s counsel: delegate wisely, trust others, and create clarity. The admired leader applies this today by defining roles, timelines, and outcomes. They make sure everyone knows who is responsible for what — not to control, but to empower.

Clarity brings freedom. When expectations are defined, people can create, serve, and rest. Admired leaders measure progress honestly, not to punish but to learn. They understand that accountability done well is pastoral care — it keeps people from confusion and fatigue.

They also manage time as a form of theology. Their calendars reflect their convictions. Meetings have purpose; rest has place. Reflection isn’t wasted time; it’s worship.

Organization is what allows ministry to endure. It is the bridge between inspiration and impact — the scaffolding that lets vision take form.

## **Respect: The Glue of Leadership**

Respect is love with its sleeves rolled up. It’s how the admired leader makes dignity visible in daily life.

They honor every person equally — volunteer or elder, child or skeptic — because every person bears the image of God. They correct privately, praise publicly, and treat disagreement as an opportunity for understanding, not dominance.

Respect begins with humility. The admired pastor thinks of themselves less, not because they are small but because God is great. They ask, “What might I learn here?” before insisting on being right.

They handle offense biblically — going directly, going gently, going early. They bring solutions, not complaints. They extend respect upward as well as downward, communicating clearly with those they serve under and those who serve under them.

In a culture that rewards loudness, respect is countercultural. It slows down pride and gives space for grace.

**The Admired Leader’s Path**

When the six principles of VECTOR meet the daily behaviors of Admired Leadership, the result is a shepherd worth following:

- **Vision** becomes believable through clarity and communication.
- **Excellence** honors God and elevates others and becomes contagious through accountability and example.
- **Character** sustains trust and becomes credible through consistency and humility.
- **Teamwork** multiplies strength and becomes lasting through trust and recognition.
- **Organization** creates stability and becomes liberating through clarity and cadence.
- **Respect** cultivates peace and becomes transformative through empathy and restraint.

This is leadership that looks like Jesus — humble, intentional, consistent, and strong. It cannot be automated or faked. It is learned through faithfulness, practiced with love, and proven over time.

> “His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’” — Matthew 25:23 (ESV)

*Note: David J. Chamberlin is VADM Redd’s son-in-law.*
### Tramping Out of Dante's Hell
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/tramping-out-of-dantes-hell/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:35:04.000Z
**I.**

> “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” — L. P. Hartley, *The Go-Between* (1953)

It can be difficult to fathom just how different the worldview and interiority of previous generations was from our own. And the farther back you go, the more this holds true. For example, in 2026 it’s difficult to read the beloved [*The Way of a Pilgrim*](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-way-of-a-pilgrim-olga-savin/1100419257?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) as anything other than a fairy story, a Russian Orthodox fable, instead of a realistic account of a devout believer. Even though it dates from the 19th Century — post the Enlightenment, post the Industrial Revolution, and therefore by no means ancient history — a suspension of disbelief is required to accept that anyone could have the dogged and simple faith of the pilgrim described: a simple man trudging here and there with only a nine-word prayer, hard bread, and some salt to sustain him; the spiritual world as real to him as the physical. The vast majority of us are so far removed from that kind of living. We rarely see ordinary people who are totally devoted to their vows of poverty and discomfort, not as a temporary vocation but as a way of life, and who are awake to the spiritual aspects of existence.

Even in the first two decades of the 20th century, there were many people devoted to the lifestyle of ‘tramping’ — living outdoors, roaming between cities and villages, subsisting on the charity of strangers, devoted to a life spent on the road and in Holy Nature, singing songs and composing poems, loving God and their fellow man — a way of life which stands in opposition to the vagabonds and hobos of the Great Depression, the hippies of the 1960s and 70s, the homeless drifter of the 80s and 90s, or our 21st century’s opioid addict. Stephen Graham’s 1926 *The Gentle Art of Tramping* describes the best sort of tramp: a wanderer by choice not necessity, escaping the mounting machinery of the Industrial Revolution and WW1, hopelessly in love with creation, and opting to separate himself from the ways of the modern world — not by way of hermetic retreat, but by relentlessly pursuing a real life in the real world. His eyes were open to the terrible truths of the world, but were also open to the spirituality of every living creature. And he also knew his philosophy was nothing if it wasn’t applied through suffering and discomfort and [the rediscovery of simple joys](https://shagbark.substack.com/p/is-hitchhiking-dead).

The main difference between us and the simple 19th Century pilgrim or the joyful 1920s tramp, is the gaping hole opened in our culture by postmodernism’s attack on meaning. The philosophical approach of postmodernism, developed in the 1960s and 70s and ascendent as the dominant school of thought over the past 50 years, teaches that there are no singular truths — everything is subjective, and what we call ‘truths’ are really social constructs, shaped by individual perspectives, surrounding culture, and power dynamics. The result of this approach is the destruction of grand narratives and simplistic faith. Instead, our worldviews are increasingly atomised and endlessly customisable, with no possibility for an overarching story, no purpose to seek, no goal to strive toward except for mind-numbing comfort. So it’s no wonder that in 2026, we live in a cynical and tired world. We’ve arrived at the logical endpoint of postmodernism, the inevitable result of tearing down the icons and statues and frameworks bequeathed by previous generations. And now, we have nothing left to admire or build upon. If, as Pontius Pilate once claimed, there is no such thing as truth, then life has no purpose.

So where do we go from here?

**II.**

> “We see this manifest as a kind of informed naïvety… The metamodern generation understands that we can be both ironic and sincere in the same moment; that one does not necessarily diminish the other.” — Luke Turner, *Metamodernism: A Brief Introduction* (2015)

Metamodernism is a recent cultural development emerging from the black hole of postmodernism, building off the work of Dutch professors Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s foundational 2010 essay, *Notes on Metamodernism*, which describes metamodernism as a third way beyond old-fashioned grand narratives and ironic postmodernism, by way of oscillating between the two extremes. This ‘oscillation’ isn’t the same as compromise or even synthesis, but a constant and purposeful swinging between sincerity and irony; it’s the choice to take a leap of faith after every bout of cynicism.

As professor Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm outlines in his 2021 book *Metamodernism: The Future of Theory*, the metamodern traveller recognises the futility in seeking a singular meaning to give his life a purpose, and yet nevertheless strives towards such a narrative with a kind of ‘willed hope’. He isn’t a foolish idealist, but nor is he a nihilist. He oscillates between the two, and in this oscillation, in this refusal to fall for either blunt-force optimism or ironic depression, he charts a path toward the light.

**III.**

> “And he said: ‘Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’” — Matthew 18:3 (ESV)

The man at the centre of *The Way of a Pilgrim* is guileless and hopelessly innocent — closely related to Don Quixote riding full tilt into a fantasy. Compare this to Stephen Graham’s tramp who is wise to the ways of the world — sly when he has to be, naïve when he can be; foolish in the eyes of many, but an object of envy in the secret hearts of many more. I think the ‘gentle tramp’ described by Graham is a model of the metamodern way of living, and a more realistic example for our times, because he is childlike without being childish.

Christ taught his followers to adopt an attitude of childlikeness, not immaturity. The use of ‘turn’ in the phrase “…unless you turn and become like children…” comes from the Greek work ‘*stréphō*’, which is different from ‘*metanoia*’ or wholesale transformation. It’s not a change of our inner nature or a relinquishing of our adulthood, it’s simply a change in our approach. Christ knows we cannot become children again in our hearts — this would be stooping to childish immaturity — but we can be childlike in how we choose to live.

The tramp does not have a child’s mind filled with simple faith like the earlier pilgrims, but he nevertheless adopts a child’s way, approaching life with a cheerful openness and simplicity, despite knowing the horrors that lurk behind every corner. He wears the cloak of childlikeness as a covering over his cynicism, even as he oscillates, as we all must, between faint hope and weary realism. Ultimately, he chooses to have faith and to pursue meaning, while acknowledging that the old narratives may not be fully applicable, that there may be no real hope of success. His faith is not an impenetrable suit of armor; instead it is threadbare clothing, providing only a little protection against the sun, wind, rain, and frost.

**IV.**

> “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” —Dante Alighieri, *Inferno* (1321)

Dante’s *Inferno* visualises hell as a downward spiral. And doesn’t this aptly describe the state of our global culture, everything constantly getting worse than whatever bad thing preceded it? Paul Kingsnorth terms this being ‘trapped in the Machine’, Rod Dreher uses the word ‘disenchantment’, Catherine Shannon calls it the ‘Great Diminishment’, Cory Doctorow coined the awfully suitable ‘enshittification’, and academics may refer to it as ‘postmodern malaise.’ But whatever term you use, we all feel it. Every choice only seems to lead us to a further descent, like we are in the worst possible timeline of the supposedly infinite multiverse.

We are usually given two types of answers to the problem of the downward spiral, and I dislike them both. The first is to pretend it isn’t happening, that things are not so bad, that this diagnosis of hellishness is historically blinkered. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this answer because when people from all walks of life, across the entire political spectrum, all agree that our global culture in 2026 seems a lot worse than before and only likely to get worse again, we should sit up and take notice. I’m more interested in refuting the second category of response, because it seems enticing but it’s mostly unhelpful, which is that the only way out of our downward spiral is to rewind back to an earlier stage, somewhere further up the spiral itself. This is essentially the position of Kingsnorth’s *Against the Machine* and Dreher’s *Living in Wonder*, as well as the basis of the New Romantics’ passionate yearnings, the Ortho-Bro and Catholic-Bro desire to ‘RETVRN’ to former glories, and the glossy promises of the tradwife influencers. Everyone seems to have identified a former time where things were better, and wants to press the rewind button to get us back there.

But even if that kind of rewinding were possible (it’s not), then what? How do we avoid slipping back down again? To travel up from the 7th to the 3rd level of Hell isn’t exactly an improvement; you’re still in Hell. I would go so far as to say it’s pathetic to be aiming for stasis, wishing we could freeze culture at whatever moment seemed good to us.

Neither Kingsnorth nor the New Romantics nor the tradwives are suggesting a workable solution for the masses of normal people who work in multi-national companies, who live in cities, who need to earn a living, who like engaging with the internet and social media, etc. They may be adept at identifying the manifold problems with modernity, but a doctor who diagnoses an illness without prescribing a practical cure isn’t much of a healer.

**V.**

> “...be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” — Matthew 10:16 (ESV)

The glaring problem for any of us who write about the harms of engaging with the Machine (myself included), which we tend to brush over, is that for all of our whinging about modernity and technology, we are all living in it, profiting from it, working for it. By any fair definition, we are hypocrites. The tradwives are wealthy entrepreneurs selling a reality TV version of their lives (they aren’t ‘trad’ according to their own definition); Kingsnorth makes his income from a Substack newsletter; the New Romantics are forming online communities and internet journals. And I am as guilty as anyone of posting pithy notes about the ills of phone addiction from the very mobile device I supposedly detest. In fact, probably the only person left on earth who can eruditely critique the modern machine world without being a hypocrite is farmer-poet Wendell Berry, and the man is 91 years old. Very few of us are going to be taking the Wendell Berry option.

What I’m more interested in is how to become the opposite of the hypocrite. If a hypocrite feigns innocence they don’t possess, then I want to be an *informed naïve*, living out an innocence I don’t deserve. I want to be the foolish-seeming tramp who oscillates between wisdom and innocence. I think this is our best hope for finding the way out of our current downward spiral and into an upward spiral, because there is no going backwards. We can’t LARP our way back to mediaevalism or pre-Industrialisation or whatever time period you personally feel nostalgic for. We can’t even go back to the 90s or 2000s (despite current fashion trends). No, we have to make something from this world deconstructed of meaning, and the answer can’t be limited to looking in the rearview mirror. Instead, in the wake of so much deconstruction, we must seek the journey of reconstruction.

**VI.**

> “The man you tramp with is not a foreigner… as you may discover before you discover he is kindred. You are thrown into intimate contact with him. Even if the two of you are a couple of egoists strongly self-centred, something is bound to get across in a long tramp. That is one reason why tramping is such a healthful spiritual experience.” — Stephen Graham, *The Gentle Art of Tramping* (1926)

I want to live as one of Graham’s gentle tramps. Not hard-bitten and cynically detached from the world, but moving through the world with an open-hearted love for my fellows. To act with sincerity while knowing my acts are partial; to commit to meaning while admitting the possibility of emptiness.

Storm, in describing metamodernism, goes so far as to argue that the ‘myth of disenchantment’ is itself a modern construction, that we have never been purely disenchanted, that we are inherently spiritual creatures who constantly reinvest the world with meanings, rituals, and tacit metaphysics. The question then is not whether our age can believe again, but whether we will choose wise forms of belief — habits that convert longing into love, skepticism into service, and individual ideas into shared projects of reconstruction.

What does this look like, practically? I think it must begin with travelling light, stripping down your life to one of fewer possessions and more hospitality. Does it matter that the traveller at my campfire tonight doesn’t share all of my opinions, eats my dinner, drinks half of my coffee, and is seeking a different road than the one I’m on? Of course not. Besides, what am I so afraid of? Sure, we may have an uncomfortable conversation, I may find him impolite and selfish, wrong-headed and foolish. But haven’t I also been the same? Can we not help each other despite these issues, overcoming or overlooking what are really, in the scheme of things, small obstacles?

We must approach people and projects with the spirit of ‘as if’. Building groups, communities, third spaces, projects, and institutions ‘as if’ the common good is still possible, ‘as if’ grander narratives still apply, ‘as if’ others have our best interests at heart. We won’t build anything worthwhile out of mean-spirited or fearful cynicism, and we will trip over our own feet if we remain blind optimists, but by oscillating between serpentine wisdom and dovelike innocence as the circumstances require, we can overcome our fearful inaction. By expecting the best of people, you open up a space for them to step into, you invite them to rise to the occasion, as opposed to boxing them in with your pre-conceived nihilism.

None of us are escaping the Machine, not totally. Most of us can’t even quit social media, and we rely upon our phones and the internet to engage with the global economy, to perform our jobs, to communicate with our family and friends. So I reject the reactionary approach, the ‘pilgrim aesthetic’ of seeking to escape technology and the internet, of declaring oneself too holy for such devices. The tramp knows better, he appreciates the value of tools without allowing them to master him. To use a tool so far as it serves your purpose, but to not become enslaved by it, is the way to freedom and human flourishing. So thread your way through the internet, through the modern economy, through the machine-world. Do not cease to look upon it all as a tool, a way to connect and discover and learn and get things done, but nothing more. The tramp knows his tent is but a thin barrier separating him from wild creation and his fellow man. The tent is useful just as the internet is useful, but we must never forget that neither of them are the sum total of the world.

**VII.**

> “The first tramp left Eden many years ago… it was the only place in which one could feel at home forever and ever. And outside of it one must wander. Life is a wandering and a seeking where it was once a sitting still and an adoring.” — Stephen Graham, *The Gentle Art of Tramping* (1926)

I don’t envision tramping as the end point. Drifting impermanence is ultimately antithetical to building anything worthwhile. But I do think we need to become nomads again — mental, spiritual, emotional, cultural nomads. We are locked in a downward spiral which needs to be left far behind, not rewound. Instead of focusing on what is wrong and distasteful about our postmodern world (there is an endless supply), focus on what you want your life to be about and move doggedly in that direction. Find out what small, achievable, tangible steps you can take today which move you toward a life of loving your fellow man and your God.

Instead of wailing about the poisoned fields and rotten fruit of our current age, let us set off into the world and allow those destitute fields to lie fallow. By doing so, we may gain the wisdom that only comes with departure from the known and contact with real people and moments requiring real faith. And upon our return home, we’ll see what has survived the oscillations of the journey, the sifting and unburdening of a period spent on the road.

The tramp is a discerning creature, seeking to be as innocent as the pilgrim while remaining as wise as the cynic. He is more mature than either the pilgrim or the cynic, for he has learned how to be childlike without being childish. I think if more of us were engaged in this kind of discernment, we would stand a better chance of exiting our current hellish spiral and building something new and better. Something more befitting our metamodern age.
### The Christian Achievement of Martin Luther King Jr.
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-christian-achievement-of-martin-luther-king-jr/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:35:07.000Z
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning [biography](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/08/books/the-new-definitive-biography-of-martin-luther-king-jr.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of Martin Luther King Jr., Jonathan Eig tells the story of King’s relationship with Stanley Levison, who served as “a key advisor and \[King’s\] closest white friend.” Levison shared his vision for racial equality, but not his faith. King challenged Levison, pointing out that his passion for justice demanded a belief in God: “Levison’s moral fervor was such that King refused to believe his friend’s agnosticism. ‘You don’t know it, Stan,’ King said, ‘but you believe in God.’”

In his words to Levison, King illustrated what twentieth century theologian Cornelius Van Til called “[borrowed capital](https://frame-poythress.org/cornelius-van-til-the-apologist/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com),” the idea that other worldviews must borrow presuppositions from Christianity to reach their conclusions. In this century some Christian apologists employ “[subversive fulfillment](https://www.thegoodbook.com/plugged-in?ref=mereorthodoxy.com),” a related concept which teaches that secular desires can only be fulfilled within the Christian story and that modern values only make sense within a Christian worldview. Those who reject Christianity while adopting its conclusions want what Mark Sayers [calls](https://www.amazon.com/Disappearing-Church-Cultural-Relevance-Resilience/dp/0802413358?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) “the Kingdom without the King.”

In *Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World* Tom Holland recognizes a similar contrast between King and the Beatles:

> The Beatles did not—as Martin Luther King had done—derive their understanding of love as the force that animated the universe from a close reading of scripture. Instead, they took it for granted. Cut loose from its theological moorings, the distinctively Christian understanding of love that had done so much to animate the civil rights movement began to float free over an ever more psychedelic landscape.

Holland realizes that the Beatles had appropriated the fruit of Christianity without its foundation. King, on the other hand, came to his convictions through his immersion in Scripture. I note King’s Christian foundations because in recent years it has become a favorite pastime of the “[irreverent right](https://www.theblaze.com/fearless/martin-luther-king-jr-vs-charlie-kirk-and-the-irreverent-right?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)” to use this holiday to parade and catalogue his sexual immorality as well as his denial of several core Christian beliefs. How should we respond to this particular symptom of the larger “[vibe shift](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/every-vibe-shift-lords-hand/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)” on the right? I recommend one path forward: tell the truth. All of it.

King was certainly not an evangelical, and he rejected Jesus’ literal, bodily resurrection. He had a number of sexual partners while married to his wife Coretta. He held views on a variety of topics that would make any traditional conservative squirm uncomfortably. Acknowledging these realities exhibits what Aaron Renn calls “[scrupulousness on facts](https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/scrupulousness-on-facts?ref=mereorthodoxy.com),” the practice of being up front about uncomfortable truths. Brutal honesty about King reduces radicalization, increases trust, and robs provocateurs of the opportunity to gain credibility by revealing taboo truths to the ignorant. However, we must accompany these inconvenient facts with the truth about how King’s Christian worldview influenced his actions and words in the civil rights movement.

In his [*Letter from a Birmingham Jail*](https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles%5FGen/Letter%5FBirmingham.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) King quoted Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us. He affirmed the Christian tradition when he said, “A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.” He pointed to “the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar” in Daniel 3 as an example of civil disobedience. He applauded the courage of early Christians, who considered themselves “a colony of heaven” and “brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests.” More broadly, King taught his followers to turn the other cheek and rooted human rights and dignity in the *Imago Dei*.

Those who foreground King’s failures miss these and other points, one of which is that a non-violent civil rights movement was never a foregone conclusion. Today we celebrate MLK, not Stokely Carmichael or Huey Newton. Both of those men criticized and rejected King’s peaceful approach. More recently we saw a rash of “[mostly peaceful protests](https://www.commentary.org/articles/christine-rosen/media-excuse-destructive-violent-riots/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)” in response to George Floyd’s tragic death in 2020\. We could adapt Ross Douthat’s [famous observation](https://x.com/DouthatNYT/status/704462319074594816?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) about the religious right to say, “If you dislike the Christian civil rights movement, wait till you meet the non-Christian civil rights movement.” If you cannot handle King, just wait until you read [*In Defense of Looting*](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/vicky-osterweil/in-defense-of-looting/9781645036678/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

God’s common grace means that we will find much good in non-Christian movements for justice. Human depravity means we will also discover many shortcomings and failures in Christian efforts. Nevertheless, we should not be surprised if chaos ensues when Christians [cede moral leadership to the world](https://wng.org/articles/black-lives-matter-doesnt-represent-the-gospel-nor-should-it-1617287118?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). As he joined others in leading the civil rights movement, King remained tethered to a Christian understanding of non-violence and human dignity and worth. This produced a distinctively Christian approach that stood in contrast to those of his contemporaries.

So let us honor MLK today. We can remember that King led a movement founded on the bedrock principle that we must honor all people because each one is made in God’s image. We do not have to engage in hagiography or tell half-truths. Nor do we need a man to mirror all our beliefs in order to celebrate his accomplishments, unless, like Narcissus, we insist on constantly seeing our own reflection. We can commend King for working for reconciliation, not retribution. And – like King to Levison – we can challenge our [co-belligerents](https://ca.thegospelcoalition.org/article/working-with-others-allies-and-co-belligerents/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) who embrace justice but reject God with their own contradiction and inconsistency.
### Why Populism is a Problem for the Intellectual Right
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-populism-is-a-problem-for-the-intellectual-right/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:35:09.000Z
[In my last piece for *Mere Orthodoxy*,](https://mereorthodoxy.com/two-cheers-for-michael-heiser) I ended with a vague complaint about intellectual ecosystems (e.g., Christian scholarship) that become defined excessively by a particular tradition (e.g., a certain conception of theology). This tendency extends beyond conservative Christian circles to much of the broader Intellectual Right of today. Insofar as many Christians are part of or closely adjacent to the Intellectual Right at large, it bears articulating some of that criticism more precisely.

Ironically, a neutral observer might very well perceive that the Intellectual Right presently has the upper hand, not least as regards the institutional setting of the university. In some corners, there is a perceptible change in attitude: that maybe American higher ed need not be a total loss, that reform is possible, and that some measure of ideological balance might be possible after all, [entrenched leftist incumbency](https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-disappearing-conservative-professor?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) notwithstanding. Certainly, many left-of-center academics have taken alarm at recent turns.

A number of developments contributed to this sea change. For starters, political winds have turned sharply against that social phenomenon called “Wokeness,” which originally sprang from the university itself. In turn, the Trump administration has applied considerable pressure upon institutions such as Harvard and Yale to make ideological reforms. More locally, Florida’s educational overhaul has dramatically altered the complexion of schools such as the University of Florida and New College. Other red-state legislatures are applying increased scrutiny to their respective public university systems, which is one force behind many of the new civics centers appearing in other places, such as Ohio and Tennessee.

Or, on a smaller scale, one could point to the most right-leaning school in the country, tiny Hillsdale College, which has kept plugging along with a hefty endowment, low admission rates, and an ever more prominent national footprint. Its successes have demonstrated there is still some demand for a rigorous, conservative college education. Furthermore, in the last decade alone, Hillsdale administrators have increasingly engaged in high-profile [publicity events](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/07/is-hillsdale-college-gaining-the-world-and-losing-its-soul/565916/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and [collaborations](https://www.hillsdale.edu/news-and-media/press-releases/white-house-appoints-arnn-and-spalding-to-lead-1776-commission/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) with Republican officials at both the [federal](https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/23/trump-hillsdale-college-partnership-00306508?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and [state](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/07/05/hillsdale-leaders-comments-teachers-spur-tenn-controversy?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) level, drawing praise or criticism depending on one’s political leanings but magnifying the school’s profile in any case.

Having spent most of the last decade moving to-and-fro between conservative spaces and mainline academia— a Hillsdale alum who attended grad school at Ohio State during Peak Woke and returned to Hillsdale for his first teaching job— I have had something of a front-row seat to witness the present “vibe shift.” It has churned up more than a few reflections on the disconnect between these two worlds, their respective intellectual virtues and weaknesses, and where those elements have shaped my own formation.

In aggregate, some of the recent developments, such as the civics centers, encourage me more than others. Even so, I have serious doubts about the Intellectual Right effecting durable reforms. This is only partly due to the obstacle of progressive incumbency in education. In point of fact, there are even deeper structural problems that restrict the Intellectual Right’s ability to change American academia. This is particularly so in the context of larger universities and especially in disciplines with more obvious ideological stakes, such as the humanities and social sciences. One obstacle is the conservative intellectual temperament itself. The other is populism.

## **Temperament**

Many conservative academics and intellectual types are not keen on specialized, empirical research, knowledge production, and what we might even more loosely call “data.” Almost definitionally, conservative intellectuals prefer to operate within inherited traditions and conventions, which means they gravitate more to synthesized Big Ideas and away from empirical particulars. The Big Ideas here concern first principles and fundamental philosophical questions, tending especially toward matters of theology and political philosophy.

In a liberal arts college or even a classical high school, there can also be a strong pull toward becoming a generalist conversant in the broader “Canon.” Working in these institutions, one can start to sense that it’s insufficient to know Thomas Aquinas in the original Latin: one really ought to be able to hold an intelligent conversation about the *Gospel of Thomas* and Thomas Jefferson as well. To be clear, that generalist tendency is perfectly suited to those institutional settings, and it often midwifes some truly excellent outcomes for grateful students (like myself) who received their principal intellectual formation there.

So far, none of this description would strike conservative intellectuals as a scandalous secret. These same tendencies—focus on Big Ideas and the Canon—are even a mark of pride on the Intellectual Right over and against unreflective forms of knowledge production. But there is a tradeoff here: in the broader academic landscape, these interests often lead to [self-ghettoization](https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/beyond-academic-sectarianism?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), as Steven Teles observed recently. If one’s core interests are constantly circling back to theology and political theory, that’s actually a pretty narrow niche.

While the minutiae of Aristotle’s *Politics* or Thomas Aquinas’ *Summa Theologica* may ever excite a certain kind of conservative philosopher or religious studies prof, there is, in my experience, only a small slice of American university students who will share that interest. Meanwhile, even good-faith liberal or progressive faculty have even less interest and more suspicion—often justifiable—about a lurking ideological agenda. One way of bridging this disconnect is to master broader “data”: fresh material uncovered in research that is not immediately linked to the Big Ideas and that is further removed from charged topics of ideology and identity. One can, for example, share an interest in medieval codicology with a friend who radically diverges in their politics or religion. That in turn can supply a low-stakes entrée to broader and deeper conversations.

But if if you as a conservative intellectual believe—perhaps correctly—that civilization has already bequeathed to you “the right answers,” you might be naturally disinclined to do the difficult work of looking into anything fundamentally new or revisionary, much less to question or critique the civilizational heritage. Or if you’re a graduate student, you might be inclined to produce a thesis on an understudied aspect of a canonical author than to do new work on a lesser-known contemporary. Of course, some conservatives do break these tendencies. Even so, I seriously doubt a legion of rightist doctorates stands ready to fill even some significant minority of the humanities and social science posts that exist in the American university system—and that’s acceptable, as long as the Intellectual Right stays honest with itself about the tradeoffs.

## **Populism**

If there are healthy tradeoffs to be had in the conservative intellectual temperament, it is harder to take the same view of the more timely and acute problems posed by populism. To misquote that canonical wordsmith Costanza, “If Populist George walks through that door, he will *kill* Intellectual George! A George divided against itself cannot stand!”

It is true that many of the apparent recent successes fostering current optimism owe something to a broader populist wave in the Western world, which has directed its ire at many institutional centers and upended the political *status quo*. By the same token, it doesn’t take a prophet to foresee reversals when the electoral winds inevitably shift in the next few years. Perhaps a bit further off but still in the not-so-distant future, the broader populist wave will also subside.

Now, there’s an unpleasant irony lurking here. What populism does best is *break* things. Thus, while it lacks the political capital (and attention span) to reform mainstream higher ed, in the shorter term, populism does have the power to mangle the Intellectual Right and those institutions it controls, both in the collegiate sphere and beyond.

Historically, education and the life of the mind are aristocratic and counter-egalitarian pursuits; I ([and others](https://matiane.wordpress.com/2021/09/15/democratic-education-by-c-s-lewis/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)) would argue this is inexorably so. So what exactly happens to right-leaning classical high schools, colleges, centers, institutes, think tanks, and magazines if they become possessed by populism’s naked anti-intellectualism and its mean online egalitarianism? Can the Intellectual Right serve two masters in populism and the virtues of the mind?

I must say, leaders of conservative academic or academy-adjacent institutions don’t seem too interested in that question. Instead, many appear to be [lashing themselves to the mast](https://thedispatch.com/article/isi-tucker-carlson-alex-jones-postliberalism/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), intending to ride out and even harness the populist wave while they can.

Take an exaggerated hypothetical. What happens at a conservative college when, say, an untenured professor or administrator writes something slightly impolitic—let alone overtly left-of-center—in a public forum that offends the rightist *demos*? We can picture a modest social media storm brewing; a few opinionated donors and parents take umbrage and begin writing lengthy emails to the chancellor’s office. If the school has enough prominence, maybe some right-wing media figures start taking notice and pressing the issue. Does the school show a little spine and let the storm blow over? Does it maybe let some open debate take place that poses alternative arguments to those in the impolitic opinion piece? Or does it make the offending employee recant and retract under pain of hemlock?

Let’s get riskier and less hypothetical. One may, in good hope and Christian charity, commend Charlie Kirk’s soul to the Lord and still wonder about the motives and foresight of schools that endorse his legacy [overtly](https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/charlie-kirk-statue-new-college-florida-b2827840.html?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) and [conspicuously](https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/266925/sculpture-of-jesus-and-charlie-kirk-to-be-installed-at-ave-maria-university?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com). What kind of ethos does that instill in the institution? What does it say about the school’s sense of its own *telos*? What kind of students or donors does it hope to attract?

Fair-minded observers (and less fair-minded future historians) might come to suppose that these kinds of choices say an awful lot about who (and what) is really running the college, the think tank, or magazine.

What’s puzzling is that this is not just any Faustian bargain between the Intellectual Right and populism: it’s a *lousy* one, even as Faustian bargains go. The Intellectual Right lacks the necessary horsepower to shift the ideological needle meaningfully at Big State U, though cultural and electoral currents have made it seem more possible at present than ever before. On the other hand, those same cultural and electoral currents have more than sufficient voltage to denature the relatively small conservative academic and intellectual ecosystem.

## **Solutions**

If this outlook seems grim, there are some sensible steps available that wouldn’t require divine intervention to have a chance at success.

First, if conservatives do want to change the coloring of broader academia, then more of them will need to step out of the Politics-cum-Theology box. For historians like myself, that will mean venturing beyond intellectual history, which (fairly or not) was left for dead by the larger discipline well before the current crop of grad students was even born. It may also entail looking beyond the traditional borders of Western Civilization, and it will certainly necessitate a more critical—or simply less reverent—posture toward the Canon of the Western and American heritage. If that sounds a little subversive and potentially dangerous to conservative ears—well, that’s the problem. Healthy, well-rounded intellectual communities entertain and even pursue such lines of inquiry.

A less ideologically loaded means of achieving that same end would be for the Intellectual Right to triple down on teaching languages. Strategically, this is low-hanging fruit. Interest, institutional investment, and training in languages [is dying](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/tenure/2023/08/11/west-virginia-universitys-unprecedented-proposed-cuts-become?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) even at [the R1 level](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/princeton-greek-latin-requirement/619136/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). They require good teachers, willing students, and much painstaking work from both over the course of years. Languages, however, open up all kinds of research opportunities in the humanities, which makes them difficult to ignore in grad school and job applications, even when the applicant might not have the desired ideological and/or sociological profile.

Second, a more diverse ecosystem of right-leaning colleges doing this kind of work would be salutary. Donors who care about education (and by extension, culture and politics) should play the long game and invest their money here instead of burning cash in political campaigns: found a few more schools like Hillsdale, Grove City, and University of Austin; offer generous scholarships to boost recruiting; fight grade inflation aggressively and advertise academic rigor accordingly. A broader range of such colleges will offer substantive education to a greater number of high-quality students who might otherwise choose one of the better state schools. In just several semesters teaching dual-enrollment courses at Hillsdale, I met dozens of excellent high school students who would have attended and flourished in a Hillsdale-style education but would not be admitted due to limited slots.

Some more healthy competition between right-of-center colleges might also guard against ideological capture by one particular rightist faction, intellectual sect, or political fad. And that naturally brings us back to populism itself.

Consider the parting words of an old American statesman:

> It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. . . . Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric? Promote then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.

The collective American Right is earning a failing grade here. Some institutions ostensibly devoted to cultivating and diffusing knowledge have put at least some of their chips on a different strategy: stoking fear, resentment, identitarian grievances, and conspiratorial suspicions corrosive to the very idea of *res publica*. Rather than cynically (and shortsightedly) cozying up to populism to harness its effervescent anger, the Intellectual Right and its institutions should be the very ones *teaching and leading* rather than going along for the ride. They should encourage a panoply of moral and intellectual virtues, including currently unfashionable ones such as patience, circumspection, moderation, and meekness. But to do that, the Intellectual Right will have to take more deliberate steps to stay in its institutional lane and manage a narrower set of ends: pursuing truth comes first and anything else is a far distant second, including activism, public relations, donor cultivation, and “relevance.”

That will also mean ignoring and even explicitly saying “no” to certain vocal, energetic factions and actors. There simply must, in my view, be more healthy distance between the Kirks or Carlsons of the world—whatever you think of them—and conservative intellectual institutions. They occupy entirely distinct tracks with conflicting incentives, they apply incongruent metrics of success, they reward dissimilar skill sets, and they operate along incommensurate time horizons. Simply put, their ultimate aims diverge sharply.

Or they ought to diverge, anyway. In gloomier moods, one despairs that the Intellectual Right can so discipline itself. And if it cannot, it seems doomed to shrivel into an appendix of the right-wing industrial complex. Bitterer still, its choices will seem to have confirmed a standard plank of the Intellectual Left. Namely, ideas and truth themselves are never really the driving force of intellectual pursuits or ideology: they ever and always serve as mere *post hoc* justifications for pursuing power.

Yes, there are some genuinely fruitful branches on the tree of the Intellectual Right. But conserving them will mean throwing away the populist ax set against the roots.
### The Rise of the Skilled (and Lonely) Consumer
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-rise-of-the-skilled-and-lonely-consumer/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:35:11.000Z
David Riesman, in his 1950 work [*The Lonely Crowd*](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300174144/the-lonely-crowd/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), wrote that “Today the future occupation of all moppets is to be skilled consumers.” I would alter this to say “to be skilled *and lonely* consumers”—a change that I’m quite sure Riesman would approve of.

Riesman’s work was a profound analysis of middle-class America after World War II. Riesman looked at American culture and saw two types of people: inner-directed and other-directed. Inner-directed people were dominant in 19th and early 20th-century America. They internalized their values from their parents and community life—church, family, neighbors, and local politics. These communities instilled an “inner gyroscope” that guided their decisions despite what others thought. The societies that these inner-directed people lived in were, according to Riesman, “societies dependent on inner-direction.” A key point we will return to momentarily.

Post-war America saw the rise of another category: other-directed people. Other-directed people look to their peers and contemporary social signals for guidance, slowly replacing church, family, neighbors, and local politics. This social category has what Riesman calls a “social radar” which is constantly scanning the environment for subtle shifts.

Inner-directed people suit societies which emphasize production while other-directed people suit societies which emphasize consumption. As more and more people find meaning in how others perceive them, society shifts to meet the demand for consumption. As I type this, there are many examples of what I mean: Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, short-form texting platforms like X. These feed our insatiable desire for other-direction. Society bends itself to what its people want. Prior to World War II, the community instilled value and meaning and thus society was reflective of this. As we will see, this major societal shift has had massive implications for younger generations—especially Gen Z and below. Riesman wrote his work in 1950, but we are now seeing the end result of the society’s shift from inner-direction to other-direction. And the results are not encouraging.

## **Gen Z and the Engendering of Loneliness**

For the past few years, discussions of Gen Z and loneliness have focused on gendered lines. I’ve even fallen into this trap. And while I don’t necessarily think it’s wrong, it is most certainly incomplete.

For example, there are specific gendered ways we deal with loneliness. Men tend to withdraw into themselves. Fearing the judgment of emasculation, they would rather handle it themselves than invite others into their struggles. Women, on the other hand, tend to invite others in, which can also lead to its own set of difficulties. In some ways Riesman’s thesis can also be a gendered thesis, though not a perfect fit.

Our first task is to ask why we tend to think of the loneliness crisis as a male phenomenon. For me, it’s the news. Dylan Roof, Tyler Robinson, and Bryan Kohberger are three of the most prominent recent examples. Three young men who were heavily engaged in online communities, and for the most part were loners. Severed from meaningful real-life communities.

So yes, the more prominent cases are certainly among young men, but this is perhaps an incomplete picture of what is happening. A recent study, sent to me by my friend [Rod Dreher](https://substack.com/@roddreher?utm%5Fsource=global-search), highlights this very point. The study called “[“The loneliness crisis isn’t just male,”](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/the-loneliness-crisis-isnt-just-male?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) was conducted by [*The Argument*](https://www.theargumentmag.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). They asked 23,000 young people various questions about loneliness—both how lonely they felt and how they dealt with feeling lonely. Here's how they conducted the study, which will be helpful for understanding the charts I've included:

> Over the course of three national surveys of registered voters conducted between August and December, we asked 15 questions — five per survey — centered around loneliness, mental health, anxiety, and socialization. Each response was mapped to a numerical value between -1 and 1, with -1 indicating the most antisocial and 1 indicating the most social response.  
>  
> With nearly 23,000 responses to survey questions distributed over more than 4,500 individual survey respondents, our dataset is rich and lends itself well to subgroup analysis.

The results are staggering. To start, they reveal that the loneliness crisis has been over-gendered. This gets back to my previous point: we’ve been conditioned to think of the crisis as a purely male issue. The narrative goes something like this: a young man feels increasingly antisocial so he goes home, searches online, finds a 4chan or Reddit thread, and accelerates into the manosphere, finding it easier to find connection online than in person. The study is not pushing against this narrative, merely showing that it is part of something larger: the crisis is defined by age; gender is merely a subfactor. Thus for our examples above, the key deciding factor is not that they are men, but that they are young.

The study also notes that there is a current “antisocial crisis” but that it is actually most common among young women. The chart below shows that among females 18–29, they predominantly identified their well-being as between “very negative” and “somewhat negative.”

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!X2Z9!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F461c5bfd-5a76-4e40-acad-b7bca4646764_1540x782.png)

I’ve argued [elsewhere](https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-radicalization-of-gen-z/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that this trend can be explained by the rise of several social movements which have uprooted young people and disintegrated their bonds to local communities. For men this leads them to connect with manosphere groups online, but for women, this leads to extended social media usage. Listen to some of the descriptions given in this study. Surveyors were asked to mark whether they disagreed or agreed with the following as a description of how they feel today: “I get easily overwhelmed.” “I dislike myself.” “I panic easily.” “I have a difficult time starting tasks.” “I am a worrier.” The results demonstrated that while there was a gender split, the real divide was age.

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SGQd!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb0d5f9b4-ce82-4db9-8617-29b44582590b_1576x816.png)

Women 30 and above were largely facing less emotional distress than women ages 18–29\. [Freya India](https://substack.com/@freyaindia?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) has aptly diagnosed this issue among Gen Z women. Her piece [“You Don’t Need to Document Everything”](https://substack.com/@freyaindia/p-140277246?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) shows that, to use Riesman’s thesis, women are pushed to become more other-directed people online. In other words, they are pressured to document and demonstrate value for others. In our consumption economy, this leads to endless “unboxing” reels and reels showing beautification tips. Young women are being pushed to be unhappy, and it shows. But, lest we simplify it too much, we should highlight that millennial women use social media too—so why are they emotionally better off?

*The Argument*’s survey had some interesting, yet unsurprising information to explain this. As [Jonathan Haidt](https://substack.com/@jonathanhaidt?utm%5Fsource=global-search) has documented already, the most socially isolated generations are those that grew up in a digital other-directed consumer society. The internet gave young people more information than they could handle, and taught them they need to demonstrate their value to others. This tradeoff ensured that value among their local communities no longer mattered. The internet opened up the world to them, and by doing so gave them the tantalizing, but unrealistic idea that they can be the next big influencer.

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Rodg!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb9467582-545b-4a68-b037-c00979f6c5f5_1610x804.png)

Millennials certainly deal with the same issues, but, especially young millennials bordering on Zillennials (aged 28–32), can still remember a time before the internet and all of the issues that came with it. The late 1990s was a time caught between the full-fledged other-directed consumer society and the older inner-directed tradition-oriented society. Caught on the precipice, we (I am one such case) are able to recall some of those older communities and find a way of escape. Sadly, Gen Z does not know many of these communities, and they are finding substitutes in the manosphere (for men), and Instagram/TikTok (for women).

## **The Need for Community**

*So where do we go from here?*

This is the prevailing question of the day. But in some ways it isn’t a new one. Tocqueville, in fact, predicted this when he, at the behest of the French government, traveled around 19th-century United States. He wrote:

> “In some countries, the inhabitants seem unwilling to avail themselves of the political privileges which the law gives them; it would seem that they set too high a value upon their time to spend it on the interests of the community....But if an American were condemned to confine his activities to his own affairs, he would be robbed of one half of his existence; he would feel an immense void in the life which he is accustomed to lead, and his wretchedness would be unbearable.”

Tocqueville understood that the push for individualism would be a temptation for the young nation. We can say that he was very correct in his analysis and also very wrong in just how severe the problem would be. What Tocqueville observed was early inner-directed individualism—people oriented by internal values but still embedded in robust local communities. What we have now is something far more corrosive: other-directed isolation, where young people are simultaneously hyperconnected and profoundly alone. The lonely crowd.

The solution, if there is one, must involve a return to what Riesman called "societies dependent on inner-direction." This doesn't mean rejecting technology wholesale (and yes, I do think there are serious issues with the Machine) or pretending we can return to 1950s America. Instead, it means rebuilding the institutions that give young people an internal gyroscope: churches, civic organizations, stable families, local political engagement, and face-to-face communities. Robert Nisbet, drawing on this theme from Tocqueville as well as Durkheim, writes that this dislodging from community will have a profound effect not only on the emotional well-being of the person, but on his spiritual well-being as well. He writes:

> “Man’s alienation from man must lead in time to man’s alienation from God. The loss of the sense of visible community in Christ will be followed by the loss of the sense of the invisible. The decline of community in the modern world has as its inevitable religious consequence the creation of masses of helpless, bewildered individuals who are unable to find solace in Christianity regarded merely as creed. The stress upon the individual, at the expense of the churchly community, has led remorselessly to the isolation of the individual, to the shattering of the man-God relationship, and to the atomization of personality. This is the testimony of a large number of theologians in our day.”

Reclaiming community is hard work. Even at the individual level, it takes time to create relationships. I'm not unfamiliar with this. Several years ago, I had just moved to a new area and was craving meaningful community. After church one day, I struck up a conversation with a guy who was my age and shared a love for history. We decided to try reading a history book and discussing it. This turned into two books, and two people turned into four. Eventually we were meeting regularly as a group. We're now on our tenth book. It takes effort to get out of bed at 6 am to meet as a group and talk about the book we're reading together, but in the end a communal bond is formed. We were created to live in community. My suggestion to young people is to start a reading group. It's a fairly low-stakes way to cultivate community.

Millennials and Gen Z are predisposed to other-direction. But there are some around today who remember what life was like before the dominance of other-direction. Another simple way to push against this is to ask questions and have conversations with older generations. There's something to be said for seeking wisdom from those who have gone before us, whether that's in person or through books. The only way to push against the "OK Boomer" stigma is to take time to learn about what life was like before our time. I've always loved history. If you haven't already sensed that, you will if you keep following my writing. I'm perennially interested in how we view the past and those who lived it. A sad reality is that there are only about 46,000 World War II veterans still living today in the United States. If we don't take intentional time to build relationships with those generations above us, we will not only lose what life was like before the internet, but we may fall into the same traps in our own lives.

In short, what I'm saying is that it requires intentionally choosing embodied community over digital connection, even when the former is more difficult and less immediately gratifying. For young people especially, it means learning to find value not in how others perceive you, but in who you are becoming within a community that knows you, challenges you, and holds you accountable.

The loneliness crisis isn’t just about young men or young women—it’s about a lonely generation raised to be skilled consumers in a society that has lost its capacity to create inner-directed citizens. Until we recognize this and work to rebuild the communities that create such citizens, we will continue producing skilled and lonely consumers, scanning their social radars for meaning that neither comes nor, when it does, fulfills.

[*originally published on Substack*](https://eddielarow.substack.com/p/the-lonely-generation)
### The Rise and Fall of Confession—and What It Reveals
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-confession-and-what-it-reveals/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:35:13.000Z
One of the more interesting books to appear last year was James M. O’Toole’s [*For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America*](https://amzn.to/3NdR8bu?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). It traces the development and diminishment of the sacrament of penance in the Catholic Church, expressed in the act of regular confession and embodied in confessional booths inside many church buildings. The book provides a fascinating look at what became one of the most identifiably Catholic practices in America in the middle of the last century, and then the freefall that followed—such a stunning numerical decline that it makes the cultural ethos of confession’s heyday seem like news from a foreign land.

O’Toole offers a few explanations for this precipitous decline, and contrary to the expectations of readers, he does not pinpoint the problem on the sexual abuse revelations of the early 2000s. (Those were just the final nails in the coffin.) The collapse began much earlier, due more to a loss of confidence in the church’s objective categories of sin and the embrace of therapeutic assumptions flowing from Freudian psychology, as well as the resistance of Catholic congregants to official Church teaching on contraception.

\>In [a review](https://firstthings.com/the-erosion-of-sin/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) for *First Things*, John Wilson, a Protestant, notes a similar trend among evangelicals—not in terms of Catholic penitential rites, but in a shifting view of sin, as all Americans now live in a world marked by what Philip Rieff deemed “the triumph of the therapeutic.” We no longer conceive of sin and righteousness in the older categories of obligation and duty (so that “talking in church” or “being late to prayer meeting” would even register as sins to confess); we’re more inclined to think of sin in subjective categories based on whatever harms or detracts from our personal spirituality. Because that subjectivity is so pervasive, [Ross Douthat believes](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/opinion/confession-catholic-knives-out.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) the Catholic rite has a future. Young people “may not have a rite like confession integrated into their lives in the routinized weekly or monthly pattern that once prevailed in American Catholicism, but they don’t regard such things as obsolete or unimportant, and they want sacramental possibilities to be there when they really need them.”

(As a side note, I’d love to see more books that track the rise and fall of specific spiritual practices in various denominations. For example, in the last quarter of the last century, most Baptist churches held Sunday night worship services, often in between other kinds of training events and fellowships. These services were replaced by Sunday night “activities,” and what followed as a gradual drop-off of Sunday night participation altogether. I’d love to see how and why these changes took place, and how potlucks and training meetings and worship services reinforced and shaped ecclesial identity. But that’s for another day. Back to confession…)

## **When Penance Becomes Punishment**

A couple of elements jumped out at me when reading O’Toole’s account, both heightened by my classically Protestant—particularly Neo-Calvinist—understanding of sin. To be clear: the Protestant Reformers did not uniformly oppose private confession. Confessing sins to a pastor could be valuable for the sake of assurance. But the Reformation framework stands in contrast with how the Roman Catholic practice developed and functioned in the 20th-century.

First, the one-to-one relationship between individual sins and acts of penance rests on the logic of making restitution after an infraction. To make things right, the penitent must submit to something “contrary to his own ease and pleasure to compensate for satisfying his own ease and pleasure” in violating God’s laws. For example, O’Toole writes, “the obligation to abstain from meat on Friday was a requirement, and so telling a sinner not to eat meat on an additional day of the week would be a proper penance for any confessed mortal sin.” Another example: if you sinned gravely in some way, you must attend Mass on a day in addition to Sunday.

This mindset reaches back to the medieval era that brought about precise sentences (often called “tariffs”), based on the idea of a heavenly “treasury of merit.” In debt and in need of forgiveness, the sinner could borrow merit from Jesus or Mary or the saints, by following instructions to reduce time in purgatory and have the slate wiped clean. At the height of confession in 20th-century America, these penitential requirements had been largely reduced to prayers (Hail Mary’s, the Lord’s Prayer, the Rosary), seen as “a good medicine for any moral evil.” O’Toole writes:

> For the normal run of sins, priests assigned a simple penance that was easy for most parishioners to accomplish. In a matter of a few minutes, they could say the required prayers either at the church’s altar rail or in any unoccupied pew, and then they would be ready to leave for home or the day’s other occupations.

What strikes me about these penitential prescriptions, despite the well-intentioned medicine analogy, is how they cast prayer or church attendance as punishment—or at least something unpleasant that must be endured in order to make restitution for one’s sins. I find this counterproductive. Prayer may be medicinal, but it should not taste like cough syrup. Communion with God and fellowship with his people are meant to be enjoyed and savored; they are not merely external rites we must undergo if we want to be free of guilt.

Mark Galli, an evangelical convert to Catholicism, has not made peace with this aspect of confession even now. [He writes:](https://amzn.to/4sH0wom?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

> In my experience, I’ve not been impressed with priests’ attention to the value of penance. Especially after I confess something that I find deeply shameful… I’ve been told to pray a handful of Hail Marys (not even the complete Rosary, as if I couldn’t bear such a penance) or to read a Psalm. I’m sorry to say that this does not cut it if one is interested in growing in Christ. If I have any criticism of contemporary Catholicism as I’ve experienced it, it’s that it believes too casually in the grace of God.

Galli locates the problem in a faulty view of grace. But that leads me to what I think is the deeper issue: a superficial grasp of sin.

## **Not Just Sins, but Sin**

The confessional practices of last century, with acts of restitution corresponding to acts of sin, sought to increase a believer’s sensitivity to sin with a corresponding impulse to confess. But the result can be, ironically, a diminishment of sin’s seriousness and pervasiveness.

This problem isn’t confined to Catholicism. I remember a fierce disagreement I once had with a pastor at a pizzeria in northwestern Romania when he told me there were whole days he went without sinning. I was incredulous. We do not know ourselves well enough to uncover our deepest motivations, which are shot through with selfishness or self-righteousness even when prompting ostensibly good deeds. King David, the man after God’s heart, pleaded for deliverance even from secret and hidden sins—the wrongdoing he may have been unaware of. To my pastor-friend, who was sure he could go days without sinning in thought, word, and deed, I responded simply: you do not know yourself.

The crux of the Reformation lies in the first of Luther’s 95 Theses, where the Reformer declares Christ’s call for all of life to be marked by repentance. The flipside of that vision is the recognition that all of life, apart from Christ, is marked by sin. The corruption runs deep. Which is why, even after conversion, Augustine acknowledges how the light of Christ reveals continual caverns of sin and temptation. “I will confess then what I know of myself, I will confess also what I know not of myself. And that because what I do know of myself, I know by Thy shining upon me; and what I know not of myself, so long know I not it, until my darkness be made as the noon-day in Thy countenance.”

The problem we face, even after conversion, is the lingering presence of *sin*—not just sins. Sin is far greater than a temporary lapse; it’s a chronic disease. It goes beyond a one-time mistake or occasional slip; it’s a pervasive condition that affects every aspect of our being, showing up in our thoughts, desires, and actions, and leading to brokenness and dysfunction in our relationships with God, others, and ourselves.

In [his classic work on this subject](https://amzn.to/3LyLpwd?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), Cornelius Plantinga defines a sin as “any act—any thought, desire, emotion, word, or deed—or its particular absence, that displeases God and deserves blame.” But immediately following that comes sin in general as “the disposition to commit sins,” which also displeases God and deserves blame. Sin as a power corrupts human thought, word, and deed.

So, when I confess, I’m confessing more than particular acts; I’m throwing myself on the mercy of God because of my disposition, the poison of sin that pervades my inner self. Daily repentance, then, means more than confessing my sins. It means confessing my sin. It goes deeper than accounting for sinful acts; it acknowledges my sinfulness.

Seeing sin in this light means our proclivities are impossible to fully define and our particular sins impossible to count. “Lord, if you kept an account of iniquities, Lord, who could stand?” the psalmist marvels (Psalm 130:3). Our iniquity runs deeper than we can tally. A higher view of God’s holiness and a deeper view of our sinfulness should lead us to see, with Paul, our wretchedness—wondering, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?”—before exclaiming, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” as we fall on his mercy.

## **Beyond Sin Management**

One of the perennial temptations for all Christians, Catholic or Protestant, is to foster and reinforce a life of sin-management. The result is an impoverished imagination and a superficial reckoning with sin, where our good deeds cancel out our bad deeds. Perhaps this is why, often when I speak with Catholic friends—and yes, too often when I speak with nominal Bible-Belt evangelicals—I find salvation described in terms of a heavenly spreadsheet where good deeds must outweigh the bad. The sin lists may vary, but the result is the same: sin reduced to outward actions—drinking or smoking or dancing or lusting—when what the gospel actually calls for is a life-altering repentance that trusts the word of the grace of God in Christ.

A life of repentance is far more encompassing than a life of penance. In [*The Gospel Way Catechism*](https://gospelwaycatechism.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), Thomas West and I define repentance as “not merely regret over sin’s consequences or our failure to live up to our standards. Repentance is turning away from evil—seeing sin in light of God’s holiness and experiencing conviction in response to his kindness.”

The collapse of confession in Catholic America may seem like a story about Rome, but it reveals something true about us all. We are always looking for ways to manage our behaviors rather than to confess our condition. Whether it’s the previous generation’s one-to-one relationship of sin and penitence, or the current self-focused shrinking of sin to whatever diminishes our self-defined spirituality, we often settle for quick and easy remedies instead of the deeper work of repentance. We reach for techniques to avoid transformation.

But the gospel does not hand us a system for balancing moral accounts. Neither does it give us a stairstep to more satisfying personal spirituality. The gospel offers mercy for sinners who know they are bankrupt and who know their self-assessment is always tainted by self-deception. Unless we learn from well-intentioned but mistaken practices, both past and present, we will keep settling for penance instead of repentance, balancing the ledger instead of basking in grace.
### Magpie 3: Gender and Kwaku’s Car
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/magpie-3-gender-and-kwakus-car/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:35:14.000Z
David Edgerton, [*The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900*](https://www.amazon.com/Shock-Old-Technology-Global-History/dp/0199832617?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)(2006).

Dorothy Littell Greco, [*For the Love of Women: Uprooting and Healing Misogyny in America*](https://zondervanacademic.com/products/for-the-love-of-women?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (2025).

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of misfortune, must be in want of a theory. This theory must explain her discomfort. It should give an account of the temperature at which offices are set and the misfortune of any particular woman who is not promoted at her job. It should explain why female pianists injure their wrists more than males—due to the keyboard span on the piano, which is more suited to the size of male hands. It should correct the clothing design of firemen and the military, as well as accommodate for the inconveniences of women’s reproductive cycles and fertility. This theory should universally explain any personal comments that any woman might experience as hostile, uncomfortable, or uncalled for.

It’s a high bar. In *For the Love of Woman*, Dorothy Littell Greco has pursued such a theory. Identifying it as misogyny, Greco points to the pervasive and persistent reality of male superiority and female inferiority that is prevalent in every sphere of life. My concern is less whether her theory fails to track onto reality. My concern is what happens if her theory succeeds.

Critiques of misogyny have been pervasive in popular literature of the last decade. Perhaps the most celebrated is Kate Manne’s *Down Girl*: *The Logic of Misogyny* (2017), which rambles from observations about Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh, Andrew Puzder, and Elliot Rodger, the young adult “incel” who murdered several young women in California in 2014.

Manne’s book has much to recommend it. She argues that we move beyond a “naïve view” of misogyny—one where “misogyny is primarily a property of individual misogynists, who are prone to hate women qua women.” This hatred moves beyond particular instances of despicable women toward a hatred of women as a category.

The limitations of such a view, according to Manne, is that accusing someone of misogyny would entail finding out if they, in fact, disliked women. It would become a therapeutic endeavor as much as a theoretical one. Manne’s view, as well as Greco’s, is that misogyny does not reside in the minds or consciousness of individuals but rather in social structures as a whole. It is the lingering “law enforcement” wing of residual patriarchy, the codes and norms left over from a world where men were in charge.

With these assumptions, it is easy to give an account of such a world. Indeed, the design of piano keyboards and iPhones, the lack of consistent maternity leave policy and the inattention to medical care designed for women’s bodies would seem to be downstream of a world that was designed by and for men. Have you encountered hostility at work? It is misogyny. Do you struggle to keep track of your children’s school paperwork? Also misogyny. Does your husband always forget to sort through the mail? Misogyny.

Greco’s desire is for Christians to recognize and address this lingering patriarchal design of the world in order to promote the flourishing of women. To address the difficulties unwed mothers face, she suggests that the government provide free condoms, subsidize childcare, and cover the cost of full maternity leave. To honor women, her argument goes, we need to redesign the world to ameliorate the difficulties women face.

This desire to move the cost of care from the individual and the family toward the government is a common one in recent feminist work (see *Mere Orthodoxy*’s discussion of Leah Libresco Sargeant’s work on the subject [here](https://mereorthodoxy.com/dependent-in-the-first-place), [here](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-presence-of-christ-in-our-dependence), and [here](https://mereorthodoxy.com/what-has-war-to-do-with-motherhood)—with Sargeant’s own response [here](https://mereorthodoxy.com/leah-sargeant-replies)). But it also reflects an inattention to the deeper logic at work within critiques of the world as “misogynist.” Kate Manne’s work on misogyny insists that women have “equal moral purchase” to men, and that the expectation that women are caring and nurturing exhibits a “tyranny of vulnerability.”

With regard to “equal moral purchase”, Manne offers a thought experiment. If cis men were to become pregnant, she asks, how would the workplace treat them? Would they encounter the workplace as a “man’s world”, or one more conducive to their reproductive status? This question unravels what, for me, is a weak point in both accounts of misogyny.

I suspect that it is in fact the very case that women’s bodies conceive that has led to the uneven treatment and consideration of professional women. To borrow a quote attributed to Oswald Chambers, the “unguarded strength” of female reproduction—which grants women a certain form of visibility, status, dignity and power—can easily become a “double weakness” insofar as reproduction brings with it also certain demands, needs, and complications. Whether it is design or accident, the fact that women conceive and gestate children will necessarily bear with it certain needs and demands that only women hold. The system that is thought to take place due to this reality—what is called misogyny—is really, then, a hatred for the weak.

Sargeant has in her book identified this as such. But even in her emphasis on dependence, she mimics the same sort of optimism that Manne and Greco’s critiques contain. Manne speaks of the possibility that reproductive labor might one day, through the advent of reproductive technologies, be shared across genders. Sargeant calls for a more vigorous and supportive social safety net that will buffer so many of the costs that fall disproportionately on women. But for every recognition of dependence as the state of all humans, male and female alike, there is an equal but missing recognition of *limits* as the state of all human creatures. Persons, after all, are not abstract considerations. They are irreducibly particular. They exist only as themselves. “Misogyny” gives a weak account of what it means to be a person; and any optimism regarding how the state might buffer the needs of persons by my read must be undertaken with the limits implicit in such an endeavor leading the charge. Put more simply, we are as limited as we are dependent. We are for that reason just as likely to make things worse with our attempt to lessen the burden of care as we are to alleviate it. Worse, we might in fact come to experience each other as burdens, or to consider that such burdensome care is the responsibility of the state.

We have forced our bodily needs into systems that don’t admit the reality of difference. We’ve then theorized these systems and made them total. A world where every pregnant woman becomes the Virgin Mary serves none of us well.

It would be unfair to criticize Greco’s book wholesale, alongside quick blows at Leah Libresco Sargeant and Kate Manne, without giving an attempt at my deeper concerns that linger in all three. After all, I too have experienced the uneven treatment and expectations of a professional world that feels “built for men.” To work in such a world includes discomfort. It can feel stretching. But theories make demands that individual persons cannot comply with, and I refuse to adhere to a view of the world that is so boring in its demands.

It may seem unlikely to take the Peugeot 504 as a solution to this problem of heavy-handed theory. It’s even unlikelier still to take *this* Peugeot—a French import to Ghana, now owned by an entrepreneurial taxi driver named Kwaku—as the illustration. For Kwaku’s car had veered quite far from its original design. It has undergone repairs that were not quick fixes as much as complete alterations, as David Edgerton explains in *The Shock of the Old*: “All the fuses in the Peugeot were repaired with copper wire, because original ones could not be found or were too expensive. At several places nails were used as lock pins. Some rubber tubes were fixed with iron wire, whereas others which evidently were out of use were closed with old spark-plugs, butterfly nuts or even pieces of wood.”

As was common in cars in Ghana, Kwaku’s car had been repaired in a way that relied on what David Edgerton calls “creole technologies.” Creole technologies invert expectations about what makes a “technology” useful. A technology is often assumed to be novel, replacing the old and insufficient with something new, profoundly different, and clearly superior. Such a view of technology pairs well with a view of progress as inevitable, as an advancement distinct from the past.

Kwaku’s car presents an alternative view of technology. Instead of seeking routine maintenance, Kwaku added greasy paper to cushion the worn-out bearings. He considered using soap-suds instead of brake fluid. He sometimes sought prayer or exorcisms for the car’s difficulties. His “creole” techniques might be haphazard workarounds, but they kept his car running and his livelihood as a taxi-driver intact. Kwaku “raised the oil level in his shock-absorbers beyond normal so that he could drive more comfortably on roads full of potholes” and even relied on his body to smell, to suck petrol out of the gas tank to attempt a repair or even to stick his tongue to the battery to feel if it was charged.

Kwaku relied on very old, even primitive methods to find solutions to new problems. David Edgerton describes “creole technologies” as workarounds that are “earthy, local, genuine, vulgar, and popular.” They take account of the facts on the ground and the materials at hand, and privilege what works over the false promise of a permanent, perfect solution. Kwaku’s car offers a perfect example of “creole” technologies because it reflects this pattern of ad hoc, creative interventions. But it also reveals another bias in academic work—towards the theoretical and away from world of material things. Scholarship on vehicles in Africa shares this bias toward theory, thinking about cars sociologically or symbolically. In doing so, scholars can overlook the way the car actually functions in everyday life. Just like theories of misogyny, scholarly theories about “Africa” and about “gender” prefer to consider reality at a remove.

Kwaku’s relationship with his car focused on the car itself. His relationship to it derived not from a focus on an “ideal” car, but from an observation of the vehicle as it exists. It was moved to action by noting the limitations of the vehicle as it interacted with varying terrain—the Peugeot was now driving not in France, but in Ghana—and invented repairs and hacks that addressed the problems that occurred. In this way, the “creole technology” of Kwaku’s car repair revealed a knowledge of the Peugeot that was actually greater than that held by a licensed mechanic. Because Kwaku responded to the car’s needs as they appeared, he was not stuck in a constant cycle of attempted repair, a cycle that can sometimes cause further harm. Neither was he alienated by the kind of “blind confidence” that can arise from someone who regularly drives a car that they have never attempted to get to know. He was not alienated from his technology.

Kwaku’s car and Edgerton’s “creole technologies” may appear an odd entry point to Dorothy Greco’s *For the Love of Women*, but I can think of no better one. I cannot say it is a *bad* book—it is clearly written and peppered with compelling illustrations that serve to support Greco’s point. The problem is that Greco’s thesis—that misogyny is endemic in America and especially in the church—is not that compelling. If misogyny exists, I am against it. But that in 2025 the persistence of misogyny is “subtle and insidious,” creating uneven health outcomes, professional prospects, and spiritual harm remains difficult for me to accept. The book reads to me as if it were alienated from the experience of many people for whom “gender” and the relationship between men and women is much more of a workaround, much more earthy and particular, much more “creole”, than she wishes to consider. I find the categories—"misogyny” and its wholesale corruption, as well as the attendant repair—too brittle a tool for the repair needed.

Critiques of misogyny fall prey to the same critiques of technological progress that David Edgerton takes up. Edgerton argues that technologies do not move linearly, taking the place of prior technologies completely and rendering the former obsolete. Rather, old technologies stick around and some widely-celebrated “new” technologies fail. Additionally, some technologies that are new take hold simply because they are trendy, and not because they are better than what existed prior; in fact, they are often worse. They might reflect, too, a widespread preference for replacement over repair. By contrast, to repair something, as Kwaku came to find out, requires both a knack for improvisation and a knowledge of the technology and the conditions it would encounter. Kwaku observed what was needed and figured it out.

What I think is happening with the misogyny critiques, writ large, is this sort of misunderstanding of technological progress that Edgerton is critiquing. The assumption is that the *new*—in this face, gender norms inflected by feminism—will inevitably outpace and replace the former. But in this preference for novelty, what has been ignored is the sort of skillful craftsmanship of those who came before us and could just wing it because they understood how the machine worked. The preference for replacement has led us to think we could craft a new system that would be missing the weaknesses and flaws of the former. But it turns out the flaws are just part of the world. The “blind confidence” of the man who seeks out the dealership when the check-engine light goes on reveals not knowledge but ignorance; he is alienated from the machine because has not the first idea how it works. So, too, the doubly employed couple who seek out a new theory of gender when they are bickering after too many sleepless nights with a new baby. What they need is not a new theory, but maybe a more skillful observation of the world and its limits, of the facts on the ground. Perhaps more paid leave would help a bit. But more likely, demands are just the shape of the world. Attempts to make caregiving less demanding—especially in order that we might be more skillful employees—is one of the few things able to make a radical out of me.

Settling on “misogyny” as an account of what is wrong with the world, to me, is like preferring the novelty of a machine that “just works” to the reality of a world that is riven through with unpredictable demands. Like a car, such a system alienates us from the reality we are trying to move across. These theories also demand compliance. Any workplace friction or disappointment can be counted toward its tally, any interpersonal difficulty seen as evidence of its existence. For the same reason, these theories are non-falsifiable. When any experience of cross-sex friction can count toward misogyny’s tally, there is simply no way to discredit its account.

Like divinity, misogyny does not admit of degrees. And like technological progress, it prefers the shape of its own novel forms over the haphazard workarounds of former generations. These workarounds weren’t always attractive, but they got a lot of people where they needed to go.

Like Kwaku’s car, gender is a wide collection of experiences, genetics, dispositions, aptitudes and culture. It creates many and vast opportunities for cross-sex relations, ones we might emulate and ones we might not wish to. But we cannot grasp at universal diagnoses and solutions for realities that are so embodied and so particular. When we seek out and settle for accounts of misogyny as “what’s wrong with us,” we risk preferring theory that will “fix” us for the abiding, demanding realities of the lives we’ve been given. It seems sometimes that such accounts demand a world that cannot exist. Lamenting the shape of a piano keyboard, designed around 1700, and using it as evidence of a bias against women is more than just chronological snobbery. It’s a demand for a world that was built with only your interests in mind. Some men’s hands are too big; some women’s too small. Might that not be what makes us interesting?

Like Kwaku’s car, we need to jerry-rig our own ways through the world that we have. It might be gritty and a bit unreliable—but also like Kwaku’s car, it’ll get you where you need to go.
### Why It Is Difficult to Talk About Ethics of the Body
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-it-is-difficult-to-talk-about-ethics-of-the-body/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:35:18.000Z
*"When I came in and sat down and looked around, I realized it was a Roman Church full of plaster statues and bad art, realistic art. I hated the statues; all the emphasis on the human body. I was trying to escape from the human body and all it needed... I saw the bodies standing around me on all the altars... and I remembered that they believed in the resurrection of the body, the body that I wanted destroyed forever.*

*But could my vapor love that scar? And then I began to want that body that I hated, but only because it could love that scar. We can love with our minds but can we love only with our minds?"*

\~ Graham Greene, *The End of the Affair*

What do we immediately think of when ethical discussions around the body, sexuality, and procreation arise? What intuitions immediately surface? We get a layer or two underneath these reactions by asking, “What’s behind that?”

In Carl Trueman’s 2020 book *The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self*, he writes,

> Central to understanding the world in which we live is the concept of the social imaginary. This concept highlights that the tremendous changes we are witnessing can be interpreted through a variety of lenses. First, it is important to understand that most of us do not think about the world in the way we do because we have reason from first principles, to a comprehensive understanding of the cosmos. Rather, we generally operate on the basis of intuitions that we have unconsciously absorbed from the culture around us.

Conversations around fertility and bioethics fascinate me. It’s not so much the explicit arguments or official teaching which intrigue me, but the reflexive ways in which these discussions often unfold.

*The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self* is an exploration of our current air of expressive individualism, the sexual revolution, and how the confluence has given rise to phenomena such as the normalization of transgenderism. Much of this book echoed Abigail Favale’s *The Genesis of Gender* as a “how we got here” type of journey.

For instance, he writes,

> The increasing power of technology "fueled a view that the world was increasingly the raw material of human creativity, not the act of divine creation. The social imaginary emerging in the 19th century was one that intuitively placed human beings as the sovereigns at the center of a universe to which they could give shape and significance.

Issues surrounding [“biblical sexuality”](https://mereorthodoxy.com/nashville-statement/), [in vitro fertilization](https://mereorthodoxy.com/responding-dr-wayne-grudem-vitro-fertilization), [surrogacy](https://mereorthodoxy.com/surrogacy-challenge-fair-mindedness), [transgenderism](https://matthewleeanderson.substack.com/p/723-the-body-god-gives) or the general [culture of death and absolute procreative control](https://matthewleeanderson.substack.com/p/684-assorted-thoughts-about-the-douthat) provide opportunity for reflection on which areas we see as morally urgent (if at all), and which are left out in matters of sexuality.

What struck me while going through this book was how much of it illuminated patterns in discussions of fertility and bioethics with many conservative Christians. The prominence of emotivism as the sole driver of moral action is one. The reality of human nature and its relationship to medicine is another. And the two feed off each other.

## Emotivism and Untethered Compassion

Trueman:

> Human beings may like to think they still believe in good and bad, but these concepts are unhitched from any transcendent framework and merely reflect personal, emotional, and psychological preferences. In practice, it is we who decide our own preferred ends—and shape our ethics to that purpose. Any greater sense of purpose, any transcendent teleology, is now dead and buried.

Most conversations we now have about the medicalization of fertility — whether suppressing or erasing it through medicalized forms of contraception, or forcing it through in vitro fertilization — begin with an emotional framing. This is simply how we are as humans. It is normal and is not in and of itself bad! Such sentiments have their place in the workings of the soul. These deep wells of emotion and desire are, however, nothing stable to build moral reasoning upon.

Trueman continues:

> What is true about abortion can be extrapolated into other areas. In our contemporary society, sexual morality has become largely a matter of pragmatic considerations. Will this make me happy? How can I attenuate the risks? Does it harm someone else's psychological wellbeing? And because these measures are always changing and are frequently subjective, they provide no stable framework for ethics.

In cases of removing fertility through medicalized forms of contraception, there are many common reasons people give for avoiding pregnancy generally. We likely know them ourselves. For our purposes, we won’t focus on the discernment process or particular reasons. The point being, we can see this is simply where many conversations begin: “I feel a certain way about X reality. We have a reason to want X.”

In cases of forcing a chance at pregnancy through in vitro fertilization, there is most certainly a couple in the depths of grief. They have likely been bowled over by deep longings their bodies have not allowed them to realize. Of course these are valid emotions anyone would have, and any one of us would experience the same if put in the position of being open to children and not receiving them. Again, this is simply where conversations begin: “I feel a certain way about X reality. We have a reason to want X.”

In [a long essay](https://lifeconsidered.substack.com/p/the-ideology-of-machines-medicine) exploring the morphing of the healing profession over time, I wrote:

> Oliver O’Donovan, in his 1984 book [*Begotten or Made?*](https://davenantinstitute.org/begotten-or-made?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), a treatment of personhood and the fitting boundaries of reproductive techniques, identifies how a blind virtue of compassion—when untethered from anything beyond itself—can become the driving motivator for action: ‘Compassion is the virtue of being moved to action by the sight of suffering–that is to say, by the infringement of passive freedoms. It is a virtue that circumvents thought, since it prompts us immediately to action. It is a virtue that presupposes that an answer has already been found to the question “What needs to be done?,” a virtue of motivation rather than of reasoning. As such it is the appropriate virtue for a liberal revolution, which requires no independent thinking about the object of morality, only a very strong motivation to its practice.’

In Trueman’s book, he proposes that we have been a therapeutic culture for a long time. In the absence of a sacred order this means Psychological Man reigns, and is guided by the sentiments of the self.

He writes,

> These cultures are really just therapeutic cultures, the cultures of Psychological Man. The only moral criterion that can be applied to behavior is whether it produces feelings of wellbeing in the individual.” “Ethics, therefore, becomes a function of feeling… because there is no greater purpose that can be justified in any ultimately authoritative sense. ...  
>  
> In a world of empathy-based ethics, the moral sense is basically the aesthetic sense. And that means when the sacred order collapses, morality is simply a matter of taste, not truth.

A collapsed sacred order. Feelings of well-being. Untethered compassion. Empathy-based ethics.

Our emotions desire a certain end. Pathos longs for something to be true, to change reality to fit the desire. This is understandable! Untethered from any further sense of what is good about the created order, however, Christians are just as prone to thinking like those who are not seeking to live before the face of God their Maker.

Trueman observes:

> In this context, it is interesting to note how much of the debate about sexuality in Christian circles likewise tends to operate in terms of personal narratives, isolated from any larger metaphysical or theological framework. Even in the church, personal stories have a powerful, emotional impact that can easily transform the chief end of human beings into the personal happiness that stands at the heart of the therapeutic culture.

He notes the arguments that same-sex and transgender couples now deserve the right to their own families via assisted reproductive technology. It is interesting to observe how many conservations around procreation and IVF for other couples hold similar sentiments.“This, in turn, points to the function of the family as being primarily therapeutic. It is about the sense of psychological well-being of the parents.”

Emotivism in the realm of ethics is also amplified when we are confronted with moral dilemmas and potential action “at the bedside,” as it were. Proactive approaches are always better than reactive ones. Times of urgency and emotional pressure are never helpful times to be confronted with issues never before considered. We need the moral sensibilities of our bodily life shaped before then.

Trueman writes that, "The movement of sexual problems from the sphere of morality to the sphere of medicine is one that continues today, as society's strong preference for technical—rather than moral—approaches indicates."

For our purposes, that means there is a need to provide theological, practical, and relational tools for navigating the reality of our bodies in ways that retain a sense of their sacredness over mere utility. Farming out our imaginations about sexuality to rudimentary sex ed in high school and medical professionals has not worked out swimmingly thus far. We need truer, more whole stories. After all, ignorance during times when such knowledge doesn’t seem pressing can later become a matter of urgency. A lack of thought in the beginning will lead to barren formation in the end. These are simultaneously physiological, relational, and ethical issues.

Consider the girl (or woman) who has never learned the basics of her reproductive cycle, what symptoms are concerning, which deserve proper investigation and care, or what ovulation and the monthly window of fertility is, or how she can expect such variations throughout the month to affect her physically and mentally.

Consider the engaged couple who has never learned or considered the same—and weren't encouraged to—prior to marriage.

We know what happens with women and girls who have physical complaints or concerns in most doctor’s offices. We also know what happens with spouses who haven’t been taught to mutually learn and respect their bodies in marriage. Medicalization in the form of hormonal contraception can be a bandaid given from providers for deeper maladies which deserve deeper investigation and care. Such medicalization is a way to offload ongoing participation and responsibility, or of sidestepping the annoyance of friction and the need for attentiveness in sexual relationships.

Consider the couple struggling with infertility. This is an emotional—and simultaneously physiological—experience. They may not have considered, prior to their very real crisis, the workings or health of their reproductive systems. They may not have been directed to providers trained in[ Restorative Reproductive Medicine or NaProTechnology](https://lifeconsidered.substack.com/p/the-female-body-a-compilation)—which aim to live up to the name of the healing profession when it comes to seeking restoration of both overall and reproductive health. Most traditional medical providers have limited tools and time for investigating root causes of infertility. Therefore, many are referred to IVF without so much as a proper diagnosis (let alone investigation) into particular, common causes of “unexplained infertility.”

We need to consider our bodies—and help our fellow Christians do the same—prior to becoming deer in headlights under the weight of desperate, emotional pressure to instrumentalize our bodies. If our bodies matter at all to our faith then this, too, is spiritual work.

## Human Nature

Trueman:

> Take away the idea of universal human nature, and ethics sends into the subjective emotivism that MacIntyre sees as characterizing our present age. Empathy on its own is liable not just to sentiment, but to degenerate into a sentimentalism that simply wants other people to be happy in their own way, on their own terms. It is the collapse of this meta-concept of human nature that will prove so critical...

What things are behind many of our assumptions when talking about the body?

Kelly Garrison, in her article [A Return to Love](https://thegrandinquisitor.substack.com/p/a-return-to-love), writes a gentle plea for clearer vision about what is true of human nature and thus of our approach to sexuality: “any lessons about sex and anatomy must focus on the body as it is—that is, vulnerable, fertile, mortal—not what we wish it to be.”

What are we wishing the body would be? What might be preventing us from living within the limits of the body as it is? In essence, “What’s behind that?” is an invaluable question.

## The Glorious Goodness of It

The word “just” can strip the beauty out of anything special, intimate, or sacred. It’s worth asking how we have come to feel that way about our bodies. It’s “just some flesh, just biological functions.” We do not believe this about other matters of sexuality. I wonder at what point we believe the body does start being meaningful?

We will leave that to others embracing the issue of embodiment more broadly. I remain fascinated by the things we do to our fertility, and the practice of procreation outside of the marital bond.

## The Medicalized Transformation of It

In her essay [Religio Medici](https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-32/religio-medici?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), Kristin M. Collier explains:

> Our bodies, our histories, our relationships are given before they are chosen. They have a radically “thrown” quality; we come into the world already dependent on parents and other caregivers, on the natural world, on social structures we did not design, and above all on God. Our lives are not things we own so much as vocations we receive. To forget this is not only a theological error; it has practical consequences that are both numerous and baleful. When the body is seen as raw material for self-expression or self-construction, any limit—mortality, disability, vulnerability, infertility, aging—becomes a kind of insult. Technology then appears as the liberator that can free us from these indignities. The goal of medicine shifts from caring for the body as given and toward redesigning it… The “can” of technological possibility quickly becomes a “should.”

Consider especially her comment about the limits of our body becoming a sort of insult. What parts of our humanity insult, distress, or annoy us? In what ways do we think medical technology ought not just heal what is amiss, but free us from parts of our nature we no longer want?

Trueman again:

> The idea of self-creation, that we can shape our essences by acts of will, is deeply embedded in the way we think... weakening, and even abolishing, the idea that human nature is a given—something that has an intrinsic, non-negotiable authority over who we are.

Medical techniques and attitudes have been reshaping our view of our bodies, sexuality, and procreation in ways that have nothing to do with healing or aiming toward true health. Rather, the healing profession has, in various ways, turned into a means of fulfilling psychological desires of what we want to be true about ourselves.

C. S. Lewis draws a similar parallel in *The Abolition of Man*.

> There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious...

Perhaps we were meant to form our souls to reality. But now, we bend the nature of the body to the will.

"...then the problem becomes one of the body, one to be treated with medication and surgery. Technology, therefore, makes the whole claim plausible. Technology, one might even say, defines ontology." This defining of ontology, Trueman goes on to observe, is “fueled by a powerful individualism, and facilitated by a technological ability to manipulate biological realities… thanks to surgery and hormones, and modern medical breakthroughs, we can now plausibly separate gender from sex and even revise the relationship of the sexes to the means of reproduction.”

In a word, “Take away the notion of human nature, and all that is left is free-floating subjective sentiment.” Likewise, in an [interview at the Public Discourse,](https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2025/11/99578/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) Angela Franks shares that,

> The modern rejection of substance rejected the need to have linguistic clarity around who and what the triune God and Jesus Christ are. I think the motive for that is really just the modern obsession with freedom. Because if I am not limited by a certain nature, by my human nature, if I am not limited by being this finite substance, then this whole new world of possibilities opens up. ... Yet transgenderism is only the latest and most extreme form of this movement… it is a symptom, not a cause.

We can have sex stripped of procreative powers before its time. We can have the gratification of biological children obtained through any means necessary.

Hayden Nesbit writes in his reflection on [Resonance and the Psalms](https://mereorthodoxy.com/resonance-and-the-psalms?success=true),

> Indeed, one of the casualties of trying to control the nature of the world is that we distort its true nature. Creation by nature speaks to us, but we have rendered it mute by our incessant attempt to master it through control.

In muting the design of the created order, it also seems possible to mute our moral sensibilities. It’s hard to talk about something one can no longer see. Medicalizing our sexuality—whether to be rid of fertility or to force a pregnancy—is so commonplace, it is no longer a matter of robust consideration. It no longer factors in our spiritual or moral formation. It is not just underappreciated. It is often not even on the map.

Why does this matter? Why should we care about any of this? Erik Varden offers an answer:

> Faith in the Son of God made man requires of me an embodied response, made concrete in a life of conversion, not just in the rehearsal of abstract sublimities.

## Our Own Formation

What does the Christian life consist of? Is it rehearsing abstract sublimities of theological truths? Does it include embodied responses, humble faith made concrete?

I’ve been thinking about spiritual discipleship and how moral formation goes hand in hand with it. In this way, our inner dispositions find outward expression.

Bodily and particularly sexual ethics reinforce ways of being in the world. They reinforce what we believe about what it means, or doesn’t, to live set apart lives. They reinforce what we think it means to live as awe-filled, obedient, and very loved creatures “before the face of God.”

Do we see the face behind such an invitation?

We need the orthodoxy of proper theology and doctrine. We need the orthopraxy of right living and moral action—to show our orthodoxy makes sense in the world. We also need the orthopathy of ordered passion and affections. In *The Abolition of Man*, C.S. Lewis describes this dance when he says “the head rules the belly through the chest.”

Our bodies were designed with intention and declared good. Our sexual lives in marriage were meant to be nourishing of the marriage itself. Of course, this comes by way of pleasure and subsequent emotional bonding. If we look at God’s intention for the blessing and sanctification that is offered in marriage, I can’t help but think we were meant to press into the reality of being one flesh in the sharing of our procreative potential. I can’t help thinking the friction of getting to navigate our biological workings of our bodies is actually a feature, not a bug to dispose of as we wish. Pleasure is one way we are united. The other is in the way we handle and communicate the reality of our shared fertility.

The prospect of this confronts us with many emotions about many things. Physiological factors ebb and flow throughout the month. Mood changes affect our communication. We have desires, frustrations, longings, or fears about pregnancy and parenting. We all struggle in what to talk about and when to do so.

These are also invitations to be formed as a couple and individually into the likeness of Christ. How closely do husbands pay attention to the bodily life of their wife, as one flesh with her, as a husband living with her in an understanding way? How closely do both pay attention to the layer or two beneath longings, fears, frustrations, desires for control, openness to God’s voice? How will both be confronted with the disposition behind related issues in our hearts and marriages? Bumping up against the grain of our humanity—and especially the procreative nature of sexuality—can reveal much. How will we find out what’s there if we refuse this invitation of patience and forbearance?

How else does formation work except ultimately through our bodies? Formation happens through what we choose to do—the habituation of the fruit of the Spirit, the habituation of virtue. Christian tradition says we practice virtue to gain the virtue.

Of course we want what we want immediately. We don't want to keep choosing it over and over. We don’t want to keep having to deal with our pesky bodies. But there are challenging, tender, soul-stretching experiences we miss out on with our spouse and with God when we are not willing to do that.

We are catechized by what we believe, but perhaps more so by what we do. What we do in the body catechizes the soul at a deep level. It can catechizes the conscience. Things spoken, heard, permitted, practiced, endorsed over time forms prominent grooves, dulling us to what might otherwise have disturbed us.

Like the unassuming but steady stream of water, our souls are formed for ill but also for good. I wonder how much we’ve lost the ability to notice the water itself—this “social imaginary”—which wears grooves into our personal and communal intuitions.

[In an essay](https://blessedendurance.substack.com/p/five-sons-hope-and-reconciliation) considering paths of spiritual formation, Leah says “Christians know we are to grow in Christlikeness; we are tempted to believe that we have the foresight and wisdom to determine what will get us there.”

We can choose to accept being a creature crafted by our Maker. We can choose to live more fully within the grain of our given bodies, within the limits of our flesh. Transformation might come.

If we have healthy fertility, we can choose to accept the friction that comes with receiving it and navigating it for the years it’s given to us. If we have broken bodies, we can choose to pursue the healing of whatever is not functioning as intended. If we have bodies that cannot—for anatomical reasons or factors we have pursued restoration of—bring forth children from our marriage bond, these are realities that can burst with devastating grief. We need a robust, Christian vision of what living within the limits of our flesh looks like—for the blessedly fertile, for the sick and struggling, and for [the infertile](https://www.christianitytoday.com/2017/04/why-church-needs-infertile-couple/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

Our crosses are ours to bear, and the blessings found in those crosses ours to receive. This is the way of the Christian life. We worship the incarnated Christ. He took on flesh in order to pour it out, and so our own bodies and physical laments take on meaning. The body holds the ways in which we were made to know Him, in all the delights and suffering along the way. It is ours to receive, as bought with a price and given in love.

If Christianity is good news, we need to show in our very selves that it is. That trusting Him and living under His sacred order is not an intellectual exercise, but flows into the whole of life—including our bodies, sexuality, pregnancy and parenting. We can trust Him and submit to Him in our flesh, because we are the clay and not the potter. As Erik Varden puts it, “Once our eyes have been opened to faith as something real, a reorientation of existence is called for.”

Reoriented and freed from postures of utility, we might yet find there is work the Lord wants to do in us—work not in spite of, but in the midst of—our finite selves. The boundaries have fallen for us in pleasant places.

We are invited to become humble enough to be molded with firm hands. Hands that can form His image from dust and bone. Hands that can form us through the fleshy means He chose for us. Hands that have only ever worked for our good.

He is not a harsh taskmaster. Will we allow the potter to do His work?

## The Christian Witness

I’ve heard it said that the question of the first millenium was “Who is Christ?” (and thus, the councils and creeds). The question of the second millennium was “Who is the Church?” (and thus the Reformation). The question of the third millenium might very well turn out to be “Who is Man?” (and thus our response to technologically-driven anthropological questions which arise about [the body](https://firstthings.com/the-battle-for-the-body/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), sexuality, and procreation).

Our moral reasoning and action is never confined to our own life. It does not affect only ourselves. What we believe are merely personal decisions are in fact theological statements and anthropological in nature. They contribute to a slow drip which affects ecosystems and props up plausibility structures for ways of thinking about our body, sex, and procreation.

And so, our collective formation is the Christian witness. Individual action can dilute or make more potent the witness of the whole. We are in the midst of an anthropological crisis about the human person, sexuality, and why our bodies even matter at all.

Faced with massive disembodiment, sexual disorder, and bodily desecration, we need a coherent vision of the human person to share with the world. Let us show—and not just tell—that another creaturely life is possible.

May we be found speaking true things with our earthen vessels, the temples of the Holy Spirit.

Its essence is not ours to refashion, wish away, or transcend. Any proclamations to the culture around us regarding the goodness of living within the bounds of God’s created order—especially in the realm of sexuality—first needs to be true of ourselves.

Otherwise, we will remain scandalized by certain sexual practices and procedures out there, not seeing how our imaginations have been cut from the same cloth. We, too, resist the limitations and friction of our bodies. We, too, bend our sexual nature to our will.

To change course, Trueman suggests Protestants must revive natural law and a high view of the body, before wagging fingers at the world around us.

Which brings us back to my original realization—that a book about the attitudes and plausibility structures which fostered transgenderism are the same ones a person bumps up against when discussing fertility and bioethics with even conservative Christians.

Matthew Lee Anderson [wrote](https://mereorthodoxy.com/nashville-statement) that his book *Earthen Vessels*

> argued that evangelicalism had tacitly adopted secular practices and habits through inattentiveness to our bodily life. It is not our explicit affirmations and denials that matter, I suggested, but what happens beneath the surfaces and outside the edges of our view. But that means the way to recover a community and a society of people who value the goodness of bodily life in its fullness is not through reducing the chief expressions of our public witness to the last, thin thread of sexual ethics that we can all still agree on. Rather, we must set about rediscovering and reviving the broad and beautiful backdrop of the goodness of mortal flesh, a goodness we have each denied in a thousand different ways. We cannot authentically or authoritatively name and resist the “spirit of our age” until we recognize that before the world made Caitlyn Jenner, we made it.
### Courage and the Loneliness Crisis
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/courage-and-the-loneliness-crisis/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:35:20.000Z
The incomparable study-finder [Stephanie H. Murray](https://open.substack.com/users/6945863-stephanie-h-murray?utm%5Fsource=mentions) recently shared [this article](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/the-loneliness-crisis-isnt-just-male?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) from [The Argument](https://open.substack.com/users/351373560-the-argument?utm%5Fsource=mentions) showing that the loneliness crisis is not just middle-aged men as is commonly thought (by me), but actually most pronounced among younger voters, and among them female voters. I strongly recommend [reading the entire article](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/the-loneliness-crisis-isnt-just-male?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Maybe a survey that looks at more than just *voters* would reveal a different result, but it is a revealing study, particularly the way social isolation overlaps with low self-worth, anxiety, and inhibition. The COVID-19 Epidemic and the Internet are pointed to as factors contributing to this isolation and anxiety. I would also add that the #MeToo movement (for all the good it did!) likely made some young women afraid of young men and some young men inordinately afraid of crossing a line they couldn’t see.

Having worked with many young people over the years, none of these results seem particularly surprising, although I would say that the young people I work with usually tend to have the benefits of stronger social networks by virtue of being in college. But the challenge of talking with the opposite gender, socializing, and striving after employment and success all resonate with what I’ve seen with both genders. As I’ve written about before, anxiety and inhibition are two defining characteristics of this age, and they feed each other. The more anxious you are, the more you are afraid to act as an agent in the world, so the more anxious you become about your situation, and so on. The article at *The Argument,* written by Lakshya Jain, ends by offering no solution or action items, and that’s where I’d like to pick up here. What can we do to encourage young people to break out of social isolation and inhibition? I believe young people need to cultivate the virtue of courage in order to lean into who they were created to be.

For all of us, the world is a hostile, chaotic place. But for young people raised on the Internet and the constant dump of information, the world is an incredibly dangerous and hostitle place. There is an expectation that you present yourself to the world on social media, to advertise yourself. But this exposes you to criticism and judgment. Strangers are looking at you and judging you. Young women can be pressured to share intimate images of themselves in relationships, which exposes them literally and to blackmail. Young men can be tricked into sharing explicit images of themselves by those trying to blackmail them. Stories of abuse fill their newsfeeds. Narratives of the toxicity of the opposite sex fill their newsfeeds, of ways young women are too liberal and young men are too conservative. Influencers can convince them that they are fragile, traumatized, and vulnerable. Young people are given plenty of reasons to fear social interactions and the opposite sex.

In addition, the Internet gives young people plenty of opportunities to distract themselves in isolation. But this distraction is not healthy, it’s anxious, depressing, and lonely. It’s doomscrolling until 3am. It’s watching YouTube for hours on end. It’s choosing not to connect with real life because it feels too dangerous. This may look like working long hours at a job or at school and then retreating to their room to isolate on the Internet as a safety behavior.

It is certainly the case that some young people struggle with isolation and anxiety due to past traumas or mental health challenges, and I don’t want ot discount that. But in general, what all of us need (young or not) is to cultivate a deeper virtue of courage.

Yes, the world *is* a hostile place. That isn’t going to suddenly change. We can and must fight for justice (that involves another virtue), but while we live in this fallen world we must live with courage.

Courage, or fortitude, as I define it in [*To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1514002248?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*,* involves enduring suffering or vulnerability to suffering for the good. In the case of social interactions, the good is friendship or romantic relationships. It is good to make friends. Friends are one of the greatest gifts God gives us in this life. Marriage, though not for everyone, is a great gift. “He who finds a wife finds a good thing” (Proverbs 18:22). So we *know* that it is **good** to have friends at the very least. And for most of us, it is good to find a spouse. Therefore, we need to *endure* the *suffering and vulnerability* necessary to pursue that good!

Not *all* suffering is necessary to find a friend or a spouse. Abuse is not necessary. In fact, it’s wrong to suffer abuse from someone because you want to be their friend or spouse, because you are created in the Image of God and deserve to be treated with respect and honor!

But some suffering and vulnerability is natural. You’re going to get rejected. You’re going to get your heart broken. You’re going forgotten. You’re going to get offended. You’re going to have to risk sharing something personal about yourself. It takes courage to put yourself out there and go to a party, to ask someone out for coffee (as a friend or date), to call someone up.

It also takes courage to opt out of some of the Internet-driven vices that pressure young people. For example, it takes courage to say “no” to sending intimate photographs. It takes courage to not turn your social media pages into advertisements for yourself. Opting out of these activities makes you vulnerable, which is a key to courage.

I think what young people will discover if they act with courage is that they have more agency in the world than they realized, and some of their anxiety will decrease. It requires taking a step of faith, however. As I discuss in [*To Live Well*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1514002248?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*,* all the virtues are intimately tied together. In this case, courage is grounded by the faith in Christ, faith that *he* is the one who justifies us, not our friends or our spouse. And that *when* we get hurt or rejected, *he* will always be there to love us. We can step out in *confidence* because we were *created* to live socially and he *desires* us to courageously act in the world.

Young people are anxious and inhibited largely because they were not taught by their elders how to be courageous. Instead, they were taught to be afraid and worried about everything, because the world is a scary place. Well, the world *is* a scary place. But we have agency to act with courage and *do something* in this world. We can take a step to the block, we can apply for that job, ask that person out, invite that friend to coffee, go to that party, stretch our comfort zone. Yes, the world of distraction and dissipation will always be there calling us to give up and isolate and be inhibited. But we don’t *have to* give in. We have the freedom to act. God has given it to us. The only question is if we’ll use it.

[*originally published on Substack*](https://newsletter.oalannoble.com/p/dealing-with-the-youth-loneliness?utm%5Fsource=post-email-title&publication%5Fid=944214&post%5Fid=184129699&utm%5Fcampaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=bjni&triedRedirect=true&utm%5Fmedium=email)
### Tiny Moving Parts's Defiant Joy
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/tiny-moving-partss-defiant-joy/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:35:23.000Z
Punk rock is fundamentally and proudly and, therefore, essentially antiestablishment. Principally, it has always been a creative act of defiance and a celebration of defiance.

Punk is a stepchild of rock ’n’ roll. The instrumentation is in the family to be sure, with guitars and drums and so on. The lyrical content has some kindred traits too, though it tends to be more pointed than its parent with an incisive eye and aggressive disposition toward politics and social machinery.

The style is proportionally pointed and subversive. Guitars and drums and vocals eschew a more traditional rock ’n’ roll feel, and there’s an anarchist’s anger for the music industry and its pop(ular) acolytes. It’s supposed to feel like a rejection of something — capitalism, romance, the American dream, soulless music, etc. etc. It rejects musical norms and bourgeois themes with ferocity and delight. Like an angsty teenager, the earliest punk music feels like a rejection of just about everything, including its parent.

There’s a lot more throat-clearing to be done, like how this history orients punk rock to underground and decidedly interesting sub-genres. But, defiance is the lifeblood of the movement. You can feel it in the instrumentation, in the lyrics, in the vocals, in the mosh pit. That’s why so many find the music baffling and irritating. It’s why some find it vicious and unacceptable. It’s why I, and many others, love it.

Defiance is not of value without context. Without something worthy of opposition, the posture makes no sense. It’s like a toddler sticking out his chest to his parents, even as they offer him the thing for which he’s asking.

To get theological for a moment, defiance is part of the human problem. Pride operating in defiance against God and love is at the heart of our predicament. It’s a key feature in the destruction of people, animals, and land. We act with self-interest, and dig our heels in, over against loving others.

However, what is redemption if not the defiant act of love in a context of brokenness and death? What is justice if not a defiant imposition of wholeness where fracture or fragmentation has occurred? Defiance in the right context not only makes sense, it’s necessary, right, and good. We ought to act with defiance toward evil and vice and deception.

Defiance is the stiffened spine of opposition; it’s a steely gaze toward a determined, worthy foe. The musical form of this posture is punk rock.

My favorite song of the last couple years uses precisely this logic to capture something beautiful that I’m convinced we need more of: defiant joy.

Whatever all the “vibe shift” has been in the last five years, mostly it has felt foreboding. There was Covid. There was the car crash impact of Trumpian politics across the social landscape. There were UFOs and AI and woke policing. On and on we could go. There were school shootings and highway protests and resurgent partisan podcasts. Of course, there’s the rampant loneliness and SSRI dependence and rapidly rising (and then declining) gender transitions. There’s sports gambling and doom scrolling and gooning. There’s adult child estrangement and fears of commitment. Really, on and on we could go. Many of these things weren’t new per se, but they’ve all become culturally noticeable and lamentable.

In spite of our advancement and comforts, this moment in the west feels uneasy and unhealthy. We’re sick, or at least we feel sick. Much of it feels inherited, yet much of it feels chosen. The backward momentum is palpable and poignant, and it is worthy of opposition. Whatever all the vibe shift signals, it involves a change in the internal collective response to our cultural sickness.

One of my favorite icons of these feelings is a simple punk rock song by Tiny Moving Parts, a midwest emo band with technical, mathy guitar riffs and deliberately melodic song structures. It’s from their 2024 full length release Deep in the Blue, and it’s aptly titled “The Cure (But Not Really)”.

The song starts at a sprint, a bright one. And I don’t just mean the pacing is fast; I mean the sound immediately conjures an image and a feeling of moving quickly, of alacritous running. The guitar is chipper and warm. Honestly, it strikes my psyche like the opening of “Semi-Charmed Life” by Third Eye Blind but at a faster pace and without the doo-doo-doos. Much like that famed song there’s a deliberate interplay and ironic divergence between the melodic and lyrical themes. The brightness gives way to something apprehensive.

Emo music tends toward overly literal lyrics or overtly metaphorical ones. Tiny Moving Parts gravitates to the latter, so lyrics about temperature and uneasy feelings are used to convey a deep-seated, widely-held anxiety.

Of course, the anxiety doesn’t sit well, but the sensations aren’t communicated easily. The effects are emotional and physical and negative - references to stomach churning and dull razor blades gesture in the direction. But that’s all we get as listeners. Maybe the band has something specific in their minds, but the song only evokes generalities.

I almost want to critique the song on these grounds. Malcolm Gladwell once made an argument about country music that has been bouncing around in my head ever since. He said the strength of country music’s lyrical ethos is its specificity. The details enable a listener to connect with what feels like a real story that can then be projected onto one’s own experience or feelings. Vagueness in lyrics can be lazy or cheap, like they’re asking the listener to do the hard work of connecting the art to their life. The lyrics in this song definitely flirt with that…unless they’re about a specific broadly-experienced reality. Like a gray cloud over top of the lot of us (a metaphor that’ll rear its head shortly). That’s my inclination; in this instance the vague anxiety is actually specific. It’s the anxiety we all seem to be feeling in the 2020s. I think it helps explain our political fervor and our yearning for religious revival. We all seem to think things feel off.

And, just before the chorus (and just before we dip toward nihilism), we’re told, “I think it’s the perfect time for a change.”

Yes, and amen. Let’s seek a change. I love this pivot because it is existential and spiritual. The first thing Jesus tells people when he begins public ministry is to repent. Whatever else repentance includes, it’s no less than a willingness to recognize the wrongness of one’s former direction and to change course.

What does Tiny Moving Parts suggest? That’s the hook: “Run…with me.”

This line is repeated several times, then its essence is doubled down on: “Run until your feet fall off your legs, so I know at least you’re trying to race from what’s coming.”

It feels like a much-needed jailbreak, like freedom with friends. Let’s move together and move quickly and move away from the anxieties and failures of our moment. That’s the right first step, a willingness to change and movement in a new direction.

The pacing of the intro and chorus are the key. It’s definitively a step of happiness and joy to embrace change with friends. Better still, it’s defiantly a step of happiness and joy to do so. Defiant joy in an age of anxiety and bad vibes will look a lot like trying new things with our friends. It might even be the simple willingness to make friends or sustain friendships rather than stagnate and self-medicate by other means. One of the sweetly moving musical decisions in the song is the buttressing backup vocals in the chorus, which attest to the subtle but integral beauty of movement with friends.

Like ordinary life though, verse 2 complicates the picture a bit. The music slows back down. Together, the protagonist and company “swallow vitamins” and “reconnect again.” The result is they grow like chameleons.

This sounds like people who have partaken of a culture’s prescribed medicines to alleviate that culture’s contagions. So rather than moving away from the problem, they blend in with the masses and become part of the problem again.

We’re all prone to this. We can see and feel that we’re not healthy, but we’ll turn to our favorite Instagram influencer for her #ad remedy or the latest manosphere Youtuber ~~yelling at~~ inspiring us to be a better version of ourselves. The tailwind of culture nudges us imperceptibly but powerfully toward conformity. We often end up joining and perpetuating the sickness.

Cue: cloud metaphor - “Why does the midwest sky hold the darkest clouds above my head every night?”

This is the bridge of the song. Things still don’t look or feel right, even as we take the vitamins and blend in. We’re still anxious and depressed. We lack hope, so we doubt the future. We avoid commitments, which means we avoid love. All of these feelings loom large in our thoughts and in our world, like a hazy, gray cloud hovering above us all.

So what’s the first step? You guessed it: Run…with me.

And that’s it, but the song’s title makes more sense now - “The Cure (But Not Really)”. The first step toward something new is the same as the first step away from something old or dying. Ideally, we’ll do it together, and we’ll do it with resilience and joy. Because maybe it could get worse, but it could certainly get a whole lot better.

That’s why this song is best written as punk rock. It’s defiance against regression and nihilism. It’s defiance against loneliness and stagnancy. It’s a baby step or two in the direction of wholeness and happiness by way of friendship into the unknown.

I think my favorite part about this whole thing is knowing the band writes the lyrics comfortably after the instrumentation, so says Dylan Mattheisen, the frontman of Tiny Moving Parts. The band writes and memorizes the music before he writes the words, which means he writes his songs the same way I receive music. For me, the instrumentation and melody drive the experience, and the lyrics may or may not enhance that experience.

In the case of this particular song, my soul and Dylan’s feel something similar in the music: defiant joy looks a lot like friends moving together in opposition to the angst of our time. This song is what that sounds like in my head.
### How Should Evangelicals Respond to the Vanishing Mainline?
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-should-evangelicals-respond-to-the-vanishing-mainline/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:35:25.000Z
Ryan P. Burge. [*The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations Is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us*](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781587436697%5Fthe-vanishing-church?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*.* Brazos Press, 2026\. $26.99\. 232 pp.

The title of Ryan P. Burge’s new book *The Vanishing Church* might suggest that this is just another statistics-laden chronicle of the recent decline of American religion, of the sort that Christian Smith described in his recent book [*Why Religion Went Obsolete*](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/why-religion-went-obsolete-9780197800737?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). But in fact, Burge’s book is about something much more intriguing—the decline not of Christianity in general but of a particular type of Christianity: mainline Protestantism.

Burge, a political science professor who is probably the leading analyst of religion data in the United States today, points out that not all branches of American Christianity are declining. The percentage of Americans who identify as evangelical is just as high as it was fifty years ago, during the 1970s. Whatever else may be happening to religion, the evangelical church is not vanishing. And the percentage of Americans who identify as Catholic has dropped only slightly (from 26 to 22 percent) during the past fifty years.

But at the same time, the percentage of Americans who say they have no religion has increased by nearly six times (from 5 percent to nearly 30 percent). And among Gen-Z adults (those born in the late 1990s or early 2000s), nearly half identify as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular.” There are now more nones than either Catholics or Protestants in the United States.

If the percentage of Americans who identify as evangelical or Catholic is holding steady, where are the “nones” coming from? The data seems to provide a clear answer: The growth of the “nones” has come almost entirely at the expense of mainline Protestantism. In the mid-1970s, 31 percent of Americans were mainline Protestant, and in the 1950s, perhaps as many as 50 percent were. But today, only 9 percent of Americans identify as mainline Protestant, and that figure is likely to drop even further in the next few years, as older mainline Protestant church members pass away. With only 2 percent of Americans age 18-40 identifying with a mainline Protestant denomination, the future of mainline Protestantism looks bleak.

In short, with evangelicalism and other forms of conservative Christianity holding steady and with nones on the rise, America is becoming more religiously polarized. Burge’s data provide statistical confirmation of what Tim Keller presciently observed eighteen years ago. “Skepticism, fear, and anger toward traditional religion are growing in power and influence,” he wrote in 2008 in [*The Reason for God*](https://www.amazon.com/Reason-God-Belief-Age-Skepticism/dp/1594483493?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). “But at the same time, robust, orthodox belief in the traditional faiths is growing as well.”

In Keller’s view, the continued vitality of “robust, orthodox belief” and the decline of a lukewarm, moderate, cultural Christianity was a positive development, but in Burge’s view, the loss of the moderate mainline is cause for lament. Regardless of what one might think about mainline Protestantism’s theology, its demise will have catastrophic effects for American politics and society, he suggests.

For decades, mainline Protestants controlled American cultural institutions. Mainline Protestants founded the majority of the nation’s colleges and universities. Most American presidents and Supreme Court justices of the twentieth century were members of mainline Protestant denominations. And mainline Protestants were important intellectual leaders who wrote many of the articles and books that shaped American political and social thought for much of the twentieth century.

In the 1950s, the secretary of state (John Foster Dulles), the founding editor of the nation’s largest news magazines (Henry Luce), and the president of the United States (Dwight D. Eisenhower) were all mainline Presbyterians. So, for that matter, were many elite university presidents, including the president of Princeton University (Harold Dodds), who was the son of a Bible professor at Grove City College (which was a mainline Presbyterian institution at the time).

But today mainline Protestants have only a fraction of the membership numbers or the cultural influence that they once enjoyed. A few mainline Protestant colleges (including Grove City College) have joined evangelicalism; many more (Princeton included) have secularized.

Intellectual historian David Hollinger argued in [*Christianity’s American Fate*](https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691233888/christianitys-american-fate?srsltid=AfmBOoq3qmfG5CNiLu203mpNhmL62POyPluTHlW94MvUUkmwgIspVQmu&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (2022) that on a political or social level it may not matter, because liberal Protestants’ ethical causes triumphed in a secularized form even as mainline Protestantism declined. Civil rights became widely accepted, same-sex marriage was legalized, women achieved greater equality in the workplace, and the military draft disappeared, even as the mainline Protestant denominations that had advocated for all of those things continued to decline.

But Burge argues that the decline of mainline Protestantism has hurt American politics far more than Hollinger assumed. Mainline Protestant congregations have generally not been bastions of left-wing thinking, he asserts. Instead, they have been a force for political moderation, where Republicans could worship alongside Democrats. Many mainline Protestant clergy may have leaned toward the political left, but a large contingent of the members were more conservative, thus keeping the typical mainline Protestant congregation from veering too far from the political center. For decades, public opinion polls showed that mainline Protestant voters leaned slightly Republican, but with plenty of Democrats in the midst.

But today, as conservative evangelicalism has replaced the mainline as the dominant expression of Christianity in the United States, American Christianity has lost its political moderating force. The Democratic Party has become much more secular and the Republican Party more evangelical and conservative Catholic—but with no sizable mainline Protestant contingent available to split the difference or moderate the extremes.

Burge believes that when we worship alongside those of different political perspectives, we learn to avoid demonizing the opposing political party, and we begin to understand the merits of the other side’s arguments even if we do not fully agree with them. That’s what once happened in mainline Protestant congregations, he argues—and it’s part of the reason why Republicans and Democrats used to be less extreme and more amenable to friendly conversations with members of the other party.

But political moderation is no longer in vogue, and that may be one reason why Americans haven’t shown much interest in attending mainline Protestant congregations. “By trying to reject the extremes of evangelical Christianity on the one hand while also resisting the pull toward nonreligion on the other, the mainline has found a way to accelerate its own demise,” Burge writes. The result has been disastrous for American democracy. In politics as in religion, Burge notes, “there is no place for moderates.”

Burge writes as an evangelical-turned-mainline-Protestant who laments the decline of his own mainline Protestant denomination. During the time that he was writing this book, the small American Baptist congregation that he was pastoring as a part-time minister dwindled to fewer than ten regular attendees and then closed its doors altogether. Across the country, there are numerous similar stories. “In the American Baptist denomination, very few churches are avoiding rapid decline,” Burge says. What’s true of American Baptist congregations is equally true of Episcopal, Methodist, Disciples of Christ, and United Church of Christ churches; their membership is aging and they have few younger adherents to carry on the torch after the next decade or two. Half of all Episcopalians are over age 65\. One-third of the members of the Presbyterian Church (USA) are over 70, while only 4 percent are under 18.

Evangelicals who view the mainline as theologically vacuous may be tempted to greet the decline of mainline Protestant denominations with a bit of schadenfreude, but Burge asks us to remember that the demise of mainline Protestant churches will have a detrimental effect on our communities when the soup kitchens, charities, and other socially beneficial projects that these churches operate also shutter their doors. “When mainline churches close, opportunities to serve the less fortunate and build social capital will largely be lost,” Burge says. And on a national level, the loss of the mainline will deprive us of the political moderating force that has held our democracy together.

On a societal level, I suspect that Burge’s argument is largely correct. Mainline Protestantism has been a stabilizing force in American political and community life, and its demise will leave a hole in our political community that will not be easy to fill.

But rather than merely lament the decline of mainline Protestantism, perhaps evangelical churches can try to fill that gap. As Tim Keller argued in [*Center Church*](https://www.amazon.com/Center-Church-Balanced-Gospel-Centered-Ministry/dp/0310494184/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?crid=101UOW4SFBV3E&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.-CaV5eGFMD%5FY-F3egQ7K4unGyC8ivKanLOah6ukepK8Hj6TLDatjJmUITgjHqF9A71GzcivGB6A7btKa0Nugxo8%5FSazMEl363ZzxEzu1gpuLBnaHtfhZ-P-enM7d5un4H-9kzVPod6ad%5Fivw1SAAYFc-2y8XfnaevsTcLA5aSwIyVMwaXG0wyqwCEppKcz7g8YiG%5F9ePI%5FDBOQPdiHnBpx1o7namk7LxHQzLbC6B6Qo.6egtVhE-i%5FAXwymi5U-RqeigPz75UV-jdoDQS25a3g4&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=timothy+keller%2C+center+church&qid=1768249329&sprefix=timothy+keller%2C+center+church%2Caps%2C109&sr=8-1&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), gospel-centered churches can love their communities and spearhead initiatives to serve the needy around them, just as mainline Protestant churches historically have. They can even become places for civil political dialogue by welcoming Christians from multiple political perspectives in the same way that mainline Protestant churches have.

There’s no intrinsic theological barrier that should keep evangelical churches from being centers of irenic sanity in the midst of a growing partisan divide in the United States. In fact, the more that evangelical churches preach the superiority of the kingdom of God over all earthly kingdoms, the more they are likely to transcend the nation’s partisan divisions and serve as a refuge from polarizing politics.

Burge is correct to note that evangelical churches have in recent years not been known for political moderation or irenic service to the community. But perhaps as mainline Protestant churches decline, there is now more need than ever for evangelical churches to step into this role—a role that is compatible with their gospel mission.

Evangelicals might be tempted to mobilize *en masse* in a culture war against secular forces, polarizing the nation along partisan lines. But perhaps in the long run, it would be wiser to instead fill the void left by the vanishing mainline Protestant church and attempt a more irenic approach. Just because Americans are more divided than ever over religion doesn’t mean that they have to be equally polarized over partisan politics.

If we want to avoid further polarization, perhaps we’ll have to set the example of irenic dialogue and civic-minded community service in our own churches. After all, if mainline Protestantism is now a “vanishing church,” more theologically conservative Christians may be the only ones left who can take on this responsibility and save the nation from partisan extremism.
### After Nationalism: What Next for American Conservatism?
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/after-nationalism-what-next-for-american-conservatism/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:35:27.000Z
*This is a lightly edited transcript of my remarks given at a recent Faith and Law forum held in Washington DC.*

In February of 2017 I attended [a book launch](https://www.plough.com/en/articles/benedict-option-event-transcripts?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) in New York City for the release of conservative journalist Rod Dreher’s book *The Benedict Option*. The event featured not only Dreher, but also Rusty Reno of *First Things* and the New York *Times*’s Ross Douthat. It was jointly sponsored by both Reno’s magazine and *The American Conservative*, where Dreher at that time served as an editor and did most of his writing.

In the years since that event, Dreher and Reno have both become closely linked with the National Conservative movement which has been primarily led by the Jewish biblical scholar Yoram Hazony. Both Dreher and Reno have spoken at NatCon events. Additionally, Dreher serves as a visiting fellow with the Danube Institute, a Hungarian think tank closely associated with Hungarian Prime Minister and nationalist conservative figurehead Victor Orban. Reno, meanwhile, joined Hazony in endorsing [*The Case for Christian Nationalism*](https://www.amazon.com/Case-Christian-Nationalism-Stephen-Wolfe/dp/1957905336/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?crid=15WOZ5I9HRJ9L&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.MnUD8Yh9Ywd3OTsjCti65YWjqDwI8msm5IUlO67XV3nzdpgKU8i4EiSIjFOTmvL8ijfnmb%5FS57hsgjwSSm8ywcH498mWkGkTia0W6798SoGURbN30KFs3m%5Fd0MlONBUlKguX9U5-UNaSBtkUXVMSDpXxdLEIGr6--kFp9MUuOxMu47VpFIdAAr8w2nFZHxk1uEItVSeYEUru7PSKcBm0ydU3tMdYR4cGvl%5F%5FukYk2QM.kKQR5aJwagnyQ6j2wJWpngm07lLkCgn4NA0i4jPPz2U&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=case+for+christian+nationalism&qid=1768191884&sprefix=case+for+christian+nationalis%2Caps%2C188&sr=8-1&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) by Stephen Wolfe, which was published by Idaho pastor and provocateur Douglas Wilson’s Canon Press, and serves as the most developed theoretical text defining Christian nationalism in particular.

It is not hard to see some foreshadowing for their future turn to national conservatism in Dreher and Reno’s work even in 2017\. *The Benedict Option* begins with the presupposition that progressive liberal western culture is hostile to Christian faith, and that western Christians will need to adopt new strategies of cultural engagement to survive the coming storm. Reno had written a similar book at the same time, though more positively framed. His book was *Resurrecting the Idea of Christian Society*, a book whose title echoes T. S. Eliot’s essay on “The Idea of Christian Society,” whose critique of liberalism in many ways anticipated more recent critiques from the American New Right.

In his follow up book, *Return of the Strong Gods*, published in 2021, Reno defined what he called the “post-war consensus,” which was a bloodless sort of global order primarily organized around free trade and the ascent of the managerial class, which facilitated the global economic system. The goal of this consensus was to build a post-war social order that would make something like the horrors of World War II highly unlikely, if not impossible, to ever recur. Reno’s book in particular, and especially his notion of the “post-war consensus,” has become a key text in New Right critiques of our current cultural and political moment.

In fairness to both Reno and Dreher, Reno has not himself deployed the theme of the post-war consensus in the way others have since his book came out, and Dreher has [opposed](https://roddreher.substack.com/p/reviewing-the-boniface-option) the [turn toward ethno-nationalism](https://www.thefp.com/p/rod-dreher-the-woke-right-is-coming?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) on the right, sometimes at considerable personal cost to himself. This is perhaps most clearly seen [when he provided further proof](https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-thomas-achord-alastair-roberts-mess/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of [Alastair Roberts’s claims](https://alastairadversaria.com/2022/11/27/the-case-against-thomas-achord/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that Wolfe’s podcast cohost Thomas Achord was maintaining a variety of pseudonymous social media accounts where he routinely posted racist and misogynistic content. It would be unjust to both men and especially to Dreher to lazily equate them with a figure like Wolfe. Even so, both men have been fellow travelers with the nationalist right as a part of their rejection of Reaganite conservatism.

Here is what’s interesting about that 2017 evening in Manhattan, however: There were other speakers and groups represented there that you might not expect, looking back on it from the vantage point of 2026\. The panel responding to Dreher’s book also included former Obama administration faith outreach director Michael Wear, who now runs an organization called the Center for Christianity and Public Life. Alongside Wear on the panel was Harvard lecturer Jacqueline Rivers, who also has served as the Executive Director and Senior Fellow for Social Science and Policy of the Seymour Institute for Black Church and Policy Studies at Harvard.

There was another panelist as well: Randall Gauger, who served as a pastor in the community that published the magazine which served as the evening’s third sponsor, alongside *First Things* and *The American Conservative*: a magazine called *Plough* which is published by a community of non-violent Christian socialists who live from a common purse and take lifelong vows of pacifism, poverty, and obedience as part of their common life as Christians. (Disclosure: I serve as a contributing editor with *Plough*.)

The question you are likely asking as you listen is something like this: What are non-violent Christian socialists and former Obama staffers and directors of programs at Harvard focused on the Black church doing at multiple events alongside prominent natcon speakers, one of whom has endorsed the work of Stephen Wolfe?

This is the answer, I think: Everyone involved in these conversations at that time sought to oppose an ideology they sometimes called “liberalism” but which is best thought of as a kind of hardened individualism that said “you belong only to yourself and if anyone else tries to guide or limit the ways you express your freedom they are a tyrant.”

What unified them—us, really, as I was at the event and now am a contributing editor with *Plough*—was a sense that there was something deeply wrong with a world that told people that it was exclusively up to them to, in the words of former Supreme Court associate justice Anthony Kennedy, “define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” I expect virtually everyone at both events would agree with [these words written](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/28/opinion/anthony-kennedy-individualism.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) by the New York *Times* columnist David Brooks upon Kennedy’s retirement in 2018:

> Professor Kennedy gives us a homework assignment that almost none of us can actually fulfill. Each of us has to define our own “concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”  
>  
> Wow! That requires a lot of background reading. If your name is Aristotle or Nietzsche, maybe you can do it, but for the rest of us it’s going to be tough. We’re busy!  
>  
> You wind up with a society in which the schools, the public culture, even the parents say: It’s not our job to instill a shared morality and worldview from scratch. That’s something you have to do on your own. The practical result, given this impossible task, is that most people wind up without a moral vocabulary, with only scattered shards of values, with no firm foundations for when times get tough.

To Brooks’s list I would add the fact that a society that regards the capacity for such self-definition as the essence of the good life is also inherently a society hostile to the poor, the elderly, and the disabled, all of whom for different reasons will struggle to accomplish the goal that many of our peers regard as the essence of “a life worth living.” In other words, Kennedy’s vision of individualistic liberalism unintentionally birthed a society of spiritual orphans that had great difficulty knowing how to value or care for disadvantaged people.

Whatever would come to divide those of us in those two rooms later on, all of us recognized then and, I pray, still do believe that there is something quite cruel about the naked individualism entailed in the sort of procedural liberalism that defined the era of American life running roughly from Reagan to Obama.

That is what united us, anyway. But what divided us? Why was it not terribly surprising to find all of those people and organizations together in 2017 and yet practically unimaginable to imagine such a gathering in 2026?

The answer here is a function of how one thinks about belonging and political life. The error of what I am calling “procedural liberalism” and what Reno has alternatingly called both “the post-war consensus” and “the dead consensus” is that it did not offer a robust account of belonging. Rather, it tended to frame political life in terms of autonomous actors creating identities from nothing while rejecting all forms of unchosen identity. To borrow a phrase from the Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, the dominant narrative of that time was that I have no story except the story I chose when I had no story.

Politics, in this understanding, is essentially the task of organizing public life and enacting policies that facilitate self-creation. The trouble, of course, is that none of us actually *are* autonomous in any real sense. Our lives are records of debts we owe from the moment we enter the world, which we only do after spending our first nine months literally living from the body of another. This means that all of us spend part of our life too week and contingent to be able to self-create. It also means that those of us who pass through longer periods of weakness, vulnerability, or heightened dependence will be regarded with some measure of suspicion by the mainstream, which will tend to think, even if it does not say so explicitly, that such lives are not worth living. That, of course, is the ugly subtext to contemporary debates surrounding not only abortion, but also euthanasia, disabilities, and mental illness. Some of our neighbors seem not to understand that Swift’s modest proposal was not suggested in earnest. Indeed, it is probable that the rise of medical assistance in dying is simply the natural destination of a politics arranged around accomplishment and self-creation.

A political vision that seeks to banish questions of belonging in the name of emancipation, thus, cuts so radically against the grain of human existence that it can only prop itself up via artifice and a great expense of blood, particularly the blood of the weak and the vulnerable. And this is precisely what has happened in recent years as that vision has begun to fail.

So much for the procedural liberals then.

What, then, divided the group that became known as national conservatives from an alternative group, which I will refer to as solidarity conservatives?

The answer is in how each group addressed the problem of belonging as it relates to public life. 

For national conservatives, the problem facing us now is that “America” has been diminished to an “idea” rather than being “a people.” Vice President Vance [put it this way in 2024](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/us/politics/read-the-transcript-of-jd-vances-convention-speech.html?utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=email),

> You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea. And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas, like the rule of law and religious liberty—things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation. But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.

In his book *The Virtue of Nationalism* Yoram Hazony defines a nation in a similar way–as a common people unified by common culture, tradition, ways of life, and so on. Entailed in this claim is, of course, a rejection of what has come to be known as “propositional nationhood,” as the marker of American identity. 

Some voices on the new right, such as Christian nationalist podcaster C. Jay Engel [who lives in a far right “aligned community” associated with Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellows](https://www.newschannel5.com/news/newschannel-5-investigates/confronting-hate/men-behind-tennessees-christian-nationalist-settlement-this-country-belongs-to-jesus-not-the-jews?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), are quite explicit about this fact, [arguing against propositional nationhood](https://x.com/contramordor/status/1838011456735899739?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and in favor of a nation for “heritage Americans” instead. Indeed, [Engel explained his decision](https://x.com/contramordor/status/1797752542220443828?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to move to the Ridge Runner compound in Tennessee by saying that his home state of California had too many Indians in it now, [who he referred to](https://x.com/contramordor/status/1797767111764488388?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) by [using an ethnic slur](https://x.com/contramordor/status/1833308018424811944?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Others, like Vance, are not quite so forthright, even as it remains difficult to identify where precisely he would differ from Engel with regards to the rejection of propositional nationhood.

The most straightforward definition of a nation in the sense that the national conservatives mean it, however, comes from Stephen Wolfe. For Wolfe, common culture, customs, rituals, etc. arise from a common people who share a common place and ethnicity. He claims in his book that nations, properly speaking, cannot consist of a plurality of ethnic groups, but must necessarily be confined to single ethnic groups to be genuine nations, writing that,

> I use the terms ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nation’ almost synonymously, though I use the former to emphasize the particular features that distinguish one people-group from another. Since every people group has internal differences, ‘nation’ is used to emphasize the unity of the whole, though no nation (properly speaking) is composed of two or more ethnicities.

I say this is the more honest treatment for the simple reason that if you reject the notion of America as being an idea, as Vance plainly does and as many of the nationalists do, and instead seek to anchor our national identity in vagaries such as “culture” or “ways of life,” you will then have to provide an account of what precisely anchors that culture or way of life. And your answer will either cash out to *values* (which can then be articulated as propositions) in which case you arrive at propositional nationhood through a better, clearer route *or* your answer will cash out to genetics. 

Appeals to “common culture” as a way of sidestepping this problem do not work because culture itself is contingent on something and any honest account of this problem must define what that something is—and ultimately the something will either be ideas we give our assent to and submit to as expressed through our living *or* it will be the claims of kin and fatherland. Wolfe is honest about this. Given that Hazony, the leading figure of national conservatism, endorsed Wolfe’s book, calling it, “A pioneering work that paves the way for a new genre of American Christian-nationalist political theory,” it seems that Hazony, at one point at least, was not categorically opposed to Wolfe’s treatment of ‘the nation.’

In practice, then, the national conservative answer to the problem of political belonging, which the proceduralist liberals failed to address sufficiently, is rooted in ethnicity: We experience belonging, on the public level, via the shared customs and ways of life adopted by people united by common ancestry and heritage.

This sort of nationalism immediately crashes into two problems.

First, the stipulated definition used by Wolfe is largely a contrivance in two different ways. First, in the aftermath of Westphalia and the Berlin Conference and the Treaty of Versailles, we simply no longer have a global political system that treats “nations” in the way Wolfe or Hazony call for. There are virtually no nation-states today that are properly “nations” in the way defined by Wolfe. To remedy that, their project inherently requires undoing several centuries of global geopolitics–a work which seems to me utterly impossible.

Indeed, even the nations one might, at one point, have recognized as nations in the Wolfe sense of the term are contrivances in another: That we now think of “English” as a certain sort of national or ethnic identity is largely a historical artifact resulting from the fact that 1000 years ago King Alfred and his grandson King Aethelstan successfully merged many of the various kingdoms on the island of Great Britain to form “England.” But if you had told a 9th century Mercian or Northumbrian or East Anglian that all three of them shared a common nation and ethnicity they would have laughed at you, if not worse.

Simply put, the notion that large-scale political societies should exist as ethnically constituted “nations” is not really how national identity has ever worked historically–it has *always* been much more malleable–and it certainly isn’t how modern nation-states have been defined.

There is a second problem for the natcons as well within our own context in the United States, which is that America has often, though not always, been uniquely friendly to immigrants, relative to many other nations at least. We have often regarded our common culture as consisting less in highly specific shared religious identity, cuisine, civic customs, and so on and more in terms of a still positive but more modest commitment to liberal democratic life–a life that certainly has positive substance to it and common customs and culture and objects of love and even its own sort of virtues, but all of which are construed in ways quite distinct from the traditional identities of many European societies.

Within the parameters of shared democratic life, our nation has been able to include a quite broad range of cultures in ways that European nations never quite managed in the same way: We welcomed the Lutheran Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes who farmed much of middle America (some of whom were my ancestors). We were, at the very least, happy to benefit from the labor and skill of the Chinese immigrants who built most of our early industrial infrastructure, even if we also often treated them deplorably. We also received Catholic Irish and Italians and Orthodox Greeks who filled our urban factories in places like Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Boston–not without difficulty, of course, but also with greater success than is found in much of the western world traditionally. All of this, of course, is to say nothing of the Afro-Americans who were brought here against their will but have contributed their own talent and labor to the democratic culture of our nation. Indeed, Afro-Americans in particular have often been more faithful to our nation’s founding vision than many white Americans–is that not, after all, the entire point of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech? King did not reject the American democratic project, but rather called on America to more fully exemplify the democratic ideals she was founded on.

Further, the particular life of the American nation has proven itself to be remarkably malleable–consider how many times we have amended our constitution, for example? To take another example of this changeability, consider that our nation’s flag once bore 13 stars but now bears 50\. What does a term like “heritage American” even mean, then, given how fluid America has been as a country?

Thus the problems with a nationalist conservatism that seeks to solve the problem of political belonging via a thick and rigid account of the nation founded on, minimally, common “culture” and, often in practice, shared ethnic origins. In the world created by technological and political realities of the past two centuries, such a strategy cannot work because it is simply not possible to reverse all that has happened in the past 200 years. And in America especially, such a strategy cuts against the grain of our national project in ways that render it, ironically, anti-nationalist if we are speaking of how our specific nation has traditionally existed.

So whither belonging?

Are our only choices a cold sort of utilitarian, procedural liberalism that grounds our common life in nothing but self-actualization facilitated via the market *or* a nationalism that is, whatever else one might think, utterly impracticable?

To answer the question, I want to extend an observation I made earlier in this paper regarding our dependence and contingency as human beings. No one here today is, or ever will be, entirely self-sufficient. We come wearing clothes made by other people, having eaten food grown or raised by others–and both our clothes and food likely came to us from some considerable distance away, being transported by still other people. This contingency is not foreign or weird or unnatural: it is, rather, unavoidable.

After all, each of us only comes into this world because our bodies are sustained by our mother for nine months and then we live off of her care for still longer. Indeed, as a species it takes humans a great deal of time to mature–sexual maturity comes in our teen years, physical maturity a few years after, and our brains continue to mature and change well into our 20s. In other words, the very nature of our existence as humans speaks to a high degree of need and dependence that we all experience in certain phases of life. Likewise, as we approach the end of our lives we will decline into what Shakespeare referred to as “second childishness… sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste,” and find ourselves similarly vulnerable and needy.

One response to this dependency, of course, is to try and suppress it, mask it, or chip away at it–which is what we have spent a great deal of time doing for many decades now in America. If we make enough money we can genuinely remove some forms of dependence on others or, minimally, we can at least relocate the sources of our care to distances sufficient that we needn’t see them or think about them particularly much. 

Yet this is a losing struggle. It seems to inevitably lead to rapidly declining birth rates, which will have catastrophic long-term affects. It also means that when we find ourselves in positions of acute dependence, as most of us will late in life and some will sooner in the event of a catastrophic injury or health crisis, that we have no one to turn to for aid, save the state–which incidentally relies on a sufficiently large tax base of prime-age workers to provide the revenue it needs to offer the care required.

We have had a political order designed to maximize lifestyle choices. The nationalists propose a system to maximize national identity. What I want to propose is a political order that regards human contingency and dependence as normal, and recognizes that much of what makes human life enjoyable and pleasant is bound up in the giving and receiving of care. In short, I am calling for a system that regards dependence and the care called forth by that dependence as normal and that sees the purpose of politics as being to facilitate and support human communities in their work of caring for one another and seeing to one another’s needs.

What would that look like, in practice? For now I want to consider three angles that might help us define what such a political vision might be. I will start by working from a fairly theoretical level to a more granular policy level vision.

First, building off what we already said, the early Protestant theorist Johannes Althusius treats the purpose of politics in his *Politica*, published in the early 17th century. Althusius argued in it that the purpose of politics is to insure that the social relationships we all unavoidably have, as I have already mentioned, are mutually beneficial and delightful.

Put another way: He wants a social order built around symbiotic social relationships rather than parasitic social relationships. So one way of defining this political vision is to say that it is anti-exploitation. It sets itself against any sort of political vision that denies the humanity of another, reducing certain human persons to something lesser which can be freely exploited, mistreated, or abused. Needless to say, such a vision would find much to condemn in how we presently treat the unborn, the immigrant, and the elderly, as well as many others.

Second, we could also use the language often put forward in Catholic social teaching. Indeed, the term “solidarity” itself is a key concept for Catholic social teaching, dating all the way back to Rerum Novarum, in which Pope Leo XIII sought to define a political economy that preserved the right to private property while condemning the excesses of the 19th century, which so frequently led to the abuse of workers. If we found our vision on solidarity, then the tradition of Catholic social teaching would insist that this political project must find ways to encourage a family wage for workers, for example, as well as economic policies that offer a robust social safety net, including support for healthcare, unemployment insurance, and care for the disabled. Catholic social teaching, then, has quite stringent economic standards, which address questions of poverty and workers rights, at the very least.

A third and final angle we might consider: One of the unique challenges of our technological moment is that some of the chief forms of exploitation currently practiced seem to target people as consumers rather than as workers. This is significant because I think most of the time when we use language of “exploitation” we tend to think of exploiting people who find themselves trapped in some kind of situation that easily becomes coercive: think of the exploitative supervisor at work or the exploitative landlord who mistreats residents. 

But the advent of the smartphone along with certain legal norms that now hold has created an environment in which *consumers* can be exploited quite easily, as in the cases of sports gambling as well as, I would argue, online pornography. These are both industries founded on exploitation. Pornography does involve exploitation of workers, of course, as the harrowing tales told by many former sex workers shows. But both of these vices also trade on a certain exploitation of the consumer–offering a quick and easily accessed hit of dopamine upon which they can over time become dependent and which tends to draw the consumer away from human connection and into deeper isolation and, in the case of gambling and potentially pornography as well given the arrival of Only Fans, toward financial crisis. 

If you read [*The Athletic*’s reporting](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5777632/2024/10/14/sports-betting-addiction-problem-fans/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) on the suffering experienced by sports gambling addicts at the hands of companies like Fan Duel and Draft Kings, you will see a form of exploitation that is not *per se* coercive, and yet nonetheless draws users into a kind of entrapment which is perhaps all the more isolating for being “chosen” in a sense. [The widely read *Harper*’s feature](https://harpers.org/archive/2025/11/the-goon-squad-daniel-kolitz-porn-masturbation-loneliness/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) on so-called “gooners” tells a similar story about pornography: A growing group of mostly young men increasingly organize their lives around the consumption of pornography and marathon sessions of self-pleasuring as they consume practically unfathomable amounts of pornographic content. The women these men are leering at and consuming as objects are obviously exploited. Yet there is some sense in which these young men are as well–the men profiled in the story are someone’s son, someone’s brother, sometimes even someone’s husband–probably soon to be ex-husband, one has to think. There is an immense human tragedy that can be easily minimized given the grotesqueness of the behavior.

What does this mean on the level of politics? Several years ago [I used a children’s story](https://mereorthodoxy.com/frog-and-toad-christendom) to illustrate the point: The story comes from the delightful *Frog and Toad* stories by Arnold Lobel. In one of them, the eponymous characters are enjoying some cookies that one of them baked. The story is built around their attempt to stop eating the cookies: They first try to use “will power” to stop. But that is insufficient. So they try various things–putting the cookies in a box, then tying a string around the box to keep them from opening it, then putting the box on a high shelf to prevent them from untying the string and opening the box. Eventually they give up and throw the cookies outside for the birds to eat. As the story ends, one of the friends says to the other “now we have no cookies,” to which the other replies, “but we have lots of will power!” Writing at the time, I said:

> The idea is best summarized, as one friend helpfully put it, as resetting society's defaults to favor people's long-term interests rather than short-term pleasures. At present, we make it easy for people to indulge in in short-term pleasures provided by exploitative powers that will, stretched out over time, leave them poorer, more lonely, and less able to contribute to their communities. We also make it harder to pursue things that will be in our best interests long-term. This is precisely the opposite of how it should be.

We want to make it easier to choose virtue and harder to choose vices on a broad, societal level. How can we address this problem, such that we are not reducing our citizens to a bleaker version of Frog and Toad trying not to eat the cookies? It seems to me there are specific cases where the equivalent of throwing the cookies outside so the birds can take them away might be called for–the examples of online gambling and online pornography being the two chief examples of this.

What we need today is not a return to liquid modernity of the sort that defined the post-Cold War world. We do not need a social order that views any kind of unchosen obligation or intervention in one’s life as tyranny. That only leaves us isolated and alone. 

Yet nationalism is not a solution either, if only because the nationalist plan is so dependent on contrivances and impossible political goals that it will tend to make us both angrier (as long hoped for goals are shown to be impossible) and more closed off to our *actual* flesh and blood neighbors with whom we share a place.

What is needed, it seems to me, is the embrace of a political culture that normalizes care and dependence, opposes exploitation of all forms, and seeks instead to normalize practices and habits that reckon with the full ontological density of our neighbors. The benefit of this plan, it seems to me, is that there are some instances of relatively low hanging fruit where we might build broad coalitions to accomplish specific goals. And perhaps in the course of building those coalitions and living within them we will once again learn to see our neighbors as beloved creatures of God–for that, of course, is precisely what they are.
### Resurrecting the Party of Bryan and Ryan
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/resurrecting-the-party-of-bryan-and-ryan/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:35:29.000Z
Since their 2024 presidential election loss, Democrats have understandably engaged in considerable soul-searching. In their self-examination, they would do well to look both abroad and to their past. Democrats might profit from studying the ‘Blue Labour’ movement within the British Labour party, especially how it has diagnosed the latter party’s failures. It first emerged in 2009 as an alternative to the more centrist, globalist and business friendly mainstream New Labour. Never a large group, its supporters today number only a handful of Labour MPs in Parliament. 

Blue Labour’s founder, Maurice Glasman, calls for his party to return to defending the economic interests of the working class and rejecting the neoliberal policies that have disproportionately benefited the wealthy. At the same time, Blue Labour advocates conservative positions on social and cultural issues, eschews centralized, top-down bureaucratic governance and celebrates localism. At its heart, it seeks to address the needs and concerns of the British working class by once again drawing upon the labor movement’s religious roots and cultural conservatism.

Glasman stresses that, historically, the labor movement’s “leadership and membership took the form of a broad-based Christian Movement, a distinctive blend of Catholic, Methodist and dissenting with a dose of High-Church Anglicanism. The Christian concepts of love, brotherhood, the dignity of labour, of community and solidarity, and even the Kingdom of God that sometimes peeked through, formed \[its\] fundamental language.” By the late twentieth century, however, the Labour party sadly became “compromised, lacking in vitality and severed from the roots of its renewal.” Glasman puts it poignantly: “The uncritical embrace of globalisation, the domination of finance capital combined with a pitiless progressive modernism left no place for workers in the movement they had created. It was a case study in alienation and dispossession.” Glasman argues that the “Christian inheritance of labour is a treasure of renewal…. a constitutive aspect of its inheritance but \[one that\] is rendered inaccessible if \[instead\] a revolutionary secularism prevails.”

Although the history of the Democratic party is obviously very different from that of its British cousin, it would benefit from recovering its first principles, including its religious heritage. Rather than cultivating a secularized, deracinated and cosmopolitan Left, Democrats should embrace and commend the religiosity and localism that have long characterized blue collar culture. Their failure to do so since the 1970s helps explain their declining portion of the blue-collar vote.

Two very different historical figures, a Protestant and a Catholic, illustrate how Democrats can build upon their religious heritage. The three-time presidential nominee, William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925), and New Deal supporter, Monsignor John A. Ryan (1869-1945) provide an illuminating insight into the Democratic party’s once successful appeal among blue-collar voters. Both sprang from rural Populist roots in the Great Plains, both understood the Democrats as the party of the common man, and both allowed their Christian faith to profoundly shape their politics.

While not a member of the People’s Party, Nebraska Congressman William Jennings Bryan became a tribune for the interests of rural labor when America was undergoing rapid industrialization and corporate consolidation. Catapulted suddenly to fame by his powerful oratory at the contentious 1896 Democratic nominating convention, Bryan never managed to win the White House but he enjoyed a wide and devoted following among the white rural working class. 

Bryan argued that America’s dramatic economic growth after 1865 had chiefly benefited the Robber Barons whose giant corporations dominated the Gilded Age economy. In response, he called for the state to “counter the overweening power of banks and industrial corporations” and heavily tax the wealthy. He held that the Democrats should (in the words of biographer Michael Kazin) consistently “side with the common man and woman in their perpetual battle with the defenders of privilege, corruption, and big money.” 

Like earlier nineteenth-century evangelicals who had championed the anti-slavery cause and temperance, Bryan understood that his faith had both a personal and a social dimension. Bryan came of age when the divisions over social reform among American Protestants were not as clear cut as they later became. Though Bryan never embraced the theological liberalism of Social Gospel leaders such as Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch, his thinking was clearly influenced by their approach. And he was happy to appear on the same platform with prominent Social Gospel clerics and academics at the Chautauqua Institute and similar venues. “Christ is not only a guide and friend in all the work a man undertakes,” Bryan declared to a 1912 church meeting, “but his name can be invoked for the correction of abuse and eradication of every evil, in private and public life.” Bryan often spoke of his politics as simply “applied Christianity,” a phrase he may have borrowed from Gladden’s 1886 book by that title. 

Bryan refused to grant millionaires a pass simply because of their church attendance. Referring to the Baptist head of Standard Oil, Bryan declared that “it is not necessary that all Christian people shall sanction the Rockefeller method of making money merely because Rockefeller prays.” Never a deep thinker, Bryan usually side-stepped complex theological questions that divided evangelicals. Instead, his approach was thoroughly pragmatic. As he explained: “If it be true, as I believe it is, that morality is dependent upon religion, then religion is not only the most practical thing in the world, but the first essential.” 

After winning the presidency in 1912, Woodrow Wilson appointed Bryan Secretary of State. Bryan’s opposition to U.S. entry into the European war strained his relationship with Wilson and he resigned from the administration in 1915\. Thereafter, Bryan focused more narrowly on religious matters, especially opposing the teaching of biological evolution in public schools. Contrary to the common caricature of Bryan, his opposition to Darwinism often focused on the dangers of social Darwinism’s scientific-sounding argument used to support cutthroat competition and *laissez-faire* economics. Bryan feared, in Kazin’s words, “a society run by Darwinists \[that\] could justify a law barring the feebleminded and poor from having babies and could engage in endless wars of conquest.” In 1925, his naive defense of a literal six-day creationism at the infamous Scopes ‘Monkey trial’ made him the object of widespread ridicule. 

In his three presidential runs, Bryan drew little support beyond rural America and failed to appeal to ethnic working-class voters in northern urban areas. His very public evangelical Protestant convictions appear to have alienated Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Jewish voters in the cities. But economic collapse, in the form of the Great Depression, helped unite working class voters at the ballot box across ethnic, sectional and denominational lines in support of FDR’s Democrats. Like the early British Labour party, the Democratic party managed to unite Protestants and Catholics. 

Though never a candidate for elective public office, Monsignor John A. Ryan was one of the New Deal’s most prominent and articulate Catholic supporters. Unlike Bryan, Ryan was a genuine intellectual who developed a philosophical and theological case for an activist government committed to defending the interests of the poor and dispossessed. But like Bryan, Ryan was a son of the Prairies, born on a Minnesota farm that his parents had homesteaded. Personally acquainted with the grievances that fueled the agrarian revolt of the late 1800s, Ryan first encountered Populist economic thought as a precocious teen when he read and was inspired by Henry George’s *Progress and Poverty* (1879). Alarmed by rising inequality and widespread poverty in America, George proposed eliminating all taxes except for a ‘Single Tax’ on the value of land. Such a tax, George argued, would target land speculators and encourage owners to make productive use of their property. As a mature thinker, Ryan retained this commitment to the sort of humane, small-scale proprietary capitalism that George maintained would ensure an egalitarian social order.

Later, as a Catholic priest and theologian, Ryan’s thinking obviously drew from Catholic sources foreign to the evangelical Bryan. Chief among these were a natural rights philosophy grounded in the historic Catholic conception of natural law and the teaching of papal social encyclicals, chiefly *Rerum Novarum* (1891) and *Quadragesimo Anno* (1931). Ryan held that all human beings created in the image of God possessed a fundamental dignity. Moreover, as divine image-bearers, they all possessed basic rights that the state was obliged to protect. Like Bryan, Ryan’s faith was not limited to a blinkered personal pietism. Ryan insisted that Catholics were called to engage in faith-driven social reform. They should work to promote the common good, a concept central to Catholic social teaching, stretching back to medieval theologians.

Throughout his early writings, Ryan offered constructive criticism of the economic order from a distinctively Catholic perspective. In his doctoral dissertation, later published as *A Living Wage: Its Ethical and Economic Aspects* (1906), he made a persuasive case for minimum wage legislation. His *Distributive Justice* (1916) focused on the maldistribution of wealth in the United States and censured unregulated capitalism. Ryan was the chief author of the *Bishops' Program of Social Reconstruction* (1919) that put forth several reform proposals including social security, unemployment insurance, and a federal minimum wage, some of which would later be adopted in Roosevelt’s New Deal program.

Predictably, Ryan became an early and outspoken supporter of the New Deal, including serving on the Industrial Appeals Board of the National Recovery Administration (NRA). In a controversial move for a Catholic cleric, Ryan openly endorsed Roosevelt for reelection in 1936, admonishing Catholics not to be led astray by the demagogic radio priest and FDR critic, Charles Coughlin. Ryan defended his provocative radio address in support of Roosevelt as “a discussion of certain political events in the light of moral law” rather than as an expression of partisanship.

The Wagner Act (1935) and other New Deal measures promoted the unionization of the American labor force that Ryan had long urged. This helped union membership in the nation triple between 1930 and 1940\. The percentage of unionized workers in the economy rose from just under 13% in 1934 to over 34% in less than a decade. Strengthening the voice of trade unions and boosting their membership rolls deepened a sense of class solidarity. It furthered what Glasman refers to as “the elevation of covenantal institutions,” essential for durable and secure societies.

Moreover, Ryan always adhered closely to Catholic ethical teaching, including discouraging contraceptive use and supporting other measures to promote stable family life. As historians have noted (not always with approval), many of the New Deal’s social policies reflected traditional conservative ideas about gender roles and the family. The so-called New Deal ‘Maternalists’ (including Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, Katharine Lenroot, and Mary Anderson, to name a few) endeavored to make the male ‘family wage’ the cornerstone of New Deal policy. The original Social Security Act (1935) and subsequent related legislation assumed and served to promote a conventional arrangement of husbands serving as the chief breadwinner, and women staying at home with young children, if possible. Such legislation was implicitly designed to discourage divorce and having children out of wedlock. In short, many New Deal policies envisioned a welfare state that protected conservative social ideals. 

Both Bryan and Ryan understood that state intervention could protect the economic interests of working-class Americans while it nourished the kind of social conservatism blue-collar folks valued. This combination has been a central feature of authentic populism, which contrasts sharply with the fraudulent populisms in circulation today. Globalization and neoliberal policies have produced a market society that, as Glasman observes, gradually “disintegrates as its only bonds are self-interest and contract.” He terms this “the liquidation of solidarity” – something leading Democrats have promoted, though not always intentionally, for decades. By building on these and other historical examples, Democrats can engage in a revitalizing *ressourcement* to help them reconnect with working-class Americans.
### The Good News About Bad Work Days
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-good-news-about-bad-work-days/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:35:31.000Z
Very often, when we talk about faith and work, we talk about vocation. We encourage people to find and follow their calling, not just to pursue wealth or worldly success. Vocation is a very good thing and those are very good conversations. 

But not everyone finds their vocation. And while vocation is also closely tied to the idea of fulfillment, sometimes our work is unfulfilling. 

As a result, conversations about faith and work can be hard for some people to enter and the ideas surrounding faith and work can even be a bit alienating. When we talk about faith and work, we should also be talking about sanctification. 

Work can be a place where we find great fulfillment and meaning, but work can also be a source of great disappointment and frustration. We distinguish between work and toil, but even if the work we do is more than toil, we are not guaranteed good bosses or ideal circumstances. You might not get the promotion or raise you expect, even the one you deserve. You may do great work and your company may still go under. You may be called upon to make personal sacrifices for the greater good and never see that rewarded. These are all normal work experiences.

Work can lead to burnout. Though “job burnout” is not a medical condition, it is taken seriously by medical professionals. The [Mayo Clinic](https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in-depth/burnout/art-20046642?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) identifies the causes of burnout as: lack of control, lack of clarity about what’s expected of you, conflicts with others, too much or too little to do, lack of support, and problems with work-life balance. The [American Psychological Association](https://www.apa.org/topics/healthy-workplaces/workplace-burnout?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) is also concerned with worker burnout, which is linked to psychological conditions like depression, insomnia, and psychological distress *and* to physical conditions like heart disease, headaches, and musculoskeletal pain. According to the [Society for Human Resource Management](https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/inclusion-diversity/burnout-shrm-research-2024?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), in 2024, as many as 44 percent of workers felt burned out, 45 percent felt “emotionally drained” by work, and 51 percent felt “‘used up’ at the end of the workday.” At the end of 2024, [Pew Research](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/12/10/job-satisfaction/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) reported that: “Half of U.S. workers say they are extremely or very satisfied with their job overall. Another 38% say they are somewhat satisfied, and 12% are not too or not at all satisfied with their job.”

Many people are somewhat miserable at work or are sometimes made miserable by work. “Dream jobs” are elusive. Even seemingly great and desirable jobs might require long hours or great effort. The Bible establishes that work is good, but the experience of work can be frustrating as often as it is fulfilling. It can be hard to make sense of this reality, especially considering how many hours of our lives are spent at work, whether or not we love it. We all want meaningful work, but we also have to make sense of the meaning of the hard work we do and what it takes from us. 

When we think about our work and our faith, we should be considering what to draw from the difficult parts and what it means that so many of us will end up feeling like we have given more than we have received at work. Viewing work as a means of sanctification can help people derive more meaning from work, even when the job and the results do not align with dreams or vocation. Sanctification is understood as the process of making something or someone holy, associated with spiritual growth and increased alignment of our will with God’s. Sanctification involves smoothing our rough edges and slowly dying to ourselves. 

While the home is central to our existence, many of us spend more of our awake hours at work than at home, which means something in terms of how we should evaluate the significance of how we experience, and are experienced at, work. Many of the exhortations of the New Testament can relate directly to workplace experiences. Consider Jesus’ admonition not to worry, given in Matthew 6 and Luke 12\. It is human to worry, because we lack control and our future is uncertain. Our lack of control exists in many parts of our lives, but it can be exceptionally stressful at work, where we are often dependent on our co-workers and bosses and even the whims of the economy. We have all the parts of our lives to learn to trust God more when we experience a lack of control, but we have an [average of almost eight hours per weekday](https://www.bls.gov/charts/american-time-use/emp-by-ftpt-job-edu-h.htm?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to do that at work.

Many people have a “work bestie,” but most of us do not choose all, or even most, of our co-workers. The question of “who is my neighbor?” is a pressing one at work. As in the parable, our neighbors are not necessarily the people we select, they are the people in the neighboring cubicles, or down the hall, or on the same presentation team. We have no genetic predisposition to love our co-workers and, often, no familial ties to secure our affection. The people we work with are, outside of family, the people whose lives we can do the most to improve. Even if your work is about benefiting specific, other people, it is unlikely you spend more time with the target population than you do with your co-workers. 

Day after day, year after year, we work alongside people whose strengths and weaknesses and personal struggles we can come to know intimately. We have the opportunity to love and serve these people, not as benefactors but as neighbors. Some of us may have leadership roles, but most of us will make our most meaningful contributions to the lives of others as peers or even as subordinates. Caring for our co-workers has less glory than a missions trip and co-workers will know better than most people how well developed we are in the fruits of the Spirit. Work gives us the opportunity to love our neighbors—the ones we are gifted, not the ones we choose—as our most human, exhausted, overworked selves. 

Sometimes work is miserable. Who has not labored in a bad workplace situation? Who has not waited to be recognized or promoted or even paid? Who has not been challenged by confusing processes or silly protocols? What good comes of this? Much good can come of this. Work is a place where we learn to increase our patience and restrain our tempers. We are not at liberty to say or do whatever we feel or please when we are unhappy, not if we want to remain employed. 

A challenging workplace can be a context we can use to practice and integrate many virtues. Wages stagnate, bonuses do not always arrive, co-workers have different compensation for the same jobs. How will we handle ourselves and how will we evaluate our worth when compensation might be unfair or our efforts seem underappreciated? Can we understand our work as being “unto the Lord” as Paul advised in Colossians? Even when the pay is good but the effort is exhausting, we must build a narrative around what is required of us—will we see it only in terms of our exhaustion or exploitation or can we transmute that into something more meaningful?

One reason we are so often inclined to narrate our workday at home is because that is the only way we can be the center of the story of the workplace. We are rarely even the center of the floor we work on. Whatever work we do, it goes beyond us and is not built exclusively around our wants and desires. We can resist the lessons in this reality, or we can use it as a reminder that we are not in the center of the universe and that is a very good thing. 

There are many goods we can derive from work even when work does not always seem good. The ideal is work that is fulfilling, but we can be well-formed even by work that is not. Arguably, the workplace struggles we experience are some of our best opportunities for sanctification. Thinking about work and sanctification can help us toward a richer understanding of the ways that work is a blessing, even when it does not feel especially satisfying. Bringing sanctification into the conversation around work can help us move toward a more robust theology of work.
### Soul Care in a Collapsed Age
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/soul-care-in-a-collapsed-age/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:35:33.000Z
In his recent book, *Superbloom*, Nicholas Carr surveys the history, development, and use of various media technologies. He laments that these tools touted as connective mediums actually do more to fragment than bring us together. One of the unintended effects of such advancements Carr describes is the concept of content collapse. As the regulations for online media became increasingly lax and the power to broadcast messages was democratized, distinctions between form, register, sense, and importance became blurred. Text, image, and even sound became flattened into one undifferentiated feed––severed from their histories, forms, and purposes so they could be consumed efficiently.

The result is that *everything* is now categorized as “content”, regardless of its actual shape or voice, and all content must fit the internet’s conventions of immediacy, novelty, and efficiency. 

But what Carr describes as “content collapse” is not merely a media phenomenon. It has become a way of seeing—one that trains us to strip things of history, context, and form so they can be consumed quickly. Once learned, this way of seeing does not stay online: collapse cascades from online spaces to interpersonal relationships like an orchestrated demolition. And one marked casualty in the rubble of this collapse is the craft of soul care––the art of attending to the whole, distinct person in bringing God’s gifts to his people.

## Character Collapse

Content collapse encourages us to view people the same way we view information: as context-free snippets all categorized within the same indistinct register. This is because, as Samuel James notes, the web is an epistemological habitat. As such, it not only *rewards* certain ways of thinking, it actually *reteaches* how we think. James gives shallow skimming and knee-jerk intuitions as primary examples of such retraining.

This is certainly a crisis on an informational level. But the rewiring of our brains wreaks relational havoc as well. We have become epistemologically habituated to shallowly skim *people* too. We primarily think of others, James says, “via the profile page”, a soul in motion reduced to a digital snapshot. Thus we’ve learned to process people the same way we process content.

Like content collapse, we suffer from something like “character” collapse––each individual we encounter is viewed as no more than a flat, momentary manifestation of their being. We are the main character; they are supporting roles that seemingly appear on a page ahistorically and disappear just as quickly. We slide through social interactions much the way we scroll through a news feed, with nearly all context removed. Carr describes this sort of removal of personal context as *dislocation*.

But it's one thing to sever bits of information from their intended form and sense. It’s another to cut off a human being from their history.

## History Whisking

Our online habituation––with immediacy and efficiency as king––has formed us into “history whiskers”. I’m taking this language from Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel *Brave New World*. In it, Huxley paints an eerily prophetic vision of society-as-machine. Towards the end of the novel, explaining how the powers-that-be come to achieve such a “stable” society, the World Controller says,

> “History is bunk. History,” he repeated slowly, “is bunk.” He waved his hand; and it was as though, with an invisible feather whisk, he had brushed away a little dust, and the dust was Harappa, was Ur of the Chaldees; some spider-webs, and they were Thebes and Babylon and Cnossos and Mycenae. Whisk. Whisk-and where was Odysseus, where was Job, where were Jupiter and Gotama and Jesus? Whisk-and those specks of antique dirt called Athens and Rome, Jerusalem and the Middle Kingdom-all were gone. Whisk-the place where Italy had been was empty. Whisk, the cathedrals; whisk, whisk, King Lear and the Thoughts of Pascal. Whisk, Passion; whisk, Requiem; whisk, Symphony; whisk...

The goal was stability, the means to that goal was history whisking––the removal of any story that could elicit an extraneous emotion, feeling, or thought that didn’t serve the vision of an efficient society. The result of such historical eradication were collapsed classes of people––Alphas, Betas, all the way to Epsilon Semi-Morons––that were predictably generic. Whisking away history did not merely produce ignorance; it produced *predictable people* who were easy to manage, categorize, and consume (like context-free content).

While fiction, we are not as far from Huxley’s world as we may like to believe. Sociologist Sherry Turkle coined the “Goldilocks effect” for how we prefer our relationships not too close, not too far, just right. We use technology to “clean them up”, digitally categorizing others, flattening people until they fit predictably within the narrative of *our* life.

But this is not how people are meant to be viewed. Great story tellers know this. In his memoir *On Writing* Stephen King advises against creating a flat “bad guy” or “best friend.” No real human can be so simplistically reduced. King’s counsel is to create and then bring the whole of the character's life to bear on the narrative, suggesting that this helps guard against stories full of “one-dimensional dopes”.

King recognizes the irreducible complexity of the human story, and rightly knows that to whisk that composite history away is a misrepresentation of the human experience unworthy of even works of fiction! How much more impossible must it be for image-bearers of the Triune God to be one-dimensional dopes. As Lewis said, “there are no ordinary people.” And yet, our default mode is to relegate others to the role of one-dimensional actors—flat “neighbors” or “coworkers” or “parishioners”—orbiting around our multi-dimensional roundness. 

So what happens to a soul when it is robbed of its history? Simply put, it cannot be properly cared for. When history is whisked and people are flattened, the contours of the soul are fundamentally misunderstood, thus grace can never be appropriately applied.

## Soul Care After Collapse

The care and cure of souls is not a new ministry endeavor. We have wise examples throughout church history from Bucer to Baxter, all seeking to apply our Lord’s command to “feed my sheep.” However, the Spirit-filled art of learning Jesus’ way must now have a greater focus on rejecting the ahistorical flattening of others. 

In his collection of essays on John’s gospel, Richard Bauckham points out the evangelist’s use of the full spectrum of character types: from flat, “walk-on” characters, to full-fledged “individuals”––round characters with unique histories and personalities. Bauckham’s emphasis, though, is not the typical observation that these characters *respond* differently to Jesus; rather, that Jesus *deals* with them differently: He meets Martha in her mourning; Peter in his failure; Nicodemus in his religious rigidity. Jesus applies his healing contextually, the particular soul encountered determing the specific plan for care.

It is interesting that the accounts of Jesus’ omnipotent healing in both Mark 2 and Luke 5––where the title *Great Physician* is drawn from––both include a nod to Jesus’ omniscience. Inseparable from his physician-like healing is his physician-like knowledge of the unique, multi-dimensional histories of those right in front of him. He is not merely the Great Physician of diagnosis and treatment; he is the Great Physician of oral history! 

True soul care always takes place in the context of soul knowledge.

So while merely modeling our ministry on the omniscient Healer is utter folly, we must––as attendings filled with the Physician’s Spirit––seek to follow his ways within our human limits. Harold Senkbiel, a skilled practitioner in the art of soul care, likens soul knowledge to the gathering of an oral history by a doctor. In medicine, and in life, no two patients are the same. The difference between successful and unsuccessful “treatment” can be attention to this unique history:

> The right word at the right time lies at the heart of faithful soul cure, and we won’t know what word to speak unless we have both prayerfully meditated on God’s word and attentively listened to the soul.

Notice Senkbeil’s *both*. Yes, of course Scripture discloses the history of redemption (medicine), but we must also know the history of *their* redemption (oral history)! Likewise Eugene Peterson agrees there are no fail-proof prescriptions; each person is a complex being with “shapeless longings” and “badgering questions”—symptoms that must be considered in light of their history. There are no boilerplate blessings. True, the promises of God in Christ apply to everyone, but those promises need to be skillfully mapped onto the soul in history. 

In his philosophically rich work on inhabiting time, Jamie Smith points out that it is the *historical creature* that is redeemed. Indeed, we do not merely *have* a history, we *are* a history. And it is the “me” with a history that God has dealt with *in time* through the person of Jesus. God’s salvific act of justification is a *final* verdict of judgment decreed *in eternity* that is then applied *in history* in the life of the person sitting in front of you.

## History as Spiritual Practice

It is, then, the historical creature we must attend to in caring for the soul. The personal history of the redeemed is worthy of our attention, because it is there where God has chosen to act. Senkbeil says the first crucial component of soul care is paying attention in Jesus’ name. Such unhurried leisure of listening, as Peterson calls it, became his metric for a fruitful week of soul care: he reflected not on “How many people have you spoken to about Christ this week?” but “How many people have you listened to in Christ this week?”

But what exactly are we listening *for*? Again Peterson is a worthy guide:

- What has God been doing here?
- What traces of grace can I discern in this life?
- What history of love can I read in this group?
- What has God set in motion that I can get in on?

Listening for this––listening *at all*––is an increasingly tall order for an overstimulated and deeply distracted age. However, this only compounds the immense gift that attentive ears can be to burdened souls. 

Peterson is adamant that such attentiveness must be used to “read the minutes” of the previous meeting (i.e. *their* previous meeting with God). We must reject our main-character disposition and realize with each person we encounter that God is already at work. They exist as a multi-dimensional person *outside of our experience of them* and we are coming into that pre-existing process. 

One simple way to grow in this practice of minute-reading is to *actually keep minutes* in the form of pastoral notes. Taking such notes is not a technique for efficiency, but rather is an act of honoring history. Practically, we must do the hard work of learning all we can about someone in the context of genuine relationship and document as much as possible (discernment around issues of confidentiality goes without saying). Then, we should update these “minutes” after each future encounter with them––glimpses of grace seen, sadnesses left unsaid, offhanded comments worth remembering. These are living documents that take on the shape of the soul in time. It is important to emphasize that this is not a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system––such systems typically encourage collapse for efficiency's sake. Rather, this is a practice of honoring the history of time-inhabiting souls. 

Practically, reviewing these notes before meeting with someone in their home or out for coffee then becomes a spiritual practice––a historical liturgy to prepare our hearts for a multi-dimensional encounter. This practice reminds us that this person is not merely a supporting character in the story of our life. They are a storied soul that has been acted upon in history by the Eternal God. Such perspective helps us refrain from becoming what Peterson describes as a project manager ordering busywork, and instead allows us to pay attention to *who they are* and ask God, “How can I join what you are already doing?”

\*\*\*\*

In a collapsed age, keeping history is an act of care. To remember a person’s story is to refuse the lie that they are interchangeable, manageable, or finished. Soul care after collapse is not the mastery of technique, but the patient, prayerful insistence that God works in others *in time*, forming a unique history that cannot be whisked away.
### Christianity and War: An Interview with Timothy Larsen
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/christianity-and-war-an-interview-with-timothy-larsen/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:35:36.000Z
In 1917, a group of seventeen Anglican clergymen who served as military chaplains during WWI published a volume, *The Church in the Furnace*. Who were these seventeen men? What were their stories, both before and after the war and their contributions to the volume? Why did they write this book anyway? What did they think about their faith and war—and why do the varied answers they propose still matter to us today? These are just some of the questions that Timothy Larsen sets out to answer in his new book, [*The Fires of Moloch: Anglican Clergymen in the Furnace of World War One*](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-fires-of-moloch-9780198887751?cc=us&lang=en&&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (Oxford University Press, 2025). 

Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought and Professor of History at Wheaton College and an Honorary Fellow of the School of Divinity at Edinburgh University. He is the author or editor of over twenty books, including [*George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles: Incarnation, Doubt, and Reenchantment*](https://www.ivpress.com/george-macdonald-in-the-age-of-miracles?srsltid=AfmBOoqwDQjeebrJPf37UjLbCHu8Jh1%5F5Bf8WPOj-vbhpFyF9lSJ1ekj&ref=mereorthodoxy.com); [*The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith*](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-slain-god-9780198757429?q=timothy%20larsen&lang=en&cc=us&ref=mereorthodoxy.com); [*John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life*](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/john-stuart-mill-9780198753155?cc=us&lang=en&&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), and [*The Oxford Handbook of Christmas*](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-christmas-9780198897415?q=timothy%20larsen&lang=en&cc=us&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). 

\*\*\*

**Nadya Williams:** This is a group biography of seventeen Anglican clergymen during WWI—a concept that already makes your book somewhat unusual. What is the story behind this project? When did you realize that this is a book you wanted—and maybe even needed—to write? 

**Timothy Larsen:** I have structured several of my books this way. John Wilson, who was the editor of *Books & Culture*, delightfully calls it the “Larsen template.” I am drawn to chapter-length biographies because it gives you enough room to experience human life in all its quirkiness and poignancy. 

In my way of thinking, historical writing should be thoroughly grounded in the particular. I resist projects that are so focused on making generalizations that they have no room to include details that reflect who an individual was and how their life unfolded. To pluck a sentence pretty much at random from the book, of one of my military chaplains I remark: “A houseguest glimpsed him heading off to bed with a Greek Orthodox Prayer Book and an Agatha Christie novel.” That is the stuff of life. 

I think of the chapters as sort of like short stories—at least I am striving towards something along those lines—and I adhere to the writerly advice to try to show rather than tell. I hope that when reading these biographical sketches, a reader might occasionally laugh out loud, but I tell my students (and myself) that I’m only interested in writing in a way that elicits a laugh if what we are really laughing at is the human condition and thus ourselves. People’s petty vanities make me laugh aloud because I am petty and vain; it is a laugh of recognition.

As to the actual subject matter of this book, I tend to do “faith and . . .” projects—the two most recent ones before this book were “faith and anthropology” and “faith and philosophy.” So I decided I wanted to do a “faith and war” project. Looking back, I see this had a lot to do with my parents dying. (Thankfully they both died in old age and from natural causes.) My father was a Korean War veteran whose hobby was military history. He is the reason I became a historian. I think, unconsciously, I was processing their deaths by finally turning to military history. 

**Nadya Williams:** How did WWI affect these clergymen? To what extent would you consider their experience and reactions typical?

**Timothy Larsen:** The war was so big and so bewildering. Even these ordained clergymen by 1917, if not earlier, agreed with the widespread consensus, especially among the fighting men, that the war was meaningless. It must have been extraordinarily difficult to think of the defining event of your life as devoid of meaning. Their response was to decide that the tremendous losses of the war could be made retrospectively meaningful if they did worthy things with their lives after the war. They were filled with zeal to bring about beneficial changes in the post-war society. No doubt this desire was tinged with survivor’s guilt. 

I think this desire was widespread, so in that sense they were pretty typical, but I do think that the Christian faith helps people to believe they are doing something meaningful with their lives. So in that sense, the clergymen who had served as chaplains had an advantage in that it was probably easier for them than for many others to convince themselves that they were doing something meaningful after the war.

**Nadya Williams:** What are some key takeaways you hope your readers will gain from this book?

**Timothy Larsen:** In terms of an original, scholarly contribution, I think the most important one is the section on prayer. There was widespread disillusionment, but what people were disillusioned with was very specifically the false assumption that fighting the war could bring about something good. Scholars tend to imagine that the soldiers and people in general became disillusioned with God and the Christian faith and, in particular, with prayer as a supposedly ineffectual and pointless activity. That is not at all what the primary resources reveal. There was actually a great revival of prayer during the war, both among the soldiers and on the home front. People were much more interested in the question of *how* to pray than whether praying was worthwhile. Even those who described the soldiers as “godless” admitted that they all prayed. What the soldiers often wanted from their chaplains was instruction on how to pray. Written prayers were very popular items. Soldiers often would put one under their hat or helmet for quick and easy access.

More generally, I wanted readers to grasp what this generation went through. Every Briton in uniform during the First World War had been raised and educated as a Victorian. The country had not fought a war with another major power since the mid-1850s. They found themselves in this modern, mechanized war that was so unlike how they had been taught to imagine war. Then, after the war, came the Great Depression. Then after the Great Depression came the Second World War. 

One of my chaplains who gets a chapter-length biography in the book is Neville Talbot. His younger brother, Gilbert, was a lieutenant during the First World War, and as was so common with lieutenants, once he was deployed to France, he only survived for a matter of weeks. Gilbert was killed in one of those futile charges the war has become notorious for. Literally every single soldier who attempted it was either killed or wounded. Neville risked his life to recover Gilbert’s body from a no man’s land under artillery fire and rife with snipers. Neville married during the war. He and his wife had a daughter and then a son. Neville’s wife died from complications from their son’s birth. Neville named their son Gilbert in honor of his brother who died in the First World War. Neville’s son Gilbert was then killed in action during World War II. I came to think of these chaplains as a generation that went from the Victorian age to the atomic age.

**Nadya Williams:** History doesn't operate according to the scientific method of the lab sciences. Still, akin to researchers in the hard sciences, we usually begin a book project with a working hypothesis or argument in mind, then see where the rest of the research and primary sources take us. What was your working hypothesis when you first started this project? Were there any surprises along the way, or did the overall story you are telling end up being mostly what you expected?

**Timothy Larsen:** A lot my books have had a very strong revisionist thesis. I used to quip that my thesis was always “you have always thought this, but you were wrong.” I did not come to this project, however, with a revisionist agenda. Another theme of my work has been that there is more faith going on than the standard story usually sees or admits. I think I did bring that lens to this project—a suspicion that the view that a lot of people have that the war caused many people to lose their faith was probably wrong (and it is). 

Another thing I tend to do is pick a project that I don’t know much about so I can learn something myself. So I learned a lot working on this book. It was a new subject for me. Here is one thing that surprised and struck me: I came at the project assuming that the war would cause people’s beliefs to change radically. They did change sometimes, and sometimes radically, but I had badly underestimated the degree to which people tend to double down on what they already believe in a time of crisis. There was a notable pattern of people “learning” from the war the lessons that they wanted to learn. Very high church people insisted that the war vindicated high church practices; very theological liberal people insisted that the war vindicated liberal beliefs; strident evangelicals asserted that the war illustrated the rightness of evangelical ways, and so on. 

In general, I have a theory that historians have a bias in favor of seeing and discussing change and therefore tend to underestimate or largely ignore continuity. Continuity is essential to making history meaningful for us. It is because we can recognize ourselves in things that people in the past thought and did that their stories matter to us.

**Nadya Williams:** You are a prolific researcher and writer, as well as a teacher. I especially appreciate in your work a visible delight in intellectual labors—it really comes through in everything you do. What are some key habits for you in maintaining an active and joyful intellectual life? 

**Timothy Larsen:** This is such a wonderful thing to say! The book is dedicated to David J. P. Hooker a friend of mine who is a ceramic artist and a colleague, a professor of art here at Wheaton College. I explain in the acknowledgments: “I need to hear him talk about the process, as opposed to the product, of our work over and over again.” 

I realized that I needed to talk about process a lot more with my own students as well. I came to think of the way I used to teach as like the kind of cooking shows that were on TV when I was growing up in which you would see someone chopping a carrot for a few seconds and then you would see them pull this amazing, finished dish out of the oven. The real truth is, counting both the preparation work and the cooking time, that dish was probably a four to five hour project. Therefore, the relevant question is: do you want to go out and find and buy these ingredients, do the labor-intensive effort to prepare then, and wait the substantial time it will take for it to cook? The product is a moment—"here is this book I wrote”—but process is what we do with our lives, it is the eight years of work I put into the project of which this book is the tangible fruit. 

When choosing a project, I am less and less focused on thoughts such as, “Will the resulting book be an important contribution to the field that critics will praise?” and more and more on “Will I enjoy reading these sources, thinking about these issues, and working on this project for the years of my life that it will take to get to the book?” The older I get the more the question, “Will I actually enjoy reading the primary sources?” has become more central and decisive.

Another thing I tell my students (and myself) a lot is: “You don’t control reception.” It is not a wise strategy to do a project primarily because of your hopes for how it will be received. You don’t control reception. Do a project because you think it is intrinsically worthwhile, because it is the way you want to occupy your time, because you will find joy and fulfillment in actually doing it—joy and fulfilment *in the process*. That is the part you can control. And then you will always have that sense that it was inherently worthwhile—and you will have the memory of that joyful, fulfilling process as time well spent, whatever the reception of the resulting product ends up being.
### The Dark Triad and the Death of Repentance
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-dark-triad-and-the-death-of-repentance/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:35:39.000Z
It begins in the pulpit—or perhaps, if we are honest, it begins in ourselves. I have seen it in churches, in leaders I once admired, and at times in the mirror: the inability to say, “I was wrong.”

We preach grace and speak of repentance, yet we rationalize and reposition. We ask for prayer but not forgiveness. We call for revival but rarely confess. We proclaim grace, but weep not. And we are not alone.

Psychologists speak of a “Dark Triad”—Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy—not merely as a taxonomy of antisocial traits, but as a framework with moral implications. These traits resist remorse, responsibility, and grace. Their defining feature is not mere immorality but a structural incapacity for contrition. One need not be a criminal to fit the profile. Some smile, charm, lead—and devastate—without ever acknowledging fault. Their conscience does not fail; it is suppressed.

This raises a theological question of grave importance: What occurs when the human will, already bent by sin, ossifies into a structure fundamentally closed to repentance? Reformed theology rightly teaches that repentance is not a human achievement but a divine gift. Yet even divine grace, though irresistible in the elect, often meets fierce resistance until it breaks through. What if certain personalities, apart from divine intervention, lack the psychic architecture to conceive of themselves as sinners?

Martin Luther described sin as *incurvatus in se*—a turning inward of the self. In this light, the unrepentant are not simply stubborn; they are enthroned. They do not so much reject grace as find it unintelligible. John Calvin observed that repentance is born of faith—that is, it begins not in self-awareness but in the death of self-sovereignty.

The Westminster Confession defines repentance unto life as a saving grace whereby a sinner, out of a true sense of sin and an apprehension of God’s mercy in Christ, turns from sin unto God with grief and hatred. But what becomes of repentance when grief is absent—when there are no tears? When sin is rebranded as strength, and guilt is reframed as pathology? In such cases, theology confronts the hard edge of moral detachment. As Jean Twenge and W. K. Campbell [observe](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-narcissism-epidemic-living-in-the-age-of-entitlement-jean-m-twenge-phd/c7fac03e1b66f15b?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), we live in an age where narcissism is not only tolerated but celebrated—where guilt is pathologized and repentance appears regressive.

Psychologist Joshua D. Miller has observed that grandiose narcissists exhibit strong resistance to moral self-revision. Robert Hare [notes](https://bookshop.org/p/books/without-conscience-the-disturbing-world-of-the-psychopaths-among-us-robert-d-hare-phd/36fc52d3a14ec278?ean=9781572304512&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that those with psychopathic traits tend to receive confrontation not as care, but as challenge—and respond not with reflection, but with manipulation. Paulhus and Williams, [who first coined the term “Dark Triad,”](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0092656602005056?via%3Dihub&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) emphasize the interpersonal callousness and manipulative orientation inherent in these traits. These are not momentary lapses in judgment but durable dispositions, which may correspond to what Paul calls a “seared conscience” (1 Tim. 4:2): not dead, but cauterized. While the Dark Triad is an imperfect lens, it helps name dispositions that theology has long warned against.

This presents not only a pastoral challenge but an ecclesial crisis. What becomes of a church whose leaders are structurally incapable of repentance? When charisma deflects correction, and authority insulates from accountability, the congregation ceases to be a flock and becomes a firewall. The gospel, in such contexts, is not proclaimed but performed—without tears, without sorrow, without death. And performance is what unrepentant hearts often master.

Such figures are not rare. They are present not only in pews but on stages. They offer no confession, respond to confrontation with rhetorical maneuvering, and pursue therapy as strategy rather than healing. Their apologies serve not as admissions but as instruments of control. They do not seek restoration but leverage.

We need not imagine far-fetched scenarios. In the wake of recent evangelical scandals—from celebrity pastors to fallen movements—the pattern is hauntingly consistent. A leader builds a vast ministry, preaches grace weekly, and teaches repentance as spiritual maturity. Yet when confronted with credible reports of bullying, manipulation, or moral failure, he responds with evasion. His resignation cites stress, not sin. He soon reappears elsewhere, rebranded and unrepentant. The sheep are scattered; heaven hears no confession.

Still, grace does not depend on the penitent heart. It creates it. Grace does not await sorrow; it generates it. But this grace must come from beyond. No technique, no therapeutic method, can produce repentance where the self remains enthroned. The way forward is not adjustment but crucifixion—the radical undoing of the self. Only in the death of pride can resurrection begin.

This is why theology must attend to psychology—not to baptize it, but to examine it critically. The Dark Triad is not merely diagnostic; it is apocalyptic. It reveals what becomes of human nature when left to itself. And from such, Jesus says, the kingdom hides.

Yet the gospel reaches even further. The One who knew no sin became sin—even for those who deny sin (2 Cor. 5:21). Christ descends not only into graves of guilt but into tombs sealed by self-worship. Not with flattery, but with fire. Not with affirmation, but with mercy severe enough to break stone.

Repentance is impossible for man. But not for God. He who breathed life into dust can breathe sorrow—even tears—into stone. He who wept at Lazarus’s tomb can awaken tears in eyes long dry. “I will give you a new heart,” says the Lord, “and put a new spirit within you” (Ezek. 36:26). Even the Dark Triad is not beyond the reach of pierced hands.

And so the Church must recover the ordinary rhythms that make repentance plausible again: weekly confession, transparent elder accountability, and slow pathways back into leadership for the fallen. These are not techniques of grace but rooms cleared for grace to enter.

If we desire renewal, it will not begin with new strategies but with tears. For the Spirit moves where breath is gone, rattles the gates we sealed, and speaks into hearts we deemed unreachable. He does not knock. He enters. He does not negotiate. He resurrects.

A church without repentance is near death. But where death meets the crucified Christ, resurrection waits.
### Reading Dante with C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, and Charles Williams
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/reading-dante-with-c-s-lewis-dorothy-sayers-and-charles-williams/
Last updated: 2026-04-20T18:11:36.000Z
Richard Hughes Gibson. [*The Way of Dante: Going Through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven with C.S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams*](https://www.ivpress.com/the-way-of-dante?srsltid=AfmBOortMso3w9ZD2OoW6a6XXtWuEeWDme0JluTsp9RT2b0y9YZ0VI-S&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). IVP Academic, 2025\. $24.99\. 248 pp.

Christmas has come and gone, and if your loved ones are anything like mine, they probably gave you some very sensible gifts—the kind of things normal people could use. But I am not a normal person, and neither are you, so it’s time to get ourselves what we really want in our odd little hearts. I went looking for gifts related to Dante’s *Inferno*, and the internet did not disappoint. 

You can trade your traditional peppermint sticks for [Dante’s Inferno Hot Candy Canes](https://www.amazon.com/Dantes-Inferno-Candy-Canes-Funny/dp/B0CJ8Y4SWR?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) or enjoy a cup of hot cocoa from your [Charon’s Ferry Service mug](https://www.etsy.com/listing/1625619045/dantes-inferno-charons-ferry-service?ls=s&ga%5Forder=most%5Frelevant&ga%5Fsearch%5Ftype=all&ga%5Fview%5Ftype=gallery&ga%5Fsearch%5Fquery=dantes+inferno+gift&ref=sr%5Fgallery-1-26&sr%5Fprefetch=0&pf%5Ffrom=market&pro=1&content%5Fsource=4e4b3ba3-1412-490a-8b21-45092e18eca7%253ALTae40c5ca38a29b31e5819c3c733994e621c7d7c5&organic%5Fsearch%5Fclick=1&logging%5Fkey=4e4b3ba3-1412-490a-8b21-45092e18eca7%3ALTae40c5ca38a29b31e5819c3c733994e621c7d7c5). Welcome members of your family home for future holidays with this [helpful sign](https://www.etsy.com/listing/43069131/gothic-abandon-all-hope-gargoyle-sign?gpla=1&gao=1&&utm%5Fsource=google&utm%5Fmedium=cpc&utm%5Fcampaign=shopping%5Fus%5Fps-b-home%5Fand%5Fliving&utm%5Fcustom1=%5Fk%5FCj0KCQiAxonKBhC1ARIsAIHq%5Flv2j0LZl5KuoZ2wE2Z-FmSVw15Y5QTeo-SqpztcuRHVEY3XK4mJ5Y8aAkX6EALw%5FwcB%5Fk%5F&utm%5Fcontent=go%5F21500568360%5F167985819559%5F716809480270%5Faud-2320558161823:pla-303628061699%5Fc%5F%5F43069131%5F129048517&utm%5Fcustom2=21500568360&gad%5Fsource=1&gad%5Fcampaignid=21500568360&gbraid=0AAAAADtcfRL5VV3PkxtJvZM5Id5Jsqa0c&gclid=Cj0KCQiAxonKBhC1ARIsAIHq%5Flv2j0LZl5KuoZ2wE2Z-FmSVw15Y5QTeo-SqpztcuRHVEY3XK4mJ5Y8aAkX6EALw%5FwcB). If your price range is a bit higher, perhaps you would enjoy [a clutch from Olympia Le-Tan](https://olympialetan.com/products/dantes-inferno?srsltid=AfmBOoqgLijs1fz-2VwPxZtUrq7pQ8foHEElokflUI1-j%5FQ3uanjCsGr&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) designed to look like a Gustav Doré illustrated copy of the *Inferno*? (Not that you’ll have any money left to store inside.)

It is one of those unfortunate inevitabilities of history that Dante Alighieri should be remembered even by those who know nothing of medieval poetry, but only in association with the macabre. The fullness of Dante’s achievement in his *Comedy* and *Vita Nuova* is beyond my ability to express but T.S. Eliot said it perfectly in his volume *The Poets on Poets: Dante*: “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third.”

Eliot did not mean Shakespeare and Dante were responsible for the electric light bulb or the atomic bomb, but that the breadth of their works provided the supreme description of the human experience. “And gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation *and higher degrees of exaltation.*” (emphasis mine)

It is those positive aspects of Dante’s work—the quest for virtue and entrance into glory—that chiefly interested the literary trio of Charles Williams, C.S. Lewis, and Dorothy Sayers. In his new book, *The Way of Dante*, Richard Hughes Gibson examines the interactions between these three authors, the ways in which they helped each other understand Dante, and the spiritual truths they uncovered.

Through his analysis of documents held at Wheaton College’s Marion E. Wade Center, Gibson found that, “Sayers, Williams, and Lewis must be understood as a cohort of Dante readers whose invocations of Dante—public and private, conspicuous and covert—comprise a network of allusions, quotations, and citations.” They were “translators of Dante to their generation,” endeavoring “to bring readers, auditors, students *into* Dante’s poem, Dante’s mentality, Dante’s cosmos.” Gibson takes us on a journey through their engagements with Dante in the hope that it will inspire us to seek out the old master ourselves. “Reading Dante just might change your life. It changed theirs.”

Williams found his love for Dante early, while Lewis first studied Dante seriously around 1930 while in the process of converting to Christianity. Their mutual love for the Tuscan bard brought them together. When Williams first read Lewis’ work *The Allegory of Love*, a meditation upon medieval chivalric literature, he “felt he had found a kindred spirit among the living—just as he had in Dante among the dead.” 

Sayers was latest to the party, picking up a volume of Dante while sheltering in the family bunker during World War II. She immediately longed to bring its magic to a general British audience. “She sought to enlist Williams because his method set historical trivia aside. She wanted him to close the temporal gap between medieval and modern and reveal the poem’s continuing *relevance* to ordinary reader’s lives.”

This is a critical point, for the trio’s interest in Dante’s work was not merely literary. They believed it was of genuine spiritual importance in an age when evil had been put on such terrible display. Gibson concludes that “my authors’ truly outstanding contribution in the wartime and postwar contexts in which they were publishing was to argue that the *Comedy* is *true*.” Crucially, this meant not only that its descriptions of the worst of humanity were true, but also its predictions of what humanity would be at its best.

The trio sought to affirm the reality of hell not as the torture chamber of a wrathful God, but the self-made torment of those given over to evil. “With Dante, Sayers and Lewis depict hell as the choice to remain forever in the ‘dungeon’ of one’s own mind. Hell is the fierce embrace of *un*reality.” In the *Inferno*, “they beheld the sins we coddle within ourselves bearing their poison fruit.” The purpose of Dante’s journey to the underworld, they concluded, was not to scare readers straight, but to make them long for another way of being. “By contemplating the kingdom of hell and recognizing that it is within and around us, we may yearn for another kingdom.”

Therefore, the *Comedy* truly gets to work on the purgatorial mount, where human beings shed the evil desires that hold them in chains. “All three members of my cohort preferred the *Comedy*’s second canticle to its first,” Gibson notes. “Yet the reading public didn’t share their esteem of *Purgatorio* because, for the most part, the common reader hadn’t read it.” Here again we see how most people are attracted to Dante’s descriptions of evil rather than those of goodness. Desiring and seeing the good, according to the trio, requires a change of vision brought about by God himself. “*Purgatorio*, on this understanding, presents the arduous journey to *clearsightedness*—regarding the self, one’s neighbors, creation, and the Maker of all of these.”

The storytelling becomes more difficult when Dante arrives in paradise itself, for nothing sinful lends drama to the story. C.S. Lewis admitted that the concept of glory—of being transfigured into a luminous being—fails to capture the imagination of the modern person. He explained that in his day “the artist doesn’t just have to help us to see the latent glory in creation; the artist also has to make Dante’s sort of glory desirable.” The awakening of that desire occurs through encounters with blessedness that point us toward the beatific vision we will behold in eternity. Again, God must remake our vision for us to see clearly.

Beatrice played this role for Dante in real life and in the *Comedy*, but it can be taken up by all manner of persons, for “as Lewis had learned from reading Williams, *anyone* can be a Beatrice.” This concept was clearly portrayed in Lewis’ book *The Great Divorce*, where we find “a series of Beatrician encounters in which figures of glory try to coax hellions out of their self-enclosed shadows and into the life-renewing light. The book, simply stated, is about the ever-present opportunity for glory that lies before us all.” That pursuit of glory was the chief objective of Williams before his sudden death in 1945, of Sayers as she penned her translations of the *Comedy*, and of Lewis as he applied its principles to his fiction and non-fiction works.

In *The Way of Dante*, Gibson takes us on a journey with Sayers, Williams, and Lewis, as they journey with Dante. Even so, we all look back to the inspirational figures of the past as we walk the pilgrim way, some of whom play the same role for us that Beatrice did for Dante and Dante did for the trio. As Gibson explains,

> Dante took Dorothy Sayers, Charles Williams, and C.S. Lewis through hell, and they thanked him for his infernal instruction in how not to live. But they loved the medieval poet because the pit is only the first stage of his epic pilgrimage. Dante made ‘art for seeing evil.’ My trio testified that the *Comedy* is also, and to a far greater extent, art for experiencing glory.

*The Way of Dante* is an academic work based in part on Gibson’s Hansen lectures. The writing is generally clear and engaging, and the best thing I can say for this book is that it fulfilled one of its author’s primary goals: it made me want to read Dante again. The afterword by Nicole Mazzarella is an interesting addition that will help readers engage with the second volume of the *Comedy*, *Purgatorio*. This is an ideal book for fans of both Dante and the Inklings.
### A Protestant Response to a Roman Argument for Christendom
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-protestant-response-to-a-roman-argument-for-christendom/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:35:42.000Z
Andrew Willard Jones. [*The Church Against the State: On Subsidiarity and Sovereignty*](https://newpolity.com/books-in-inventory/the-church-against-the-state?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*.* New Polity Press, 2025\. $34.95\. 321 pp.

Christians who feel the oppression of a secular government that is hostile to their values might be attracted to the vision of Christendom that Andrew Willard Jones presents in *The Church Against the State*. 

Jones, a professor of history and political theory at the College of St. Joseph the Worker in Steubenville, Ohio, and the founding editor of *New Polity: The Journal of Postliberal Thought*, does not merely want to limit the state’s power or Christianize it. Instead, he wants a revived Christendom—that is, a society in which every facet of society, including the state, derives its meaning from its relationship to God and works harmoniously with all other entities in society to further God’s ends. 

Jones arrives at this vision partly because he thinks of society as an organic unit. Just as the hand is part of the body and functions effectively only when it works harmoniously with all other components of the body, so each component of society is organically connected to the others.

The individual is part of the family, which is part of the community, which is part of the state, which ultimately has meaning only in its relationship to God. The relationship between each of these entities is hierarchical, but these hierarchies are based on mutual obligations—an arrangement that Jones, using the language of Catholic theology, calls “subsidiarity.” 

In an ideal political order, the local community would assist the family’s effort to bring children into the world and raise them up, and the family would find their happiness and larger identity in the larger local community. The state would exist to help the local community assist the family, while the local community would find meaning in its larger relationship to the state. A common relationship to God and to moral virtue would bind everything together. And the church would infuse all of these relationships by mediating grace and teaching virtue. 

A postliberal who disagrees with the liberal commitment to individualism, Jones also believes that too many of his fellow postliberals have been antagonists against the state or have sought to appropriate the state to their own ends. Some postliberals have advocated the confessional state—that is a state that is explicitly Catholic or Christian. But a confessional state can easily use religion simply to acquire power, which is not what Jones wants at all. Instead, he wants something larger than merely a nominal Christian confessionalism. He wants an organic unit encompassing all of humanity, which is possible only if all human societies are organically connected to their Christian purpose.

Jones believes that all political systems other than Christendom—including liberalism, socialism, fascism, or the various confessional states of early modern Europe—ultimately degenerate into some form of authoritarian state. This includes the modern American liberal order, he argues. And modern American conservatives have no real solution to this. They imagine that by promoting individual rights, they can limit the state, but a society of atomistic individuals who have no larger external grounding for their freedom-seeking will have no defense against the growth of the state. Competition, which is the basis for classical liberalism, cannot lead to virtue or to a just society; it will instead lead to a society in which state power supersedes everything else, because the state, as the largest player in the competition, will inevitably overcome its rivals.

The only solution, Jones thinks, is a return to the Christendom that Europe enjoyed before the Reformation, when every monarch’s power was limited by the state’s relationship to a larger Christian order that was ultimately grounded in God. 

As a Protestant who supports many of the principles of classical liberalism, I finished the book asking myself why I don’t find Jones’s argument for Christendom and subsidiarity compelling. After all, many of his observations are grounded in Christian principles to which I also subscribe. His argument that competition and atomistic individualism are incompatible with Christian virtue is hard to disagree with. His argument that in a struggle for power, the state will always win also seems empirically true much (if not all) of the time. And his depiction of the beauties of a state committed to virtue and grounded in its relationship to God certainly sounds compelling.

The problem, I think, is that that type of state has never existed and will not exist until the second coming of Jesus. Jones’s book includes a great deal of political theory, but no discussion of the actual workings of the medieval societies that he seems to long for. He quotes Thomas Aquinas at great length, but does not discuss the political and social history of thirteenth-century Europe. If he had, I suspect that Christendom would have seemed a lot less virtuous. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s *Montaillou*, a classic work of microhistory that reconstructs the social relations of a French village at the beginning of the fourteenth history, reveals a society in which extramarital affairs were rampant, even the most basic theological knowledge seemed to be lacking, the local priest was corrupt, and the Cathar heresy was winning a lot of converts. Le Roy Ladurie’s analysis focuses on the local level, but if he had extended his narrative to examine the French Capetian kings or the politics of the papacy, he would have found plenty of other examples of corruption and blatant power-plays. 

Jones doesn’t deal with the argument that classical liberalism was not the invention of utopian idealists who imagined that individualistic competition would produce a perfect society but was instead the creation of realists who understood the depravity of human nature and believed that a diffusion of power was the best way to deal with it. 

James Madison, for instance, wrote at length about the question that interests Jones—how can we avoid a corrupt, authoritarian state?—but he gave a different answer to the question, because he was cognizant of the evil propensities of human nature. “It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government,” Madison wrote in *Federalist 51*. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” 

Madison thought that the best way to control the government was to make it directly accountable to the people and at the same time divide its power internally, so that through separation of powers, each branch of government would keep the other in check—a form of competition that reflects the liberal model that Jones finds so problematic. 

“This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public,” Madison wrote. “We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights.”

Classical liberalism is also based on a realistic understanding of religious pluralism. Jones never explains how non-Christians will fare in a restored Christendom, but we know that in medieval Christendom, the rights of Jews, Muslims, and Christian heretics were severely constricted and some (especially those whom the church declared to be heretics) faced direct persecution. That makes sense, because if all of society has meaning only in its relationship to God, as mediated by the church, there is no place for religious diversity or for those who don’t imagine that they are related to God.

After the Reformation, the various Christian confessional states of Europe fought a series of religious wars for decades, but when neither the Protestants nor the Catholics could gain full control of Europe, the next generation of European political thinkers began to imagine an alternative that would allow people of diverse religious views to coexist in the same political community. The result was a liberal order committed to religious pluralism.

Evangelical Protestants of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries largely accepted the idea of a religiously pluralistic, classically liberal society that was committed to religious freedom because they recognized that the kingdom of God could thrive even in the midst of religious competition and a state that was not aligned with the church. Many evangelicals (especially Baptists) welcomed the demise of Christendom because of their belief that the kingdom of God grew only through individual regeneration, which state power could never effect. The kingdom of God could thrive under a liberal political order, they thought, because individual conversions could continue to multiply. State support for a particular church or version of Christianity was not only unnecessary for true conversions but would likely only hinder them.

We’re still testing the limits of our liberal political order today. It’s certainly not a perfect system—as the flaws that Jones points out make clear. Whenever the state acts to limit the rights of the church, it’s easy for some post-liberals to imagine that the solution might be something like a restored medieval political order or something even more radical. 

But perhaps the real issue that Jones has is not with the political order we have but with the individuals who make up the political community. The government we have in the United States and the laws we live under reflect the reality of our community. Catholics who attend church every week make up only about 6 percent of the American population today, and even that group includes at least a few people who disagree with Catholic teaching on even the most fundamental moral issues, such as abortion. Evangelical Protestants who attend church at least once a week make up about 12 percent of the American population, and of that group, the overwhelming majority are opposed to abortion and same-sex marriage. Another 2 percent of Americans are evangelicals who attend church once a month. But even when the totals of all of those churchgoing groups, both Catholic and Protestant, are added together, that still leaves about 80 percent of the population who are not in those camps. And while some of the non-churchgoers do support pro-life legislation or other moral causes, most do not. It shouldn’t surprise us, therefore, if some of our laws or cultural trends do not reflect Christian moral beliefs. 

We could react to these demographic realities by longing for a restored Christendom, as Jones does. Or, we could instead react by realizing that the kingdom of God is not made up of states or societies but of individuals—and that the growth of the kingdom therefore requires the regeneration of individual people, not the remaking of a political order. The free religious marketplace that a classically liberal political order produces will include some Christians preaching the true gospel—which means that even in the midst of error and heresy, God’s kingdom will continue to grow.

There will come a day when society will look very much like the ideal that Jones imagines. The state will be completely subsumed in God, as Jones wants. But as a Protestant, I believe that that day will come only with the arrival of the new heavens and new earth. Until then, the corruption of human nature will prevent the full realization of that vision, and both the state and individuals will require limitations to curb the evils that unbridled power fosters. The classical liberalism that Jones objects to offers a promising way to restrain those evils, I think. But even if it doesn’t, the individual regeneration that will grow the kingdom of God can continue, and the church will flourish, regardless of what happens with the state.
### How to Have a Day Job and an Intellectual Life
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-to-have-a-day-job-and-an-intellectual-life/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:35:46.000Z
It won’t come as a surprise to anybody reading this that I love to read, and write, about ideas—from theology to philosophy to legal theory to modern art and basically anything else.

I started out doing this in high school when I would write up book and movie reviews as Facebook Notes, then later on my own WordPress blog. And I’ve tried to keep doing it over the years—since then, I’ve had the chance to write for some pretty neat venues about a fairly broad range of topics. I also try to maintain a pretty active personal reading habit (there’s a circular relationship here; writing about a topic means finding sources, and reading source material sparks new ideas to write about).

I’m also, for whatever it’s worth, a lawyer who likes his job. I went to law school straight out of college and have been gainfully employed in the field since then. I don’t tend to write all that much about legal issues, but I see it all as one big intellectual continuum: the force of law is always just a few steps downstream from questions of first principles.

Because I’m a lawyer whose job is (somewhat) public-facing, and because I’ve written a lot about extraneous topics not directly related to work, I get a decent amount of outreach from conservative students interested in similar paths. And as it happens, I’ve had some version of the following conversation with a smart mid-twenties interlocutor probably a dozen times over the last few years:

> Them: I’m still figuring out what I’m going to do next. I’m kind of interested in law school…but I’m also interested in academia. I’m really interested in reading and writing about ideas.  
>  
> Me: Well, you can do that as a lawyer too. You don’t have to give up being interested in big ideas just because you have a job that pays decently.  
>  
> Them: Well, yeah…I suppose…but I don’t want to spend my life doing something I hate.  
>  
> Me: But you can be very satisfied having a job that pays the bills, that allows you to have a family, and you can always do your reading and writing on the side.  
>  
> Them: Well, yeah, but…

Here’s the problem: somewhere along the way, smart young people seriously interested in relatively unmarketable ideas—in theology, philosophy, political theory, or what have you—have gotten the message that the only viable career path for them is academia. Now, anyone reading this probably knows how dire the job market is for new academics, especially in humanities fields, so I won’t belabor the point.

But we can say more: assuming you *get* a tenure-track job, you may be consigned to living in a place you detest. You will be expected to teach a substantial load of classes. You will have service responsibilities, both to the university and to your students (those rec letters won’t write themselves). You will have bureaucracy to deal with. All of this means that your opportunities for actual research and writing (at many institutions) will be compressed into a smaller and smaller window of time.

Making matters worse, American academia doesn’t really reward the big, “synthetic” sort of writing that’s the most fun to read—the grand social or cultural theories that weave together disciplines and advance a new way of thinking about the world. The institutional incentives favor narrow specialization. (See [Paul Griffiths on this](https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/05/letter-to-an-aspiring-intellectual?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).) In other words, your professional future depends on the outcome of your research and writing, but several years in, you may not even be researching something that really interests you anymore.

I think it’s worth asking whether, for the average twentysomething who loves the life of the mind, this route makes a lot of sense. Against this backdrop, the value proposition of a “normal” job starts to look a little more appealing. (At least, this has been my calculus.) The hard part of working a “normal” job isn’t subsistence. It’s finding the time and motivation to pursue the reading and writing you love. And these problems are solvable.

Regarding law as an alternative path, let me concede this much. A peculiar thing seems to happen to incredibly bright, interesting people who spend a lot of time working in large law firms. Specifically, their personalities tend to “flatten out”: their interests outside of work start to converge around (1) HBO or other prestige TV shows; (2) fancy restaurants; and (3) fancy vacations. There are a lot of talented attorneys who went to top-flight schools, and who probably once had strong opinions about Rudolf Carnap’s philosophy or the character development in *Northanger Abbey*, who just seem to…stop caring after a certain point. Office happy hours get duller.

There’s nothing nefarious going on here. In fact, it’s an entirely logical shift. If you’re working a lot of hours in an intellectually demanding role, then you watch TV when you’re too fried to think straight anymore before you go to bed, you go to nice restaurants for client events or date nights, and you look forward all year to that swanky overseas trip you have scheduled. It’s as simple as that.

But I think it’s fair to say that this is not the future that a lot of bookish young twentysomethings want for themselves. They don’t *want* to lose that part of themselves that really cares about Trinitarian theology or the trajectory of the West or Thomistic epistemology. And the good thing is that they don’t have to.

This is one of the reasons I loved Zena Hitz’s 2020 book [*Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life*](https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691178714/lost-in-thought?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) so much. Hitz makes the point that an “intellectual life” is not, strictly speaking, an *academic*’s life. Countless thinkers have produced brilliant work while working jobs that have nothing to do with their creative interests. And Hitz is entirely correct. You don’t need a stage or a tweed coat to think on the levels you want to think, or engage the ideas you want to engage. What you need is *motivation* coupled with *organization*. To that end, here are a few practical strategies that have helped me balance reading, writing, and other intellectual projects with my job (and family) responsibilities:

- **Make reading schedules.** This means deciding what “hard” books you want to prioritize reading, and then coming up with your own syllabus-style breakdowns of how much to read per week. You don’t need huge, uninterrupted blocks of time to do this. Very few people I know have the acumen (or inclination) to read dense theory for more than a few hours a day. Even if you just read some Heidegger or Gadamer for 30 minutes in the evening before you watch Netflix, you *will* get through very long, very hard books if you do this consistently.
- **Read multiple books simultaneously.** There will be days when the thought of cracking open a 700-page volume of theory feels impossible. That’s why you keep some lighter nonfiction or novels around. Maybe also stick an ePub or PDF or two on your phone.
- **Embrace audiobooks where possible.** Title selection is key here. You’re never going to internalize a book like Peter Leithart’s recent [*Creator: A Theological Interpretation of Genesis 1*](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1514002167/ref=ppx%5Fyo%5Fdt%5Fb%5Fasin%5Ftitle%5Fo00%5Fs00?ie=UTF8&psc=1&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)[ ](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1514002167/ref=ppx%5Fyo%5Fdt%5Fb%5Fasin%5Ftitle%5Fo00%5Fs00?ie=UTF8&psc=1&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)by listening to it on your commute. Rather, audiobooks are perfect for “fluffy” fiction (I recently finished Pierce Brown’s sci-fi thriller *Light Bringer*) or narrative nonfiction in the mold of Alec MacGillis’s *Fulfillment*. Point is, if you’ve got a stack of heavy theoretical texts to get through, don’t waste your limited “book-in-hand” reading time. Use Audible for the fun and easy stuff.
- **Give your writing space to breathe.**When you’re inspired to write, you don’t need to necessarily put pen to paper right away. Jot down notes or outline an argument, and then come back to it when you’ve got a block of time to develop it more fulsomely. This not only makes for better writing, but *faster* writing: the words fly when you’ve got the full argument already cemented in your head.

In the end, I suspect that many—even most—young people who love ideas, and who think that academia is the only way to maintain a “life of the mind,” simply don’t know what other paths are out there. You can live a happy and intellectually fulfilled life working a “normal” job (maybe even happier, if you’re not constantly strapped for funding). The key is discipline. And anybody can learn to be disciplined.

[*originally published on Substack*](https://jsehrett.substack.com/p/how-to-have-a-day-job-and-an-intellectual)
### To Be a Christian Is to Sanctify the Machine
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/to-be-a-christian-is-to-sanctify-the-machine/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:35:47.000Z
Paul Kingsnorth’s *Against the Machine* has generated both admiration and frustration, often in equal measure. Some read it as a manifesto against modern technology; others as a hopeless lament for a world already lost. But the book is best understood neither as a how-to guide nor as a call to retreat *simpliciter*, but as a philosophy of history. 

Kingsnorth is not asking how we might fix the Machine, or even whether we should change it. He seeks instead to understand the kind of age we inhabit in the flow of the historical process itself. 

In other words, *Against the Machine* is a philosophy of history. Seeing it this way changes how the book should be read, softens many of its criticisms, and complicates how supporters may use it.

This is because Kingsnorth is not offering a technical analysis or a set of evidence-based prescriptions; he is working within a romantic and historicist account of history.

Within that frame, he finds us at the end of a cycle, in an age of decay. From that diagnosis follows a revolutionary and romantic response: unplug from the Machine. There is no solution to the problem. It just is. We cannot sanctify the machine; it has unfolded and enframed us all. It spells the end of humanity. It is the end of an age, one that will pass and lead to a rebirth in the next recurrence.

## **Kingsnorth’s Philosophy of History**

Where Kingsnorth’s view of history becomes most clear is in Chapter 3, “The Faustian Fire,” in which Kingsnorth draws heavily upon Oswald Spengler’s *Decline of the West*. Although Kingsnorth describes the work as “a comparative history of civilizations,” it is also one of the great works of the philosophy of history. As Kingsnorth explains: “its author claims to have discovered a pattern of birth, growth and decline which can be applied to all major human cultures, from that of Ancient Egypt to that of the modern West” (23). It is not a positivist or encyclopedic work; Spengler’s book can be likened to poetry, claims Kingsnorth. And it is obvious that Kingsnorth approves of some of the categories that Spengler uses for history, albeit not in all the particulars.

Importantly, Alasdair MacIntyre too plays a role in Kingsnorth’s mapping out of history. As MacIntyre demonstrated in *After Virtue*, the West has a collective amnesia when it comes to moral language like virtue and vice. We might use the language of virtue, but we have forgotten its substructure. Yet this use of MacIntyre mostly furthers his thesis that “Western civilization is already dead” (12). There is nothing to fight for. There is no culture war. It is all mere emptiness until something comes to fill it (12). Kingsnorth speaks of culture war as “the equivalent of two bald men fighting over a comb” (12). Well, he does have a way with words. But the point remains: Western culture has died.

We are, to use Spengler’s wording, in the Faustian age, the age of the machine (28). This age is marked by Christ’s unthroning and our uprootedness. Having moved through the Apollonian and Magian cultures, we are now in the unfolding of history at the end of this point in time: our Faustian age of the machine. This “decay,” as Kingsnorth calls it, alluding to the historicism common in Nietzsche’s day, which located us in an age of decadence, began to set in during the Reformation and came to atrophy civilization by the 1800s (26).

That Kingsnorth follows the line of Romantic (and idealistic) historicists from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seems clear at this point. He even cites Arnold Toynbee, one of the modern principles of the philosophy of history alongside Spengler and Giambattista Vico, as those who saw history unfold in cycles or ages (28–29).

Further, he finds wisdom in the cyclical philosophy of René Guénon (164). This helps to explain why the West is broken. It has denied higher truth due to the “Reign of Quantity” (Guénon’s phrase). The West has deviated, even though traditions have a certain universal character, which means we all unfold toward truth. Not the West, however. It is off cycle. It is in decay.

This is nothing new. Whether in Stoic thought or ancient Vedic thought, humans have theorized that time moves toward decay. We started in a golden age, then a heroic age, then a silver age, and so on. Yet these are reborn after a time of conflagration or the like. This is the kind of thing that Kingsnorth posits.

Hence, he cites Toynbee positively, who sees a similar recurrence that ends in death, and then: “Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old things again, but of something new” (29). We live in death; there is no culture war to win. Only rebirth matters. The West is not worth saving.

And that philosophy of history undergirds Kingsnorth’s work. We do not resist the machine, we do not sanctify the machine, and we certainly do not talk about a good use of the machine. We are in the Faustian age, of decay and decadence. There is no war to win. We died. We live in the ashes. So the only real response is to unplug.

## **Critics of *Against the Machine***

Some reviewers have missed this aspect of Kingsnorth’s work. In missing it, they have accused him of cynicism or of mere Luddite nostalgia. But these critiques look for something Kingsnorth does not offer. They read the book as an analytic and prescriptive argument, when it belongs instead to the genre of philosophy of history.

Kingsnorth is a historicist and idealist, and he employs a romantic method rather than a calculative one (contra Comte and his heirs). As a result, his critics may ask for falsifiable analysis, for proposals that can be tested or measured; when they do so and find him wanting, they dismiss his conclusions as impractical or anti-technological. Yet this misunderstands both his method and his aim.

For example, in [Joel Miller's](https://www.millersbookreview.com/p/against-paul-kingsnorth-against-the-machine?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) critical review, he points out that Kingsnorth “bungles the story” of the West. Miller then mounts counter assertions and points out flaws in particular aspects of Kingsnorth’s thesis. However, Kingsnorth is making a meticulous argument about cause and effect *as such*. Rather, he aims to show that modern capitalism is a qualitative break from the past, that we have truly entered into an age of decay. The historical trajectory, while important, does not falsify or prove Kingsnorth’s thesis; rather, it only adds context.

This is because Kingsnorth sees us on the final rung of a civilizational cycle, with the Machine at last revealing itself in its most profound form. This revelation brings about the end of a certain vision of humanity and calls for its rebirth. He is not giving tips. He is describing an apocalypse that follows from his philosophy of history.

In another review of *Against the Machine,* [Andrew Perlot](https://andrewperlot.substack.com/p/against-the-machine-a-review) criticizes Kingsnorth for his lack of analytical and descriptive argument:

> Kingsnorth has a head for analogies and turns of phrase. He’s a great writer who identifies what’s not working in our world, and has done it since his days as a world-trotting environmental reporter. But when breaking down root causes and solutions, his go-to move is to reach for a vibe.

Overall, I agree with Perlot that specifying root cause and solutions would be ideal, but whether or not that is possible is the question. Throughout, Perlot is looking for evidence, for specificity, and he finds vagueness. But again, I am not sure one should expect that from the kind of book that Kingsnorth has written.

While philosophy of history *may* digress into the science of historical causation, it mostly aims to describe axiomatic or vectorial laws (so Maritain). It aims to place historical data within the process of history, but it does not primarily aim to make an argument of historical causation.

This helps explain why Kingsnorth offers no resolution, no path of sanctification for the Machine. Within his particular philosophy of history, such a resolution is not possible. The cycle has already turned. We have decayed. New birth is all.

He advocates for a romantic, historiscist, and cyclical history. I should note: like Zoroastrian cycles, it is evident that Kingsnorth sees a final end. There is no hint of eternal recurrence. But we have moved into the Faustian age, characterized by the Machine.

But even so, that does not excuse real criticisms of lack of clarity in argument. For example, [Brad East](https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/kingsnorth-paul-brad-east-technology-machine?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) has criticized *Against the Machine* for lacking a real argument, being a sort of stitch of various substack posts. Or in his own words, it is “ a hodgepodge of internet writing stitched together between two covers.”

I suspect that East here overstates the case. Even so, as I read the whole work, I did find myself grasping for a full argument. Kingsnorth has mastered the office of assertion, but I too wanted to be carried along the flow of an argument to the end. I did not always feel that the author led me as well as he could have.

## **Proponents of *Against the Machine***

If critics sometimes have misaligned expectations, then I believe the same holds true for his advocates. Many advocate a rejection of technology as a sort of retreat-and-rebuild mindset. Yet I am not sure Kingsnorth thinks anything of the like. He sees not the rebirth of the old ways, but the rebirth of new ways.

Here is where Kingsnorth’s Christianity overcomes the possible cynicism of his argument thus far. Since Christ has been dethroned, it stands to reason that we can place him back on the spiritual throne of our culture. But here, right in front of us, there is nothing to redeem, nothing to sanctify about the Machine.

In a lengthy passage, Kingsnorth explains:

> When I look at this history, and then I look at the culture war, I see cause and effect. I see a war being fought over the spoils and the ruins of Progress by people who live in those ruins and are mourning the loss of something they don’t even quite understand. That sense of mourning is common to both ‘left’ and ‘right’. Whether they are mourning the end of the arc of history or the end of a country they miss without maybe even having known it, the sense of loss is profound, even if unspoken. For many people, everything is broken. This is why, though I will never condemn those ‘dead white men’, neither can I stand up and ‘defend the West’ in some uncomplicated fashion. The West is my home—but the West has also eaten my home. Should I stand up to save it from itself? How would that happen? What would I be fighting for?  
>  
> No: when we talk about fighting for ‘the culture’, or fighting against it, I think we miss the mark.

Why do we miss the mark? Because culture is a spiritual byproduct (164), and we have steadily denied spirit for materialism. We have submitted to the Reign of Quantity. We live in an artificial world, one cut off from truth.

And this leads to the central metaphor of the book: the machine.

## **What Is the Machine?**

Kingsnorth chose the machine metaphor to explain the constructed nature of the West, of our world. It is new, not old. And in this sense, it is a dead thing. He writes:

> But why a machine? Why choose this particular image to try and pin down this thing that is enveloping us? Because a machine is an emotionless, inorganic system; something which is pitiless and determined, and which has some task to fulfil. Above all, a machine is something unnatural: something constructed. Specifically, it is constructed of separate parts, all of which, when taken together, perform the wider function for which the machine is designed. If today, then, we live under the reign of the Machine, what is this machine made of? What are its parts, and how do they operate?

Since the machine replaces all that is old with what is new and materialistic, constructed, we have lost what it means to be human, our essence. One can read C. S. Lewis’s *Abolition of Man*, or Jacques Ellul’s *The Technological Age*, or the work of Canadian philosopher George Grant to understand just what this means. Kingsnorth does not put the pieces together, but points out *that it is.* It is all the things that modern capitalism is; it is technological; it is constructed.

Minimally, the machine has changed us into masters of technique, of nature. We become like the technique slowly, because the power of the machine to enframe all of life cannot be stopped; progress must march forward. There is no other way, even if there is no real justification for this progress.

This machine culture is downstream of spirituality, since all culture is spiritual: “there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from” (11). The machine is on the throne today. Materialist demons run rampant (12). “Western civilization is already dead” (12). It envelops us (xv), language that is perhaps allusive to Heidegger’s enframing (Gestell).

## **My Review**

My point in writing is to demonstrate that Kingsnorth’s thesis cannot easily be dismissed as quantitatively insufficient (it is, but that is not a primary critique because of the genre); nor can he be used to create a sub-culture to retake the culture. He is a prophet of death and of rebirth.

With this reflection aside, I did find Kingsnorth’s argument to be wanting. While he pulled together many threads, I never found the tapestry. I nodded along at many parts, frowned at others, and sometimes even smiled.

He knows how to write and delight. And yet I find his overarching thesis implausible. Yes, the machine enframes us. The metaphor works. Yes, we must find ways to resist. We must become cooked ascetics, those who limit their participation in the machine. Better, one expects, is if we become raw ascetics and completely reject the machine (304–7).

But such a view of culture has no place for common grace; it has only an uncomfortable place for the created good of technique and technology. Are we really in a Faustian age? Are we not living in two cities: the city of God and the city of Man, defined by two loves?

When Augustine rejected *cyclicalism* in *The City of God*, he rightly saw its flaws. That said, it is not as if there are no types or repetitions in the fabric of reality. And we might be in the age of grace today. But I am not sure the story Kingsnorth tells (through various authors) about our entrance into an age of decay works.

It did not work either in Nietzsche’s *The Birth of Tragedy*. Too often decadence stories justify extreme conclusions. And I think Kingsnorth’s might just be one of those. I mostly agree with his criticisms of the deleterious effects of modern technique. I too read Ellul, Postman, Grant, and so on. I appreciated and still appreciate the work in many ways.

But I also wonder at Paul’s words in 1 Timothy 4:4–5: “everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving, for it is **sanctified** by God’s word and by prayer.”

And has not God shaped and formed human life? Has not God given the city of Enoch music, metallurgy, ranching, poetry, and city works (Gen 4:17–26)? These techniques and tools that built the pyramids, which Kingsnorth associates with the Machine, do not evince in and of themselves something unredeemable.

Christians have seen in tools, technique, and technology an ambivalent structure: good and evil mix. Jacques Maritain calls it a law of ambivalence in his *Philosophy of History*, and I suppose I find that law hard to gainsay.

The authority God gives to magistrates is real, yet can be abused. Likewise, the mandate God gives humanity for agriculture, horticulture, and all other cultures remains a gift, albeit one often misused.

But Christians have known that food and cloth dedicated to the altar can be sanctified, dedicated toward a good use: “nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving.” Even the Machine’s all-enframing (*Gestell*) and all-pervasive scope in our lives does not mean it cannot also be “sanctified by God’s word and by prayer.” It is not clear to me that an entire culture, an entire way of being in the world, can be something as black-and-white as murder.

But Kingsnorth wants us to reject the Machine *carte blanche*. Still, if God can call [Cyrus the Great his messiah](https://www.wyattgraham.com/p/why-does-god-call-cyrus-his-shepherd?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (Isa 45:1), using the great empire of Persia to restore Israel to her land, then I believe that God can sanctify, that is, dedicate many ambivalent things toward holy use.

And so I am not sure the machine, technique-driven as it is, really amounts to a complete death of all things. Instead, to be Christian is to sanctify the machine by God’s word and by prayer. Only then can we receive it with thanksgiving.
### Bible and Theology Reading Plans for 2026
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/bible-and-theology-reading-plans-for-2026/
Last updated: 2026-09-23T15:42:15.000Z
As we begin a new year, we thought it might help our readers to compile various reading plans that they might use both to read through the Bible in a year and to tackle some other great works in Christian theology. Below you will find reading plans for the Bible, Augustine's *City of God*, Thomas's *Summa*, Calvin's *Institutes*, Bavinck's *Reformed Dogmatics,* and Barth's *Church Dogmatics*.

## Bible Reading Plans

There is obviously no lack of Bible reading plans you can choose from. But if you belong to an ecclesial tradition that uses a lectionary with daily Bible readings, one of the simplest things to do is to practice the daily office with the scripture readings prescribed by your church.

### Lectionary Reading Plans

If you are Anglican, [this link](https://www.biblegateway.com/reading-plans/bcp-daily-office/next?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) will take you directly to the assigned lessons for the day following the Book of Common Prayer's daily readings. That said, I would highly recommend simply buying [the 1662 International Edition of the BCP](https://www.ivpress.com/pages/content/book-of-common-prayer-international-edition-free-resources-faq?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) from InterVarsity Press (don't miss the free additional resources on the IVP page for the book) along with the companion volume on [*How to Use the Book of Common Prayer*](https://www.ivpress.com/how-to-use-the-book-of-common-prayer?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) by Samuel Bray and Drew Keane, who edited the International Edition.

In fact, I'd commend both of the above books to you even if you are not Anglican—the daily office used in the 1662 IE is amenable to any Protestant tradition I can think of and the volume on how to use the BCP is really just a marvelous book about the ins and outs of historic Christian prayer and daily piety. If you follow the lead of Kirsten Sanders and think about the life of Christian discipleship as being a bit like learning to "speak Christian," to adopt the practices and habits and ways of living of a new family, then Bray and Keane's volume is a bit like having a primer on the whys and hows of the family's traditions and practices. Of all the books I read last year, I don't think I read any better than that one.

For other ecclesial communions:

The Orthodox Church in America has supplied a guide to their lectionary for 2026 which [you can access here](https://www.oca.org/readings/monthly/2026?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod has [a document](https://www.scribd.com/document/896825441/LCMS-2025-2026-Church-Year-Calendar-One-Year-Series?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of their lectionary readings for this year.

The Roman Catholic Church's lectionary readings [can also be found online](https://bible.usccb.org/daily-bible-reading?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

For individual reading plans that can be used in your home or with a group from your church, you can try any of the plans listed below. That being said, I have begun to think lately that there might be more value than I'd previously thought to following a prescribed reading plan passed down by a church. I've been attempting to incorporate the BCP's morning and evening prayer into my devotional practice recently and found it immensely rewarding. Bray and Keane do a wonderful job in their book of explaining why certain passages are read on certain days in the church year.

So if you are a Protestant and not Anglican, I'd still suggest a certain value in adopting something like the 1662 International Edition reading plan.

### McCheyne Reading Plan

The most common plan in my circles has tended to be the McCheyne plan, so named for Robert Murray McCheyne, the Scottish pastor who developed it as a way to structure private and family devotionals and to allow him to get through the Psalms and New Testament twice a year and the rest of the Old Testament once a year.

You can sign up to [receive an email](https://bibleplan.org/plans/mcheyne/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) every day with that day's reading.

My friend Jacob Gerber, a Presbyterian Church in America pastor in Lansing, IL, has created [Free Daily Bible Study](https://freedailybiblestudy.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). It is another valuable resource that includes a short written devotional to accompany that day's reading on the McCheyne plan.

You can also read [D. A. Carson's devotionals](https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/devotionals/read-the-bible?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) on the day's passage.

### One Story in Two Years

My wife's old Bible teacher, Fran Sciacca, has created an interesting reading plan designed to walk you through the redemptive story of Scripture over two years.

[One Story in Two Years](https://web.archive.org/web/20240812225622/https://fransciacca.com/print/readingprogram.pdf)

### The Bible Reading Plan for Shirkers and Slackers

This plan designed by author Margie Haack (who is also a personal friend) is still another approach: In this system, you have assigned readings for every day, but the books are batched by day of the week, so if you miss Monday, you don't have to make up before Tuesday; you just read it the next Monday and continue on Tuesday.

[Bible Reading Plan for Shirkers and Slackers](https://openoureyeslord.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/bible-reading-program-for-shirkers-and-slackers.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

### Alastair Roberts Bible Reflections

Alastair has published a series of video commentaries on the entire Bible which are available for free on his YouTube channel.

You can also access [audio files of Alastair's commentary](https://audio.alastairadversaria.com/playlists/1/biblical-reading-and-reflections/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) on his personal site. Finally, there are also [transcriptions of much of his commentary](https://opentheo.org/i/5467369947627995391/alastair-roberts?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) available as well.

### Crossway Bible Reading Resources

Finally, Crossway [has put together some excellent resources](https://www.crossway.org/articles/introducing-the-new-and-improved-esv-bible-app/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to aid you with your Bible reading this year.

## Theology Reading Plans

Secondarily after Scripture, there is also great help and aid to be found in the riches of Christian theology as written by our fathers and mothers in the faith. Below you can find reading plans for reading key works from five of the great theologians of the church—St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Herman Bavinck, and Karl Barth.

### Augustine's *City of God*

I do not recall who first created this list, but some time ago someone shared a reading plan with me to get through all of the *City of God* in one year—you'll actually finish it in October with this plan and that includes catch-up days.

[Download *City of God* Reading Plan](https://mereorthodoxy.com/content/files/2026/09/Read-Augustine---s-City-of-God-in-a-Year.pdf)

### Thomas Aquinas's *Summa Theologiae*

One of the greatest benefits of reading Thomas is not simply the normal benefit of reading great theology, although that is very much *a* benefit. But you learn as much from his method as you will his conclusions. He is rigorous, methodical, and careful—and will at times surprise you.

One note on this plan: Due to the size of the Summa, this plan has you reading it over two years with assigned readings for each week.

If you have trouble getting a complete copy of the *Summa* to read, you can [read the entire *Summa*](https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.I?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)[ online](https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.I?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

[Download *Summa Theologiae* Reading Plan](https://mereorthodoxy.com/content/files/2026/09/Read-Thomas-Aquinass-Summa-In-Two-Years.pdf)

### Calvin's *Institutes*

Though Calvin was not at the time perceived as *the* authoritative voice in the Reformed tradition (on which more in a moment), over time his work has stood the test of time as the preeminent dogmatic work to come from the 16th century Protestant Reformation.

[Download Calvin's *Institutes* Reading Plan](https://mereorthodoxy.com/content/files/2026/09/Read-Calvins-Institutes-in-a-Year.pdf)

### Herman Bavinck's *Reformed Dogmatics*

Several years ago Aaron Armstrong created a reading plan to get through the *Reformed Dogmatics* in about half a year. If you need convincing that it is worth your time, [Jess Joustra's cover essay](https://mereorthodoxy.com/modern-yet-faithful-lessons-from-herman-bavinck) from our fourth print issue might be of interest.

[View Bavinck's *Reformed Dogmatics* Reading Plan](https://aaronarmstrong.co/bavinck-reading-plan/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

### Karl Barth's *Church Dogmatics*

Barth is someone I've never spent much time with, though I know I ought to remedy that. But if you've wanted to read him and haven't known where to start, I also tracked down a reading plan for the *Church Dogmatics*. 

Note: The simplest way to get the full *Church Dogmatics* is probably to get [the Logos e-book set](https://www.logos.com/product/5758/barths-church-dogmatics?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

[View Barth's *Church Dogmatics* Reading Plan](https://www.walkingtogetherministries.com/2015/12/23/a-one-year-reading-plan-for-karl-barths-church-dogmatics/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)
### The Flattening of the Human Person: Looksmaxxing and Clavicular
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-flattening-of-the-human-person-looksmaxxing-and-clavicular/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:35:54.000Z
**mog**

*verb* | MAWG

To look or perform far better than someone else

\*\*\*

I’ve long been thinking about the rootlessness of Gen Z—a generation longing for home and community. One symptom of this rootlessness is the spectacle of status: young men and women saying outrageous things to evoke a reaction, forging pseudo-communities through shock value, attempting to break free from the digital mass society by becoming its most extreme performers.

Michael Knowles’ [recent interview with Braden Peters](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8qj9RNA938&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)—better known as Clavicular—was one such performance. Peters tells Knowles that he began taking testosterone at fourteen (he’s nineteen now), claiming he was simply placing himself “where we…evolutionarily should be” given declining testosterone levels across generations. His justification? “Ambitious young men want to improve themselves.”

When I heard this, what became evident was how young men are seeking community and meaning online. There is something they are seeing in the mirror or online that is driving them to want to be different. Peters seems to be one such case. He was dissatisfied with himself—with his appearance. At one point in the interview, Knowles points out that this change in identity is not much different than what motivates transgender ideology, to which Clavicular offers a laugh and half-heartened attempt at engagement with the critique. But more than being dissatisfied with himself, he has a misconstrued notion of what makes “success.” Peters views success in purely temporal categories: high paying job, attractive girl, an online following, independence from society and authority, breaking free from the generational shackles, the list could go on and on.

It was interesting that Knowles asked Peters what his parents thought about his decision to “better himself.” They apparently saw the issue and tried to take away his supplements, but this was to no avail. Peters was determined to change his trajectory by altering his appearance. Shaping himself into who we wanted, or better yet what others wanted, him to be.

Peters highlights several areas of improvement on the quest to gigachadom: physical, mental, spiritual. But for him, all of these collapse into one metric: *looks*. “Looks,” he says flatly, “is just the most important metric.” Metric for what? Well, in this case, a metric for status and self-worth. Peters spends a good portion of the interview explaining his transition from a regular boy to the definition of looksmaxxing.

Looksmaxxing is an online movement that promotes maximizing one’s own physical attractiveness. There are varying levels of “maxxing” including softmaxxing, which is done by “mewing” or oral posture training. Mewing is a facial strength exercise whereby one places their tongue on the top of their mouth and applies pressure in an attempt to modify the structure of the jaw. Hardmaxxing, as in the case of Cavicular, is more drastic and often involves the use of outside means of improvement such as surgical enhancements or the use of anabolic steroids (“roidmaxxing”).

As I listened to the interview, on thing that stood out throughout the exchange was Peters’ fixation on status. I kept asking myself “but status in whose eyes?” But it was apparent who he meant: the eyes of the social media masses. The spectacle being the mediation of oneself to others through media. Guy Debord summed it up well: “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” One thing that is apparent is that Peters would not be doing what he’s doing before the mass media age, or if he did, it would look quite different, and I wouldn’t be writing about it.

Gabriel Marcel, in his *Man Against Mass Society*, explores what he calls “the mass man.” Marcel theorizes that in this mass society, man is defined not by his intrinsic value, but by the function he performs. In other words, degrading man to a valueless cog in society. This lack of depth brings with it a lack of community. Marcel says “there can be no authentic depth except where there can be real communion; but there will never be any real communion between individuals centered on themselves, and in consequence morbidly hardened, nor in the heart of the masts, within the mass-state.” Thus DeBord’s spectacle has arrived hand-in-hand with Marcel’s mass society. The product? A disconnected mass of young people with no roots. Thus Peters is another example of this nihilistic impulse.

Honestly, my heart goes out to this young man. He’s clearly insecure, finding his identity in appearance and the perceived status that comes from this appearance. But appearances fade. We all grow old. Bryan Johnson can pretend to defy aging, but even he can’t hide the wrinkles forever. We try to cover up our frail humanity, but in the end it always shows.

The conversation then went into darker waters. The vocabulary reveals the ideology. Peters calls VP Vance “subhuman” while praising Gavin Newsom as a “mogger”—slang for, in Peters’ words, “someone who is just like, I would say, the peak human.” To “mog” someone is to dominate them in “looks…wealth…and status.” At one point, Peters offers a physiognomy assessment of Sydney Sweeney, analyzing her “recessed infra orbitals and recessed upper maxilla” before rating her “average to above average.” This quick physical categorization, almost medical in nature, gets to the root of the issue: *disconnecting the human person from their being created in God’s image*. The spiritual, a point that Knowles constantly tried to steer the conversation back to, was absent. There is a latent nihilism in this exchange. Knowles kept trying to bring the conversation back to meaning, and Cavicular, in a joking nonchalant demeanor gave the impression that nothing matters — only the rugged individual, the fleshly person staring back at us in the mirror.

This is where the manosphere’s obsession with “looksmaxxing” reveals its true nature: an attempt to flatten human beings into purely physical specimens, sorted and ranked by facial structure and biological markers. In some ways this is a grasping at simplicity in a digital age that offers anything but. Young men are grasping for a way to find meaning in a society that lacks it. Dating apps offer temporary fulfillment. But one thing that seems to be the most enticing is how their (young men) peers perceive them. Robert Nisbet talks about this in his categories of social community found in his seminal work *The Social Philosophers*.

One category of relevance is the community found in war and the military. He notes that in battle, young men find community and affinity with their squadron, not with the cause they are fighting for. In other words, when in the trenches, the young men are no longer thinking about the global superpowers, but about their friend to their right and their friend to their left. This sociological community offers some help as we think about this phenomenon. Young men are seeking validation from other young men. But instead of dealing with humans as complex God created beings, they seek to simplify it. Humans are what we can see, so they seem to indicate. We are no more than flesh and blood because this is what we think we can change.

But it is important that we see the dangers. We have a clear warning in history about doing this and if we are blind to history, we run the risk of repeating it. This is not to say that Clavicular is rehabilitating twentieth century ideology. Based on the level of the interview I’d be surprised if he could define ideology, let alone trace its roots. But we must be aware of the past lest we be doomed to repeat it.

\*\*\*

I went to college a few hours from DC, which made for some memorable weekend trips to the city’s historical sites and museums. One museum stands head and shoulders above the rest—the Holocaust Museum.

When my friends and I first visited, we rode up the elevator talking and laughing, completely unprepared for what awaited us. The elevator doors opened to a massive image of burning and charred bodies. We were brought to our knees in somber reflection.

I visited twice during my college years. Both times, the display that stuck with me most was the evolutionary biology section—the Nazi system for sorting people based on facial structure. Physiognomy. The Nazis had identified the male Aryan as peak humanity. All other people groups were subhuman. The ultimate status symbol was the Nietzschean *Übermensch*, or “superior man.” The way they decided this was through head measurements and facial features. The echoes of this ideology should warn us.

The parallels are impossible to ignore. And I was reminded by this Debord quote: “With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations, and untenable reasoning.” When young men begin measuring “infra orbitals” and “maxillas,” when they call others “subhuman” based on appearance, when they inject hormones to reach some imagined evolutionary peak—they are walking down a very old, very dark path. I am not sure that Peters is consciously making this connection. But the parallel reveals how dangerous this mass movement can be. Our online culture has given men and women digital status symbols that they must achieve—and many are pursuing them, going so far as to alter their physical appearance to achieve status (just look at the countless weight loss commercials). In desperation to achieve status, many are saying things that are outlandish and untrue to get a reaction. Living is through digital representation not through reality.

Of course, this is not all representation, or a way to project a spectacle. For instance, there is something to be said for caring about our bodies and taking care of ourselves. But the obsession gripping young men in these spaces is not healthy self-improvement. It’s the reduction of human dignity to bone structure, the worship of biological hierarchy, the ranking of human worth by physical dominance. José Ortega y Gasset warns that “The mass crushes beneath it everything which is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.” Our desire for mog is becoming our god; and when the masses worship the spectacle of status, it will inevitably lead to a dark place.

Gen Z is longing for home and community. But a home built on physiognomy assessments and the cult of “mogging” is no home at all. Young people need strong social authority in their local communities. Churches must address these grasping attempts at meaning. Older men, step up for younger men. Older women, do the same. Parents, address these topics head-on. Don’t overreact—that often drives young people further into these spaces. Instead, be voices of truth who acknowledge the longing while exposing the lie that human worth can be measured in millimeters of bone structure.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

[*originally published on Substack*](https://eddielarow.substack.com/p/mog-king-of-the-groypers)
### What We Read in 2025
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/what-we-read-in-2025/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:35:55.000Z
As we continue our annual wrap up of the past year's work, here are some of the books that our editors and team have most enjoyed in the past year:

## Jake Meador

[*The World She Edited* by Amy Reading](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-world-she-edited-katharine-s-white-at-the-new-yorker-amy-reading/951d5005d71969c7?ean=9781328595911&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**: You probably are at least somewhat familiar with the legendary *New Yorker* writer and children's book author E. B. White. What you likely do not know is that his wife, Katharine Sergeant White, also worked for the *New Yorker*, that she played a key role in the first three decades of the magazine's life, and that without her we probably wouldn't have any of her husband's greatest books. Even that account of her, however, sells her rather short, I think—to get the full picture you'll need to read the book.**

[***Cold Warriors*** ](https://bookshop.org/p/books/cold-warriors-writers-who-waged-the-literary-cold-war-duncan-white/bdc07a31f92919c2?ean=9780062449832&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)[**by Duncan White**](https://bookshop.org/p/books/cold-warriors-writers-who-waged-the-literary-cold-war-duncan-white/bdc07a31f92919c2?ean=9780062449832&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**: A story of the Cold War, told via the lives of the writers whose own stories are so bound up with it—Orwell, Hemingway, Koestler, McCarthy, Le Carré, Pasternak, and Solzhenitsyn, but many others as well. Orwell in particular comes out looking even more remarkable than I already knew him to be.**

## **Nadya Williams**

[***The Place of Tides* by James Rebanks**](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-place-of-tides-james-rebanks/004cc09817c0f58e?ean=9780063434172&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) ([*Mere O* review](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-shepherd-and-the-duck-woman)): On tiny and uninhabited (by humans) Norwegian islands, above the Arctic Circle, eider ducks come to nest each spring, and duck women (and men) have cared for them for generations, collecting their soft eider down as their reward (a feathery gold!). In his new book, the author and farmer James Rebanks shadows one such "duck woman," Anna. It's a beautifully written book about a lot more than duck care--about the relationship we moderns have with place, nature, and calling.

[***The Writer's Table: Famous Authors and Their Favourite Recipes* by Valerie Stivers and Katie Tomlinson**](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-writer-s-table-famous-authors-and-their-favourite-recipes-valerie-stivers/754b74c126d495df?ean=9780711293915&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com): Emily Dickinson used to write poems on the back of baking recipes, Joan Didion cooked for 40 people at a clip, and William Butler Yates once ate peacock at a rowdy party. These stories and many more are collected in this book that collects in alphabetical order (by author) stories about famous authors' eating and cooking habits, and includes a recipe for each one. The writing is delightful, the art outstanding, and the end result is just plain fun--this is the book I'm gifting all the food-and-books lovers in my life.

[***The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of the Modern World*** ](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-library-of-ancient-wisdom-mesopotamia-and-the-making-of-the-modern-world-selena-wisnom/fa1b238230aa12d8?ean=9780226822556&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)[**by Selena Wisnom**](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-library-of-ancient-wisdom-mesopotamia-and-the-making-of-the-modern-world-selena-wisnom/fa1b238230aa12d8?ean=9780226822556&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)([*Mere O* review](https://mereorthodoxy.com/all-the-things-we-do-not-know)): I am an ancient historian, yet I sometimes forget just how much antiquity there was already before my Greeks and Romans arrived on the scene. This exquisitely researched book tells the story of the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, and it reads like the most incredible novel.

## Brad East

[***The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays* by Simon Leys**](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-hall-of-uselessness-collected-essays-simon-leys/de2dbb526ed7655d?ean=9781590176207&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com): My favorite book I read all year. A large volume of classic essays by the late Belgian-Australian scholar of Chinese art and literature, the result is a panoramic view of French, English, and Chinese letters, history, and politics. Leys, a Roman Catholic and man out of time, was a one of one. You won't regret giving him your time.  
  
[***The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900* by David Edgerton**](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-shock-of-the-old-technology-and-global-history-since-1900-hans-rausing-professor-david-edgerton/bc61ce1a8110ebfb?ean=9780199832613&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com): My favorite technology book I read all year. The thesis: Most of our technology is old, including the technology that makes the world run; technology that seems defunct at one time or place reappears in another; most technological work is maintenance, not invention; most innovation falls by the wayside; and nothing technological is ever inevitable, because all technology (being social and cultural all the way down) is a contingent matter of human history, practice, and decisions. Let the reader understand.  
  
[*Jesus and the Law of Moses: The Gospels and the Restoration of Israel within First-Century Judaism*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/jesus-and-the-law-of-moses-the-gospels-and-the-restoration-of-israel-within-first-century-judaism-paul-t-sloan/9c80fa0fd2e15fa1?ean=9781540966384&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) **by Paul T. Sloan, and** [*Paul and the Resurrection of Israel: Jews, Former Gentiles, Israelites*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/paul-and-the-resurrection-of-israel-jason-a-staples/5429763b91ef1602?ean=9781009376761&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) **by Jason A. Staples**: Most biblical scholarship is a bore, but when it's good, it's marvelous. These two works should be read in tandem. Together they constitute a basic reorientation of Christian (or any) reading of the New Testament. This is historical research on Scripture done right, by two rising scholars not yet at the peak of their powers. Keep an eye on both.

## Kirsten Sanders

[***Dorie’s Anytime Cakes* by Dorie Greenspane**](https://bookshop.org/p/books/dorie-s-anytime-cakes-dorie-greenspan/67c614d082bb7f5b?ean=9780063346963&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com): This just landed (October 2025), and I’ve already baked from it. I don’t enjoy labor intensive banking, so I make a lot of quick breads and easy cakes. The banana bread recipe alone is worth the purchase price.

[**The Old Filth trilogy by Jane Gardam**](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-old-filth-trilogy-old-fifth-the-man-in-the-wooden-hat-and-last-friends-jane-gardam/a55ae1e6f4b8119f?ean=9781609456443&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com): Expect a review of Gardam coming early next year in the Magpie. I have done something I’ve never done before and ordered her entire back stock. Gardam is a master novelist. These books do not take themselves too seriously and manage to truthfully retell stories about aging, loves lost and found, about empire and the end of colonialism. They are even deeply Christian in ways I’m not sure she intended. This trilogy would be a great gift.

## Tessa Carman

[***Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry***](https://bookshop.org/p/books/weep-shudder-die-on-opera-and-poetry-dana-gioia/0fdb489f8cae5556?ean=9781589881969&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) **by Dana Gioia**: Dana Gioia is charming literary company in any subject, but perhaps particularly so in these personal essays that explore the art of poetry in opera as well as the adventure of artistic collaboration. Along the way Gioia makes the case that it is power of the libretto—the words—that in turn inspires the composer to make great accompanying music. Gioia’s argument that Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd is indeed an opera and his tantalizing discussion of his own forays into writing librettos (perhaps most notably for an operatic treatment of Nosferatu) conclude a little volume that is a delight from start to finish.

[***The Woman Without a Shadow: A Twice-Told Tale***](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-woman-without-a-shadow-hugo-von-hofmannsthal/c6e0abcacf15afc2?ean=9781963319873&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) **by Hugo von Hofmannsthal**: In 1919 Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s fairy tale opera The Woman Without a Shadow (Die Frau ohne Schatten), with music by Richard Strauss, premiered in Vienna. Later on, Hofmannsthal rewrote the story as a novella. This volume presents the novella, translated into English for the first time, along with the libretto in English, with an introduction by Dana Gioia on Hofmannsthal and the Marchen tradition. Imagine a tale with the atmosphere of Undine and the eucatastrophe of MacDonald’s “The Day Boy and the Night Girl” that meditates on the neglected-yet-central mystery of procreation. This “serious, passionate, and complex marital drama” (in Gioia’s words) captivated me and will be something I keep returning to.

[***The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination***](https://stpaulcenter.com/store/the-high-hallow-tolkiens-liturgical-imagination?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) **by Ben Reinhard**: A book on Tolkien, liturgy, and imagination checks off some of my favorite things, so this book by literature professor and Beowulf translator Ben Reinhard was a must. Not only does Reinhard help fill in the gaps for a rather neglected aspect of Tolkien’s vision—the influence of his Catholic imagination on his work—but also he provides a sterling example of scholarship: He is careful in his argumentation, avoiding making too-grand statements or over-generalizations, all while making a beautiful case for how Tolkien’s Paschal-shaped fairy tale epic taps into the signs and symbols of redemptive history. An appendix also notes how Tolkien’s “domestic church”—his life as a husband and father—is also an essential part to his liturgical and fairy tale imagination.

## Matthew Loftus

[***Cahokia Jazz* by Francis Spufford**](https://bookshop.org/p/books/cahokia-jazz-a-novel-francis-spufford/48ddcfd0a4fc96db?ean=9781668025468&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com): A noir detective story set in an alternate history in which the First Nations were able to form a sovereign territory in the middle of the Midwest. Spufford's take on the grizzled veteran cop helping his rookie partner navigate the dark underworld of pagan rituals and KKK conspiracies is spellbinding, as is his femme fatale who is also... a Christian princess? You'll struggle to put it down.

[***The Wake* by Paul Kingsnorth**](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-wake-paul-kingsnorth/7790bbc38c49413d?ean=9781555977177&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**:** Written in a "shadow tongue" that imagines Old English in a form accessible to moderns, The Wake is one of the most memorable books you'll ever read (or listen to, as the audiobook version is easier to take in and performed magnificently.) Set during the Norman invasion, it is not a pleasant tale but it does give one a sense of the path Kingsnorth was walking before he turned to Christianity. It takes a few minutes for the shadow tongue to become familiar, but once it does you'll be transported to a very different world.

[***The Age of Diagnosis* by Suzanne O'Sullivan**](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-age-of-diagnosis-how-our-obsession-with-medical-labels-is-making-us-sicker-suzanne-o-sullivan/6d8becf950f17be4?ean=9780593852910&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com): O'Sullivan, a UK neurologist, offers an insightful look at the rise of medical and psychiatric diagnoses, especially among young people. She lays out a convincing case that "ordinary life experiences, bodily imperfections, sadness and social anxiety are being subsumed into the category of medical disorder" and what that means for Western culture.

## Ian Harber

[***Growing In Christ* by J. I. Packer**](https://bookshop.org/p/books/growing-in-christ-prof-j-i-packer-ph-d/3dd55a2e36db8709?ean=9781433581212&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com): This year I wanted to go back to the basics in a lot of ways. What I love about Packer’s Growing in Christ is that it covers the traditional catechism of The Apostle’s Creed, The Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments and also includes a section on Baptism which is basically his way of covering conversion and the church. These are all such foundational things that on one reading are really basic, but you could spend your whole life thinking about them as well. It really seems like every church should have a class that just goes through this book. I feel the same way about another little book I read this year, *The Nicene Creed: An Introduction* by Philip Carey.

[***Hannah Coulter* by Wendell Berry**](https://bookshop.org/p/books/hannah-coulter-wendell-berry/173f40bc83390d48?ean=9781593760786&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com): I had never read Wendell Berry until I read Hannah Coulter over the Summer and I finally understood why people love him. It’s a short and simple book that is about an elderly woman reflecting on her life. There is much to meditate on in this book however, and it’s also beautifully written. I think reading it right after my wife did added a really rich dynamic in our home too. Highly recommend.

[***For The Children’s Sake* by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay**](https://bookshop.org/p/books/hannah-coulter-wendell-berry/173f40bc83390d48?ean=9781593760786&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com): We’re starting to have to think about school for our oldest son, and with the rise of AI during his earliest years, it’s sort of sent me on a side quest to really think deeply about education, what it is, what it’s for, and what will be needed in an AI world. Naturally, it didn’t take me long to fall down the Charlotte Mason rabbit hole. I went into *For The Children’s Sake* wanting to learn more about education, but I came out learning more about parenting in general. While I don’t think we’ll end up being a full-on Charlotte Mason home after all (for various reasons), I know for a fact this book helped me be a better parent.
### Best of Mere Orthodoxy: 2025
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/best-of-mere-orthodoxy-2025/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:36:01.000Z
As we wrap up every year, we have long had a habit of reviewing the past year's work here at *Mere O* and sharing some of our favorite pieces in an end-of-year recap. This collection is not necessarily indicative of traffic, but simply is our own attempt to highlight some of the year's best work.

It has been a full year for us. We have grown our team to three full-time employees, our email list, which was at 800 in the spring of 2024, has exploded to over 22,000 as we close out the year. Our paid membership has likewise nearly tripled from where it was in early 2024 to where it is now.

Additionally, we are now posting ten original essays and reviews per week rather than five, which means we have doubled the amount of work we are already giving away for free on our website every day. If you've been encouraged, helped, or otherwise blessed by the work, the simplest way for you to help us continue doing it is to [become a *Mere Orthodoxy* member today.](https://mereorthodoxy.com/membership) 

Often in these posts I will also consider some broader media trends in the past year and how those have influenced our work.

What I shared above largely covers that, however: Social media is dying or perhaps dead as a traffic generation tool for online media. Relatedly, "selling ads based on high traffic" is also dead and has been for some time. These days Facebook, Twitter, and other similar platforms want to treat their platforms more as walled gardens then as a portal to the open web. When I first took over *Mere O* in 2015, our leading traffic source was direct traffic, with Facebook and organic search next in line. Twitter was also significant. By the late 2010s and early 2020s, Facebook traffic had dropped off substantially, but Twitter was still a good traffic source.

In 2025, however, 75% of our traffic is coming from direct site visitors, email, and website referrals. Search and social combine for only 25% of our traffic. This implies a broader change in how online media works today. In the past, the goal was traffic, social media made it relatively easy to get large amounts of traffic, and then publishers tried to monetize their site via their traffic, usually via partnerships with advertisers of one kind or another.

Though it is sometimes remembered as a golden age of blogging, this wasn't a great model, actually. It incentivized poor behavior on the part of media producers, it caused media producers to build their publications on top of audiences they did not own or have direct access to but only could access through a mediator, such as Facebook or Twitter, and due to the low payments offered by advertisers it forced media companies to chase unsustainably large audiences just to pay their bills.

The model we have now is generally better, but also a bit harder to break into. The default funding model these days is a blending of **reader support** in the form of memberships and **sponsorship ads for podcasts and email**, which both work far better as advertising platforms than websites, and **donations**.

The reason this model is harder to break into is because it is much harder now to build an audience as an individual writer or producer. That said, the media organizations that succeed with this model will be *far* better positioned for long-term success than the signature digital media outlets of the social media age, such as Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post, Vice, and so on, virtually all of whom exist today, if at all, only in a zombiefied form.

The current business model for supporting online media encourages publishers to know their audience, makes it far easier for them own their audience and access them directly, and can theoretically allow for the flourishing of small magazines of the sort that once thrived in America and might do so again. On that note, here are some of our favorite pieces from our own small magazine's work this year.

## Politics and Culture

[Why You Shouldn't Burn it All Down by Myles Werntz](https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-you-shouldnt-burn-it-all-down)

[How to Think About Using Government Funds for Christian Charity by Matthew Loftus](https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-to-think-about-using-government-funds-for-christian-charity)

[What Were the Real Origins of the Christian Right? by Daniel Williams](https://mereorthodoxy.com/real-origins-christian-right)

[Iron Sky: Peter Thiel and the Rise of Gay Space Fascism by Jonathan Cioran](https://mereorthodoxy.com/gay-space-fascism)

[Common Arts That Matter by Thomas Fickley and Fr. Mark Perkins](https://mereorthodoxy.com/common-arts-that-matter)

[The American: A Frank Capra Retrospective by Ryan Shinkel](https://mereorthodoxy.com/frank-capra)

## Books

[Surviving the Magic Universe by Maguire Boles](https://mereorthodoxy.com/surviving-the-magic-universe)

[Dostoevsky and Euthanasia by Vika Pechersky](https://mereorthodoxy.com/dostoevsky-and-euthanasia)

[We're All George Smiley Now by Ana Siljak](https://mereorthodoxy.com/were-all-george-smiley-now)

[A Future Worthy of Life: Houellebecq, Decadence, and Sacraments by Brad East](https://mereorthodoxy.com/houellebecq-submission-ten-years-later)

[Augustine, Slavery, and Damaged Goods by Myles Werntz](https://mereorthodoxy.com/augustine-slavery-and-damaged-goods)

[A Sham Trial: Reviewing 'The Sin of Empathy' by Dani Treweek](https://mereorthodoxy.com/sin-of-empathy-joe-rigney-book-review)

[*Lamb of the Free*: A Critical Review by Derek Rishmawy](https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-review-of-andrew-remington-rilleras-lamb-of-the-free)

## Church and Theology

[The Rise of the Right-Wing Exvangelical by Jake Meador](https://mereorthodoxy.com/two-types-of-exvangelicals)

[A Place Where I Found Courage and Peace by Anna Catherine McGraw](https://mereorthodoxy.com/wheaton-college-controversy)

[Lessons from Post-Soviet Russia for American Christians by Vika Pechersky](https://mereorthodoxy.com/lessons-from-post-soviet-russia-for-american-christians)

[The Not At All Secret History of Nicaea by Susannah Black Roberts](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-not-at-all-secret-history-of-nicaea)

[How to Read the Bible with the Historic Church by Michael Niebauer](https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-to-read-the-bible-with-the-historic-church)

[The Rule of St Augustine: Wisdom for Our Moment by Joey Sherrard](https://mereorthodoxy.com/rule-st-augustine)

[How John MacArthur Changed American Preaching by Daniel Williams](https://mereorthodoxy.com/john-macarthur-legacy)

[Learning from a Humble Theologian by Joshua Heavin](https://mereorthodoxy.com/learning-from-a-humble-theologian)

[Doug Wilson Is Not a Prophet by Jeremy Sexton](https://mereorthodoxy.com/doug-wilson-is-not-a-prophet)

[Faithful Obedience Without Pragmatism: The Music of John Van Deusen by Paul Frank Spencer](https://mereorthodoxy.com/faithful-obedience-without-pragmatism-the-music-of-john-van-deusen)

[The Plight of the Christian Scholar by John Ahern](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-plight-of-the-christian-scholar)

[The Deconstruction of Evangelical Missions by Ted Esler](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-deconstruction-of-evangelical-missions)

## Sex and Family

[To Hate the Vulnerable: *Roe* at 52 by Nadya Williams](https://mereorthodoxy.com/to-hate-the-vulnerable-roe-at-52)

[Did David Rape Bathsheba?: A Close Reading of the Relevant Texts by Alastair Roberts](https://mereorthodoxy.com/david-bathsheba)

[The Babies Money Can Buy by Nadya Williams](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-babies-money-can-buy)

[Children of Men by James Locklear](https://mereorthodoxy.com/children-of-men)

[Forsaking All Others by Kirsten Sanders](https://mereorthodoxy.com/forsaking-all-others)

[The Case Against In Vitro Fertilization by Stiven Peter](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-case-against-in-vitro-fertilization)

[The Case Against Vasectomies by Haley Baumeister](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-case-against-vasectomies)

[Misunderstanding Porn by Matthew Loftus](https://mereorthodoxy.com/misunderstanding-porn)
### To Us a Child: A Christmas Sermon
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/to-us-a-child-a-christmas-sermon/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:36:04.000Z
Hear the word of the Lord, from the prophet Isaiah:

> The people walking in darkness  
> have seen a great light;  
> on those living in the land of deep darkness  
> a light has dawned.  
> You have enlarged the nation  
> and increased their joy;  
> they rejoice before you  
> as people rejoice at the harvest,  
> as warriors rejoice  
> when dividing the plunder.  
> For as in the day of Midian’s defeat,  
> you have shattered  
> the yoke that burdens them,  
> the bar across their shoulders,  
> the rod of their oppressor.  
> Every warrior’s boot used in battle  
> and every garment rolled in blood  
> will be destined for burning,  
> will be fuel for the fire.  
> For to us a child is born,  
> to us a son is given,  
> and the government will be on his shoulders.  
> And he will be called  
> Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,  
> Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.  
> Of the greatness of his government and peace  
> there will be no end.  
> He will reign on David’s throne  
> and over his kingdom,  
> establishing and upholding it  
> with justice and righteousness  
> from that time on and forever.  
> The zeal of the LORD Almighty  
> will accomplish this.  
>  
> Isaiah 9:2-7

///

Today we welcome the King, friends. Christ is born—forever born. Born again in the world. Born again in our hearts.

Alleluia.

Isaiah identifies him, this One—just a child—saying that all authority and power rest upon his soft shoulders; he is called “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace,” and “of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end” (Is. 9:6-7).

The paradox splits the mind and rends the heart, but there it is, the very center of our faith: the Vulnerable One, the One Born of the Virgin—he and no other is our God, *God in flesh, our hope divine*, surrounded by animals, lying in a manger, weak and in need, hungry for milk and love, utterly dependent.

And that is what pushes the mind so—that it is before him, *the Child*, that all things in heaven and on earth and under the earth bow low in reverence; that it is he, *this One*, who is called *Salvator Mundi*, the Savior of the World; that it is he and no other who is our God.

Our *holy human God*. The fate of the world rests on him. And this is good news.

Alleluia.

///

It has been a year of disruption over in our little corner of the world. In conversation with folks across the course of the year, I found myself often saying that while I have had more *painful* stretches of ministry—when the agony went bone-deep and it felt like the nights of weeping might never end—I have never had a year that demanded more frequent sudden changes.

*Disruption* is the exact right word. So much disruption. Just when I thought I had my bearings, the landscape would shift *yet again* and a sense of disorientation—which became unwelcomingly familiar as the year progressed—would descend. On very many of these bewildering days, I simply could not see beyond the next moment, the next meeting, the next *you-name-it*. We talk glibly and altogether too romantically about “living in the present.” Sometimes that’s the only place you *can* live—when there is simply no time to dwell on the past, for the demand of the present is so breathlessly urgent, and the future is so maddeningly uncertain. You learn to walk by what lights you have. Too often, such lights are much less than you would like.

*The people walking in darkness* indeed. But where is the *great light*?

I gained a new appreciation for the doctrine of providence this year—a difficult doctrine, no doubt, but inescapably biblical and full of consolation. John Webster is most helpful:

> Providence is knowledge of God, and known as God is known, in the act of faith … \[and\] faith is faith in the omnipresence of God to whom all occasions are seasons of mercy, faith in providence is knowledge of what will be true on all occasions … *Without knowing our future course, faith in providence confesses that God orders our time*.

Elsewhere Webster invokes Barth who teased out a doctrine of providence under the rubric of God’s “fatherly lordship” over all things; that is, providence is “faithful reason’s receiving of the consolation that, from before the foundation of the world and through all its course, *God is for us*”—which teaches us, he says, to live in time in the right way, full of confident trust. Biblically speaking, according to Webster (and I think he’s right) providence is not *fate*—nothing mechanistic about it. It is, rather, the conviction that our omnibenevolent and deeply personal God is getting God’s way. And God’s way is good. For everyone. Always.

*The government shall rest upon his shoulders …*

During one particularly dark episode this year—one in which I was, quite honestly, struggling just to breathe—a friend of mine sat across the desk from me in my office at church and said, “Andrew, I wonder what Jesus knows about you that you don’t (yet) know about yourself, that *he knows* that now is the *exact* right time for you to go through what you are going through …?”

Now that is the kind of question that I love: gloriously and deliberately circumlocutionary, witty and wise. Yes, *what*? What *do* you know, Lord?

If I had hoped for an answer to that question, the days and weeks ahead would surely have disappointed. But I think I know enough now at least to know that there are very many questions in the world that are salubrious not for the answers they provide but for the comforting light and nourishment that the very asking of them gives. “I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart,” said the poet Rilke to an aspiring young colleague, “and try to love the *questions themselves* like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers,” he advises, “which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Good advice, if challenging, not least because our hunger for certitude is so great. And it is not wrong, this hunger. We live by very many certitudes—gravity, the general predictability of the seasons, the cycles of evening and morning. Such things as these orient us in the world, in time. They make life livable—these things of which we do not need to guess. Praise God for certitude, blessed certitude.

But there is much in the world that falls firmly *outside* the realm of certitude—more, in fact, than falls within it. These are the “secret things” of which Moses spoke (Dt. 29:29), and they do not belong to us. They belong to God, held deep within his private counsel. “Who has known the mind of the Lord” (Rom. 11:34), after all, is a rhetorical question for which the answer is not “me” and whose end, if followed properly, is not understanding but rather—and much better—pure doxology (vv. 35-36). We do well to remind ourselves of these things.

So, what *does* Jesus know about Andrew …? About any of us …?

///

I held that question for a great deal of the year—*lived* it, as Rilke advised. It did in fact provide me with some light—if not the “great light” spoken of by Isaiah, light all the same.

Or was it?

What I finally concluded was that *what Jesus knows about Andrew* is not all that interesting. Only *that* he knows certain things. That is what is of interest. And more—*what* he knows has far less to do with me—or any of us—than it does with *him*. God is the protagonist of his story. We are bit-players. What he knows about *us* is first and primarily what he knows about *himself* and his aims for us.

And this is light.

Not that we are unimportant—not at all. It is for us that he came, for us that he lived and died, for us that so great a salvation was accomplished. The *pro me* (“for me”) of the gospel can never be abandoned. God’s work is directed towards us, for God is love and love is not self-seeking (1 Cor. 13:5).

It’s just that he doesn’t really consult us, and the salvation he gives is not really—not ever—based on our readiness to receive it. It happens as a pure gift, as an act of divine *fiat—*a gracious order, originating from God and God alone, given from on high. Isaiah says that it is the people *walking in darkness* who have seen a great light. We might ask: just why are these people walking in darkness? The answer is ready at hand:

> *Consult God’s instruction and the testimony of warning. If anyone does not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn. Distressed and hungry, they will roam through the land; when they are famished, they will become enraged and, looking upward, will curse their king and their God. Then they will look toward the earth and see only distress and darkness and fearful gloom, and they will be thrust into utter darkness.* (Is. 8:20-22)

Let the reader understand: these people are in darkness *because they chose it*. They cursed God and their curses plunged their world into a suffocating spiritual midnight. And then—just like that, seemingly out of nowhere—a light dawned upon them.

They didn’t want it. They certainly didn’t deserve it. But they got it anyway. The word for that is *grace*, and it is the lub-dub of the biblical story.

It was that sense of undeservedness, of pure grace, that unmade me many times over this year, as the Steady Hand guided us through each disruption and—not only that—used them to bring us into genuine newness. “We went through fire and water, and you brought us to a place of abundance …” said the psalmist (Ps. 66:12). Or—to bring it back to Isaiah—“… you have shattered the yoke that burdens them …” (Is. 9:4). “You have enlarged the nation and increased their joy …” (v. 3).

Which is just like our God—*nothing wasted*. Blessed be. How often it is the case in the biblical record that what looks like the end of the world is but in fact the beginning of a new world—one that God is making. He brings our little kingdoms to an end that he might establish his own. “*Of the greatness of his government and his peace there shall be no end”* (v. 7).

*His* government, *his* world—not ours.

And *better*—his government, his world—than ours.

Better.

Always better.

Forever better.

///

The thing that takes some time to learn is that you can’t muscle your way into it. You have to *receive* it. And often the receiving is very hard—precisely because the gift of God’s kingdom comes wrapped in forms we may not have expected, untrained in the mysteries of the kingdom as we are.

A friend of mine had a dream this year. In the dream, he saw a great storm coming over the mountaintop, barreling towards his house. He began rebuking the onrushing tempest until the voice of God spoke to him from amid the menacing clouds:

“*I am the storm*.”

Dream ended.

I thought often about my friend’s dream this year—how difficult and how true it is—and then more or less gasped when I ran into a poem of Rilke’s I had never read before. After describing the coming of a great storm upon the landscape—eerily similar in tone to my friend’s dream—the poet writes:

> *What we choose to fight is so tiny!What fights with us is so great!If only we would let ourselves be dominatedas things do by some immense storm,we would become strong too, and not need names.* 
>  
> *When we win it's with small things,and the triumph itself makes us small.What is extraordinary and eternaldoes not want to be bent by us.I mean the Angel who appearedto the wrestlers of the Old Testament:when the wrestlers' sinewsgrew long like metal strings,he felt them under his fingerslike chords of deep music.* 
>  
> *Whoever was beaten by this Angel(who often simply declined the fight)went away proud and strengthenedand great from that harsh hand,that kneaded him as if to change his shape.Winning does not tempt that man.This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,by constantly greater beings.*

Is it possible that in our attempts to control our lives, we in fact make our lives smaller, more cramped, less livable? We think ourselves masters of our fates and captains of our souls, but are we? Control, I am more convinced than ever, is an illusion. Most—not all, but most—of what happens to us in our lives is beyond our control. Believing otherwise is a snare—and perhaps more than a snare, a dangerous toxin that poisons our hearts and diminishes our lives. The life of faith is not a matter of conquering our lives, but, in a manner of speaking, to *be* conquered by the purposes of God the Ever-Greater, whose will for us is good even if—much more often than we would like—it comes to us cloaked in darkness and mystery, concealed in tempest and storm.

///

Isaiah was insistent upon these very things. Again and again his prophetic oracles assert that it is precisely what looks like *not-God* (Assyrian armies, to name but one example) that carries within it the good purposes of their promise-making, promise-keeping God. The conviction gives Isaiah courage to taunt the nations: “Devise your strategy, but it will be thwarted; propose your plan, but it will not stand, for God is with us” (8:10), and to direct and direct and direct again the people’s attention to their God: “The LORD Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy, he is the one you are to fear, he is the one you are to dread. And he will be a holy place …” (vv. 13-14). As the people come to fear God and God alone, they likewise come to know him as their “place” in the world, which means their place is forever secure, for the Lord is God and he changes not. Hemmed in on every side by the One who loves them and blesses them, they are therefore hemmed in by love and blessing—whatever else the visible circumstances might seem to dictate. An old hymn of the church by William Cowper gets it exactly right:

> *God moves in a mysterious way,* 
> *His wonders to perform.* 
> *He plants his footsteps in the sea* 
> *And rides upon the storm.* 
>  
> *Deep in unfathomable mines,* 
> *Of never-failing skill,* 
> *He fashions up his bright designs* 
> *And works his sov'reign will.* 
>  
> *Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take,* 
> *The clouds you so much dread* 
> *Are big with mercy and shall break* 
> *In blessings on your head.*

What else can we do but fall down in worship? What more can we say but “Thank you, God”?

And yet there *is* more to say. As I’ve meditated on Isaiah’s words over the last several months, what I’ve been struck by is how much and how often his sense of the future constellates around a human figure. Across the texts that bear his name, a *person* looms—from the child called Immanuel (ch. 7), to the shoot from the stump of Jesse (ch. 11), to the stirring and gut-wrenching “servant songs” of the latter part of the book (chs. 42-53), and on grand display here in chapter 9 (“For to us a child is born, and to us a son is given …”). For Isaiah, it is not just Invisible God who is the ground and goal of all the people’s hope—it is this mysterious human figure as well.

Further—and here is the great shock—Isaiah is unambiguous in his ascription of deity to this human figure. Perhaps never more so than here, where of this child, this son, it is said that

> *…. he will be called* 
> *Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,* 
> *Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.*

It would be blasphemy if it were not true. But in his own Spirit-inspired (if rudimentary) way, Isaiah knew—this is who God is. Not just “God Alone,” but “God and God Again”—Yahweh and the Child, whom the church would later identify as the Father and the Son, in the power of their mutual Holy Spirit. *God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity.*

We must not miss what Isaiah is saying, what Christmas teaches us over and over again: *It is the Child in whom the Fullness of God dwells; it is the Child who is tangible, undiminished Deity; it is the Child who is the reign of God in human flesh*.

This and no other. *Veiled in flesh the Godhead see! Hail the Incarnate Deity!*

Knowing this makes all the difference in the world.

///

I started seeing a spiritual director some years ago in the midst of a deep, personal crisis. The wheels had fallen off of my life and I needed someone to help me find my way back to a sense of where God was for me. David helped me do that. Our times together routinely called—and still call—me back home to God, to sense and sanity, to soundness of heart and mind.

I walked into his office a couple Advents ago, harried, breathless, and not a little stressed. He gave me a few moments to settle myself, prayed, and then asked if he could lead me in a short exercise. I said yes.

“I want you to imagine yourself in the Nativity, with the animals and the wise men and the shepherds, with Joseph and Mary and, of course, with Jesus. Mary is holding Jesus. Are you able to do that?”

I was able, and I did it. “What do you see?” he asked. I described the picture. “What’s happening?” I told of how the woman and the Child at rest in her arms had created a kind of focal point of attention for those of us who surrounded them.

“And what is happening *in you*?” he asked.

Then I noticed: without any effort, I had begun to slow down. It felt good. “Stay there,” he said. And I did.

After a few moments he said to me, “Andrew, I want you to imagine one more thing: Mary offers you the Baby. Will you take him?”

I have four kids of my own. The scene was familiar to me in its sheer bodily detail. The very thought was tactile—I have muscle memory for this, for the many times Mandi offered me one of our little ones, sleeping and at rest. There’s a kind of art to the handoff, a sort of maximal adjustment of one’s physical demeanor so as to maintain the tranquility of the child. The attentive reception of a baby modifies you in all the right ways.

So I received him, this One; took the “Son given” (Is. 9:6) into my arms, the Infant who is God; held him close, and adored. David gave me a minute or two to sink into the moment.

“What do you notice, Andrew?”

I did not answer right away. It felt wrong to shatter the exquisite, fragile sense of holiness that had descended upon us (I knew David felt it, too). Some experiences need little, or no, commentary. “The LORD is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him” (Hab. 2:20).

Sometimes the temple is your arms.

It was several minutes before I spoke again. When I opened my eyes, David asked me to reflect. “What were you experiencing?” I told him of how my mind had slowed, how my breathing had regulated for the first time in I-don’t-know-how-many weeks, how my *body* had suddenly become quiet. I had come home—to God, to the sacrament of the present moment, to myself. I was very struck by how attention to the Child who is God—in my arms, of all places, peaceful and at rest—had done that for me. In tending to a fragile holiness, in holding the Baby, God’s unfragile, eternal reign—wonder of wonders—had re-established itself in me.

David nodded in approval. I continued, “But I think what I am struck most by is the thought that there is never a moment of my life—of any of our lives—when this experience is not available to us. At any time, I can take the Child in my arms and let the presence of this fragile holiness quiet me.”

Any time, any place, however and wherever we find ourselves, we may enter the Silent Night of the Lord, the beauty of God’s peace.

It is worth saying that if the thought of this shocks you, well, perhaps it should. That’s part of the scandal of the Incarnation. God, to the biblical mind, is supra-temporal, situated above and beyond space and time. Not, mind you, as One apart from it, but rather as the One in whom all things live and move and have their being (Acts 17:28). From a metaphysical standpoint, God is our *environment*. This is basic.

What is not often noticed, however, is that this supra-temporality applies not just to God in his *essence*, as it were, but to God *as God reveals God-self in the economy of salvation*. That is, in Jesus (who, by the way, *is* God in his essence—or else the whole Jesus-as-God thing is a cruel charade). To put a finer point on it: *Jesus as we meet him in the Gospels, at every stage of how we meet him in the Gospels, is the One in whom we live and move and have our being*. Not without reason is he called “the Lamb slain *from the foundation of the world*” (Rev. 13:8). The Jesus of the Gospels is not just “one thing” that happens in time; rather, he is the “happening” of God to all time; he is the Time that encompasses all time; his is the Time of times.

Which is why we can—whenever we choose—worship him not only in the agony of Gethsemane but in the sunny climes of Galilee; not only at the cross but at the empty tomb; not only seated at the right hand of the Father but tucked away in a manger. He is God with us, God for us, in all these ways, in all these places, in all these “times.”

It is the sheer *this-and-thatness* of our God that over the years I have come to find so deeply consoling. Yes, he is God in the storm, moving in a mysterious way to perform wonders. And also, he is God in the arms, quieting us as we attend to him while the wind and waves sweep over our worried heads. He is God in both of these modes—the One who shakes the heavens and the earth, and the One who keeps company with us in the shaking, dilating and softening of our hearts which are ever-prone to close and harden in doubtful fear.

For as long as I can remember, Psalm 139 has been my favorite psalm. The affirmation “Where can I go from your Spirit, where can I flee from your presence?” (v. 7) has wrapped itself many times like a warm blanket around my terrified and bewildered heart. “You hem me in, behind and before, you have laid your hand upon me” (v. 5) has—how many times it has—fallen upon me as a direct and personal blessing of the Lord, a benediction cascading from the infinite heights of the Almighty.

The New Testament tells me that it is in Jesus Christ—the One in the Manger, the One on the Cross, the One at the Right Hand—that all these things are so (2 Cor. 1:20). It is in him that Psalm 139 is true. As the year unfolded, I found myself more than ever clinging to him for my very life. “When my spirit grows faint within me, it is you who watch over my way” (Ps. 142:3).

And the gospel tells us further that he—our good Jesus—not only *knows* the way, *he is the Way*. Thomas, in exasperation: “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?” (John 14:5). And the Lord replies, in words that resound down through the dark corridors of history, lighting up all things with the Great Light that he is and has:

*“I am the way …*” (John 14:6)

///

He is the Way—capital ‘W’. Which, I am learning (slowly learning) means that I don’t really need to know anything about my “way”—just that he is with me and for me upon my way—as he is with and for all of us. That Jesus is both our goal and our path, even when it all seems so bewildering and terrifying. We are in good hands with him.

One day, Scripture tells us, everything will be made plain to us (though I have a suspicion that when we see the Lord face-to-face, all that we spent our lives fretting about will not matter much). For now, we walk in dark mysteries—though not without the Light. It is not part of our discipleship to have our lives figured out, to solve the mysteries. “The secret things belong to the LORD our God” after all, while “the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever” (Dt. 29:29).

And Jesus is “The Thing Revealed.” He belongs to us, and we to him. We have God—and everything—as we have Jesus.

And we’re going to make it. You’re going to make it. I promise.

Said Teresa of Avila:

> “For our sight is poor and the dust which we meet on the road blinds us; but in contemplation the Lord brings us to the end of the day’s journey without our understanding how.”

And the gospel assures us: not just a day’s journey, friend, but a *life’s*.

Stay close to the Child. Adore him. He’s taking you by the hand straight to the Father. And he’ll never lead you astray.
### 2025 Eliot Awards
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/2025-eliot-awards/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:36:07.000Z
Each year we like to honor the best writing published elsewhere by small and large magazines as well as independent writers. We call these honors "the Eliot Awards" for T. S. Eliot, who was himself a great man of letters and whose work has influenced us here at *Mere Orthodoxy* in many ways.

## Overall Winners

[I Didn't Know I Could Feel This Way by Freddie de Boer (published on Substack)](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-didnt-know-i-could-feel-this-way?utm%5Fcampaign=13660601-Mere%20Orthodoxy%20%7C%20Weekly%20Digest&utm%5Fsource=hs%5Femail&utm%5Fmedium=email)

Freddie de Boer has been a favorite writer of mine for probably at least a decade. Earlier this year he and his wife had their first child, prompting de Boer to write this reflection on fatherhood, which captures both the difficulty and the glory of it in ways few pieces I have ever read do.

[Inside America's Death Chambers by Elizabeth Bruenig (published in *The Atlantic*)](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/07/death-row-executions-witness/682891/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

Elizabeth Bruenig strikes me as one of the most pervasively *Christian* public writers we have going today. In writing about Scripture, the Protestant theologian John Calvin likened Scripture to a set of spectacles we used in order to see the world. I doubt that a Catholic like Bruenig would necessarily appreciate my using Calvin to praise her, but if you want a writer who genuinely attempts to keep the truths of the faith so near, like one's glasses, that she can't help seeing all the world through them, I can think of few writers who exemplify that more than Bruenig. The heartbeat of her work has always been the necessity of mercy, yet a mercy that is not morally empty or indifferent to justice. Holding that all together takes immense talent, but Bruenig often lives up to the task and there are few pieces of hers where she does it better than this lengthy meditation on capital punishment.

[The Goon Squad by Daniel Kolitz (published in *Harper's*)](https://harpers.org/archive/2025/11/the-goon-squad-daniel-kolitz-porn-masturbation-loneliness/?utm%5Fcampaign=13660601-Mere%20Orthodoxy%20%7C%20Weekly%20Digest&utm%5Fsource=hs%5Femail&utm%5Fmedium=email)

This one comes with a content warning: It's an investigative piece on men who organize their entire lives around pornography and self-pleasuring. It's every bit as dark (and more) as that description would suggest. But I think it is an important piece for highlighting how easy it is in our cultural and technological moment for young men to lose themselves in incredible dark ways of life. As [I have said before](https://mereorthodoxy.com/frog-and-toad-christendom), we make it very very easy to destroy ourselves and actually quite difficult to be good.

[The Brother I Lost by Megan McArdle (published in *The Dispatch*](https://thedispatch.com/article/abortion-motherhood-lost-sibling/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com))

This is a mature and moving piece by McArdle, a contributing writer for *The Dispatch,* about the topic she could never discuss with her mother and about the brother she never met and never will meet now. It highlights the stakes of the abortion debate as well as some broader topics around sexuality and family life in a really compelling way which helps foreground the humanity of the unborn. (Disclosure: I am also a contributing writer with *The Dispatch*.)

[What Trump Is Really Doing with His Boat Strikes by Phil Klay (published in *The New York Times*)](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/opinion/trump-boat-strikes.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

Klay's piece uses Augustine to frame the conversation around both the boat strikes themselves and about the way those strikes are being talked about in American politics and media. Its strength is that it succeeds in the same way that Bruenig's essay does, I think: The point is less to tell you what to think about a policy question and more to remind you of the profound dignity of each person and how that dignity should influence us as we consider not simply individual policies, but as we think more generally about the nature of justice and the power of the state.

## Culture

[Elizabeth Anscombe and the Bomb by Luis Parrales (published in *The Dispatch*)](https://thedispatch.com/article/elizabeth-anscombe-and-the-bomb/?utm%5Fcampaign=13660601-Mere%20Orthodoxy%20%7C%20Weekly%20Digest&utm%5Fsource=hs%5Femail&utm%5Fmedium=email)

[The Right Has Forgotten Feeling by Freya India (published in *First Things*)](https://firstthings.com/the-right-has-forgotten-feeling/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

[From State Craft to Soul Craft by Alexandre Lefebvre (published in *Noema*)](https://www.noemamag.com/from-statecraft-to-soulcraft/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

[Punching Blind by Robert Joustra (published in *Comment*)](https://comment.org/punching-blind/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

[A Russian Novel Saved My Mind by Noah Kumin (published in *Unherd*)](https://unherd.com/2025/04/a-russian-novel-saved-my-mind/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

[Why the Pro-Democracy Center Can't Save America by Evelyn Quartz (published in *Compact*)](https://www.compactmag.com/article/why-the-pro-democracy-center-cant-save-america/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

[We Were Jesus Freaks by Trevin Wax (published in *First Things*)](https://firstthings.com/we-were-jesus-freaks/?utm%5Fcampaign=13660601-Mere%20Orthodoxy%20%7C%20Weekly%20Digest&utm%5Fsource=hs%5Femail&utm%5Fmedium=email)

[The Risk of Gentleness: Welcoming the Baby I Did Not Want by Gracy Olmstead (published in *Plough*)](https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/culture-of-life/the-risk-of-gentleness?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

## Technology

[One to Zero by Charles Carman (published in *The New Atlantis*)](https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/one-to-zero?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

[Internet Overexposure Syndrome by Katherine Dee (published in *Comment*)](https://comment.org/internet-overexposure-syndrome/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

[Keep It Private by Anton Barba-Kay (published in *Comment*)](https://comment.org/keep-it-private/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

[Content and Community by Ben Thompson (published in *Stratechery*)](https://stratechery.com/2025/content-and-community/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

[Nobody Has a Personality Anymore by Freya India (published on Substack)](https://www.freyaindia.co.uk/p/nobody-has-a-personality-anymore?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

## Ross Douthat Category

(This is partially a joke. It is also partially a recognition that Douthat is the best columnist we have going in the country, has been for a remarkably long time, and keeping him in his own category is a way to give the rest of us a chance.)

[How Progressives Lost Their Story](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/opinion/birth-rate-progressives.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

[Your Rivals Aren't Responsible for Mass Shootings](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/opinion/annunciation-minneapolis-shooting-blame.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

[An Age of Extinction is Coming. Here's How to Survive](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/19/opinion/extinction-technology-culture.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

[Why Is Christianity So Hard to Find in the Trump Administration?](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/06/opinion/trump-hegseth-christian-nationalism.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

[The Liberal Order Can't Heal Itself](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/opinion/liberalism-postliberalism-affordability.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

[Taylor Swift's Latest Reinvention is Both Coarse and Conservative](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/opinion/taylor-swift-life-showgirl-conservative.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

[Why the Euthanasia Slope is Slippery](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/14/opinion/assisted-suicide-new-york.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

[Amy Coney Barrett and the Right's Elite-Building Problem](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/opinion/barrett-trump-maga-elite.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

[Neil Gaiman, 'Babygirl', and the Ethics of Social Liberalism](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/neil-gaiman-babygirl.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)
### What One Urbanite Learned from Wendell Berry
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/what-one-urbanite-learned-from-wendell-berry/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:36:09.000Z
Two recent events started me thinking about Wendell Berry’s work once again. 

First, a month ago my wife and I stopped in Port Royal, Berry’s hometown, on our way from Chattanooga, TN to Grand Rapids, MI. Port Royal is *not* on the way, especially not if you drive the most direct, efficient way: taking interstate highways. But in the last several years, we have used our GPS to avoid highways and toll roads. We are well into our 70s, both retired, both slowing down. We no longer have strict schedules to meet. And I no longer enjoy driving fast, and I find interstate driving not quite terrifying, but at least very unsettling. So most of the time now we chart a course that uses two-lane roads, taking us away from congested areas. Last month, after we had been on the road for a couple hours and were getting near the Kentucky border, I checked a map and noticed that our GPS was going to take us within 15 miles of Port Royal. So we ended up stopping there.

Over the last 30 years, I have read most of Berry’s published works; some of his non-fiction, like *A Continuous Harmony* and *Home Economics*, many times. So I had a clear picture of Berry’s hometown in my mind. The real Port Royal was not anything like what I had imagined. It was tiny, looked like less than 100 people lived there, and almost every building in town was rundown. Only a feed and seed store seemed in good repair. We went inside, chatted for perhaps 10 minutes with the fellow manning the cash register (who looked like a character from one of Berry’s novels). He told us Wendell was 90 years old, starting to show his age. After we had chatted, he even gave us directions to Berry’s farm, which surprised us. We talked about driving there, but decided against it. One reason was that we did not want to disturb Wendell or his wife, if what I had read about him were true. I was pretty sure he would want to be left alone. But, more importantly, I feared that Berry’s farm might be as disappointing as the town of Port Royal was. 

Second, last week I stumbled upon an essay about Berry’s latest novel, written by an acquaintance of mine, a person whose work I respect a great deal. Her essay got me thinking about how seriously I should take Berry’s vision: his celebration of subsistence farms and the communities in which they are situated and his severe critiques of most aspects of our urban and suburban industrialized society. I will admit that I haven’t read much of Berry within the last 5 years. And if someone were to examine my life, they would see almost no evidence of Berry’s influence.

My wife and I live in Chattanooga, TN, a city of slightly under 200,000 people. Though my wife continues to garden, even has a primitive composting system, almost her entire garden is ornamental. She has a few tomato plants; no other vegetables. We depend upon big grocery chains for our food; we own two cars; our house is heated—and cooled—by two heatpumps; our neighbors’ houses are less than 20 feet from ours. Quite far from an agrarian ideal. As I finished Nadya’s essay on Berry, my first thought was that Berry had zero influence on my thinking and living, even though I still dropped his name occasionally in conversation. I went to bed a bit sad, as I reflected upon how I had lost my vision of the good life as Berry understood it, had given up and given in to modernity.

But my unconscious mind must have been at work while I slept, for when I got out of bed the next morning, I remembered a very rough exploratory essay I had written on Berry many years ago. I found it, reread it, and was somewhat encouraged that—even though I live a typical urban lifestyle— there are four ways that Berry’s writing has a positive impact on me.

## An Intellectual Brake

First, even though I have adopted a contemporary, urban lifestyle (notice the irony of my wife and I using GPS to find Port Royal), I find that Berry’s writing keeps me from doing that mindlessly, unconsciously. His writing acts as an intellectual brake for me: helps me notice alternatives to my normal way of operating in the world. I compare his influence on me to the influence of the Amish, the Hutterites, monks and nuns. We lived in southeastern Pennsylvania for many years and had numerous encounters with Amish families. Whenever I passed an Amish buggy on my drive through the Lancaster region, I was reminded that one did not have to own a car and drive 70 mph to get where one wanted to go. During harvest season, I was reminded that one could bring in crops without using heavy, expensive, polluting machinery—just the sort of thing that Berry often describes in his fiction and nonfiction. I had similar reactions when I read about the Hutterites farming on the American Prairie. While so many farmers and ranchers were failing, the Hutterites not only endured, but were thriving because of their communal lifestyle and very selective use of gas-powered farm equipment. 

I have not purchased horses and a buggy. I still own two cars. But Berry has helped me think very carefully about the type of car I own, how often I drive, how to combine trips so that I do not mindlessly waste gas and clog up the roads. In fact, we moved back into the St. Elmo community of Chattanooga because it is a bounded community; we can walk to church, grocery stores, the post office, and friends' houses. Not that I don’t drive more often than I probably should. But I am quite aware when I make the choice to drive to buy groceries that I had another choice. Berry is a significant part of that awareness.

## A Deeper Understanding of Sin

Second, Berry has changed the way I think about sin. I was raised on The Westminster Shorter Catechism, so I learned to think of sin as “any want of conformity to, or transgression of, the law of God.” Another way to put that was that sin was “missing the mark.” But Berry talks more about sin as “separation.” As I understand him, he does not simply mean that some of our sins can or might separate us from others (the way adultery separates one spouse from another). But he suggests we sin because we think of ourselves as separate from—different from, maybe better than—other people. That might be a big thing. For example, I might commit adultery because I think my needs are more important than my wife’s. I will admit that is an obvious example, one that most of us recognize as “sin.” But I also see this working on a much smaller scale. Take, for example, our willingness to run red lights or stop signs, or pass other vehicles on the shoulder of the road. Berry has helped me see that I do that because I think I am different than, more important than the others drivers on the road with me. My need to get to my destination 10 seconds faster than other people at an intersection allows me to endanger others by speeding through a red light, rather than waiting my turn. That sounds like “sin” to me, the way Berry has defined it.

## The Consequences of Our Living

Third, Berry made me think about living with the consequences of what we do in a way I had not before. Let me give an example from industry. Decades ago, the Dupont Company required the managers of their chemical plants to live on the site where they worked. If there were problems with the byproducts Dupont produced at one of its plants, the manger and his family were as exposed to the effects just as any of the day laborers, as any of the neighbors of the plant were. On a trip through the desert west, I was reminded that we do not act like this much anymore. In talking to residents of these lightly-populated regions, we discovered that the industrialized east sends its most toxic waste to be buried in these remote areas, inhabited by a rather small number of people. These westerners do not produce this waste (or at least most of it), but they must live with the waste and what it does to their land, their animals and themselves. 

Berry often uses examples from agriculture when he talks about this issue. But it seems to me that the principle can apply to residents of a high-rise apartment building in a major city just as it does to rural folks. I assume that many of the rules imposed on condominium owners by the boards that regulate behavior in these structures are the result of residents finding ways to help these neighbors live together in peace—even if they know almost no other residents of the condominium project. The rules eliminate behavior that could have unhappy consequences for all who dwell there.

## Understanding What Makes a Community

Fourth, Berry reminds me that we can consider ourselves members of a community if we attempt to solve the problems of that community—rather than expecting someone else (perhaps a government agency) to solve the problem for us. One obvious example of that is a neighborhood creating a Neighborhood Watch program to prevent crime. Rather than expecting the police department to monitor their neighborhood regularly, residents can sacrifice a few hours of their free time each month to patrol their streets. Our little community of St Elmo has a serious problem with speeding drivers. The posted speed limit is 25MPH. But too often people passing through on their way from north Georgia to downtown Chattanooga drive twice as fast as that. I, along with many of my neighbors, complain loudly about that; we have urged our representative to City Council to do something. But nothing the government has tried has had any effect on the issue, as far as I can see. As an alternative, someone suggested that St. Elmo residents could organize community volunteers to drive through the neighborhood at the posted speed for an hour or so each week, so that all the streets would be covered by law-abiding citizens all day, keeping people from speeding through our community. Their presence would force speeding drivers to observe the law. This was a slightly different sort of “neighborhood watch” program, a small step toward solving the problems where we live and, thus, proving our community membership.

As I reread what I have written, I doubt Berry would be impressed with what I have said. Maybe he would feel that all he has written has been for naught—if his influence is to be judged by my response to his work. He might see my suggestions as “half-measures,” at best. But, admitting that possibility, I must conclude that Wendell Berry’s writing has opened my eyes. His works have made me aware of many of the problems of modernity and my own contribution to those problems. And isn’t awareness of a problem one step—even if a very small step—toward improving the world in which we live? Perhaps it is a sort of intellectual “widow’s mite” or “cup of cold water”?
### The Ghost of Christmas Never
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-ghost-of-christmas-never/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:36:11.000Z
It took me a long time to realize that two of our family’s most beloved Christmas stories are both about men given an opportunity by heaven to see frightening visions of their own lives. Ebenezer Scrooge is somewhat moved by the visits from the spirits of Christmas past and present, but he only repents when the deathly Ghost of Christmas Future shows him grief and judgment awaiting him.

Likewise, George Bailey, the downcast hero of *It’s a Wonderful Life*, comes within inches of committing suicide, but is saved when a guardian angel thrusts him into an alternative timeline where he was never born. With no wife, children, little brother, or hometown, George realizes that his life was far richer than his ambitions admitted, and soon he is praying himself out of the horrible non-existence: [“Please God, let me live again.”](https://www.digitalliturgies.net/p/let-me-live-again?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)

Both George and Scrooge have become blind and numb to reality. Their redemption comes through an encounter with non-reality. Scrooge’s impending future and George Bailey’s alternate present are both so hellish that each character is able to see his actual reality differently. There are important differences: Scrooge’s problem is (at least partially) ignorance, whereas George has applied the wrong standard of value to everything throughout his life. But each is given a chance to see life from a godlike perspective. Inhabiting a different possible world becomes for them a way of living virtuously in this one.

It also matters that both Scrooge and George Bailey receive visions of an alternate reality that genuinely terrify them. For Scrooge, his apathy toward the poor, especially the Cratchit family, leads in the future to Tiny Tim’s death, Bob’s despair, and the contempt of the world upon Scrooge’s own passing. Both Scrooge and George temporarily experience non-existence, and realize that their own lives are bound up with the lives of others (both Tiny Tim and George’s brother Harry die without Scrooge and George there to stop it).

*A Christmas Carol* and *It’s a Wonderful Life* are both religious, if not evangelical, stories. They are culturally Christian artifacts that lack an explicit gospel, but obviously rhyme with Christian truth. George and Scrooge may be very different temperamentally, but they share fallen humanity’s tendency to be curved inward, shutting out the needs and duties that press on them from the outside. Scrooge and George share a fear of poverty, and this shared fear dominates their hearts and drives them to evaluate the people around them too low. Scrooge becomes wealthy and George stays relatively poor, but they each become the parable of the man who built bigger barns and was not “rich toward God.”

Fear is powerful. It warps the mind and shrinks the soul. It can deform character, like in Scrooge, or elicit despair, like in George. Most of all, it freezes. Fear paralyzes its host, suggesting that the next step will undoubtedly be wrong, or the next word will come back to haunt. Under the spell of fear, we hide away in tunnels of inaction, as possible worlds—alternative timelines where we are not under fear’s control—pass us by.

Risk aversion is my generation’s great besetting sin.Notions that millennials or Gen-Z are lazy and entitled are not always false, but they are superficial. Behind what looks like laziness and entitlement is fear: a pathological fear of falling short, of not obtaining what’s sought, of not knowing where to go or who to turn to.

Why do young men increasingly say they don’t even desire a girlfriend or wife? Certainly, the digitization of masturbation has something to do with it. But whenever someone retreats to a vice that is so much clearly inferior to other vices available to them, we do well to ask why. Fear is why.

Peruse any online space where men are active, or talk to a young man in your church or neighborhood, and you will hear a well-established cost-benefit calculus when it comes to love and marriage. “Why take a chance on being rejected,” they’ll ask. “I don’t want to have a bad breakup or get divorced. Why risk it?”

Daniel Kolitz’s infamous and very hard-to-read [profile of the “gooners,”](https://harpers.org/archive/2025/11/the-goon-squad-daniel-kolitz-porn-masturbation-loneliness/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) a group of online men who’ve turned pornography into a cult, reveals the fear driving brutally antisocial trends among men. Kolitz gets one of the subjects of his piece to open up about the anxiety behind his addictions:

> It turns out that what most frightens Spishak about sex is the impossibility of ever knowing what’s really going on in your partner’s (or anyone else’s) head. What if she’s bored by what Spishak’s doing but too polite to tell him? Worse: What if she’s uncomfortable with the entire situation? How could Spishak possibly know? “I just feel like it’s exhausting,” he says. “For both parties.”

Each one of the boys that Kolitz encounters represents not just a tragedy in our real, current universe, but a tragedy across every other possible universe as well. There is an alternative history in which these men are better protected in adolescence from the allure of the Internet, and more willing to inhabit the risky, awkward world of love, marriage, sex, and family. In our current timeline are women who are *not* blessed by these men’s strength and fidelity, children who do *not* exist and belong to them, industries that are *not* powered by their labor, and other men who are *not* loved or encouraged by their mentorship. These are fear’s phantoms.

What Clarence and the Ghost of Christmas Future show their protagonists is dreadful. By wishing himself unborn, George becomes a true “nobody.” But this alone isn’t the judgment, since George already believes he’s a nobody. The judgment is that when he becomes a nobody, the people he loves become nobody to him. George can’t jump into the river, let his wife cash out the life insurance policy, and have everything be well. To throw himself away is to throw her away, to throw his children away, to throw his mother and young brother and cab driver and community away. George has to be shown this, by heaven, because he can’t see it on his own.

Young men paralyzed by fear of the real are trapped in George’s alternate vision. They don’t need to see hell, the way George and Scrooge did, because they’re already there. They need to see heaven. They need a visitation from a future of hope they don’t currently have, the Ghost of Christmas Never.

The Ghost of Christmas Never could reclaim young men away from fear and risk aversion by redefining what deserves fear. There’s a strong case to be made that the self-protective instincts of my generation were most deeply shaped in our education, where the lines between real learning and instruction-following have been blurred for decades. From an early age, twenty- and thirtysomething men have been taught that a life of meaning will only come if the right letters and right numbers are next to their names, and that family, friendships, and church have to be weighed against recruitment and scholarships.

Redefining value in this way is a recipe for generational pathology. It stokes fear: the fear of not getting the right grade, not checking the right identity box, not getting into the right college or internship or job. Young men are trained by this to evaluate their lives as either wins or losses in totally material terms. Many times, the winners of this system win precisely because they cut loose the people and values that make for a truly good life. The losers stew in resentment, giving up on their own journeys before they begin.

A “wonderful life” though is not one where the right boxes are checked or the right GPA appears. The men who tend to make an impact and ascend their spheres of influence are not the best test-takers, but the men who can make decisions, solicit and follow advice, and take initiative and then ownership of that initiative. Fear of taking the wrong step is the wrong fear. The right fear is taking no step at all.

Taking this initiative does not, of course, guarantee the big opportunity. The distinction between what David Brooks calls “resume virtues” and “eulogy virtues” matters precisely because the economic results of our character are not what matter most. What should young men fear? They should fear living in such a way that their funeral is short and empty. Caskets are great equalizers. What goes before and behind us is not our money or title, but our love and our character. And how is our character oriented? Toward God and others.

The Ghost of Christmas Never would haunt men of my generation by showing them visions of a home where they give and receive love and fidelity. Instead of the struggle for existential survival or the endless quest for pleasure that won’t leave one emptier than before, they would see a wife whose body is theirs and who owns their body. They would see the freedom of covenant play out as they and their wife exchange the right to wander for the honor and healing of belonging. In these visions they would likely see things that contradict what they’ve read about women or relationships from angsty online forums. They might even grasp, just for a moment, what it means to love as Christ loved.

It might also show them a vision of *trying*. In it, these men would see the world not as a rigged game but as a place responsive to their presence and their powers. They could see opportunities and privileges come from taking the extra time, or doing the extra task, or suggesting the extra idea. Fear of failure would be assuaged by the reminders, from Scripture and their church, that they don’t labor in the fields of the world, but in the fields of the Lord. They might see themselves work, think, pray, play, and serve as men liberated from dread by the sensation that their Creator always sees and always knows.

How might the Ghost of Christmas Never come? I’m not sure. It could come through a father, mentor, or a church. It could come from putting away social media long enough to read something like this. But if Christmas fables like these are “true myths,” one thing seems certain. The Ghost of Christmas Never may come when we pray that it comes. Remember Marley’s words that Scrooge’s chance of salvation was a “chance of my procuring.” Remember the prayers in the opening scenes of *It’s a Wonderful Life*. “Please God, something’s a matter with daddy. Please bring daddy back.”
### Why Iconoclasm Will Fail
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-iconoclasm-will-fail/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:36:16.000Z
The New Right is perhaps the most revolutionary force presently at work in American politics. Frustrated by the decadence of liberalism, many young men are turning to ideological combat and authoritarian politics for salvation. They hunger for new modes and orders. Understandable as their impatience is, though, it is no virtue.

Timon Cline, one of the New Right’s more expressive Protestant advocates, [recently published an essay](https://americanreformer.org/2025/12/iconoclasm/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) defending this revolutionary fervor and the “spirit of iconoclasm” inspiring it. Contesting the claim that the New Right is a nihilistic force, he insists rather that the New Right “hates empty forms” and seeks a true spiritual substance. “What is ‘vulgarity’ when the whole world is vulgar?” he incisively asks. “What is ‘anarchy’ when the world is disordered?” To Cline, at least, the New Right has less to do with twentieth century fascism and more to do with the seventeenth century republicanism of Oliver Cromwell. His hope is that somehow this revolutionary energy can be channeled into a neo-Puritan republican project, reordering America as a Christian commonwealth fueled by intense belief.

In the end, however, that kind of revolutionary attitude cannot preserve the strength civilization needs in this hour of crisis. Lest we forget, Cromwell’s republican experiment lasted merely eleven years—and many of the Founders of the more enduring American Republic later [considered him a paragon of tyranny](https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/jay-the-federalist-gideon-ed?ref=mereorthodoxy.com#lf1631%5Flabel%5F207). Neither the English Commonwealth nor any other revolutionary regime can provide a model for genuine renewal. What is more needful than new modes and orders is an unwavering devotion to the defense of the Permanent Things. A truly conservative disposition, rooted in common loves more than common hates, is the real source of energy the West needs to survive. 

Unlike the modern ideologies it seeks to negate, conservatism above all values the moral beauty at the heart of Western civilization. Russell Kirk, the founder of modern American conservatism, borrowed the phrase “Permanent Things” from his friend T. S. Eliot to describe this beauty. “By ‘the Permanent Things,’” [he wrote](https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/02/russell-kirk-the-permanent-things.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), Eliot “meant those elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish. They work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in that continuity of belief and institution called the great mysterious incorporation of the human race.” The vast civilizational edifice built up over thousands of years—from works of great art and literature to free constitutions and institutions of liberal education—refracts and reflects the spiritual truths of biblical religion and Western philosophy that are so overpoweringly beautiful. Conservatives’ duty, then, is to redeem the times by cultivating and reviving that civilizational edifice, thereby preserving the moral and spiritual substance of the Permanent Things.

It is no doubt that the American conservative movement has fallen short of that high task. We must renew our efforts. But it is also the case that the New Right provides no serious alternative to conservatism. Its adherent’s failures are already apparent, at least so far as practical politics goes—it is difficult to identify anything they have conserved during their ten years, least of all the beautiful or the true. Donald Trump’s coalition may have won back the presidency, but his administration’s populism is already falling short of so many of his most earnest Christian supporter’s desires.

Just last week, the President [signed an executive order](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-order-reclassifying-marijuana-schedule-iii-drug-expected/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) further legalizing marijuana. His financial regulators have [recently sided with](https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2025/12/occ-accuses-banks-of-debanking-activities-in-preliminary-review-00684675?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) the so-called “adult entertainment industry” against banks who would rather not do business with pornographers who exploit and abuse women. Trump’s [appointees at the FDA have pushed](https://www.nationalreview.com/news/major-pro-life-group-demands-fda-commissioner-be-fired-immediately-for-slow-walking-abortion-pill-review/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to make it easier to access abortion pills, much to the consternation of pro-life groups. And whatever progress this administration has made securing the southern border has been utterly cheapened by Trump’s [crackpot scheme](https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/10/politics/trump-gold-card-1-million-dollar-visa?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to sell American citizenship to the highest bidder. Administration social media accounts may intone the slogans of Christian nationalists, but its actual policies have only further established the kind of permissive liberalism they claim to loathe.

If the New Right, or more specifically Christian nationalism, is so important to Trump’s coalition, why has it failed to lead us up into the land of virtue? In the past, Cline has [looked to the cunning of Niccoló Machiavelli](https://americanreformer.org/2025/12/the-trouble-with-unemployed-scholars/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), and perhaps the insights of the Florentine may help explain.

In [*The Prince*](https://www.amazon.com/Prince-Second-Niccolo-Machiavelli/dp/0226500446/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), Machiavelli described the unhappy case of Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican friar who opposed the depravity of Renaissance Florence. Many consider him a proto-Reformer, and he initiated the infamous Bonfire of the Vanities in which many artistic masterpieces were burned and lost to civilization forever. Savonarola’s iconoclastic spirit would be imitated by the radicals of history, from Cline’s Cromwell to the French Jacobins.

But Machiavelli clearly did not believe Savonarola’s sectarian religious mania made Florence great again. Indeed, he wrote, Savonarola “was ruined in his new orders as soon as the multitude began not to believe in them.” His mysticism—or perhaps gnosticism—may have initially appealed to “those dissatisfied with prevailing outward forms,” but he had no way to *force* unbelievers to believe in his prophetic politics. Eventually, as is the case with so many revolutionaries, Savonarola’s movement collapsed in on itself and the friar was burned at the stake. His republic proved nothing but a failure for the Florentine people; it preserved neither their virtue nor their liberty.

The lesson for the New Right ought to be clear: iconoclasm is not enough. Some may want to harness the iconoclasts’ energy to bring about a new golden age, but they lack the overwhelming force to effectively channel it toward the Christian ends they have in mind. Cline himself seems to acknowledge this, arguing that the great crisis of our time is not material but spiritual, “the reduction of nationhood to forms lacking all substance.”

The problem, though, is that he proposes what is essentially a material solution to this spiritual problem: “Ultimately, iconoclasts want—need—is (sic) literally men of substance. They want strong men to lead them back to strong gods, gods that speak.” In other words, he hopes that a prince’s exercise of *political power* can reorient modernity’s discontents to a higher truth. If Savonarola failed to save Florence as an unarmed prophet, perhaps the prince Cline has in mind could become an armed prophet and save America. 

The issue, of course, is that this agonistic vision of politics has little to do with the real substance of our national tradition. Our Founders read Machiavelli and learned much from him—but none more than the most Puritan among their number, John Adams. In a [pivotal article](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1408595?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), C. Bradley Thompson has argued that Adams credited the Florentine for restoring a consciousness of republicanism to the West, but that he went on to reject his constitutional vision. Much as the Massachusetts statesman admired Machiavelli’s realism about human nature, he also believed that a good constitution was a genuine safeguard for both virtue and liberty. 

What, to Adams, was a good constitution? In his 1776 monumental essay, “[Thoughts on Government](https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/thompson-revolutionary-writings?ref=mereorthodoxy.com#lfAdams%5Flabel%5F096),” he sought to define it in contradistinction with Thomas Paine’s radical, iconoclastic vision in *Common Sense*. Against those *philosophes* who sought to concentrate power in a political center, he defended constitutional institutions that put limits on power (such as bicameralism). But rather than considering these as modes and orders altogether new, Adams contended that the American Revolution was waged for a vision of free government that stretched back to time immemorial. The iconoclasts would not only throw out the decadence of the British Empire; their rage would undermine the very republican spirit that alone could secure genuine independence. 

In this, [and much else](https://fusionaier.org/2025/572/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), Adams’s wisdom resembled that of his contemporary Edmund Burke. The Irishman was not the kind of prince for whom Cline or the iconoclasts long. But he is nonetheless the prophet we most need. His friend Samuel Johnson [once remarked](https://www.samueljohnson.com/burke.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com#172), “You could not stand five minutes with that man beneath a shed while it rained, but you must be convinced you had been standing with the greatest man you had ever yet seen.” That greatness, in no small measure, came from Burke’s intense perception of the spiritual realities undergirding society—the very thing the French Revolution imperiled in his time, and that the iconoclasm of the Left and Right imperils today. 

Indeed, among Burke’s most prophetic insights was that concentrated power always destroys the very things society is constituted to protect. Earlier than any other critic, he saw that the democratic extremism of the Jacobins would transfigure into the military despotism Napoleon Bonaparte came to embody; he had no illusions about the iconoclasts’ search for order. The lust for power is profoundly anti-social no matter what slogans it deploys as justifications, Burke understood, because it was in fact irreligious. 

At the back of every word Burke said or wrote is a great faith in the living God over and against human power. To that end, Burke argued in his [*Reflections on the Revolution in France*](https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/canavan-select-works-of-edmund-burke-vol-2?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that “All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust; and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author and Founder of society.” Those who would overthrow society to seize power for themselves would undo the very thing that gives the state its divine sanction. The true task of the conservative statesman is to fight for the eternal truths around which civilization is built. 

Beyond his unrelenting opposition to the French Revolution, this political theology also inspired Burke’s other great crusades against oppression. It is why he was so dogged in his prosecution of imperial abuses in India, for example. Burke’s distinctly Anglican and Protestant faith also galvanized his ardent support for Catholic emancipation. “I shall not think that the *deprivation of some millions of people of all the rights of citizens, and all interest in the constitution, in and to which they were born*, was conformable to the *declared principles*” of the British political tradition, [he wrote to a fellow member of Parliament in 1792](https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/canavan-select-works-of-edmund-burke-vol-4?ref=mereorthodoxy.com#lf0005-04%5Fhead%5F016). Far from saving souls, Burke understood that sectarian domination, even by his fellow churchmen, corrupts politics and fuels factional resentment by excluding minorities from public deliberations and marring private conscience. 

To be sure, though, Burke was no defender of the so-called “neutral public square.” In the *Reflections* and elsewhere he passionately defended the Anglican church establishment, even asserting it to be the cornerstone of Britain’s free constitution and a “profound and extensive wisdom.” In Burke’s view, establishment consecrates the state by ordering it to the “sublime principles” taught in revelation and enjoined by reason. He even held that, as he put it in [one parliamentary speech](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16292/16292-h/16292-h.htm?ref=mereorthodoxy.com#A%5FBILL%5FTO%5FREPEAL%5FAND%5FALTER%5FCERTAIN%5FACTS%5FRESPECTING%5FRELIGIOUS%5FOPINIONS), that Church and State are merely “different integral parts of the same whole” constituting a Christian commonwealth. As such, establishment was a bulwark and “barrier against fanaticism, infidelity, and atheism.” But not all who dissent are guilty of such sins; Burke was just as concerned with the religious bigotry behind the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots. All forms of religious factionalism or sectarianism were repugnant to Burke precisely because such iconoclasm undermines the eternal contract of society he loved. 

Burkean toleration, then, is something more than liberalism. It is not indifferent to the truth, but rather embraces freedom as a duty arising from it. As the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset argued in his 1930 book [*The Revolt of the Masses*](https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Masses-Jos%C3%A9-Ortega-Gasset/dp/0393310957/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), toleration of this sort is “the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet” because it is an expression of [the Golden Rule taught to us by Our Lord](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%206%3A27-38&version=KJV&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Religious liberty—and the Western tradition of freedom more broadly—demands citizens practice immense virtue. Much the same could be said of the American Founders’ contemporaneous commitment to free exercise; rather than lowering the stakes of political life, the First Amendment’s protections actually raise up our public discourse to the high goal of pursuing truth together and loving our neighbors. 

For all his prophetic thunder, Burke believed himself to be a failure in his own life. He even requested to be buried in an unmarked grave, fearing that Jacobin invaders would desecrate his body. And yet, Burke’s soaring rhetoric inspired an entire generation of Britons to resist the seeming inevitability of Revolution. As Russell Kirk put it in [*The Conservative Mind*](https://www.amazon.com/Conservative-Mind-Burke-Eliot/dp/9659124112/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), “He elevated political ‘expedience’ from its usual Machiavellian plane to the dignity of a virtue, Prudence.” A stunning passage from [a 1795 letter](https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/ritchie-further-reflections-on-the-french-revolution?ref=mereorthodoxy.com#lf0006%5Flabel%5F237) Burke wrote to one of his political mentees illustrates exactly how this conservative disposition can be rallied against the gathering storm: 

> Novelty is not the only source of zeal. Why should not a Maccabeus and his brethren arise to assert the honour of the ancient law, and to defend the temple of their forefathers, with as ardent a spirit, as can inspire any innovator to destroy the monuments of the piety and the glory of antient ages? It is not a hazarded assertion, it is a great truth, that when once things are gone out of their ordinary course, it is by acts out of the ordinary course they can alone be re-established. Republican \[eg revolutionary\] spirit can only be combated by a spirit of the same nature: of the same nature, but informed with another principle and pointing to another end.

Burke would go on to describe this conservatism as the “true republican spirit”—a genuine devotion to the common good—contrasting with the false republicanism of the revolutionary forces. It is not iconoclasm, then, that could rescue England from the maw of revolution but *conservatism*. Burke’s doctrines captured Britain’s imagination and inspired her long struggle against both the Jacobin Republic and Bonapartist Empire. The Southern Agrarian scholar M.E. Bradford [once wrote](https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2024/10/last-great-englishmean-arthur-wellesley-m-e-bradford.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that the final victory at Waterloo “is proof to the proposition that men or nations of men can make their own fate—proof that it is possible to ‘turn the clock back’ or to ‘reverse a trend.’” That victory was only possible through Burke’s conservative spiritualism. 

In other words, Burke was a successful prophet not because he sought to impose new modes and orders on a people, but rather because he sought out the innermost truths of the political forms he inherited. He rejected both the religious mania of Savonarola and the power politics of Machiavelli in favor of a truer republican spirit, one more firmly rooted in a genuine civilizational inheritance and the Christian faith that inspired it. Rather than trusting to the might of his own hand—or the might of strongmen he supposed were on his side—he trusted in the strength of the Lord. Insofar as the New Right sneers at the old pieties, at the very ideas and history that make Americans a people, they will never accomplish what Burke and his followers did. Iconoclasm is not an ideology for strong men or prudent men. In its zealotry, it can only ever set itself in opposition to the Permanent Things.
### O God, Creator of All Things: A Hymn of St Ambrose
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/o-god-creator-of-all-things-a-hymn-of-st-ambrose/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:36:18.000Z
A few years ago, I translated a hymn of St. Ambrose on the Incarnation (*Intende Qui Regis Israel*) for *First Things*, which you can read [here](https://firstthings.com/st-ambroses-advent-hymn/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). This year, I have versified another of his hymns in English, *Deus Creator Omnium* (“O God, Creator of All Things”).

It is an evening hymn, asking for God’s protection through the dark hours of the night. Though the hymn is not about the Incarnation, the Incarnation is not irrelevant to it. For God is the light that shines in our darkness.1 And what is the Incarnation? St. John tells in his Gospel that “\[i\]n the beginning was the Word”; that in the Word was life; that this life was “the light of men” that “shineth in the darkness”; and that this Word was “made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:1, 4-5, 14).2

The hymn proved very popular right away. St. Augustine refers to it at least nine times in his writings, from his earliest works (*On the Happy Life*; *On Music*) to his latest (*City of God*), perhaps most significantly in *Confessions* 9.12.32, where he quotes two entire verses in the context of his grief over the death of his mother:

> Now came the moment when the body was borne away….\[A\]ll day long I was secretly weighed down by sorrow, and in my mental turmoil I begged you as best I could to heal my hurt. You did not, and this because, as I believe, you were reminding me that any sort of habit is bondage, even to a mind no longer feeding on deceitful words.  
>  
> I thought it a good idea to go and take a bath, because I had heard that baths derived their name from the Greeks, who called a bath *balaneion* because it banishes worry from the mind. This too I must confess to your mercy, O Father of orphans, that I bathed, and afterward was quite unchanged, for I had not sweated the bitter sorrow out of my heart. But then I went to sleep, and on awakening felt a good deal better. As I lay in bed alone I remembered some lines by your servant Ambrose, which rang true for me:  
>  
> Creator God, O Lord of all  
> who rule the skies, you clothe the day  
> in radiant color, bid the night  
> in quietness serve the gracious sway  
> of sleep, that weary limbs, restored  
> to labor’s use, may rise again,  
> and jaded minds abate their fret,  
> and mourners find release from pain. 

St. Augustine, then, found comfort in the words of his spiritual father in a moment of great pain.3

I cannot prove it, but “I went to sleep, and on awakening” (*dormivi et evigilavi*) sounds to me like an allusion to Psalm 3:5 (“I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the Lord sustained me”). Interestingly enough, it is on just that verse that we find Martin Luther, about a thousand years later, referring to the same hymn. Commenting on the third Psalm, Luther writes:

> “I laid down,” he says, “and slept.”...\[J\]ust as sleep is useful and necessary for the better renewal of our powers, as Ambrose says in the hymn (“so that sleep can relieve weary limbs”), so death is useful and has now been instituted so that we might obtain a better life. That is what he will say in the next Psalm: “In peace I will sleep and rest, since you, O Lord, have especially established me in hope.”4

May we find the same comfort in the hymn that saints have found throughout the ages. Merry Christmas!

**“O God, Creator of All Things”**

O God, Creator of all things,  
The guide of heaven, you who dress  
The day with fair illumining,  
The night with gracious gift of rest,

So sleep can take unfettered limbs  
And ready them for labor’s use,  
Relieve minds weary with life’s din,  
Unbind anxiety’s raw noose:

Now that the day is done, and night  
Begins, we pay the debt we owe,  
Vow-bound to grateful prayer. O Light,  
Please help those hymning here below.

You are the one our hearts would chant,  
You, singing voice would magnify,  
For you, our chaste desire would pant,  
You, sober mind would glorify,

So that, when daylight is shut out  
By nighttime’s claustrophobic haze,  
Faith may not know the dark of doubt,  
And night grow bright from faith’s strong blaze.

Do not allow the mind to sleep;  
Let sin know how to sleep instead.  
Let faith refresh the chaste, and keep  
Befogging dreams from pious beds.

Unburdened of perception’s wiles,  
Let all our dreams be you; and please  
Let not the jealous foe beguile  
With fitful dread our sleeping ease.

O God the Father, God the Son,  
O Son and Father’s Spirit, three,  
In essence, light, and power, one:  
Bless those who pray, O Trinity. 

## Footnotes

1\. My version makes this somewhat more explicit than St. Ambrose’s: The address to God as “Light” in line 11 is my addition, as is the reference to “light” in the concluding doxology, where I have also taken other liberties. Cf. the comments of Brian P. Dunkle, SJ: “\[T\]he reflection on the opposition between night and day draws on basic biblical themes. There is an echo of John’s language in the fifth stanza, where the hymn treats the onset of the night in diction that resembles the Gospel’s prologue (‘the darkness did not comprehend the light’ (Jn. 1:5), as well as images from Revelation (‘And night shall be no more…for the Lord God will be their light’ (Rev. 22:5)). Yet…the term lux is absent from the hymn, along with most of the language of ‘light.’ Ambrose instead substitutes fides for the lux of the biblical original, expressing the hope that faith not be overcome by the night, thereby offering a particular, mystical reading of a central Scriptural image; the singers ask that faith, especially the Nicene faith, be their guide” (Enchantment and Creed in the Hymns of Ambrose of Milan, 113).

2\. Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.

3\. Trans. Maria Boulding, O.S.B.

4\. From Luther’s Operationes in Psalmos on Psalm 3 (WA 5,89-90). The translation is my own.
### Why History Matters
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-history-matters/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:36:20.000Z
David McCullough. [*History Matters*](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/History-Matters/David-McCullough/9781668098998?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Edited by Dorie McCullough Lawson and Michael Hill. Simon & Schuster, 2025\. $27.00\. 192 pp.

David McCullough had a very distinctive voice. He was an English major who became perhaps America’s most popular history writer, capable of crafting compelling narrative from years of meticulous research. He was thoroughly patriotic but wrote about the people of the past as people, not marble ideals. He was also famously the narrator for the Ken Burns *Civil War* documentary. He had a highly recognizable voice on and off the page. 

Many of McCullough’s books had lengthy page counts. Though he stayed just outside of Robert Caro territory, there are over 1,000 pages in *Truman* alone. But the present volume, *History Matters*, is under 200 pages and includes shorter pieces, some previously published and many previously unpublished. The collection includes a variety of sources, including commencement addresses, interviews, documentary writing, and even some pages he wrote only for himself. It was assembled by McCullough’s daughter, who worked with him for years, and his research assistant for forty years, Michael Hill. The chapters in this book present compelling arguments for the importance of history and character and they help us see a bit more of the man behind the famous voice.

Many, if not all, of the chapters in this book reinforce the message of the title: *History Matters*. Along with the ways in which history is important to the body politic, McCullough always emphasizes the personal ways in which we are all enriched by history. For example, in 1995 remarks, he told an audience: “I’m convinced that history encourages, as nothing else does, a sense of proportion about life, gives us a sense of the relative scale of our own brief time on earth and how valuable that is.” This book is a *cri de coeur* for a discipline too often neglected by undergraduates. The rise in historical illiteracy was very concerning to McCullough and this concern appears on a number of these pages.

As the editors hoped, *History Matters* gives us more insight into the man behind the typewriter and what drew him to his subjects. He loved the painter Thomas Eakins, in part because Eakins’ subjects shared the qualities of “self-discipline, high purpose, and high performance achieved through rigorous training, hard work, and continued study.” Eakins painted many people who had not requested portraits. Eakins chose them because “they all made or contributed something of value to the community—knowledge, healing skill, music, art, and beyond that and of such inestimable value, their example.” McCullough’s love for Eakins gives us an insight into his own thought process. McCullough’s praise for his teachers, like Vincent Scully, and other writers also shows us his generosity of spirit and his gratitude.

Again and again, we see the importance of character for McCullough. It was not only seemingly one of his criteria for writing a biography, but it is perhaps the chief lesson he hopes we will draw from history. He writes that “character counts in the presidency more than any other single quality. It is more important than how much the president knows of foreign policy or economics, or even about politics.” McCullough once began working on a biography of Picasso, but ceased his labors because Picasso was not an admirable person. In contrast, McCullough was well-known for his admiration of Harry Truman, Abigail Adams, and George Washington, among others.

With his overriding belief in character and his open admiration for George Washington, we might be tempted to lean on the idea that McCullough came from a simpler time. Well, he died in 2022, so that would make him a man of our time. It would also be hard to argue that the American twentieth-century was uncomplicated. Further, as McCullough himself emphasized: “There was no simpler time.” He writes of Washington’s troops, “I often think of those troops at night—ragged, forlorn, pathetic troops of Washington’s crossing the Delaware in the snow and the ice to attack on Christmas Eve, Christmas night, the Hessians, the toughest troops in the world, to attack them, this little spindly army—tramping along in the dark and the freezing cold. Some of them didn’t even have shoes. And maybe one turns to the other and says, ‘Yes, but at least we live in a simpler time.’”

In all his work, David McCullough’s approach to the past demonstrated the possibility of clear-sighted patriotism. Not every American was a hero, Trumbull’s paintings were inaccurate, George Washington’s false teeth included the teeth of other people, Teddy Roosevelt’s childhood asthma attacks were likely caused by anxiety—but you can still respect character when you see it and appreciate courage and believe in values that can transcend times. You do not have to deny that Harry Truman had ties to the Pendergast machine in order to appreciate Truman’s strengths. This clear-sighted patriotism is why McCullough could maintain some optimism about America’s future. The good parts of our past were not built on perfect people. In his chapter for *Character Above All* (1995), he wrote that Harry Truman was one of the best presidents and “a great American. Can we ever have another Harry Truman? Yes, I would say so. Who knows, maybe somewhere in Texas she’s growing up right now.” 

People who love David McCullough and miss his historical voice will love this book, but so will anyone who wants to learn more about writing. Through interviews and essays, McCullough gives wide-ranging insights into his approach to research and writing, his understanding of narrative, the importance of people, and the influences on his own work, including teachers and lessons from painting. Some of the information is relevant to any kind of writing, some especially to historical writing. He emphasizes the importance of being familiar with what the people of another time were reading. In many of the letters exchanged by John and Abigail Adams, plays and books are referenced, without quotation marks. Those passages show us the world these people inhabited and also the peril that awaits later generations who attempt to interpret these letters but fail to appreciate context. Even Nathan Hale’s line, “I only regret I have but one life to lose for my country” comes from *Cato*, a very popular play referenced by so many of the Founding Fathers.

David McCullough was a great writer, deeply interested in people and narrative and history. His own story is like that of many of his subjects, talent married to hard work. It includes the trappings of a certain kind of life, with a typewriter and a writing cabin and a patient wife. But he did not live in a simpler time, he crafted his life in our time. His life and books were not built on nostalgia but decades of research and endless revisions. He had a very pleasing baritone, but his voice will persist because of its emphasis on courage and character and appreciation of the past. The title of this book emphasizes that *History Matters*, but it has the potential to inspire many people as they shape their own futures.
### No Other Means: An Advent Reflection
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/no-other-means-an-advent-reflection/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:36:22.000Z
Before the invention of [electric lights for Christmas trees](https://www.cato.org/commentary/mourning-merriment-hazardous-history-holiday-lights?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), people would adorn them with real candles that would be lit throughout the season. Of course, trees, ornaments, and living rooms were occasionally set aflame.

This came to mind a few days ago while my family and I were putting our synthetic tree together and putting on ornaments.

Ornaments are semi-sacred territory for us, because our ornaments tell the tale of our lives.

The Santa-on-a-soccer-ball ornament draws me back to when I was playing soccer as a young kid; the dog-in-armour reminds me of the time when I was struggling through junior high school and Mom would pray the armour of God over me; the blue airplane ornament reminds me of the time I flew to a far away country to teach ESL; and so on.

I would be incredibly upset if all of these precious memory-laden ornaments were somehow lost, broken, or (Lord forbid!) consumed by fire.

But this year, while I was being visited by ghosts of Christmas past, I had a thought that drew my mind *away from* worry about fragility and *towards* my sure hope:

My Christmas tree is an image for my life in Christ: Just as I place my fragile but significant ornaments on these synthetic evergreen branches, how much more sure it is to place my fragile life in Christ’s everlasting arms.

For He has promised that when you and I entrust our lives to Him, we are held by His eternally; we are kept by the Son of God who became man for us, so that our lives might be found in Him forever.

Because our lives are bound to Christ’s we know that our fragile existence is bound for eternal life, as Irenaeus said long ago:

> For by no other means could we have attained to incorruptibility and immortality, unless we had been united to incorruptibility and immortality. But how could we be joined to incorruptibility and immortality, unless, first, incorruptibility and immortality had become that which we also are, so that the corruptible might be swallowed up by incorruptibility, and the mortal by immortality, that we might receive the adoption of sons?

This is why Paul can say:

> So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power (1 Corinthians 15:42-43).

Thanks be to God.
### What is Technology Good For?
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/what-is-technology-good-for/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:36:24.000Z
What is technology good for?

For the Christian, the answer cannot be everything or nothing. If technology is good for everything, then the pursuit of the good life moves us further and further away from the simplicity of Eden. If technology is good for nothing, then how do we make sense of God’s great use of it, from the detailed engineering of Noah’s Ark to the intricate architecture of the new Jerusalem?

Whenever I talk to church members about the use of technology or it comes up in the pulpit as a point of Scriptural application, there is a tendency to hear only extremes. 

This is the most common perception I get in the pews: that to faithfully follow Christ in a technological world you must either embrace and utilize or deny and repudiate. Tech Bro or Luddite; the middle is too murky and ripe for hypocrisy. People want to know *where,* that is, in what areas of life, they can freely use technology, but often find few nuanced answers. The difficulty of the median position is categorical in nature. We simply are not trained to contain our use of technology into specific spheres of our life. This is true for at least a few reasons. 

First, it is difficult to find a middle-ground for technological use because technology is readily advancing and evolving into an all-pervasive reality. In his book *What Technology Wants,* Kevin Kelly calls this reality “The Technium.” No longer are technologies separate techniques for distinct purposes. Instead, due to economic realities as well as the choices of technologists, most technology has now been blended into an interconnected mess of chips and screens and data. Tech builds on other tech, advancing at a multiplicative rate that it begins to take on a kind of autonomy that is very difficult to escape. 

Writes Kelly: “At some point in its evolution, our system of tools and machines and ideas became so dense in feedback loops and complex interactions that it spawned a bit of independence.” The middle ground of technology is murky because it requires not just a discernment of *one technology*, but a discernment of the vast, autonomous *technium*. The reason why it seems like the best strategy against the technium is to pull the plug entirely is because we cannot imagine a world where its individual parts are able to be parsed out and powered down. Very few of us are competent enough to take apart a hard-drive, how much more a billion inter-connected hard drives? 

Second, it is difficult to find a middle-ground for technological use because tech companies create products bent towards greater degrees of dependence, which in turn incentivize everyone else toward greater reliance on technology. Consider an older man whose entire life savings is in physical gold, housed in a secure deposit box. His only form of communication is a phone landline. It seems like his life is quite secure, and yet it would be impossible for him to sign up for so much as a rewards account at Chick-Fil-A because he could not pass the online verification process without an email and cell phone. The technium *wants* you to become fully dependent on it, because that is how it grows larger and more influential. Becoming only slightly dependent on technology is like trying to ride a tsunami: better to get swept away or get out of the way. 

Thirdly, it is difficult to find a middle-ground for technological use because doing so is tiring. In his essay *The Burnout Society,* philosopher Byung-Chul Han observes how the modern west has moved from a “disciplinary society” to an “achievement society.” We are no longer defined by what we cannot or shouldn't do, but what we can and should do. Our life is not guarded by restrictions but by freedoms, and the greatest freedoms in life are offered by technological advancement. The promise of the technium is that we can go faster, know more, and achieve greater accomplishment with less and less to hold us back. The result of this thirst for achievement and freedom to achieve is greater rates of burnout, despair, and disillusionment with life. Fighting against the current of achievement society requires training, discipline, patience, and often real suffering. 

Even as I am writing this, Google’s AI assistant offers to overcome the stress of formulating a new sentence with a few simple keyboard commands. “Help me write,” it says, as if it assumes I am quite incapable without its vast knowledge base and unparalleled processing speeds at my fingertips. Should I see what it has for me, trusting in my ability to sift through its content generation and use it towards my ends? Or should I chuck my expensive laptop at the nearest wall and hope I never have to deal with un-solicited AI prompts again? Surely we can do better. 

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of enjoying a retreat at Laity Lodge entitled “Staying Human in an Age of Acceleration” with Andy Crouch and Sho Baraka. Worth the price of admission was Andy Crouch’s categories for technological use. Building off his work in *The Life We Are Looking For*, he helpfully aimed to help us answer the question “What is Technology Good For” by examining its usage in three different spheres of life: preservation (protection), production, and formation. [His talks are available online](https://www.laitylodge.org/retreats/november6-9-2025/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), but I’d like to offer my agreement and commentary on his thoughts as a way forward through the fog and towards a middle ground of technology use. 

## **The Green Light: Preservation**

What is technology good for? Crouch argues that it has an inherent good when it is tied to the preservation or protection of life, beauty, and culture. Seat belts save lives; we should not boycott them. X-Ray machines give us helpful diagnoses, and are built for the expressed purpose of preservation. In fact, most of the advanced technology we find at a hospital or clinic fits into this category, reminding us that the pursuit of medicine is a common grace of God, who is the great healer and preserver of life. 

Throughout human history, technology has been used to advance the preservation of society and culture. The previously mentioned Ark of Noah served this purpose: to preserve a remnant of creation from the wrath of God. What Noah saved was not just genetic material, but also the human story, the soft goods of culture passed from him to his offspring after him. 

The reason that technological advancement aimed at protection and preservation can be more readily embraced is because, in Crouch’s language, it leads to the innovation of instruments, not devices. Whereas devices remove human input and interaction—offering immense power at the push of a button—instruments extend human input. 

The world needs both more instruments and more musicians, which means every Christian should aim for an embrace of technological advancement which leads to the development of more and better instruments. This kind of work can begin in the church. Inasmuch the church of Jesus Christ is, as the Fathers argued, the “ark” where the remnant of God remains safe from the raging chaos of the world, the church also embraces technology to construct itself into a safe place for both life and culture: stone buildings, bound bibles, intricately made pianos, and well-printed hymnals. 

## **The Yellow Light: Production**

The second space into which we naturally invite technological advancement is that of production. The earliest and most simple of technologies are bent towards this purpose. When Adam was called by God to “work the ground and keep it”, perhaps in his pre-fall condition he only needed to harvest ripe fruit with his bare hands. But it’s difficult to imagine him working the ground, full of the thorny curse of Genesis 3, without a shovel or rake. In many ways, productive technologies are human and life-giving, increasing our capacity for hard work and the strength of our own bodies. 

Technology can also be part of the God-given grace needed to reduce the load of work, and therefore in turn lead to the ability to produce art and culture. In his renowned work *Leisure: The Basis of Culture,* Joseph Pieper argues that the ability for a society to cease from work is necessary to create anything truly lasting and worthwhile. “Leisure” says Pieper, "is not a Sunday afternoon idyll, but the preservation of freedom, of education and culture, and of that undiminished humanity which views the world as a whole.” If this is true, then the ability provided by certain productive technologies to allow for normal, working class men and women to rest from their labor is a kind of cultural good. If two men are given only one day and two shovels to move a huge mound of dirt, how can they hope to find rest? But if two men are given a skid-steer loader, they can both accomplish the task before them in the allotted time *and* get off work early to boot. 

But by accomplishing in one day what two men with shovels would take one week to do, the skid-steer teaches us to depend on, and in fact expect or even yearn for, its superior efficiency. A society that replaces the virtue of patience with that of efficiency in turn replaces rest for empty leisure. As Crouch argues, empty leisure is a cheap rest that depends on other’s hard work and only medicates the despair we feel from lives filled with empty toil. This is why the Christian must be very careful to bring technology into the sphere of production, lest he find Pharaoh demanding more and more bricks with less and less straw. 

## **The Red Light: Formation**

Whereas the latest technology used to be reserved for the hospital and the assembly line, now it is tested in the places of moral, spiritual, and intellectual formation: the home, the school, and the church. Formation spaces are not where things are made, but where people are. It is in the home, the school, and the church where we learn our morals and values, take up our first ideas and projects, and discover the good, true, and beautiful. And it is these spaces that are in most danger of being invaded by the technium and producing a kind of counter-formation. 

The reason formative spaces cannot be short-circuited with technological power is that they require resistance training. Just as muscles must be torn and stretched in order to grow back stronger, so must bodies and souls. If the promise of devices is easy power, then to continually utilize them in formative spaces is like, in Crouch’s words, “taking a forklift to the gym.” At first, it’s kind of fun, maybe even impressive. But eventually it’s boring, and it never results in making you more physically strong. Many of our formative spaces have lost the ability to produce young people who become persons of weight: someone who has a mind and a soul that is strong enough to bear the difficulties of life and persevere to the end. 

When technological power invades the places of formation, it tends to make disciples after its own kind. Short-form videos breed short attention spans, consumeristic algorithms birth vapid consumers, and easy-solutions produce thin wills. We all know that phones and [laptops in school](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/16/opinion/laptop-classroom-test-scores.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) have not led to greater educational success. It’s obvious to all of us that exposing children to more and more [screentime](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10353947/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) is harming their development. Is anyone really arguing that using AI to write college essays is anything other than intellectual stagnation and academic dishonesty? And yet, the rolling stone is hard to stop once it has been pushed downhill. 

I believe it can be stopped in the church. The people of God must be stalwartly devoted to breaking any dependence on technological power in their spiritual formation. It should be their joy to meet the trials that come with being less efficient and more human, because, as James says: “you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.” Our ministry to children should be slow, embodied, personal, and focused on exposing the beauty of the Lord. Our ministry to youth should be over dinner tables and backyard games. Our formation of the soul should be less content and more conversation, less solution and more shoulder to cry on. 

In order for Christ to be formed in the hearts of his people, we need more Christian leaders who are committed to the slow “anguish of child birth” (Galatians 4:19). Sometimes spiritual formation takes decades, and it is never without birth pains. Who is strong enough to wait it out? After all, our Savior did not take any short cuts. In re-forming the world towards the bent of justice and redemption, the only technology Christ utilized was the torturous cross. 

The options before us in the technological world do not have to be between adoption and abandonment. We can maintain our humanity—limitation, relationship, purpose—without removing ourselves from the world completely. But it takes intentional choices, and the commitment to slow, patient formation in the way of Jesus.
### Freebirth in an Age of Hospitals
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/freebirth-in-an-age-of-hospitals/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:36:26.000Z
I’ve always found it ironic that Rachel died in childbirth.

In despair over her infertility, early in her marriage to Jacob, she [exclaimed](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2030%3A1&version=ESV&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), “give me children, or I shall die.” Little did she know that decades later, giving birth to her second son would kill her. But there is more here. Rachel went into labor while on the road: 

“Then they journeyed from Bethel. When they were still some distance from Ephrath, Rachel went into labor, and she had hard labor. And when her labor was at its hardest, the midwife said to her, ‘Do not fear, for you have another son.’ And as her soul was departing (for she was dying), she called his name Ben-oni; but his father called him Benjamin.So Rachel died, and she was buried on the way to Ephrath (that is, Bethlehem),and Jacob set up a pillar over her tomb” (Gen. 35: 16-20). 

There are a number of experiences and activities that are truly unfun for expecting mothers nearing their due date. Somewhere close to the top of the list I would place long-distance travel, especially on a camel. I say this as someone who experienced two occasions of riding in an otherwise comfortable modern car to a hospital over an hour away while in active labor. Not fun. But, in an interesting detail, we hear that for Rachel, there was still a midwife at hand, even in the wilderness—not that this midwife could do anything other than encourage the weary mother in the midst of a labor so hard that it killed her. 

We can wonder what precisely went wrong—severe postpartum hemorrhage? Complications from a breech birth? The latter would explain why the midwife knew that the baby was a boy while Rachel (the text suggests) was still struggling to deliver the baby. But then, in both this case and in another instance of a maternal death in childbirth in the Old Testament—in the birth of Ichabod in 1 Samuel 4—the most encouraging thing the midwife can think of saying to a laboring mother is: you have a son! (With the obvious implication that to say, “you have a daughter!” would not have brought the same degree of joy).

Rachel’s tragic childbirth story highlights something else that is important. Midwives for even the most remote of births somehow turn up in the Biblical accounts of women delivering babies, albeit with one notable exception. No midwife seems to have been present when Mary delivered Jesus. At least she didn’t have to labor on a camel, in the desert. Still, we see the built-in expectation that childbirth is not something a woman should attempt on her own. While the two heroic Hebrew midwives tell the Pharaoh in Exodus 1 that Hebrew women are so strong, they have their babies before the midwives get to them, it’s clearly meant to be a noble lie. Since the expulsion from Eden, midwives have always been necessary, the biblical narratives of pregnancy and childbirth suggest. 

But recently, *The Guardian* [ran a series](https://www.theguardian.com/world/series/the-birth-keepers?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of harrowing investigative pieces and podcast episodes about the Free Birth Society. Run by influencers without any medical training, the FBS has attracted thousands of followers worldwide with its simple message: your body can do this. The modern medical profession doesn’t know your body, but you do. And so, FBS encourages freebirthing: “Unlike home birth—birth at home with a midwife in attendance—freebirth means giving birth without any medical support. FBS promotes a version widely seen as extreme, even among freebirth advocates: it is anti-ultrasound, which it falsely claims harms babies, downplays serious medical conditions and promotes wild pregnancy, meaning pregnancy without any prenatal care.”

The problem is, as the biblical childbirth stories remind us, while God indeed created women’s bodies to birth children, since the fall the process has been filled with pain and danger. And so, FBS is now to blame for multiple deaths and near-deaths of mothers and babies—most of which presumably could have been prevented by modern medicine. [*The Guardian*’s report](https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/nov/22/free-birth-society-linked-to-babies-deaths-investigation?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) notes that the investigation included “in-depth interviews with 18 mothers who suffered late-term stillbirths, neonatal deaths or other incidents of serious harm after they or their birth attendants were heavily influenced by FBS.” The investigation found information about a further 30 mothers similarly affected but did not get to interview them.

Evidence from history, including from the Bible, leaves no doubt: Women have been dying from pregnancy and childbirth-related complications for millennia. As recently as the 1920s, pre-eclampsia was fatal—remember the episode in *Downton Abbey* where Lady Sybil died from it? As the doctor who diagnosed it makes clear, the only thing he could possibly do is an emergency caesarean, which also (he fears) could be fatal. Nowadays, hardly anyone dies of pre-eclampsia. Perhaps modern medicine could have saved Rachel too. 

And so, in light of this history, it makes sense that the most common question I have heard in response to the freebirthing phenomenon has been: why? Why would well-educated women choose freebirthing instead of going the usual hospital birth route? *The Guardian* indeed addresses this in brief. Put simply, the low trust of many pregnant women in the system is entirely earned by the medical establishment and its treatment of pregnant women. Women who have had negative childbirth experiences in hospitals are trying to avoid the trauma they’ve encountered in their previous births. Consider the story of [Beatrice Scudeler](https://spectator.com/article/the-fundamental-flaw-in-britains-maternity-care/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), who was left without care overnight with her newborn after a birth followed by severe postpartum hemorrhage. In my own case, the cascade of unnecessary interventions during my first delivery resulted in a traumatic caesarean birth, with complications from the anesthesia and subsequent infections that had likely been hospital-acquired. It took me a full year to recover from that birth.

I desperately wanted to avoid a repeat experience with my next birth, but by the third trimester, it had become increasingly clear that the traditional OB/GYN practice close to my home still largely insisted on repeat caesareans for all women who had a previous one. But that was precisely what I was trying to avoid. What to do? Spoiler alert: I did not opt for a freebirth (indeed, the idea did not even occur to me)—because I had other options. My second and third child were born in a hospital a little over an hour away from our home, because a highly successful midwife-only practice delivered there, and a friend from church had told me about it. Women drove to that Atlanta practice from as far away as Birmingham, Alabama. Why? Because nothing else existed in the region—aside from a second similar practice, also located in Atlanta. I had a wonderful experience delivering with this practice. 

The midwives who took care of me in these two pregnancies had significant experience—over 35 years for one of them. Furthermore, because they delivered at a hospital, emergency resources were readily available for their patients, when they were truly needed. The practice’s VBAC success rate was over 90%, their website boasted. That is phenomenal, although this statistic reminds that sometimes emergencies did happen even there, but when they happened, they really were emergencies that required medical intervention. They weren’t caused by overly interventionist doctors to begin with. With options like this practice available to them, most women would certainly choose them over freebirthing. But what about a situation where no good options are available?

When in January 2023, I learned that I was expecting again, I picked up the phone to call my old midwives, only to learn that the practice had closed. The Atlanta Medical Center (formerly Georgia Baptist Hospital) had unexpectedly shut down that fall, and because the midwives’ practice couldn’t transfer in such a short time to another hospital, it too closed. When I looked up the other midwives-only practice in Atlanta, I learned that it too had closed recently. This left me with the option of going back to the OB/GYN in town or trying to find another option. At the end, because I have already had two unmedicated midwife-assisted births, I decided to look into the possibility of an at-home birth with a certified midwife. 

For the next month, I called every midwife I could find in the state and who delivered in my county. Every single one was full and not accepting new patients. It seems that many other women had the same idea as I did around that time. Then at last, when I was at the very end of the first trimester, I found a highly recommended midwife who was willing to take me on as a patient and attend my home birth. The following week, I had a miscarriage. We never did need that midwife after all.

But as I think about my fears over that month of trying to find a midwife for my home birth, I can understand a little bit more the very desperate expecting mothers who fell for the wild promises of FBS. No crazy scheme like FBS occurs in a vacuum. It is a fact that too many mothers today find the medical system inadequate when it comes to maternity care and wish they could find an option that is more compassionate and understanding. The results speak for themselves: freebirthing is not that option. And yet, we cannot condemn the women who so desperately wished that it would work for them without demanding reform in the medical establishment’s treatment of pregnant and laboring women. 

We cannot repair the real cause of death—only God can, and someday He will. But in the meantime, expecting mothers and their babies deserve better.
### Resonance and the Psalms
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/resonance-and-the-psalms/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:36:29.000Z
“Everything under control.” This is how German sociologist Hartmut Rosa describes the program of modernity. Modernity asserts that the good life comes from bringing more of the world within reach. This once implicit goal of modernity is fast becoming the texture of daily life. There are few aspects of our world—or even beyond it—left untouched.

However, the cost of such control is indisputable. Sure, we reap the benefits of technical and social advancements. But with those advancements comes acceleration. We are getting more done with more information at our disposal. But this increased tempo of production and communication has not led to the good life. In other words, we are interacting with more of the world at a faster pace but seem to find it less enchanting, less “vocal.” 

Rosa argues this muteness is *the* root cause of burnout and despair. This isn’t necessarily new. When Tocqueville visited America in the 1800s he noticed a pervasive “melancholy in the midst of abundance”. The abundance of early American life was effectively muting the world, and that muting has only intensified. Today, not many can deny our despair-inducing deafness––even Matty Healy, an atheist and lead singer of *The 1975*, sings “Jesus save us. Modernity has failed us.” While Rosa is a secular academic sociologist whose personal belief system seems to be broader than orthodox Christianity, he readily acknowledges religion as having the capacity to offer the true good life. However, it is the Christian faith alone that makes sense of our problem, and offers the solution.

## **The Problem: Distortion of Control**

Our modern obsession with control is, as many things are, a distortion of the first chapter of the Bible. Mankind is created in the Triune God’s image with glory, dignity, and authority. They are tasked with increasing, subduing, and ruling. This authority to control is a deputized authority. It is an extension of God’s own authority and control. 

However, God’s rule always humanizes and enables one’s voice. The first authoritative act by Adam was to name the animals. Our control, in contrast, has increasingly resulted in the dehumanization of ourselves and others, and the silencing of our world. For example, we have more points of connection with others than ever before, but the over-digitization of relationships has actually resulted in a decline in human interaction.

To understand what went wrong with control, we need to recall what control was meant to be. In *Creation Regained*, Albert Wolters describes humanity’s role this way:

> God’s rule of law is immediate in the nonhuman realm but mediate in culture and society. In the human realm men and women become coworkers with God; as creatures made in God’s image they too have a kind of Lordship over the earth, are God’s viceroys in creation.

Notice there are two realms of dominion and control and our deputized authority is situated within the human realm. Wolter further clarifies our authority by distinguishing between *nature* and *norms*:

> We are all familiar with the laws of nature, the regular order in the realm of physical things, of plants and of animals. These include the laws of gravity, motion, thermodynamics, photosynthesis, and heredity—all the “natural laws” discovered by physics, chemistry, biology, and the other “natural sciences.”

Norms, on the other hand, are those “laws” that are controlled (instituted, cultivated, enacted, upheld) by humankind. In other words, God’s control is *direct* over *nature*, and *deputized* over *norms*. 

The problem arises when we attempt to control like the Superior, rather than as His deputies. This is where we have erred. We have sought to control what is—for the creature—uncontrollable. Instead of aligning cultural norms with creation’s nature, we have tried to force creation’s nature to fit human norms.

For example, Wolters identifies both heredity and biology as firmly fixed in God’s domain of control (i.e. nature). However, this is just one of the many areas where we seek to control the uncontrollable!

Rosa cites our increased control in the birthing process: we perform embryo screening, amniotic fluid tests, and a host of other assessments in order to determine, even before birth, whether a child meets our expectations (norms). We are even on the cusp of being able to control our child’s physical characteristics and personality traits in utero (nature).

But, rather than improve our quality of life, these “advancements” have paradoxically led to an *increase* in birth-related anxiety. Indeed, one of the casualties of trying to control the nature of the world is that we distort its true nature. Creation by nature *speaks to us*, but we have rendered it mute by our incessant attempt to master it through control. The result of this muting is fear and anxiety. And yet, we don’t stop! Rather we assume our unhappiness is the result of “un-busted limits”, as Paul Kingsnorth calls them. We are a culture without limits.

## **Solution: Resonance as Counter-Control**

Rosa argues for a different mode of relating to the world altogether. He says “the basic mode of vibrant human existence exists not in exerting *control* over things but in resonating with them.” Rosa outlines four characteristics of resonance:

> Affection: This is an encounter with transcendence; hearing the “voice” of the world, which declares God’s authority and control (Ps. 50:6). This is not something we conjure on our own, but rather something outside of us that acts upon us.  
>  
> Emotion: This is the emotional, mental, physical, or spiritual response to the affective experience. These first two comprise a double movement of a) passively being affected and then b) actively relating to.  
>  
> Transformation: As a result of 1 and 2, we do not—indeed, cannot—remain the same. We are awakened to the possibility of a good life.  
>  
> Unpredictability: This entire process, Rosa says, is always characterized by a certain elusiveness. We can’t guarantee a resonant encounter! We cannot find them; they find us.

However, such resonance is rarely our normative experience. Our lives are anti-resonant by default, and right away Scripture gives us the first and clearest example of such anti-resonance. Adam’s failure to encounter God’s transcendence in the garden without exercising distorted control (i.e. attempting to make God’s omniscient nature his own), led to *shalom*––true resonance!––eluding all of humanity!

Just as *shalom* eluded Adam in the garden when he sought to control the uncontrollable, so too the life we so desperately want eludesus when we approach life as a series of moments to be controlled. The experience of truly being alive––*resonance––*is the result of rightly ordered control. More specifically, resonance is the (albeit, unpredictable) result of the friction between our limits and the uncontrollability of God’s created world. 

In fact, this counter-intuitive reality––that we experience life through *less* control––is in the very redemptive DNA of the Christian story. This redemptive DNA is echoed in Hartmut’s characteristics of resonance:

**Affection**: Though initially alienated from God, by grace we are acted upon by the external “call” of transcendence sounding in Jesus. New life is stirred within us as we are born again.

**Emotion**: The soul, having been implanted as Hodge says with a new “habit of spiritual affection and action” through regeneration, immediately acts out of this new habit with the free response of faith and repentance in light of the person and work of Jesus Christ.

**Transformation**: The grace of this effectual call, regeneration, and conversion transforms us––we become new creations. We are justified, adopted, and continually transformed through the work of sanctification.

**Unpredictability**: However, this entire process of election is mysterious and elusive, having its origin in the hidden mind of the Triune God before the foundation of the world.

Because these characteristics of resonance are embodied in God’s redemptive reality, resonant experiences––moments when God’s voice breaks through––work to draw us into His resonant heart. And while we cannot completely mute the divine voice of our Shepherd, when we exercise distorted control, we muffle our ears to its sound. 

Rosa warns that as soon as we enter into a combative relationship with the world, or switch to a mode of aggression, we close ourselves off, dampening the possibility of resonance. And what could be more combative than trying to control the uncontrollable nature of creation? Unfortunately, such control is the driving cultural form of our lives.

So what is our way forward? How do we balance our call to deputized control of creation with the uncontrollability of creation?

## **The Psalms: A Resonance-Shaped Life**

The solution is not to abandon the creation mandate or to give up all control, but to embrace the limits of our deputized authority while connecting with the God who governs what we cannot. As we move towards a balance of rightly-ordered control and connection, resonance becomes a beautiful possibility.

The Psalms are marked by the balance of an often visceral lack of control over the uncontrollable, and yet a profound connection to the sovereign Lord. By striking this balance, the Psalms teach us how to exercise dominion while not cutting off the world around us (and therefore our experience of God) through distorted control. The Psalms “bring within reach” the speaking creation (and Creator). 

It is no accident that the Psalms have played a central role in the Christian life; Jesus—the resonant Lord—was steeped in them, quoting more from the Psalms than from all other Hebrew Scriptures combined. He alone perfectly embodied the balance between direct control (his divine nature) and deputized control (his human nature). Thus, as songs of Jesus, the Psalms serve as a guide to resonance—consider their speed, shape, and subject.

### **Speed**

The musical aspect of the Psalms makes it a natural antidote to an ever-accelerating society. Many of the Psalms were composed as songs; they quite literally keep time. This is why music is so effective at centering us, calming down our bodies and minds in stressful seasons. Our favorite songs do not accelerate each time we hear them. They continue on at a familiar, friend-like pace. The Psalms move at the tempo of grace, breaking against our impulse to control the uncontrollable.

### **Shape**

We have seen the shape—the formula—of resonance. The Psalms as an organized whole share this same shape:

- encounter with the Lord and the promise of his Messiah (*Affection*);
- responses from God’s people of lament, joy, thanksgiving, remembering (*Emotion*);
- deep transformation through praise (Ps. 30) and confession (Ps. 51) (*Transformation*);
- patient anticipation on the Lord’s promise of deliverance (*Unpredictability*).

The Psalms are songs and prayers in *response* to an *encounter* that leads to *transformation*. Each Psalm is by nature a chronicle of a resonant experience.

### **Subject**

Not only are the Psalms marked by a resonant speed and shape, the very *subject matter* of the Psalms keep our “feet on the ground” (a phrase often used by Rosa). Rosa describes our relationship to the world with chapter titles like “Breathing,” “Eating and Drinking,” “Gaze,” “Countenance,” “Sleeping,” “Laughing,” “Crying.” These earth-bound, human realities are ones the Psalms are deeply concerned with—realities that remind us of the human limits of our control.

The Psalms not only guide us in our humanity by reminding us of our limited realm of control, they also move us along the axes of resonance. Rosa lays out various vertical axes of resonance—plotlines where encounters with resonance are *most likely* to occur in our world. These axes are *religion, nature, art,* and *history—*subjects which saturate the Psalms.

They are the religious affections of Israel. They declare the grit and grandeur of nature. They are, as poetry and song, art of the highest degree. And, chronicling the story of Israel as God’s covenant people, they are history. As such, the Psalms put us directly in the path—on the axes, if you will—of a resonant encounter with God.

Everything is under control and we’re paying the price. But the solution isn’t to stop the machine of societal advancement; there is no getting off the carousel. The solution is *resonance—*relating to our accelerating world *within our human limits*, cultivating the good life. But only a resonant encounter with the living God through his promised Messiah can give us this good life—a life of flourishing in this world. 

The Psalms guide us toward this encounter, not as a blueprint for control but a cadence for connection. As we inhabit them, we connect not only with their speed and shape, but their capital “S” Subject (Lk. 24:44).
### How to Live a Hidden Life
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-to-live-a-hidden-life/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:36:30.000Z
What gives life meaning in a post-religious age? Philosopher, biographer and ascendent public intellectual Clare Carlisle suggests in her Gifford lectures—published as *Transcendence for Beginners—*that Spinozian panentheism and eastern spirituality hold the answer. The Giffords are an endowed series of lectures dedicated to promoting ‘natural theology.’ Past lecturers include a roster of luminaries including William James, Reinhold Niebuhr, Charles Taylor, and Jean-Luc Marion. Carlisle situates herself not only within but also *against* this tradition. Natural theology, she gripes, is often ‘annoying.’ Many of its prominent practitioners are not so much incorrect as ‘uninspiring.’ She proceeds on a self-consciously unconventional tack, uniquely attentive to personal biography. 

She narrates the story of Vedanta sage Ramana Maharshi who, from the summit of sacred mount Arunachala, drew generations of disenchanted westerners seeking enlightenment. Yet the ‘transcendence’ on offer was of a decidedly immanent variety. Carlisle links this eastern spirituality with Spinoza, whose famous dictum, *Deus sive natura* (God or nature), implies that all lives have meaning because ‘without dualism, without separation…we are all already in God.’ Each of us is an incarnation. This non-dualist panentheism promises transcendence to a world weary with ‘doctrinal orthodoxy’ and institutional religion. She identifies both her lycra clad, Mancunian yoga instructor and Princess Diana as post-religious, moral exemplars directing us to this quotidian form of transcendence.

For Carlisle, *Middlemarch*’s concluding lines serve as a fitting manifesto for post-religious and post-secular life:

The effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts…\[on\] the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Yet can panentheism secure George Eliot’s vision of a meaningful life? Does it guarantee that individuals count even if their worldly impact is inconspicuous? Carlisle’s lectures build upon her earlier book *Spinoza’s Religion,* which sought to narrow the gap between Spinoza and paragons of classical theism like Thomas Aquinas. While Spinoza ‘identifies nature with God,’ God is nonetheless nature’s ‘ground’ or source. This, Carlisle thinks, retains a (narrow) space for divine transcendence. It is indeed true that for Thomas, creatures are not ‘outside’ God in a crude spatial sense. Both Spinoza and Aquinas agree with Marilynne Robinson that insofar as all things participate in God, ‘Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration.’ 

However, despite this shared rejection of a self-sufficient world existing ‘apart’ from God, at a key moment in his *Ethics*, Spinoza says ‘all the philosophers’ admit God’s being and will are wholly actual. This entails, he suggests, that every existent proceeds with absolute necessity from the divine nature and is a mode of the divine substance. Each thing is necessary for Spinoza, because producing it in some small way ‘actualises,’ perfects, or completes God.

In sharp counterpoint, Thomas says that while God *in Himself* is wholly actual, ‘in respect of creatures we can call certain things potential…with regard to an active power which is not limited to one effect.’ He goes on to explain that God is not ‘actualised,’ perfected or completed by creating because God already contains within himself all possible perfections God might create. In contrast to Spinoza, for Thomas, God is indifferently free with respect to creation, not because God haphazardly selects between various possible worlds, but because God is perfected and ‘actualised’ just by being God not because of what God creates. This, for Thomas, is inseparably related to the doctrine of the trinity. The trinity is ‘necessary for the right idea of creation.’ God is ‘already’ perfectly communicative and wholly actualised by virtue of the Father’s begetting of the Son and spiration of the Spirit. Creation is free not because is it is arbitrary but because it is gratuitous. It does not contribute to God’s being but is a free overflow of God’s perfect triune love. 

Therefore, while Spinoza and Thomas agree creatures are not ‘separate’ from God, for Thomas, creatures are not modes of God and are *other* than God in a way they could never be on Spinoza’s and Carlisle’s panentheism. Spinoza goes so far asto say ‘there cannot be in \[God\] any real love toward something else, since everything consists in one unique thing which is God himself.’

What does this have to do with George Eliot’s vision of a meaningful life? Carlisle says hidden lives have meaning because they contribute to and express the divine substance ‘just as each wave expresses the nature and power of the sea.’ Yet how much does an individual life contribute to the immeasurable sea of God/Nature? For Spinoza, each life is akin to a drop, drowned in the Pacific’s placid immensity. Were any H20 molecule, any single life to blink out of existence, the difference is less than negligible. Individual lives, even if modes of God, remain hidden and largely forgotten. It is not clear Carlisle’s brew of non-dualist panentheism with a dash of eastern spirituality offers a durable solution to modernity’s ‘meaning-crisis.’

Yet what if not nature, but something else is the measureless sea? What if the immanent trinity, as John Webster says, is a way ‘of articulating the infinite depth within the being of God, that ocean whose tide is the mission of the Son and Spirit by which lost creatures are redeemed and perfected?’ The glory of a human life is that while we do not contribute in some quantitative manner to God’s being, it is that limitless triune perfection which brought us into existence out of gratuitous love. God, in all His immensity, knows and intends us as an other, numbering the hairs on our head (Matthew 10:30). In that case, far from being swamped in nature’s immensity, no tomb is unvisited. No life, no matter how seemingly marginal, is forgotten. What gives our lives value is not what God stands to gain from us—He gains nothing, properly speaking, from the universe’s entire expanse—but God’s love for us. Far from the merely instrumental value of contributing in some infinitesimally miniscule way to nature’s greater whole, the Thomist Jacques Maritain marvels that: ‘The good of grace of one person is worth more than the good of the whole universe of nature.’

Carlisle is right, a meaningful life requires transcendence, but so long as we yearn for *true* transcendence, trinitarian ‘doctrine’ still has something to offer a post-religious age.
### Should Everyone Write?
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/should-everyone-write/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:36:32.000Z
Everyone seems to have their “ChatGPT moment.”

As in, you almost remember where you were and what you were doing when Silicon Valley dropped this dazzling new technology into our laps in late 2022\. The response was quick, the revolution swift, the discourse white hot. ChatGPT, a large language model AI system that could write a decent freshman composition paper, promised to upend and rehash our notions of language and communication. Like the printing press, the radio, the television, and the iPhone before it, AI would be here to stay. Adapt or perish. 

Of course, today we know a lot more about AI’s fundamental limitations and faults. It makes stuff up. It can’t account for context. Perhaps most importantly, it doesn’t know what the heck it’s saying since it isn’t a center of consciousness. Since 2022, I’ve been highlighting AI’s mishaps and shortcomings in dozens of essays and blogs*,* all the while seeking to develop a philosophy for the practice that AI proposes to replace: Writing. 

I started teaching freshman composition in Fall of 2024\. A new instructor, with writing experience but none with teaching, I quickly realized that while I had long loved the practice of putting words on a page, I hadn’t fully explored why such an activity might be valuable for the student athlete with plans to become a physical therapist, or the math major with an aversion to sentences. Not only would I need to convince students that composition was important, but I also had to plead with them to reject using AI to write their papers. “You’ll get nothing out of this if you opt for AI,” I told them. “It’s like asking a tall guy to lift you up to dunk a basketball and then giving yourself credit for a windmill. Absurd!” 

For the student who already thinks an introductory writing class is a waste of time, ChatGPT never looked so good. It’s a class they have to take and get out of the way, and much of the time, instructors are shoddy expositors of the craft. Many of us don’t do a good job teaching the discipline. We are mumbling adjuncts or inadept teaching assistants. (I’ve been both.) So, just assigning them four papers and then bidding them *adieu* would definitely be easy, but it wouldn’t be satisfying. Why? Because even if students don’t know it, learning how to write is a tool for learning how to think, and not only to think*,* but to grow into a mature and well-balanced human being. 

## **It's the Liberal Arts Talking**

That prior sentence shows the liberal arts advocate in me. As a student at Wheaton College, an evangelical liberal arts school outside of Chicago, we were told often about how education is not just a transfer of information. It’s about forming the whole person, emphasis on “whole*.*”We go to school to understand what it means to be a human being and to orient ourselves toward the good life. That doesn’t discount students who go into more practical fields like engineering, business, or chemistry, but all those fields can be seen as avenues of knowing truth, which at Wheaton, was no different than knowing God, or an aspect of God’s character. 

But how does one get there? How do you lean into positive formation and learn what it means to live a truly rich and deeply good kind of life? 

I learned a big part of the answer during my time at Wheaton and have been trying to tease out the implications and complexities ever since. We become who we are based on what, or who, we give our attention to. 

## **You Are What You Attend To** 

The French writer Simone Weil [once wrote that](https://bookshop.org/p/books/waiting-for-god-simone-weil/2f5426eb4d645130?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), 

> If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension. Without our knowing or feeling it, this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul.

Weil uses geometry as an example of giving one’s attention over to something external to the self, but the principle applies to writing, too. Writing requires deep attention if it’s going to be worth reading. And for Weil, this activity doesn’t just lead to “good marks.” That kind of concern should be tertiary or even go dismissed. This kind of attention can turn into something more—something that morphs into not just attention but *loving* attention. 

Naturally, then, reading is a central part of writing well. To write anything of value, you have to read the works of others. Reading well requires humility. Reading entails admitting that there’s a lot to gain from engaging with the work of others. Only after I’ve leafed through a bit of the literary canon can I feel confident in commenting on its value. If you spend any time among eager undergrad students in a creative writing class, you might find that a lot of them really want to be great writers and yet few of them aspire to become excellent *readers.* Attention is at the center of both practices. You must give your attention to a text in order to draw from it and then give your attention to a blank page in order to create a work of value. Reading well leads to writing well. 

## **Look Around. There’s Beauty Everywhere**

Giving attention, whether in reading or writing, doesn’t just make for more “critical thinkers.” If Weil is correct, it makes for more virtuous people. It’s no secret that our culture is primed with a penchant for self-indulgence, with mindless entertainment kicking older forms of leisure to the curb. People still read, sure, but the appetite for interesting, vital writing is waning. Novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace gave a 2003 interview in which he said many of his friends shied away from reading books because “there’s a kind of dread” involved in it. We can’t tolerate silence or the thought of being alone with ourselves. 

Writing helps you attend more deeply to the world outside your own head, so yes, everyone would do well to make a habit of putting words on a page from time to time. Ultimately, though, we would all do well to practice honing our skills of attention in whatever method possible, especially in society where the tech giants are fighting for our attentional currency every moment of our lives. Simply looking around is a good place to start. Noticing. *Seeing.* Philosopher Bradford S. Hadaway, commenting on Weil’s essay, [writes](https://ifl.web.baylor.edu/sites/g/files/ecbvkj771/files/2022-11/AttentivePatienceArticleHadaway.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), 

> Other attention-cultivating practices may lack the academic feel of those described above. Practicing music, creating art, playing chess, pausing in worship to reflect quietly on a text or image—all of these have a truth-orientation and a built-in demand to wait patiently on those truths to emerge. And let us not forget those long, quiet walks, where the “text” is the beautiful created order. If we are attentive and “open the envelope” of our souls as we walk, the insight we receive is as forceful as through the written word.

One of the best ways to stay sane and enrich our souls is to learn how to write. At least, that’s what I’m telling my students. Most of them may not heed the advice and opt for ChatGPT, moving into jobs where AI does half of their workload anyway. Hopefully, though, a few will truly try their hand at a boring composition essay, get lost in the words, stumbling over flashes of real insight, and shake themselves out of the wonder only to find themselves hungry for more. Once you experience that kind of semi-prayerful state of mind, it’s hard to go back to TikTok scrolling.
### Shaping Conscience on Issues where Scripture is Silent
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/shaping-conscience-on-issues-where-scripture-is-silent/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:36:36.000Z
In what is now the fourth installment of responses to Haley Baumeister’s [original post](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-case-against-vasectomies) against vasectomies, I take up Andrew Koperski’s [critique](https://mereorthodoxy.com/on-contraception-tradition-and-the-wiser-use-of-christian-history) of [my article](https://mereorthodoxy.com/sexuality-and-the-need-for-moral-guidance) on the need for better moral guidance on sex.1 Koperski misunderstands my intentions and raises many good points on the use of Christian history and its application to modern theological issues. Koperski may be surprised to learn that I have already made many of these critiques in a separate [lecture](https://www.greystoneinstitute.org/shop/p/reformed-liturgics-tg3pl-ec8xd-f6f4m-rz4e2-x84pd-9h5ts-rw3f5-sfpg3-chkje-ayefj-jra8x?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) I gave at a Protestant Theology of the Body conference in 2023, which I am currently modifying and expanding into a short book. Koperski and I agree that Christian history (or “tradition,” as our Catholic friends call it) should be interpreted carefully. Where we seem to differ is in what we think this difficulty means for our attempts to *apply* historic Christian teaching to our contemporary situation.

## **Intentions: (Not) A Ressourcement Project**

Where Koperski gets me wrong is in his assumption that I have “a moral agenda,” or that the questions I am asking are rhetorical. My agenda is always, as my parents and pastors have always taught me, to bring everything under the lordship of Christ. When I ask the question, “Why should it be licit for me as a 21st century American Christian to participate in a practice that almost two-thousand years-worth of Christians abhorred?,” I mean it earnestly. I am not asking it rhetorically to imply a black-and-white pronouncement on the evils of contraception. I do not actually think that the ethics of contraception *are* black-and white, which is why the question needs asking in the first place. 

As an ancient historian, this is presumably a question Koperski could answer! To his credit, he does attempt to do so (albeit unsatisfactorily – more on this later). 

I haven’t shared publicly about my own entry into this project and the reasons why I continue it, almost a decade later. I am overdue for another publication on writing that story. In short, I am personally convicted about the use of contraception, having learned from devout Catholic friends in divinity school about St. Pope John Paul II’s theology of the body. I did not, at first, accept it, despite its elegant logical coherence. 

But as I sought for a Protestant answer to this teaching against contraception, I found instead echoes of the Roman Catholic teaching in Augustine, Luther, and Calvin, to name just a few. And somewhere along the way, most notably at Lambeth, Protestants broke from this historically Christian teaching and haven’t looked back. That would be fine and good, if the reasoning at Lambeth had been sound. Unfortunately, it was not. 

Koperski summarizes this exact trajectory, which he calls a “declension narrative” (something I dispute and do not ascribe to). But then he says the following:

> There are different variations of this story, but the throughline is that it distorts the conversation precisely by implying some kind of seamless continuity is still on the table. For one, it leaves out the overwhelming internal support that existed within Catholicism for changing along the lines of Lambeth. Worse still, it breezes through the patristic era—the real bedrock of contraceptive proscriptions—much too quickly, leaving out that anti-contraceptive Church Fathers like Augustine would not approve of the Roman Catholic dogmatic exception for NFP.

Where I take issue is Koperski’s assumption that appealing to Christian history “implies some kind of seamless continuity” with it. You can (and I do) appeal to history *and* believe that our current particularity might make us arrive at different conclusions than our forefathers. I do not think that one Christian denomination has perfectly preserved the historic Christian teaching down through the centuries. As Koperski says, “All parties in 2025 have staked out positions that differ from the consensus moral theology articulated in late antiquity.” Yes! I think we all might be a little bit wrong, and that we should all have the humility to admit that.

The real crux of the matter is this: Anglicans broke with historic Christian teaching on contraception at Lambeth, *and they did so making no moral arguments for or against its use*. Every single argument was made on the basis of eugenics.2 That should be concerning to us as 21st century Christians for whose culture sex is a foremost idol. 

And here’s where Koperski is wrong: he seems to think that appeals to Christian history regarding contraception are a cheap attempt at “immediately adopting \[the patristics’\] conclusions,” “bypassing serious theological reflection” or “flatly outsourcing difficult theological questions to the past” *rather than* “think\[ing\] more deeply about the interstitial reasoning of older theologians and ecclesiastical bodies.” And the funny thing about the last quote is: it is *exactly* what I have also found wanting and am trying to facilitate!3

In the fall of 2023, I was honored to have the opportunity to lecture at a first-of-its-kind Protestant Theology of the Body conference in Washington, D.C. In that lecture, I had the time and the space to do more of this theological and historical engagement with the patristics. 

In addition to calling to Protestants’ attention our own theological anemia with regard to sexual ethics, I also critique Catholicism’s evolving view of sex amid assertions that it has always been the same. (*Casti connubii*, issued in direct response to Anglicanism’s broad acceptance of contraception at Lambeth, seems to be the very first time that a secondary, albeit lesser, end for sex was ever admitted: unitive, marital love.) I note that Augustine seems to think all sex is wrong except for the intent to procreate (which would render Catholic practice of NFP illicit). I note that the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control’s *Majority Report* resembled Lambeth in its application (couples defaulting to abstention and only using barrier methods in consultation with their priest/pastor). 

In another paper I treat Calvin’s faulty assumption that the spilling of seed is equivalent to murder, and note that changing scientific understanding calls for updated moral teaching (which may stay the same, or may change, according to the topic). I critique Catholicism for *not* incorporating modern science into its current teaching on contraception, even while praising them for pioneering some of the most cutting-edge science regarding women’s health to date. 

If you read my article carefully, you will see that I make no black-and-white pronouncement about whether contraception is licit or illicit. I do not know! What I do know is that I am extremely hesitant to break with historic Christian teaching on an “unpleasant moral dilemma” where there are strong pragmatic incentives and desires to break from that teaching. 

Koperski critiques “bare deferential traditionalism,” as would I. But if not that, then what?

## **A Biblical Hermeneutic is a Communal Hermeneutic**

In the case of contraception, as is the case with many other topics that are ethically fraught ([such as IVF, for example](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-case-against-in-vitro-fertilization)), Christian moral reasoning often comes down to hermeneutics and epistemology: how one interprets Scripture and how one knows things, including how to make ethical decisions that Scripture is (or seems) silent on. Hermeneutics is particularly salient in bioethical considerations, as Christians have to grapple with new technologies that didn’t exist in biblical times and are not directly addressed by Scripture. 

Koperski seems to imply that because sex and contraception are complex issues and because we exist in a different time and place from the Christians who dealt with them, we needn’t bother ourselves with wrestling with them. He says, “Reasonably catechized Christians seem to know how to navigate intent, first principles, reasoning, and context with the New Testament itself.” In other words, we can just read the Bible and know what it means. 

As a Protestant, this sentiment ignites a kind of warmth and pride in my chest. We certainly can read and understand the Bible, by God’s incredible and immeasurable grace. However, I am not so proud a Protestant as to not be able to admit that we can fall off the horse in the other direction, eschewing tradition for individualism, assuming, hubristically, that we can interpret and understand Scripture apart from all the many generations of Christians, that great cloud of witnesses, who came before us. 

This would be impossible. For starters, language *itself* is communally derived. The English language did not just “crop up” one day. It evolved into existence, over time, via the Germanic tribes that collided in Saxony, were invaded by the Vikings, and who were overtaken by the Norman French. At some point, the Bible was translated from its own (also communally derived!) original language, into the English that we now speak. We would have no Bible to read (apart from learning ancient languages) if this communal process were not undertaken, and if the Christian tradition of interpretation had not existed since the inspiration of the Scriptures themselves. 

Likewise, what would it even mean to be “catechized” apart from community? The act of catechesis assumes an instructor! At the very least, one would need a pastor (a church father, if you will) to catechize him or her; that pastor would have needed catechesis from a spiritual father or mother before him; so on and so forth through the ages. As Alasdair MacIntyre said (and I am wont to quote), 

> I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations. These constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point. This is in part what gives my life its own moral particularity. This thought is likely to appear alien and even surprising from the standpoint of modern individualism. From the standpoint of modern individualism, I am what I myself choose to be… The story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity. I am born with a past, and to try to cut myself off from that past, in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships… What I am, therefore, is in key part what I inherit, a specific past that is present to some degree in my present…

There is no biblical hermeneutic apart from tradition. At least, not an orthodox one. 

## **What does this mean for contraception?**

Koperski says the main goal of his response is to answer directly my (earnest, not rhetorical) question, “Why should it be licit for me as a 21st century American Christian to participate in a practice that almost two-thousand years-worth of Christians abhorred?” Unfortunately, he does not. 

Instead of answering the question, Koperski complicates the question (Augustine, Catholic inconsistency) and illustrates the difficulty in answering it (new scientific understandings, modern particularity). He also gestures toward other biblical issues that are difficult to apply in the modern day (asceticism, physical adornment, head coverings, eating meat with blood, usury, nursing homes), noting that most don’t care about these issues, and calling the ones who do “literalists.” Koperski seems to imply, then, that it is just too difficult and we are just too far removed from the issue to warrant taking it under consideration. 

As noted above, I very much appreciate the historical and theological complexity of contraception. (I also happen to appreciate the complexity of forms of asceticism, outward physical adornment, wearing headcoverings in church, eating meat with blood, the problems with our usury-based and sometimes even predatory loaning system, and improper care for our lonely elderly, among many other things, and I think it is strange to wave these very biblical, Christian ideas off as oddities.) I think we can and should consider all of these issues and why they may or may not be permitted or required now as opposed to then (many if not all of them *have* *been* sufficiently considered by theologians and historians past). I also think each of these issues is *particular*, and while our present-day teaching on some of them may differ from the historic teaching, teaching on others may hold the same. 

Koperski does attempt an answer. He says, “articulating why this break with tradition is acceptable and even advisable, however, requires us to do some actual theology beyond vague gestures to tradition. Rather than immediately adopting their own conclusions, it would require us to think more deeply about the interstitial reasoning of older theologians and ecclesiastical bodies.” But here’s where I get squeamish about Koperski’s position. He says, “it seems that a consistent and uncritical application of church history should be able to liberalize our morality as much as constrain it.”

If Christian history can liberalize or constrain our morality, what is the limiting principle at play? How do you decide what to liberalize on and what to constrain? Why, for example, should orthodox Christians maintain a constrained view of homosexuality (as I believe they should), but not of contracepted sex? I think there could be an acceptable answer that both maintains the historic and biblical teaching on homosexuality *and* allows for a more liberal understanding of contraceptive sex within marriage. But I have yet to see an acceptable argument to this effect. 

The question of how one should develop Christian moral guidance about things Scripture is seemingly silent on remains. I propose a four-pronged inquiry, which both recognizes our present context while seeking to maintain a kind of continuity with the Christian past: 

1. Scripture: Are there analogous issues on which Scripture does speak? If so, can those teachings be applied to the issue at hand?
2. Tradition: How have Christians in the past have thought about this or analogous issues, and how have they interpreted the relevant Scriptures regarding it? Have there been one or many approaches or interpretations to the issue? Has the approach or interpretation changed or morphed over time, and if so, why?
3. Reason: What does creation and natural reason reveal to us about the *telos* of the thing(s) or person(s) in question? What are the ends in view? How do we comport ourselves with the laws of nature and Nature’s God, that is, honoring the ends God intended for a particular person or thing?
4. Context: How is our current context unique or different? Do we have new information about the world that necessitates an updated articulation of what we understand to be the natural law, in keeping with Scripture but perhaps breaking with historic interpretation(s) or practice(s)?

This four-pronged inquiry would help Christians to determine the guiding principle in each case, considering Scripture, historic interpretation of that Scripture, and the natural world (or natural law) concomitantly. It would go a long way in guiding moral action on issues Scripture is seemingly silent on, even when those issues are complex. It would especially aid in forming conscience, especially when deep and even good desires are at play (such as the desire for a child, in the case of IVF, or the desire for your spouse in the case of sex and contraception).4 

Importantly with regard to bioethics, it allows for incorporating natural discoveries, God’s general revelation, into our understanding of the natural law. Much like Copernicus and the heliocentricity of the universe upended Christian theology, this four-pronged approach allows for new scientific understandings to be brought into conformity with Christian practice, paying very close attention to what Scripture does and does not say, and breaking with historic teaching *when there is good reason to do so*. But I am inherently skeptical about breaking with historic teaching, especially when many Christian denominations are wont to do so (and specifically are wont to do so regarding teachings on sexuality in particular!).

The morality of contraception (and the ethics of sex more broadly) has not been sufficiently considered in this way. The arguments made in favor of contraception at Lambeth were all done on eugenic grounds, and then those judgments were quickly and uniformly accepted by most Protestant denominations, without a backward glance. I would be happy to see contraception vindicated on acceptable moral grounds; I have yet to see it. Perhaps my own project will turn toward applying this four-pronged inquiry to sex and contraception for clearer answers to the questions that plague my own conscience. 

As a student of theology and ethics, and particularly theology of the body and bioethics, my question remains: why is our teaching on the purpose of sex (which implicates our use of contraception) different from the teachings of 2,000 years of Christian history, and would our current scientific understandings have changed our forefathers’ moral calculus? Should it change our own now? 

In the meantime, and perhaps even if these questions are answered more robustly, the ethics of contraception will remain an issue of conscience for Protestants. But we never have a pass for letting our consciences go malformed.

## Footnotes

1\. I am grateful to Jake Meador for hosting this incredible (and much needed) conversation at Mere Orthodoxy. If you are interested in reading the whole progression of articles and responses, they are published as follows: Haley Baumeister’s [The Case Against Vasectomies](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-case-against-vasectomies), Kirsten Sanders’ [Desiderata for a Protestant Theology of the Body](https://mereorthodoxy.com/protestant-theology-of-the-body), my [Sexuality and the Need for Moral Guidance](https://mereorthodoxy.com/sexuality-and-the-need-for-moral-guidance), Kirsten Sanders’ [A Few More Desiderata](https://inparticular.substack.com/p/a-few-more-desiderata) and [Tending Our Own Gardens](https://inparticular.substack.com/p/tending-our-own-gardens) (published on Substack), and finally, Andrew Koperski’s [On Contraception, Tradition, and the Wise(r) Use of Christian History](https://mereorthodoxy.com/on-contraception-tradition-and-the-wiser-use-of-christian-history), to which I am responding in this piece. 

2\. From my Protestant Theology of the Body lecture: “In 1908 and 1920, two “episcopal eugenicists” were influential in persuading the conferences to denounce contraception “for a return to the Christian ideal of fruitful, reproductive marriages,” primarily because they were afraid of the idea of “race suicide,” the idea that the “incapables, the degenerates, the criminals and the imbeciles” would reproduce more quickly than the “more refined,” higher classes, and overtake them. By 1930, however, contraception had become a means by which to control the reproduction of these lower classes, and clergy were actively “advocating the use of contraception for eugenic purposes.”” Quotes taken from Anna Louise Poulson, An Examination of the Ethics of Contraception with Reference to Recent Protestant and Roman Catholic Thought (London: The King’s College London, 2006), 26.

3\. In Koperski’s defense, all of this nuance was perhaps not captured in the one article he read, which was responding very specifically to Sanders’ own response to Baumeister. And I can also imagine that he, like Sanders, is responding not only to me, but to a broader array of Protestants who are writing about “Protestant Theology of the Body.” Indeed, he lists the other “ressourcement” projects beyond contraception with which he takes issue. I cannot take account for anyone else undertaking this or other projects. But as for me, I can say that not only do I not conceive of this as a “ressourcement” project, I also have serious critiques for the Catholic teaching on contraception and Catholic Theology of the Body, which are documented [elsewhere](https://www.greystoneinstitute.org/shop/p/reformed-liturgics-tg3pl-ec8xd-f6f4m-rz4e2-x84pd-9h5ts-rw3f5-sfpg3-chkje-ayefj-jra8x?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

4\. Stiven Peter has [an excellent article](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-case-against-in-vitro-fertilization) for Mere Orthodoxy considering the moral status of IVF, in which he applies a similar framework to the one I propose. That article was in the back of my mind as I wrote this piece, and specifically [Andrew Walker’s critique](https://x.com/AndrewTWalker/status/1944063807594410099?s=46&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of it. Walker says, “As Protestants retrieve the natural law tradition (which is very good), it would be an equal and opposite error to somehow speak as though Scripture is dispensable to moral reflection. Though I doubt the author of this article intends as much, an over-reliance on natural law that treats Scripture as a merely peripheral conversation partner robs Protestantism of its essence and, in its own way, fails to understand the moral grammar of Scripture’s witness to creation order.” I would agree and add that the interpretation of Scripture and practices of Christians past (what I broadly refer to as “tradition”) should also be considered alongside Scripture and the natural law, especially on issues where Scripture seems relatively silent (like many bioethical issues).
### Marketing as Stewardship
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/marketing-as-stewardship/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:36:39.000Z
There’s a quiet engine humming just beneath your attention. It shapes how you think and, in time, how you live. Can you hear it? Entire business models run on it, and they profit not only from your money but from your focus.

This engine is called marketing, and it rarely rests.

Marketing is one of the most formative powers in modern life. A primary reason why it’s so formative is that it encompasses a wide variety of talent. Marketing is a collaborative craft that is done by analysts, to whom numbers speak and patterns surface; by creatives, who make what catches the eye; by writers, who find fitting words to qualify an audience; and by strategists, who piece it all together. As a team, they decide who will be seen, what will be said, and how often you’ll be asked to care. If you can direct attention, you can disciple desire. That’s what marketing does.

There’s a fundamental problem with marketing, and it’s the same problem with any profession: work can be done for good, and work can be done for harm. This truth comes straight from the two trees in the early pages of Genesis: life received from God by trusting his definition of good (us choosing the tree of life), or trusting our own (us choosing the tree of the knowledge of good and evil). Marketing can serve the good, and marketing can corrupt. We are responsible for the difference.

Dorothy L. Sayers, in her essay *Why Work?* written in the shadow of World War 2, insists that the worth of work is measured not by the paycheck it yields but by *the worth of the thing made*. If the thing we make is shoddy or deceptive, no amount of profit or piety redeems it. But if the thing is good, true to reality, and fitted to need...it will help people.

Sayers presses further: the so-called “secular” vocation is sacred as such. A man or woman called to carpentry, bookkeeping, or copywriting is no less called than a preacher. The Church’s concern, she argues, is not only wages and humane hours, but the nature of the work itself. Work should be the kind that a person can do without degradation; no one should be driven by economic pressure into labor that is “contemptible” or “soul-destroying.” We must be able to serve God in our work, because the work itself is a medium of God’s creative care.

Work should be good. Part of making it good is naming who it serves. Spoiler: it isn’t us.

In *The Freedom of a Christian*, Martin Luther writes: “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” Freedom in Christ does not terminate on the self; it turns outward as service. In a fallen world, “ruling” creation looks like serving our neighbor within our stations and crafts. For marketers, that means our strategies, claims, and cadences are ordered to the neighbor’s good, not to our self-justification. 

Luther names the end of our work, which is love of neighbor. But loves are led. The practices that capture attention and guide action give our freedom its shape. Marketing orchestrates these practices, which is why formation, not just information, is another issue entirely.

James K. A. Smith argues in *Desiring the Kingdom* that a Christian critique of culture can’t stop at worldview analysis. We must look into identity-forming practices, often called liturgies. We don’t just ask what a message *says*; we ask what a practice *does*: *What vision of flourishing is embedded here? What sort of person will repeated exposure make me become?* That’s cultural exegesis.

Sayers tells us that work should be good. Luther tells us who the work is for, which is our neighbor. Smith shows how the things we love in life are trained through liturgies. Marketing, because it assembles practices that capture attention and guide action, inevitably disciples desire. The only question remaining is, *toward what*?

What I suggest is this: Marketing is public speech, and under Christ’s lordship, it can be practiced as a vocation that stewards truth, honors agency, and matches real needs with fitting goods. To do this, we must approach marketing from the perspective of the “How do I love my neighbor?” framework. And here’s how.

First, we must recognize that in order to love our neighbor, truth is to be over everything else. Before truth is a claim we make, it is a Christ we meet. The concept of truth is found throughout the book of John, starting with the fact that the Word became flesh “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14), and that “grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (1:17). Later Jesus names the claim outright: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (14:6). His mission is to *bear witness to the truth* (18:37), and he promises that those who *abide* in his word “will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (8:31–32). The Spirit he sends is the “Spirit of truth” who dwells with us (14:17), and in his priestly prayer, Jesus asks the Father, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth” (17:17).

If Luther shows us that human freedom is for the service of neighbor, John shows us how freedom is *given and guarded*: by abiding in the One who *is* truth and by being sanctified by his true word. This makes Christian speech an act of witness, not of spin. Our claims must match evidence, costs and limits should be named up front, no simulated urgency, and a refusal to promise what the product or service program cannot deliver. Luther also writes, “The very highest worship of God is this that we ascribe to him truthfulness, righteousness, and whatever else should be ascribed to one who is trusted. When this is done, the soul consents to his will.” Love of neighbor begins with truthful speech.

If truth governs *what* we may say, proportion governs *how much* and *how loudly* we say it. We must consider what “enough” actually looks like, as good stewardship sets limits. With truth as our foundation, we turn next to how we deliver it: through proportion, ensuring our methods serve rather than overshadow the neighbor's good.

As Smith notes, we are formed less by messages we agree with than by practices we repeat. Marketing often scripts belonging. A purchase is rarely a one-to-one transaction of problem and solution, as it also acts as a ticket into a community, a badge of identity, or an imagined future. That’s why a car can feel like joining a tribe, or a shoe like membership in a story. Those liturgies of belonging train desire toward “more.”

So a Christian account of marketing has to build in a ceiling. What does that look like in practice? Refuse to signal scarcity when supply isn’t scarce; name the trade-offs rather than hiding them; resist practices that manufacture shame. Tell the truth about the good a product or service can deliver—and to whom—and then stop. Qualify the audience that can genuinely benefit, and don’t entice those who can’t into wasting time or money. Proportion asks not “How much can we get?” but “How much is fitting for the neighbor’s good?”

Proportion names a limit, and love honors it. But limits aren’t only about how loudly we speak to those with margin. They’re also about whom we choose to speak to at all. If truth says what a thing is and proportion says how much to say it, then charity asks *to whom,* and sometimes answers: *not to them, not like this, not for this product*.

Much marketing assumes a customer who has time, money, and attention to weigh options. Many don’t. And some industries exist precisely to exploit this. They do not solve a problem so much as create dependency; they feed on the vulnerable. You know the patterns: promises of quick money with no real path to a durable livelihood; schemes that dress speculation up as “opportunity”; products that turn compulsion into revenue. Sports gambling is a ready example, which is designed for constant engagement, engineered urgency, and the illusion of control.

A Christian account of marketing cannot prop up those economies. Some work simply isn’t ours to do. Where the product itself preys on scarcity or compulsion, the faithful move is abstention. Where the product is good but the risks are real, the faithful move is protection through plain language and the humility to say, “This isn’t for you,” while pointing them elsewhere. If work should be good, as Sayers insists, then the *way* we bring it to market must be good as well. It should be true to reality, fitted to need, and incapable of thriving on another’s harm. Luther’s pastoral rule still applies: spare the weak, resist the stubborn.

All of that calls for self-examination. Before we brief a campaign or ship a headline, we should submit the work to a simple vocational examen, asking whether it is true, whether it loves our neighbor, and whether it is proportionate. Let’s name those questions plainly and let them govern our next steps.

**1) Is it true?**

Are our claims sized to the evidence? Do we disclose limits, costs, and trade-offs up front? If a tired, distracted neighbor skimmed this once, would they still understand what they’re agreeing to?

**2) Does it love my neighbor?**

Who benefits, and who could be harmed by this product or service? Are we qualifying the audience so that those who won’t genuinely benefit aren’t enticed to waste time or money? Are we protecting the vulnerable and preserving dignity in our language?

**3) Is it proportionate?**

Have we set caps on frequency and retargeting? Are we resisting faux urgency and outrage bait? Is the cadence fitting for the goods we’re offering, and bounded in time?

If any answer is “no,” do this:

**Revise** the claim to fit the evidence. Restore plain language and disclosures.

**Restrain** the method. If needed, lower cadence, remove urgency devices, and add friction where risk is high.

**Refuse** the tactic, channel, or product. Freedom in Christ includes the freedom to say a costly *no*.

Marketing’s engine will keep humming. Our task is not to mute it but to steward it. Freedom in Christ releases us from self-justifying metrics to the craft of truthful speech.

The Church’s charge is as practical as it is theological: to form people who can make good work. Work that tells the truth, fits real needs, and refuses to thrive on another’s harm. Or, in Dorothy L. Sayers’s enduring words:

“If work is to find its right place in the world, it is the duty of the Church to see to it that the work serves God, and that the worker serves the work.”
### Faith Like a Grain of a Mustard Seed
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/faith-like-a-grain-of-a-mustard-seed/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:36:42.000Z
Advent was upon us. I needed it. Advent is my favorite season of the church calendar. The readings are so encouraging. “Look up,” they seem to say, “Live in hope that Christ WILL return and will set things right.” As I just said, I really needed to hear this message. It has not been a good year. At 73, I am feeling my age: aches and pains that make movement difficult, inability to sleep through the night, lapses of memory. And things in the larger world seem more troublesome than normal: renewed conflict in the Middle East, millions of people displaced and on the verge of starvation in Africa, and Putin refusing to pull out of Ukraine. The list could go on. But those are the problems that depress me the most.

I had made a resolution at the beginning of 2024 that I would try to live more hopefully. I worked at putting a brake on my skepticism, cynicism. I began each morning praying “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” I changed my place of worship to an Anglican church, where I felt the presence of God in a way that I did not in my Presbyterian church. As I listened to the readings from OT, Psalms, Epistle and Gospel, it felt somehow that I was hearing God’s voice speaking to my particular situation. As I recited the congregational responses in the liturgy, I felt like I was speaking to God in a meaningful way. And I was beginning to believe that, as I received the wafer and wine, I was really--in some mystical way--united with Christ. Attending church was becoming not a painful duty, but something I looked forward to: an experience where my faith would be strengthened, an experience that I would leave with renewed hope.

But on my way to church last Sunday, the WARNING light on my instrument panel lit up, sending the code that one or more of my tires was low. Not a big deal, really. I was only a mile from church and the car was handling fine. When I pulled into my parking space, walked around the car, checked the tires, the left rear tire did look a bit low. But I had purchased a fancy new digital pressure gauge, and I knew it would give me a reliable reading. But I was running a bit late, so I left things as they were. I could check the pressure after the service. I needed to get to church, needed to feel the presence of God. Needed to sense that he loved me and was working things out for my good. And, truthfully, in the grand scheme of things a low tire is obviously no big deal. Even in the small scheme of things, the daily makeup of my little life, NO BIG DEAL. So I turned my attention to church and put the low tire behind me

After the opening hymn, I paid careful attention to The Collect for Purity. “To you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid. Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy name.” I had repeated that prayer many times. But in the last few months, I had actually started to pay attention to it. The first sentence always makes me a bit uneasy. I really fear having anyone—even a loving God—know what I am thinking, feeling in the privacy of my own mind. It isn’t pretty much of the time. But I have started to believe the second sentence, the plea for God to “cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit.” That sentence always gave me hope as I went through the rest of the service. I could—with the Spirit’s help—clear my mind of distracting thoughts, even evil thoughts, and focus on the good news expressed in the liturgy: God loved me, God had provided for my salvation, God would bring all things to good in the end. 

The responsive reading that day was Psalm 91, some of the most comforting words in the entire Bible: “He shall deliver you from the snare of the hunter and the deadly pestilence. . .He shall defend you under His wings. . .There shall no evil happen to you. . .I am with him in trouble.” But even as I entered into the responses, saying the words myself, in the back of my mind the thought of that low tire on the left rear made a disturbing appearance. And soon in my imagination I could see that, when I approached my car after the service, that tire would be completely flat. My lips were still repeating the comforting words of The Psalm, but my mind was completely absorbed by that tire.

The car was fairly new, a 2024 Subaru Ascent. And I tried to remember if it even had a spare tire. Many of the newer models did NOT. And if my Subaru had one, I knew it would, at best, be one of those puny “donuts,” made only to be driven a few miles at low speed to the nearest service station or tire store. And, if I had that puny tire, I knew I had never even looked at it, nor a jack. So if there was a tire and a jack, I knew I would have to consult the Owner’s Manual to figure out how to operate it. And if there was a tire, would there even be air in it—or would it also be flat? I have AAA. I knew they would come. But on a Sunday, how long would that take? And on a Sunday, would there be a tire store open that could repair the tire or supply a new one? 

While my imagination tortured me with all that might be going wrong with that tire, I mindlessly repeated the words of the liturgy. Without thinking of it, I repeated “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.” The thought of Christ’s ultimate victory over sin and death, of my own perfect life with Christ, made zero impression. And during the Prayers of the People, when I should have concentrated on “my brothers and sisters around the world, who are suffering for their faith in you,” instead I prayed that my tire might not be flat after all, that the monitoring system on my car might be wrong. 

And while I knelt at the altar rail, waiting for the priests to offer me the wafer and the wine, to remind me that Christ’s body was broken and His blood shed to preserve me, body and soul, unto eternal life, all I could think about was myself kneeling on the dirty parking lot before the flat tire, sweating as I jacked the car up, struggled to loosen the lug nuts (which had probably been tightened much too tight at the factory), lifted off the old tire and replaced it with that puny doughnut tire, getting my nice white shirt smudged with grease, maybe damaging one knee of the new pants I was wearing. 

After I returned to my seat, after The Eucharist was complete, I did not really hear myself thank God for “assuring \[me\] in these holy mysteries that we are living members of the body of your Son, and heirs of your eternal kingdom.” I was gathering up my things, ready to make an early exit while the celebrant priest offered the blessing: “The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of his Son Jesus Christ; and the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be among you, and remain with you always.” 

 And I only waited for a moment, until the first notes of the recessional hymn were sung, before I almost ran out of the church into the parking lot, praying fervently—more fervently than I had prayed during any part of the Eucharist—that my left rear tire would not be flat. And when that particular prayer was answered, when I could see that it still held air, I offered a sincere “thank you” to God (especially after my digital pressure gauge assured me that the tire had 28 PSI, only five pounds less than suggested). Then as I entered the car and started the engine, I prayed again that some sort of service area would be open at that hour on Sunday, that someone would not be “remembering the Sabbath Day to keep it holy,” so that a professional could check all the tires, fill the offending one, and assure me that all was well in my little world, once again.

My prayer was answered. Only a couple miles from church an Instant Oil Change place was open, all its bays empty, with two employees standing in the parking lot chatting. I pulled in, asked if they had air. They did, and within a few minutes they had checked all the tires, inflated the left rear and made sure all the rest were at their recommended 35 PSI. No charge. But I fished in my wallet and handed them five dollars as a thank you. 

The indicator light on the dashboard was off as I left the parking lot and entered the flow of traffic. But the entire way home, about 15 minutes, I kept my eye on the dashboard display, half-expecting the “low tire pressure” indicator light to reappear. It did not, thankfully. But when I got home, I pulled out the pressure gauge—once again—to confirm that the offending tire was, indeed, at the correct pressure. Later that evening, I was out once again, walking around the car, examining the tires, pulling out the pressure gauge again to find everything was fine. At around 4:00 am, I awoke from a dream about changing tires, and first thing in the morning when it was light enough to see, I tested that left rear tire once again. When 35 showed up on the digital display of the gauge, I finally believed that the crisis had passed. I was finally at peace, and offered a final, brief—but very heartfelt—prayer of thanksgiving.

But as I went about the affairs of my day, one sentence from The Prayers of the People haunted me: “For our brothers and sisters around the world who are suffering for their faith in you, we ask you to give them a keen awareness of your presence and enable them to STAND FIRM against the evils of persecution.” Comparing my situation to theirs, I worried about how I would behave, what I would think and feel, if and when I found myself in real trouble. My answers were not reassuring. 

But one good thing has come out of my tire pressure crisis: I now pray several times a day for “the peace of God that passes all understanding.”
### Orthodox Christians and the Rights Revolution in America: An Interview with Rev. Dr. A. G. Roeber
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/orthodox-christians-and-the-rights-revolution-in-america-an-interview-with-rev-dr-a-g-roeber/
Last updated: 2026-04-20T18:13:10.000Z
We are surrounded from every side, it seems, by arguments (and increasingly lawsuits) of various groups over claims to rights they wish to have. The problem is, it is impossible for everyone to possess all of the rights they desire, for the granting of some rights to some groups requires the explicit infringement on the rights of other groups. This, in particular, has been the concern of religious groups in connection with the demands for such rights as access to abortion—and the requirement for, say, such groups as the Catholic order of nuns, Little Sisters of the Poor, to [offer abortion and contraception coverage](https://becketfund.org/media/breaking-federal-district-court-issues-nationwide-ruling-against-the-little-sisters-of-the-poor/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) for their employees or pay astronomical fines. For judges who have ruled against the Little Sisters, obviously abortion rights supersede religious rights. 

Of course, Catholics and Protestants are not the only Christians who have been affected by the rights revolution—and at times have found their rights as believers threatened. In his new book, Rev. Dr. A. G. Roeber investigates specifically how the rights revolution in America has affected the Orthodox Christian community. 

The Rev. Dr. A. G. Roeber is Emeritus Professor of Early Modern History and Religious Studies at Penn State University, and is currently Professor of Church History at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. His *Palatines, Liberty, and Property* was the 1993 co-winner of the American Historical Association’s John H. Dunning Prize for the best book on any aspect of American history in a two-year period. He is a past president of the Orthodox Theological Society in America and most recently co-author of *Changing Churches* (2012); co-editor, *Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theology* (2016) author, *Mixed Marriages: An Orthodox History* (2018); and editor*, Human v. Religious Rights?* (2020).

\*\*\*

**Nadya Williams:** The idea of rights revolutions has been central to much of academic American history over the past half-century. We talk about Civil Rights, women's rights, and so on. What I appreciate about your book, though, is that you engage with the question of the rights of one particular religious group—American Orthodox Christians--and how their rights have at times conflicted with the other rights revolutions surrounding them. What is the overall argument that you propose in this book?

**G. Roeber:** As I wrote in the Introduction, “Orthodox Christians in the United States have selectively embraced but also rejected an increasing and sometimes bewildering variety of ‘rights languages.’ Orthodox engagement with rights claims involve issues both internal and external to the Church.” Along with other Christians, the Orthodox inherit ancient and medieval claims about rights but only partly subscribe to rights language that emphasizes “political liberty, individual conscience, and freedom of choice and expression.” 

**Nadya Williams:** You are an academic historian, but you are also an Orthodox Christian. Is it accurate to assume that this research project was deeply personal? When did you decide that this book was necessary--and that you were the one who should write it?

**G. Roeber:** I have written a [fairly lengthy account](https://publicorthodoxy.org/2024/02/02/orthodox-christians-rights-revolution/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of the book’s origins for *Public Orthodoxy* and would here only repeat in brief that my interest was piqued by the call issued in 2006 by Professors John Witte, Jr. and Frank S. Alexander from their Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. The two posed questions to the Orthodox, asking about Orthodox understandings of human rights, the nature of society, freedom of speech and the on-going debates about rights that involve understandings of sex and gender. Since no Orthodox theologian, historian, or legal scholar had responded to their query, I decided to attempt to do so. An excerpt from the book’s chapter on human rights was published with Fordham University Press’s permission at [Canopy Forum](https://canopyforum.org/2024/03/07/human-rights-claims-and-the-orthodox-in-america/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

**Nadya Williams:** To what extent do you think your findings apply to other American Christians—those who might describe themselves as *orthodox* rather than *Orthodox*?

**G. Roeber:** The book focuses on Orthodox theology, history, and experience, but because of the preponderant historical influence of Reformed Christianity on North America the book examines in some detail both Protestant and Roman Catholic perspectives on the question of “rights” and the challenges posed by secular critics of Christianity’s relationship to rights claims.

**Nadya Williams:** What was something surprising or unexpected that you learned in the process of researching and writing this book?

**G. Roeber:** I did not expect the project to take over a decade of research and writing; I was also surprised to find several instances where Orthodox commentators from various Orthodox nation-states examined various kinds of rights language—but did so apparently unaware of what fellow Orthodox colleagues had written.

**Nadya Williams:** What are the big questions that fascinate you in your reading, thinking, and writing?

**G. Roeber:** My primary interest continues to focus on the need for a single, unified Eastern Orthodox Church of North America, one that is also seriously engaged with the Oriental Orthodox and the Roman Catholic churches in a pluralistic society and culture increasingly fragmented and nihilistic in its behavior.
### Two Cheers for Michael Heiser
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/two-cheers-for-michael-heiser/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:36:47.000Z
Recently, Theopolis [has been publishing a critical retrospective symposium](https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/the-divine-council/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) on the oeuvre of Michael Heiser (d. 2023).

Heiser, for the unfamiliar, was an influential and widely read Old Testament scholar whose work often attempted to recontextualize the Bible in the mythological and religious traditions of the Ancient Near East. His writing uniquely stressed the cosmological significance of the “angelic” divine council. It also underscored the importance of the Enochian mythos in making sense of certain biblical themes and passages.

I once asked a mentor who specialized in OT and Semitics what he thought of Heiser’s stuff. On the whole, he said, what Heiser was doing was not fundamentally new or outlandish: many of his insights were fairly standard among other experts in the Ancient Near East. Certainly, some of his particular applications of that background material have parallels in other well-known biblical scholars. For example, [Richard Bauckham has discerned](https://www.amazon.com/Relatives-Church-Bloomsbury-Academic-Collections/dp/1474230466?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) crucial Enochian elements in Luke’s genealogy that link the text thematically to the epistle of Jude and (by extension) the historical family of Jesus. Indeed, what seems to have set Heiser apart was less the historical contexts he applied to the Bible so much as his ability to reach the general Christian public.

In this Theopolis series, [Alastair Roberts](https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/curiosity-and-the-divine-council/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) and [Luke Stamps](https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/heisers-interpretive-iconoclasm/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) have offered (for me) the most thought-provoking engagement. As an ancient historian who is often having to deal with “theological” topics, I have a host of reactions to all of this. Originally, I pounded out a much longer essay elaborating them, but it was becoming unwieldy. Because I want a wider audience to understand the fuller set of dynamics I see at play here, I’ve decided to compress the various points into a more bulleted set of theses. For that same brevity, many of these will have to be asserted more than demonstrated.  
  
My overarching thesis, if I have one, is something like this: Heiser’s reception and criticism illustrate much deeper and older tensions between theologians and Christian intellectuals of other disciplines. We’re circling ancient questions about the function of tradition, healthy intellectual curiosity (in the modern sense), disciplinary gatekeeping, and different kinds of readership.

I.

We absolutely need theologians, the discipline of Theology, and the intellectual habits associated with both: respect for tradition and institutions, standardization, and harmonization of doctrinal *credenda*. This was one conclusion of [my last piece](https://mereorthodoxy.com/on-contraception-tradition-and-the-wiser-use-of-christian-history) for *Mere Orthodoxy*. What I saw below is not to be construed as a case for nuking Theology.

II.

Heiser’s readings of Scripture are, of course, fair game. I don’t buy many of them myself, such as his interpretation of the *satan* in Job.

III.

I broadly agree with Roberts’s position. There is undoubtedly a measure of *curiositas* at work in Heiser’s popularity, hence my title. When people find out I know something about ancient religion, it is often the case that they first ask me about is the Enochian literature. For reasons I outline below, however, I don’t think this interest is quite as harmful as others might. Moreover, I think *curiositas* is only part of Heiser’s warm reception. Meanwhile . . .

IV.

Disciplinary lanes are also a much greater factor in Heiser’s method than I think Stamps allows. Stamps acknowledges that disciplinary differences can be legitimate but doesn’t think that fully explains the flaws he sees in Heiser, whereas I think it basically does (see 6).

V.

Less so with the Theopolis contributions themselves and more in a broader reaction to Heiser, annoyance with “evangelicals”—low-church types often carrying underdeveloped systematic theologies and a streak of anti-intellectualism—is another factor working against Heiser, since these constitute his most enthusiastic readers. The sociological prestige of the readership (or lack thereof) can be a real factor, particularly in internet discourse.

VI.

Among Christians who at least aspire to historical orthodoxy, evangelicals also tend to be among the least interested in studying the leading exegetical lights of the past.

VII.

Is Heiser’s bracketing off later tradition as he does defensible? Stamps ultimately thinks not, perceiving a deeper dismissal of the broader Christian tradition when Heiser deliberately sets aside “creeds” and ecclesiastical tradition. In my observation, however, there’s an unpleasant fact that Christian intellectuals who are *not* theologians—classicists, philosophers, historians, and biblical scholars—are routinely vulnerable to accusations of gross innovation and heresy whenever they try to say anything “theological” that isn’t repeating accepted tradition. (To be clear, I don’t think that’s what Stamps is saying: I’m suggesting there’s a less charitable set of critics out there.)

Scripture is often this site of conflict. When charges of heterodoxy are made, it not infrequently turns out that the real friction is not with Scripture itself, but with a particular “history of interpretation.” That friction can intensify when the new idea wins over an evangelical audience that some deride and reflexively distrust. N. T. Wright’s reception comes to mind, who was not so much criticized, as I see it, for ignoring the Bible *per se* but for openly challenging meticulous exegetical paradigms near the heart of many confessional identities, systematic theologies, and ancillary institutions. So I’m much more inclined to believe Heiser is quite earnest in asking his readers to return to the text itself on its own terms, holding certain doctrinal assumptions or accretions in abeyance. As much as they can, judicious authors making the kind of maneuvers he was need to try to disarm charges of innovation at the outset.

VIII.

If Heiser described the later tradition as antisupernaturalist, I stipulate that might have been a suboptimal framing, at least depending on which later exegete is in view and how one defines “supernatural.” “Antimythological” might have been more precise. In my reading of him, Augustine himself exhibits this tendency (*City of God* 15.23) when it comes to the Enochian mythos, dismissing it as the stuff of *fabulae* (a pejorative in this context). To generalize, the (Older) Discarded Image that Heiser is attempting to reconstruct is “thicker” and “darker” than the later medieval one Lewis describes in the book of that same name (which would broadly describe an awful lot of the post-biblical tradition): it is more driven by narrative while being less accessible to reason and systematization. In that sense, there’s still an important difference.

IX.

And that brings up another good reason for judiciously bracketing off the tradition here and in other exegetical issues: it is a knot unto itself. In my reading, Augustine largely cut the legs out from under the existing “tradition” of angelology/demonology as evidenced in earlier figures such as Justin, Irenaeus, Athenagoras, Tertullian, and Lactantius. For these authors, the basic drift of the Enoch story was unremarkable. (I concur with Stamps that Heiser’s project would have been stronger had he made some of these connections.) Theologians may love straightening out these kinds of knots. But . . .

X.

Many Christian scholars with training in adjacent (and narrower) fields would rather not have to handle sources beyond our specialization and outside our interests. Speaking for myself, in general, my own tendency would be to prefer reading another chapter or article on Ugaritic myth than one handling what Augustine, Aquinas, or Calvin thought about Genesis 6 or Psalm 82\. That’s not to dismiss them (or Stamps’s forthcoming project, by the way), but it does seem that there ought to be more space for varying intellectual tastes—unless, that is, the real problem is something else (see 3-5).

XI.

There’s also a much older and more serious impasse here, with parallels in the battles between the scholastics and the humanists, the oversimplified contrast between Alexandrian and Antiochene interpretation, and the more generic lumpers-splitters paradigm. The harsh truth is that, even aside from interests, many of us in other disciplines simply don’t much stock at all in the interpretational history, at least not when there is more to be learned about Bible itself (e.g., from the Ancient Near Eastern world). Any dozen examples could justify this wariness toward later tradition: no knowledge of original languages (e.g., Augustine), more subsequently available data (e.g., the Dead Sea Scrolls), rigid and distortive dogmatic agendas (*passim*), incoherence or rupture in the exegetical history (see 8), undertheorized schemas of who gets to count as “the Tradition,” etc. For that last reason especially, some of us can also be fairly allergic to the concept of *sensus fidelium* in anything but the most fundamental questions of dogma. That is all to say, I’m unpersuaded that it is a modern conceit to affirm that we *do* now know more things about the ancient contexts of the Bible than many of our predecessors—not in every case, but in many. That’s not arrogance, nor is it particularly modern, nor is it sub-Christian.

XII.

When Stamps refers to the regulatory function of tradition, I think I’d like to know more precisely *which readership* he has in mind: other Christian scholars and intellectuals, the folks in the pews, or the pastors somewhere between them? I suspect it has much more to do with the latter two, in which case, the point about *curiositas* remains a live concern. Origen frequently wrote about this same basic problem in the context of apocryphal literature (much like the Enochian corpus): there were books and ideas that Christianity’s scholars could entertain and sift that were not fitting for the general laity. In antiquity, this was a comparatively easy distinction to maintain because of social stratification: most people were illiterate. Nowadays, religious ideas disseminate much more widely and quickly.

XIII.

And it gets worse: at present, tradition and institutions are historically weak, while forms of conspiratorialism and *gnosis* are as appealing as ever. But I think another reason readers find Heiser compelling is that his writing fosters “imagination” in the Lewisian sense. Thus, even where it might be wrong on various particulars, Heiser’s work cracks open inherited cosmologies that have shrunk and grown stale, both secular and (I’m afraid) Christian. It holds out the eerie proposition that there’s much about creation we don’t understand, which should foster some intellectual humility and increase rather than diminish a spirit of circumspection. It’s the same reason that there’s value in studying the medieval cosmology (see 8). Where there is preference for Heiser’s reconstruction, it probably has something to do with the fact that the ancient one has much more to do with the Bible than the medieval. And being more mythological, it open up new horizons for Christians to ponder, whereas the medievals’ “rational” and systematic model has been solidly disproved by modern science, as Lewis notes. Taken judiciously, I think a lot of Heiser’s work opens up more questions than answers, and I have a hard time seeing that as a “bad thing.” 

XIV.

Accordingly, when I run into Christians asking about Enoch, Nephilim, or Heiser’s broader vision, I’m frankly just happy someone is actually interested in the biblical and supernatural. It’s an excellent opening to begin a longer conversation. If Origen had advice, he might quote an *agraphon* of Jesus: “Be wise moneychangers.” That means the laity will have to be taught by pastors and teachers to sift the theological coinage, spot counterfeits, and keep the good specie. How to achieve that is a huge question, but it probably starts with better education: an enormous institutional lift but one that’s also been done before in history. The Moneychanger Principle is also why we should welcome the pushback on Heiser’s arguments on their interpretive merits. 

XV.

The Christian community needs theologians and other intellectuals with more scholastic tendencies (see 1). But speaking as a historian, I wish there were more support and tolerance for “humanists” like Heiser who can work outside the walls of Tradition. For one, it can bring in some fresh air; the underlying curiosity (in the non-Augustinian sense) is also the raw material for effective apologetics directed at people who don’t know or accept Tradition.

XVI.

While it is tangential to the critiques of Heiser and his readership, this question about Tradition dredged up for me a much larger set of frustrations with the Christian intellectual ecosystem—to say nothing of “conservative” intellectual spaces more broadly. I believe [John Ahern was recently bumping up against the same cluster of issues in a piece considering the rarity of scholars like T. C. Schmidt.](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-plight-of-the-christian-scholar) This problem deserves its own book, but in brief, I think the received knowledge that defines those conservative contexts also tends to suck up a lot of the oxygen; on occasion, I’ve seen it deliberately snuff out more comprehensive but inconvenient forms of intellectual inquiry. Unfortunately, the further one’s research interests move away from consolidating a particular identity, the fewer resources and less interest there tends to be; it may even generate hostility when it becomes crosses the party line. This is not exclusive to Christian or conservative sectors, but I have an unpleasant and growing suspicion that the problem is worse there. After all, if Civilization or the “Great Tradition” have already bequeathed the right topline answers to the Big Questions, honestly why bother?

One answer: that’s what the cultivation of *philosophia* demands. Or, to borrow from one of Schmidt’s biblical citations, we might say that’s precisely what the scribes of the kingdom are supposed to do: they bring out new treasures right alongside the old. From that angle, it is hard for me not to see Heiser’s project as a welcome success.
### A Critical Review of James Baird’s 'King of Kings: A Reformed Guide to Christian Government'
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/james-baird-king-of-kings-review/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:36:50.000Z
James Baird’s *King of Kings: A Reformed Guide to Christian Government* presents readers with a simple argument: “Government must promote Christianity as the only true religion.” In just eighty-five pages, Baird seeks to simplify centuries of complex Protestant debates on the nature of church-state relations. He presents his thesis as the “classic Protestant view” and offers logical, biblical, and historical arguments to back his claim. After presenting his main argument, he closes with four brief chapters on the nature of political freedom, the relationship between the way of love and political power, and the necessity of wisdom in politics.

Does Baird succeed? Does he prove that God calls government to promote Christianity? *King of Kings* will certainly generate discussion on the topic of Protestant political theology. Its clarity and brevity—as well as the tremendous effort of its publisher to get it into readers’ hands—will ensure that it doesn’t go unnoticed. However, though the book has clear strengths, Baird ultimately fails to make a convincing case for his thesis.

## **Strengths**

The book’s major strength lies in Baird’s argument that the church must apply the truth claims of Christianity to the realm of politics. As secularists seek to relegate religion to private life, Christians must assert Christ’s universal lordship over every dimension of life, including politics. We submit politics to the lordship of Christ, not just because Christ is the rightful Lord over that domain, but also because we believe that Christianity benefits the world. We want every person in every nation to submit to Christ because we love our neighbors. This powerful message resounds through the pages of *King of Kings.*

Second, Baird carefully and wisely preserves the distinct mission of the church. He does not want the church to abandon its sacred mission of preaching the word, administering the sacraments, and practicing church discipline in exchange for political activism. Baird clearly wants the church unhindered in pursuit of its mission, and his attempt to avoid conflating church and state is commendable.

Finally, Baird’s final four chapters model wise theological reasoning. Here, Baird preserves liberty of conscience by asserting that “God designed government to deal with the external things of man, not the internal things.” He also shows that politics and love are not necessarily opposed—“we should wield our political power for the sake of loving our neighbors.” Finally, he tempers irresponsible use of his principles by suggesting that we should always err on the side of love and discretion by carefully considering the viewpoints of our fellow citizens.

The book has clear strengths, but it also has debilitating weaknesses.

## **Too Simple?**

It’s clear that Baird wanted to write an accessible book for lay readers, but his efforts to simplify such a complex topic negatively impacts the book’s capacity to prove his thesis. I’ll provide two examples.

First, Baird claims neutrality on the question of *how* government should promote Christianity, choosing instead to offer guiding principles in the last chapters of the book. The latter chapters certainly prove helpful, but avoiding the implementation of his thesis raises more questions than it answers. How can the reader rightly assess the argument without clarity on what Baird means by “promote”? If Baird means that government should ensure that churches and families are free to pursue their respective God-given missions, count me in. However, if Baird wants a renewed Christendom in which the government plays a role in determining or enforcing the boundaries of theological orthodoxy, I’m out. Abstaining from questions about implementation may assist Baird in arguing a simple thesis, but it does not assist the reader in determining the thesis’ validity.

Second, Baird’s definition of “government” poses significant problems. In the introduction, he defines “government” as “leaders who are called to hold offices of authority over civil matters.” However, throughout the book, he speaks of government more generally as an institution. Again, the imprecision of the language confuses the issue at hand. If Baird believes that regenerate government leaders should use their office to promote truth and righteousness as defined by God, then I agree. Christians enter the public square as Christians, whether they are teachers, truck drivers, or state senators. We do not check our commitment to truth and righteousness at the door of our respective vocations. The Christian elected official ought to legislate according to Christian truth claims and values as represented by the second table of the Decalogue. 

The issue, however, regards the question of authorization. Has God commissioned the institution of government to promote Christianity? While government certainly plays a secondary role through ordering society so that the church is free to pursue its mission, the risen Christ gives the Great Commission exclusively to his soon-to-be Spirit-filled people. It’s this point, in fact, that causes me to question why Founders—a confessionally Baptist organization—would publish this book. Baptists have historically maintained a strict jurisdictional divide between government and church due to our understanding of the new covenant in Christ. [Jonathan Leeman captures this emphasis well](https://www.9marks.org/article/say-no-to-christian-nationalism/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) when he writes, “With the new covenant, God no longer ties his name to a geopolitical people, but to his Son, and then to everyone united to his Son, the church.” 

Across the scope of revelation, God expresses deep concern over the question of who he allows to identify with his name. God’s name goes exclusively with God’s people, and God’s people are now identified exclusively as those who are “in Christ.” Christian citizens, even elected ones, must enter the public square unapologetically as *Christian* citizens advocating for laws and policies that uphold justice and protect life—laws and policies that lead to genuine human flourishing. However, in the new covenant, God has explicitly given the commission to promote the gospel to his regenerate people, the church.

To illustrate the importance of this distinction, think about the unintended consequences of combining gospel witness with the task of government. Christ explicitly commissions his church to proclaim the gospel (Matt 28:18-20) and then fills them with his Spirit for the task (Acts 1:8). Their new identity as God’s “holy nation” is tied to their ability to proclaim God’s excellencies (1 Pet 2:9). The redeemed people who proclaim his gospel must share somewhat in his character. When you make blanket statements like “Government must promote Christianity,” you inevitably task the institution of government with a mission it is not equipped to accomplish. Furthermore, you confuse the distinct missions of both the church and the state. The church preaches the word and administers mercy. The state bears the sword and administers justice. 

## **Logical?**

Logical syllogisms present premises toward the goal of proving a conclusion. If the premises are true and logically valid, then the conclusion must follow. In a proper syllogism, there’s only one way to disprove the conclusion—disprove one of the premises. Baird wants readers to understand how syllogisms work because he makes the entire argument of his book depend on one. 

What is Baird’s argument? 

***First Premise*:** Government must promote the public good.

***Second Premise*:** As the only true religion, Christianity is part of the public good.

***Conclusion*:** Government must promote Christianity as the only true religion.

Of the two premises, Baird thinks the second is the most controversial and thus devotes considerably more attention to proving it. However, his second premise is unobjectionable. Of course, Christianity benefits the public good. If every person in the world repented and believed the gospel, the world would drastically improve. It’s his first premise that needs revisiting.

To illustrate the problem of the first premise, consider this syllogism:

***First Premise*:** Government must promote the public good.

***Second Premise*:** Disciplining children in the home contributes to the public good.

***Conclusion*:** Government must discipline children in the home.

My syllogism begs us to place limits on the first premise. It needs qualifications. Obviously, government must promote the public good, but it must do so only within its proper boundaries. No sane father would allow a police officer to administer discipline to his disobedient son. That’s not the government’s proper role. That domain—the domain of the home—is ruled over by the institution of the family and reaches the purview of government only when laws are broken by the family. God has specifically equipped and authorized parents to administer discipline to unruly children in the context of loving authority.

As a stand-alone statement, the first premise holds. Government absolutely must promote the public good. However, in the context of Baird’s argument, the premise becomes problematic because it lacks a limiting factor. It should say something like, “Government must promote the public good within its God-ordained capacity.” 

Baird concedes this point later when he writes, “God designed government to deal with the external things of man, not the internal things.” But he makes this comment in passing and never satisfactorily expounds its profound implications. If God calls government to only deal with external things, then God has severely limited government’s capacity to promote Christianity. 

Baird’s failure to dive deeply into the vexed question of government’s proper role and limitations—a question that has occupied political theorists for centuries—oversimplifies the debate and creates a false dichotomy. Baird writes as if readers have only two choices before them: follow him and “the Greeks, Romans, and early Americans” in concluding that “the public good includes religion” or conclude that “religion has nothing to do with the public good.” 

However, where does this either/or choice leave the myriads of people past and present—in full disclosure, people like me—who believe that religion has everything to do with the public good, but that God has authorized and equipped church and family, not government, with promoting the gospel of Jesus Christ and that government’s proper function is to ensure that church and family can pursue that mission unhindered? 

## **Biblical?**

Baird claims that the biblical case for his thesis is “*absolutely overwhelming.*” However, this chapter represents the weakest argument of the book. Here’s a summary of his scriptural argument: God calls Israelite kings to promote truth and righteousness among his covenant people. Several pagan kings in the Old Testament are described as promoting truth and righteousness in their realms. Since the New Testament never explicitly denies these teachings and since Paul bases his teaching in Romans 13:4 on Psalm 2, we must conclude that modern governments possess the same calling as Israelite kings.

This view ignores any discontinuity between Old and New Covenants, once again raising questions about the theological partnership between Baird, a Presbyterian, and Founders Ministries, a confessionally Baptist institution. But it’s not just Baptists who question the direct application from Old Covenant kings to modern day governments; Baird dismisses Meredith Kline as representing theologians within his own Presbyterian tradition who “argue that modern governments do not have a duty to promote true religion because, unlike ancient Israel, we are not in a holy covenant with the Lord.” He dismisses this entire perspective by alluding to his discussion of pagan kings promoting true religion outside the covenant in the Old Testament.

However, this debate is not settled by appealing to the examples of pagan kings who repented but by examining the nature of the New Covenant in Christ. God no longer deals with his people as a geopolitical unit. In the New Covenant, the people of God are marked out spiritually by regeneration and physically by baptism into the church. God’s covenant people are no longer gathered within the borders of a physical nation under a human king but exist as scattered exiles among all the nations of the earth under the King of Kings. The kings of modern nations possess no claim to a special covenant relationship with God and thus cannot rule under the same expectations as Israelite kings who did. Baird’s covenant theology does not account for the way Christ fulfills Old Covenant types and figures.

It's remarkable that Baird fails to find even one explicit New Testament passage that advocates his view. While arguments from silence vary in effectiveness, in this case, the New Testament’s silence cannot be ignored. Virtually every book in the New Testament instructs the church on how to live faithfully in pagan culture. In other words, the epistles explicitly address the topic of politics. Yet not once do Jesus’s apostles instruct Christians to wield political power in advancing Christ’s cause. Instead, the explicit New Testament language for engagement with politics by the church includes “submit,” “pay taxes to,” “pray for,” and “honor” (Rom 13; 1 Tim 2; 1 Pet 2). As we consider contextual factors, we must note the apostles’ complete disinterest in wielding the levers of political power in service to the church’s mission. 

Baird argues that Paul derives his claim that government is “God’s servant” (Rom 13:4a) from Psalm 2:10–12\. Since the rulers in Psalm 2 are called to “serve the Lord with fear,” Baird deduces that Paul must intend the same meaning. However, in the passage under consideration, Paul calls the pagan Roman government “God’s servant,” not because it promotes Christianity (it certainly did not), but because it “carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer” (Rom 13:4b). While every ruler will one day stand before God to give an account for how he wielded the political authority entrusted to him, Paul calls Christians to view earthly government as “God’s servant” regardless of whether the government promotes Christianity.

## **Historical?**

Finally, Baird fails to model careful historical thinking. Good history accounts for context and complexity. Baird has scoured the history of Reformed Protestantism in search of quotes to back his claims, and, of course, the theologians he quotes did believe, to various degrees, that government should promote Christianity. However, these figures made complex arguments in support of this claim within unique historical contexts. These complex contextual factors are simply ignored. The reader walks away from this book believing that Reformed Protestants, until very recently, all spoke with one unified voice on the relationship between church and state. 

As a Baptist historian, I especially note the two mentions of Baptists in the book. First, readers are treated with a quote from Charles Hadden Spurgeon in the introduction. Of course, the uncontroversial quote does not support the book’s thesis. Second, John Gill appears in a footnote as a representative of “magisterial Baptists.” If a category called “magisterial Baptist” exists, Gill is certainly the closest thing to it. However, Gill’s view that the magistrate should enforce both tables of the Decalogue distinguishes him from mainstream Baptist political theology. It’s interesting that a book arguing for magisterial political theology and published by a Baptist press can find only one Baptist figure who qualifies as a “magisterial Baptist.”

If readers want to understand Baptist political theology as it developed in seventeenth-century England, the better source would be the Second London Confession (1689). Modeled after the Presbyterian Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) and the Independent Savoy Declaration, the uniqueness of Baptist political theology comes into clear view upon comparing the three documents. 

Both the WCF and the Savoy Declaration list the duties of the magistrate as maintaining “piety, justice, and peace.” However, the Particular Baptists excluded “piety” from their listing of governmental duties. These Baptists limited government’s authority to the civil realm, thereby excluding religion from its purview. Likewise, the Baptist confession omits the earlier confessions’ language recognizing the authority of magistrates to preserve unity and peace within churches, to guard doctrine, to suppress blasphemies and heresies, to reform corruptions and abuses, to oversee the administration of God’s ordinances, and to call synods. At the very least, the earliest Baptists were uncomfortable authorizing the government to act in religious matters.

Baird’s primary historical argument derives from the language of state constitutions in early America. Since many of the first state constitutions explicitly gave preference to Protestantism by either naming it as the state’s official religion or requiring religious tests for elected office, Baird concludes that the United States Constitution does not ban states from promoting Christianity and insinuates that we should return to such a system today. However, Baird relegates the fact that every single state disestablished by 1833 to a footnote. If Baird had explored the reasons for state-by-state disestablishment, he would have seen that, in the words of Carl H. Esbeck and Jonathan J. Den Hartog, many of those leading the cause were “convinced that past church dependence on state aid had led to religion’s corruption where matters of religious doctrine and observance were bent to serve reasons of state.” These early American actors did not end state religious establishments to suppress religion but to preserve it.

Did it work? Did the decision to end state establishments lead to religion’s increase in the United States? Comparing the cultural influence of religion in America today with the severe secularism in modern European nations with established churches suggests it did. Alexis de Tocqueville certainly believed America’s system worked. Visiting in 1835, the French intellectual marveled at the counterintuitive American dynamic in which Christian religion exerted extraordinary influence over the mores of society while at the same time remaining institutionally separate from political power. In fact, Tocqueville believed that the strength of religion’s power in America was the result of that separation. When religion attaches itself to political power, he theorized, it binds itself to the fragile and ephemeral fortunes of political institutions. But when religion stands on its own, it operates unhindered within its own protected sphere.

## **Conclusion**

James Baird has written a short book with a simple thesis—government must promote Christianity as the only true religion. The book will certainly spark conversation within the church on the proper relationship between church and state, hopefully generating charitable debate grounded in the truth of God’s word. However, though it has clear strengths, the book ultimately fails to make a convincing argument. 

Baird clearly believes that Christianity will gain ground with the government's backing. However, a second question—one that Baird ignores—deserves attention: What does Christianity lose by such a marriage? In his recent book, John D. Wilsey offers a historically apt reflection on that important question: “In any alliance of religion and politics, politics loses nothing and religion loses everything. That is, religion loses its credibility and influence in society because it becomes too closely associated with fleeting political trends of the day.”
### The Annunciation: An Excerpt from the Incarnation Poems of Martha Marchina
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-annunciation-an-excerpt-from-the-incarnation-poems-of-martha-marchina/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:36:52.000Z
[*To Marvel More: Holy Attention in the Incarnation Poems of Martha Marchina*](https://www.trinitynorthshore.org/trinitybooks?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) presents the Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany poems of a seventeenth century neo-Latin poet, Martha Marchina, with English translations and devotional commentary.

Marchina was a Catholic lay woman who specialized in epigrams. She used the short, witty form to highlight the wonderful mystery of Christ's birth, to shake us out of a blase attitude towards the incarnation and into a spirit of holy attention. These are the first printed translations of her work in English. The following excerpt is published with permission from Trinity Books.

\*\*\*

**De Annunciatione Beatae Virginis.**

> Ardens Virgineo Phoebus velatus amictu,  
> Mitius ardentes dirigit inde faces.  
> Sic Deus intactae nivea modo Virginis alvo  
> Velatus, fundit mitis in Orbe faces.

**The Annunciation**

> The blazing Son is veiled within a maid,  
> And from her sends a flaming, mild fire.  
> So God in an untouched womb is laid,  
> And warms the earth by this more gentle pyre.

**\*\*\***

> We know the scene: the room,  
> variously furnished,  
> almost always a lectern, a book;  
> always the tall lily.

So Denise Levertov wrote in her own Annunciation poem, calling up into our minds the familiar image of Mary and Gabriel as figured by Fra Angelico, or Rossetti, or Tanner. We know the scene. But does Marchina? We’re starting Advent in an odd way. There is no angel here, no startled woman; instead, we find a veiled God and blazing *faces*, fires or literally, torches. Without the title, would any of us be able to name the scene? What fiery Annunciation has she given us?

Marchina’s poem may not evoke Luke, but she does have another passage in mind, Moses’ encounter with God in the burning bush from Exodus 3-4\. In the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible, the author uses the same verb *ardeo*, to blaze or burn, that Marchina repeats in her poem to describe both God and the faces that he sends forth. So Marchina’s image of the Annunciation is of Mary as the burning bush—a site for God’s presence on earth, but one that is not consumed. Marchina’s description of Mary as “untouched” evokes this reality. This is more than a claim about her virginity, it is a statement about the mystery of the Incarnation, that a human could hold the God of Glory within her own body and remain unscathed. She was not consumed. 

Here Marchina’s allusion to Exodus serves an additional purpose, to remind us of the topsy-turvy work God begins at the Annunciation. When Moses realizes that God is present in the burning bush, he “hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God,” aware of God’s holiness and his own unrighteousness (Exodus 3:6). But the Incarnation began with God “veiled within a maid,” swaddled inside Mary. It is God who hides his face now, or rather, God who stoops to meet us. It is the Lord of Light who descends to us, becoming human in the same way we all become human, enfleshed in our mother’s womb, so that he could be with us, could rescue us. When we see Jesus, we can gaze into the face of God, and like Mary, remain unscathed.

As a final note, I love Marchina’s use of *faces*, torches, to describe God’s light. To modern people, the word “light” often conjures up images of glowing Edison bulbs, or perhaps the annoying glare of an overhead LED. But to Marchina’s seventeenth-century world, light was primarily found in fire. Her repetition of *faces* jolts us out of the anodyne vision of Jesus as the Lightbulb of the world, softly buzzing, illuminating the darkness. Fire does enlighten, but it can also purify. What good news, then, that this fire has come to earth in human form, because, as Marchina writes, as a human he can send forth his “flaming, mild fire,” literally “more mildly” than before. Grammatically, the adjective *mitis* in line four meaning mild, kind, or gentle, can describe both the torches, *faces* (4), or God, *Deus* (3), though of course, in this instance, they are one and the same. That is good news indeed.
### The Magpie 2: Two Theological Whodunnits
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-magpie-2-two-theological-whodunnits/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:36:54.000Z
Sarah Hinlicky Wilson, [*Seven Ways of Looking at the Transfiguration*](https://thornbushpress.com/product/seven-ways-of-looking-at-the-transfiguration/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)(Thornbush Press, 2024) and [*Forty Facets of the Ascension*](https://thornbushpress.com/product/forty-facets-of-the-ascension/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)(Thornbush Press, 2025).

In a pair of new books, *Seven Ways of Looking at the Transfiguration* (August 2024), and *Forty Facets of the Ascension* (November 2025), Sarah Hinlicky Wilson has written small, tidy volumes that contain lively discussions of two neglected dates in the church calendar. As a pastor, Wilson found that these dates occurred annually, showing up and demanding sermons for which she lacked any good ideas. As a writer is wont to do, she set out to write a book to fill each gap.

Wilson is a preacher’s writer. Her books are eminently readable and clearly reflect her own hermeneutic. In her words, from the Transfiguration book, “A sophisticated myth would make grander claims with longer-lasting effects. It would *explain* things.” A good Lutheran, she knows that this is not the sort of myth contained in Scripture. The story is much weirder than that.

She reminds us, in clear and compelling fashion, that these stories are about God. Instead of relying on too many commentaries and speculative knowledge, burying the lively word in footnotes, Wilson dives right in and attempts to draw us a picture of how these events connect to the broader pattern of Scripture, which itself endeavors to tell the truth about God.

In her reading of the Transfiguration, on which I focus here, she sets the stage as if it were a whodunnit. Peter, James and John have just walked up a mountain. They are tired. Luke tells us that the men are “very sleepy” (Lk 9:33), and are awakened from their slumber by nothing less than the transfigured Christ. But what are they really looking at, and what does it mean?

The Transfiguration, perhaps the “overlooked” bookend of God’s divine appearances through Christ’s ministry, is underwhelming compared to Christ’s baptism and the Ascension. On both occasions Jesus is clearly either coming or going. In the first there is a booming voice from the clouds that accompanies Christ’s baptism, and God’s presence is clearly in the clouds that receive him when he returns to the Father after his resurrection.

But in the Transfiguration, Jesus doesn’t go anywhere. He stays put. This episode is remarkably lacking in events or action. Jesus “was transfigured,” but returns. The stasis of the experience is emphasized by some early Greek interpreters who say that in truth *nothing really happened* when Jesus was transfigured—the disciples were simply able to perceive Jesus’ divine identity for the first time. What these interpreters are emphasizing is that Jesus has always been divine, and that God’s presence with him is not occasional, as if he put on an overcoat as needed. He was God the whole time.

But if this is the case—if nothing “changes” with Jesus at the Transfiguration, and if nothing *happens*—then what is the meaning of this event, noted in all of the synoptic gospels and remembered in the church’s liturgical year?

Wilson would have us see the Transfiguration as Christ’s “tabernacling among us” (John 1:14) as *God*. But as with every aspect of Christ’s earthly ministry, it is only temporary. He hasn’t yet come to stay.

Though the referent of “tabernacle” refers to Old Testament worship, its reference in the Transfiguration account is to the three “shelters”, or “tents” that Peter requested be made–one for Jesus, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. This is one clue that the Transfiguration is linked to the feast of Booths. The Feast of Booths, or *Sukkot*, is one of three pilgrimage festivals that Israel observed at Jesus’ time. These feasts were pilgrimage festivals—occasions where pilgrims would go up to Jerusalem to observe the religious holiday. Wilson notes that Passover and Pentecost both explain the presence of pilgrims in Jerusalem at the time of those events.

But in Jesus’ time, by her recounting, the feast of Tabernacles was perhaps the foremost Jewish feast. Seven days of offerings would precede a solemn assembly on the eighth day. Luke places the transfiguration on the “eighth day”—the day of the solemn assembly that the feast of Tabernacles would observe. As she reads it, then, the solemn assembly enshrined in Israel’s history, commemorated on this day, is offered to Christ himself. As with the baptism and the Ascension, the Transfiguration identifies Christ as God. The clouds from which God’s voice descend in the baptism are the same clouds that will receive him in the Ascension. In the Transfiguration, the disciples enter the cloud. The tabernacling is intended to point us to God in this time between the times.

“In Jesus’ Baptism and Transfiguration”, she writes, “there is a common pattern: the miraculous action is performed upon him rather than by him. He is object, not subject. He is the only-begotten Son who receives from his almighty Father. He is passive in order to be active, spoken-over in order to speak, and the order of the in-order-to makes all the difference. But in Jesus’ Resurrection, there is a change in the pattern. One might even say, a metamorphosis.”

In the Resurrection, what we see is Jesus acting with all of the power of God, defeating death as only God could do. In the Transfiguration, we have a feast of the time-between-the-times. Christ, the Transfigured one, invites his disciples into the cloud not only that they might see him, but that they themselves might be changed. It is a brief temporary taste of what will one day be total; “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye” (1 Cor 15:52). In Christ’s baptism Jesus began what came to completion in the Ascension, when he returns to the Father; but in the Transfiguration, he stayed, briefly, with us.

We live in the land of tents. In the between times, between beginnings and endings, drowsy and transient and unsure of which mountain we are on. I like to think that Paul was referring to this event when he writes, “Wake, sleeper!”—You drowsy ones!—Just like the last time I had to arouse you with a cloud flanked by prophets. When we see him in the life to come, *we will not all sleep*, and yet we will be changed. We will be wide awake. But for now, our drowsiness sometimes still precedes our transformation. That is the kind of thing God does.

Wilson has published these volumes from her own press, [*Thornbush Press*](https://thornbushpress.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), which she launched in 2020\. To date she has published ten books, including a novel, a memoir, a volume of short stories, and an edition of Luther’s catechism. The works she has selected to publish are delightfully quirky while still remaining serious and learned. 

I first stumbled upon her work through her podcast, [*Queen of the Sciences*](https://www.queenofthesciences.com/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), which is by my judgment the best theology podcast available. Co-hosted with her dad, theologian Paul Hinlicky, the episodes take up serious topics without taking themselves too seriously—a true accomplishment, if you know the genre. The rapport between father and daughter makes the whole thing light and sweet while remaining deeply learned. It’s a real gem.

I review a lot of books about gender and feminism. Some of this is an occupational hazard; I know something about this literature because of my training. Some of this is a matter of personal biography; I am female, so I’m thought to have a stake in the issue.

But some of this has become a matter of my own vocation. I care about the quality of modern theology and modern preaching. But too much of the focus on a question like “women’s preaching” or “women’s ordination” has made the possessive noun the subject of our concern. At the same time, we’ve come to care too little about the noun itself—too little about “preaching” and “ordination” and about theological thinking on the whole.

Much of what passes for discussion of “women’s preaching” or “women’s theology” leaves the latter noun uninterrogated. But we gain nothing if women participate in preaching and theology if the work they do is shoddy. In fact, we might in the end lose something if the participation of women in theological writing yields poor argument, and women come to bear the blame. Sarah Hinlicky Wilson can be accused of neither poor argument or shoddy writing. She is doing what smart women have always done—acting as a trailblazer. The whole point of theology, after all, is to speak truthfully about God. In her weird and wonderful way, she has done just that. May her tribe increase.
### Thomas Aquinas Reviews Christian Songs: 'Lemonade'
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/thomas-aquinas-reviews-christian-songs-lemonade/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:36:56.000Z
## Whether Jesus Be Making Lemonade

Objection 1: **It would seem that the Lord is not making lemonade. The claim that the Lord is making lemonade is meant symbolically to suggest that He is improving our lives by turning difficulty into sweetness. However, according to St. John, the Lord said, "If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also." Therefore, Jesus is not making lemonade.**

**Objection 2: Further, the Lord often suggests that an excess of wealth or success is not a sign of divine favor, but of our own failure to ascribe value rightly to what is most worthy. The man who enjoys conspicuous wealth is often treated as a man who loves lesser things that he ought not love at all or ought not love to that degree. Therefore, Jesus is not making lemonade.**

**Objection 3: The Lord now resides at the right hand of the Father, and his body has been taken up out of the earth. Lemons, however, are earthly. Therefore, Jesus is not making lemonade.**

**On the contrary**, St Augustine teaches that the knowledge of God is like "sober intoxication," in which he symbolically links the knowledge of God to the pleasures of wine. Likewise, the Lord makes wine to serve to others as a celebration of his incarnation. If Scripture and the Church speak of God as dispensing wine, a drink which gladdens the heart and refreshes the spirit, then it is also proper to claim, metaphorically, that Jesus makes lemonade.

**I answer that**, when it is said that a person has turned lemons into lemonade it is a metaphorical way of saying that a person has received great difficulty or sadness and turned it to joy. Scripture testifies extensively to the various and sundry ways in which the Lord brings health and wholeness out of decay and death. Therefore, it follows that the Lord can be said to have made lemonade from lemons in the same way that one can say that the Lord transforms darkness into light or raises the dead to life.

**Reply to Obj. 1**: The claim that followers of the Lord will suffer in this life is correct. However, the suffering in view is relative. For St Paul says that, "I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ."

**Reply to Obj. 2**: This is answered in the reply to objection one.

**Reply to Obj. 3**: The claim that the Lord makes lemonade is not to be understood literally, but symbolically. Therefore, the fact that the Lord is not present on earth does not invalidate the claim that the Lord be making lemonade.
### The Case for Intellectual Gratitude
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-case-for-intellectual-gratitude/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:36:58.000Z
Benjamin P. Myers. [*An Invitation to the Liberal Arts: The What and Why of Classical Christian Higher Education*](https://wipfandstock.com/9798385219360/an-invitation-to-the-liberal-arts/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Cascade Books, 2025\. $19.00\. 122 pp.

On an exceptionally sweaty August afternoon in 1999, the day before my first semester of college began, I walked into the office of one of the foremost Euripides scholars in the world (except I didn’t know it at the time) and declared my major in the Classics. In the nine years that it took to obtain first my B.A. and then the Ph.D. in Classics, I got a thorough liberal arts education, I realize in retrospect. This education has prepared me well to thrive and flourish in various situations and transitions in life. But at the time, my rationale wasn’t so sophisticated. Really, I was just thinking: I like languages and books, so I’d love to spend my years as a student with them. My typical immigrant parents, who had been harboring dreams of me going into engineering or law, were appalled.

In many ways, I was not a typical student, I was reminded yet again while reading Benjamin Myers’s new book, *An Invitation to the Liberal Arts: The What and Why of Classical Christian Higher Education*. Myers is the director of Oklahoma Baptist University’s Honors Program. He is also a former Oklahoma Poet Laureate. I wager he was not a typical student either. And yet, in this book he shows convincingly that the riches of a Christian liberal arts education are accessible and valuable for all. The defense that he offers of such an education in the age of ubiquitous screens and AI in schools is nothing short of civilizational, and it begins with asking deeper questions about education: “What do I value? What do I believe to be the nature and purpose of human beings? What do I seek as the highest good?” These questions and other related ones are not merely philosophical; they are vital for the flourishing of individuals and our society as a whole. 

Indeed, Myers muses in opening the book, in conversations with parents of prospective students and the students themselves, many are asking good questions but are not getting at the foundational questions about the purpose of education—perhaps because the foremost purpose of college for many today is instrumental. The thoroughly practical mindset of modernity has conditioned everyone, Christians included, to think in exclusively instrumental terms when planning for the future: what do I need to do to achieve the particular result? 

Thus the typical prospective college student is usually thinking about his or her desired future career and is back-tracking from there to decide on the major that will offer a pathway to that goal. To give an example of this approach, a few years ago, the chancellor of the state university system where I was teaching at the time publicized a list of careers and the number of vacancies anticipated in these careers over the next couple of decades. The message to college students (and the universities themselves) was plain: this is matchmaking (fiddler on the roof not included). Colleges just need to match current students to these fields (and the required degrees to get into them), and everyone should be set. 

Except, reality doesn’t quite work that way, Myers reminds us, and this is why thinking about biblical anthropology—who we are as persons—is so important. Perhaps the above approach would work for robots, but it definitely does not work with humans, and that is why we are living at a time of record-level turn-over in so many careers. People who thought they would love a profession learn after spending years obtaining degree credentials that the dream career isn’t what they expected. Over the years I’ve met quite a few people who have quit successful careers in medicine, law, pharmacology, education, business, and more—desirable and high-paying fields, in some cases, but they turned out to be a poor fit whether from the beginning or after some time. I myself walked away from a position as a tenured full professor in traditional academia after fifteen years, although I’m back in an academic-adjacent role now. 

There is also the issue that the list-making chancellor had not considered: career fields that existed a decade ago have thoroughly changed or disappeared, in some cases. And new fields that did not exist before are cropping up. Technology, and especially the rise of AI is changing so much. And so, the lucrative field of data analysis, into which the university system was trying to direct more students, has been remade by AI, with some jobs completely superseded by technology. Someone with an instrumental view of education as just a way to get into a career field that will disappear is going to find life challenging. But, to get back to Myers’s emphasis on anthropology, who we are as persons is not about just one particular college major that will get us into one specific career. 

The liberal arts offer a larger framework for difficult life decisions about our calling and much more besides, because they equip us to answer life’s biggest and hardest questions. Ancient history and the great epic poems of the past, for instance, show others who struggled with questions that, at their root, aren’t so different from our own. The Christian liberal arts, furthermore, equip us to remember our place in God’s creation—that we are “created in the image of God, marred by sin, and redeemed by grace.” We are very, very small—a reality that secular modernity tries to negate. But a good education calls us to love God first, rather than ourselves and our idols: “A liberal arts education aims no lower than cooperating with the Holy Spirit to enable you to ‘be transformed by the renewing of your mind’ (Romans 12:2). Such a goal is what distinguishes a truly Christian education from what is merely a secular education that happens to be provided by Christians.” To understand this idea and the significance of liberal arts education for all, Myers (ever a poet!) offers three vivid images. 

First, the cake. Imagine if you have been served a slice of the most wonderful cake you’ve ever beheld or tasted. What if you were to simply enjoy it in silence, put the plate in the sink, and walk away? It is an act of profound ingratitude for the baker. The second image involves Myers’s family home—a beautiful home that is over a century old. What would it be like if, after receiving it as an inheritance, the family did not take care of it, and preserve it for the beauty that it is? The third image is a tall mountain with a view—from there you can see farther and better than from anywhere else. These images readily speak for themselves—and they are helpful.

A good education in the liberal arts allows us, first, to be grateful for the riches we have received from writers and artists from whom we are separated by millennia. These “bakers” have “recipes” still to hand down to us—from the stunning epic poems that have been around from the days before there was a Greek alphabet, to the works of philosophy that ask questions about human life and purpose with which we continue to wrestle, to the rich promises of the Bible and beyond. Isn’t it an act of profound arrogance for us now (as some have recommended that we do) to dismiss Western civilization and its cultural artifacts as irrelevant? Surely, great works that have been relevant for millions of readers and listeners for over two millennia cannot suddenly have become outdated for us now. Besides, “We think better when we think in company, and there is no reason to limit that company to the people who happen to share our time and place. We have the great luxury of helping to ‘repair the ruins’ of the fall by thinking along with the greatest minds of the past.” Last but not least, we ignore our debts to Western civilization to our own peril: “if there were no imago Dei in ancient Israel” Myers reflects, “there would very likely be no ‘life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness’ in America.” 

Through grounding students in the classics—Greek and Roman, but also Christian, and even more modern—the Christian liberal arts education equips us for thinking of ourselves as part of a tradition rather than the sole authors of our own stories. And this change of perspective is helpful, regardless of the career the student ends up pursuing, because those immersed in the liberal arts know that their careers do not define them. 

Is Myers saying something utterly new in this book that I have never heard before? Perhaps not—although to find this coherent defense of the Christian liberal arts in one portable book is helpful. But most important, he is saying it oh-so-beautifully, reminding what a privilege it is to live in a world where there are poets—and what a gift it is that these poets teach others. And in a world too focused on practical outcomes, the beauty of both poetry and of good education is still a delight.
### My Christmas Bicycle
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/my-christmas-bicycle/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:37:01.000Z
My birthday is December 28th. When I tell people that, most of them feel sorry for me. They understandably think that having my birthday so close to Christmas is a problem. Either it doesn’t get celebrated at all or, if it is, I don’t get any birthday presents because people have just given me gifts. And that is true—at least partially true. Some of my relatives did not send a birthday card or a present, and they would say something to me on Christmas day like “this gift will count as your birthday present, as well as Christmas, ok?” As a young child, when I examined their gift and compared it to what my siblings and cousins received for Christmas, it didn’t seem to me that it was a bigger, better, more expensive gift. But I was not inclined to point that out, since my parents would have upbraided me for being materialistic and ungrateful. So I guess much of the time I did get cheated out of a full-blown birthday celebration. 

But on the occasion of my tenth birthday, I actually used the closeness of my birthday to Christmas to my advantage. I asked my Grandmother Wildeman and her daughter, my Aunt Helen, who lived with her, if I could combine my Christmas and birthday gifts from them into one BIG gift, a new bicycle. Grandma and Aunt Helen were the people from whom we received our nicest, most expensive gifts each year. My father was a minister to very poor churches throughout my childhood and youth, so we didn’t receive expensive gifts from him and my mother. My Grandmother and Grandfather McCombs were even poorer than we were, so I don’t remember even getting a small gift from them (although that could just be a problem with my memory). 

Each year, after Thanksgiving, my siblings and I were allowed to go through the Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogs to come up with a list of items we would like for Christmas. We could choose a few items from which Grandma Wildeman and Aunt Helen would normally pick two or three for each of us. Before those lists were sent, my mother would go over them very carefully to be sure we weren’t being too greedy. Usually, she would eliminate an item or two or three, the most expensive ones. Using that procedure, we would have a fairly good idea of what we would be receiving at Christmas, but still enjoy a bit of surprise when we opened our gifts. 

But the year I was to turn ten, my lack of a bicycle began to be a real problem for me. All my friends had bicycles, and they rode them everywhere. Grove City, PA was a small enough, safe enough town so that a child could go almost anywhere on his or her own. And my friends rode their bikes to school, to Little League baseball, to Boy Scouts, to the bowling alley, to the public swimming pool in the municipal park: EVERYWHERE. I knew how to ride a bicycle, and sometimes there would be a spare one for me to use. But often I was reduced to sitting on the handlebars of a friend’s bike, running alongside the gang on our way to some enjoyable activity or just meeting them somewhere later. The lack of a bike was a serious hindrance to my full engagement in social activities; I felt like a second-class citizen. 

During our annual summer vacation to Union, NJ, where Grandma and Aunt Helen lived, I brought the issue up with them one day when my parents were away, because I had mentioned the bike to my mother and father, and they had both felt I was seriously overreaching to ask for such an expensive gift. After some consideration, Grandma and Aunt Helen agreed that I could have a bicycle IF I agreed that it would be the only present I received that Christmas. My parents, my Aunt Bea and Uncle Bill and Grandma and Aunt Helen would pool their funds and get me that one big gift. Nothing else, not so much as a candy cane or a popcorn ball in my stocking. I was overwhelmed with joy—and a bit surprised—and immediately agreed. 

For the next five months, the search for the bicycle was on. My parents set a strict limit: it could cost no more than $35.00\. That might sound ridiculous in 2022, but in 1960 it was very reasonable. There were several bikes in the Montgomery Ward catalog for less than that price. So I looked each one over carefully on paper, trying to decide which features I needed to be absolutely happy. I also went to the local bicycle shop in Grove City to look bikes over in person, to sit on both 24 inch and 26 inch models to see how they felt (I was a small child, so I couldn’t manage the 26 inch bike comfortably). At the same time, I rode my friends’ bikes, asked them what they liked about their bikes, which other models they might like more. Finally, I had found the perfect bike: it was one of Montgomery Ward’s “better” bikes. (You remember that they offered “good,” “better,” “best” in every line they sold?) It was 24 inches, so that I could easily reach the pedals, bright red, what we call a “beach cruiser” these days: one gear with coaster brakes. PERFECTION! I copied out the page number and model number and sent it to Grandma and Aunt Helen.

I also tore out the page the bike was on from the catalog and taped it to the head board of my bed. For the four weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the first thing I looked at each morning and the last thing each night was my new bicycle, which was waiting for me, I knew, at Grandma’s house. I fantasized about me zipping through Grove City on my shiny new bike, outracing my friends to all our favorite places. Truly “visions of sugar plums.” 

Our family always celebrated Christmas in New Jersey. Our entire extended family on both father and mother’s sides lived in, or near, New Jersey. So no matter how far from Jersey we were living, my family drove to Jersey and stayed with my grandmother and Aunt Helen. All six of us would pack ourselves in with Grandma and Aunt Helen for the few days before Christmas. Then on Christmas day my Uncle Bill, Aunt Bea and their three sons would join us for a huge, delicious feast, followed by the opening of our long-anticipated gifts. It was, by far, my favorite day of the year. We were all very close with my father’s brother and his family, and his youngest son, Mike, was my best friend. Being with them all in a place I loved was about as good as it could get for me.

But my anticipation made the days between Thanksgiving and Christmas almost painful for me, as I played over and over in my imagination how delightful Christmas Day would be. Reflecting in old age, after a lifetime spent in the Church, I think I am not being hyperbolic when I compare my childish longing for Christmas with the longing for the Messiah’s coming expressed by the Old Testament prophets. Obviously, the two events are of very different magnitude—but I think the LONGING was very much the same.

I was a sneaky kid, and I liked nothing more than finding my presents before Christmas wherever they were hidden and doing my best to figure out what I was getting. Other Christmases, when I received much smaller gifts, I would sneak around the house, peaking in all the obvious places to hide gifts (under beds, in closets, on high shelves)—and most years I found them. In 1960 my search should have been ridiculously easy. My bike was by far the biggest gift any of us would receive, and Aunt Helen and Grandma’s house was very small. There were only two places to hide it: the cellar or the garage. So I was sure to find it well before Christmas day and enjoy stroking it, sitting on it, imagining my delight as I whizzed through Grove City with my friends, a second-class citizen no more.

My Aunt Helen knew me well. She was a very bright woman with a well-developed sense of humor. When we arrived in Union and I started my search, I discovered that the garage had been locked. And she warned me sternly NOT to go into the cellar. Since I didn’t know where the key was, there was no opportunity to search the garage. And I respected my aunt very much, so I stayed out of the cellar, no matter how much I itched whenever I passed the cellar door. For the three days before Christmas, I suffered in anticipation, longing to get my hands on my shiny red bike.

Normally, I thoroughly enjoyed Christmas: waking to the smell of roasting turkey, looking out the window, waiting for my uncle’s car to appear in the driveway, savoring the delicious feast while sitting next to my best friend, Mike, surrounded by the extended family I cherished. There was only one drawback to our annual celebration. We had to wait to open our presents until after my father and Uncle Bill washed, dried and put away the dishes. 

This particular day, I waited even more impatiently than usual for the men to finish the dishes. I had never had something so wonderful to wait for before. But the great moment finally arrived. All of us were sitting in the living room, staring expectantly at the pile of presents around the tree. My aunt announced that, because my present was by far the largest, that I would have to wait until all the other presents had been opened. I have never been patient—and the thirty minutes that passed while my siblings and cousins relished their gifts was sheer torture. I was only ten years old, pretty immature, and I was fighting back tears as one gift after another was opened, painfully slowly to my way of thinking.

FINALLY, all the presents were opened. My aunt told me I could go into the cellar. I threw open the door, turned on the light and raced downstairs to find my bike. NOTHING! No bright red bike was hiding anywhere. I walked back upstairs, gulping down my tears. “Oh,” Aunt Helen said, “I forgot that I moved it into the garage the day before you arrived.” She handed me the precious key that would open the garage.

Everyone followed me outside to share my delight. I was so excited I struggled to fit the key to the lock, struggled to make the stiff old lock turn. But I finally threw open the door, turned on the light. NOTHING! Only my aunt’s car. Even though I knew it was hopeless, I searched in front of the car, behind the car. I was devastated. My much-anticipated bike was nowhere to be found. There was absolutely nowhere Aunt Helen could have hidden it. What terrible joke had she played on me? I couldn’t help myself. To my chagrin, I burst into sobs in front of my siblings, my cousins and the adults. Looking back, I am certain that I never felt such desolation. No loss, no failure has ever felt so horrible as that one did.

I think my aunt was surprised by how violent my reaction was. She put her arm around me (though I struggled against her embrace in my disappointment and anger) and said, “Come with me.” She led me upstairs to the small bedroom where my brother and I had slept for the past three nights. I thought she was just getting me away, finding a quiet, private place to allow me to deal with my feelings. Instead, she went to the bed where I had been sleeping the entire vacation, pulled it away from the wall, pulled an afghan off a very large, thin box that was resting between the bed and the wall. Through my tears, I could read “Montgomery Ward. Bicycle. Some assembly required.” It was my bike! The ecstasy I experienced for the rest of the day, the rest of the holidays, was indescribable. I am now 71, and I can honestly say that that bike was the greatest present I have ever received.

I have thought about that Christmas present quite a bit over the years. Sitting in church recently on the first Sunday of Advent, listening to readings from the Old Testament prophets, hearing their longing for the appearance of Christ, it struck me that my experience at my tenth Christmas was, in its very small way, very much like Israel’s experience at Christ’s birth.

I think one reason many Jews rejected Christ was because they were looking for the wrong thing. They were, like me, looking for a shiny red bike, rather than a humble nondescript cardboard box. They paid attention to the descriptions of Messiah as “wonderful counsellor, mighty God,” the one who would come in power to set the world right. But they failed to hear that he would come the first time as a humble, undistinguished, suffering servant.

As a 71 year old man, I struggle with my faith. I feel hope-less quite often. I fail to experience the presence of Christ in my daily life, so I go about my days joylessly. I wait—expectantly and impatiently—for Christ to appear to me dramatically, powerfully: to FEEL the Spirit of God moving in and through me. But as I reflect on my spiritual dilemma, I wonder if my problem now is much like my bicycle problem at Christmas 60 years ago: I am looking for Christ in the wrong place, in the wrong form. For didn’t Christ tell his disciples that if they gave a cup of cold water in his name to the “least of these” they gave it to HIM? Perhaps, in seeking out the poor, the displaced, the powerless, the unattractive, I might experience the presence of Christ in an unexpected way—and find a joy like that which I experienced as a child many years ago. Perhaps Christ is as near to me as my bicycle was decades ago, when my Aunt Helen hid it in full view.
### The Enduring Relevance of Nicaea
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-enduring-relevance-of-nicaea/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:37:05.000Z
The year 2025 is the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed, and many conferences, seminars, and papers are commemorating its history and significance. Before I knew much about the creed, I would continuously hear two reasons why we do not need to take it seriously. 

First, it was said that we need only the Bible as our creed, that we do not need a man-made theology written by 4th century bishops and a pope to tell us what to believe. We should read the Bible for ourselves, and the Holy Spirit will rightly guide us. Second, the creed is too philosophical and abstract in its formula, written in ancient words and thoughts no one understands today. We just need to love others and follow the spirit of Christ in our daily and practical affairs.

Indeed, we should defer to the primacy of scripture in our thoughts about God and we should work hard to live authentic and godly lives. However, the two criticisms miss a very important aspect of the Nicene Creed--that is, it expresses an essentially biblical faith and a conscientious godliness, so says the Scottish theologian Thomas Forsyth Torrance. 

In 1988, nine years after he retired as Professor of Christian Dogmatics from New College of Edinburgh University, T. F. Torrance wrote an erudite and focused book on the patristic theology behind the Nicene Creed, *The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Faith* (published by T & T Clark in 1991). Instead of viewing the creed as a dispassionate text written under the imperial pressure and dictate of the indifferent emperor Constantine (hoping to bring peace and unity to his empire), Torrance sees the final product of a long debate from May to July about the proper wording of the basic beliefs of the universal church as a testament to the earnestness of the 318 leaders who sought to be faithful to the apostolic witness, to resist the threats of obviously contrary religious movements attached to the churches, and to undergird the faithful worshippers in these churches to endure persecutions. The careful wording of the creed is meant to guide people to understand rightly the central claims of the biblical canon, and thus to live rightly as people professing the faith of the apostles. 

The creed was not formulated in a historical vacuum. A theological range war was occurring over the teachings of Arius (a presbyter of Alexandria who died in 336). Arius argued that though Christ is the greatest and highest reality within creation, nonetheless, there was a time when Christ did not exist. Arius selected biblical passages to support this claim and subsequently to argue that God the Father is in reality supreme over the Son. However, Arius' real motivation for subordinating Christ to God the Father was philosophical--that is, an eternal being cannot ontologically mingle with a contingent being. Only God is God, Arius said, and since Christ is human, Christ cannot be equal with God the Father. Christ may be similar to God, but not essentially divine. 

Arius expressed a fundamental outlook of the Hellenized world. Plato (died in 430 BC) had argued that at the most fundamental state of existence there are two ontologically incompatible realities--the world of being and the world of becoming. Even though Plato worked hard to conceive of ways in which, for example, the virtues can almost be eternal and unchanging, they still are only representations of eternity, not permanent realities themselves. This dualism features an unbridgeable gulf between the realm of eternity and time, permanence and change, deity and creatures. 

The early church struggled with this kind of dualism from the beginning. In fact, perhaps the first list of (supposedly) authoritative books for the church was shaped by a dualistic outlook. Around 140 Marcion of Asia Minor went to Rome and presented a list of books that included only a truncated version of the Gospel of Luke and Paul's writings. His reason for this selective list was that if God is pure Spirit and not in any way mixed with the darkness and evil of creation, then the church cannot have any doctrine of the goodness of creation. Creation is a mistake, and thus, we must reject the Hebrew scriptures, for they are based on the claim that God creates the cosmos and works to redeem it. Consequently, because Jewish writers are prejudiced by the Old Testament teachings of God as the Creator of the cosmos, Marcion rejected all Jewish influence on Christianity. He kept Paul, because, as the Apostle to the Gentiles, Paul worked with a proper dualism (in Marcion's view) between the spirit and flesh, between purity and the defilement of the world. 

Marcion's appeal is mainly philosophical. God and the world cannot be mixed in any way. Consequently, he preached a gnostic doctrine of the soul's escape from the world's depravity. Salvation is an escape, not a redemption, restoration, or a new creation. If ontological dualism is true, then the apostle's claims of the "Logos became flesh and dwelt among us," of Christ being the "fullness of the Godhead bodily," of "The Father and I are one" are symbolic at best and false at worst. The true difference between Arius' dualism and the Nicene Creed is not over mere wording (that is, "same substance" versus "similar substance") but between two incompatible accounts of reality.

The Patristics sought to refute philosophical dualism, but they also wanted to reject a particular ramification of dualism--if the cosmos and our bodily existence are antithetical to the divine in all ways, then the cosmos and our creaturely existence are transitorily futile or, worse, delusional. The cosmos and our physical lives cannot be redeemed because they are irredeemable. Thus, in our creaturely state, we are locked into our sins, doomed to darkness, and destined towards nothingness. 

However, the Apostles and the early church knew such a view was wrong. They had witnessed the triune God at work in the person of Christ and in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit; they personally experienced the gift of the Spirit regenerating their lives and bestowing holiness upon them. Consequently, they accepted and affirmed the Jewish claims of a good creation, of God revealing actual divine reality, for example, to Moses at Mt. Sinai, in the Shekinah glory in the Holy of Holies, and in the words of the prophets. God can be truly real within creation. However, philosophical-theological dualism separates us from God, therefore intellectually and existentially weakens the Christian *kerygma* (that is, the proclamation of the Good News). Gregory Nazianzen (died 390) expressed clearly the reason why Christianity must reject dualism--"What is not assumed is not healed. That which is united with God, that will be saved." Because the Son of God is fully human and fully divine, the healing and redemption of the world and sinful humanity are real, not only of the soul and spirit but also of the body and the heavens and earth. Hence, it is possible to live a godly life, even in a world filled with sin, death, and evil. 

The arduous debates at Nicaea and the final Nicene Creed itself were products of the Patristic theologians and the early church's efforts to be faithful to the scriptures and to explain accurately the source of their own Christian lives.

Perhaps, the two skeptical groups (mentioned at the beginning) would most object to the ninth line of the Creed--*ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί* ("same substance with the Father"). Arius though used the word *ὁμοιούσιος* ("similar substance"). Although there is only an iota of a difference between the two words, they point to entirely different realities. Since Arius maintained that only God can be God, the human-Jesus can be only similar to God but not really divine. Contrary to Arius, Athanasius (the Patriarch of Alexandria who died in 373) started with the assumption that Jesus really *is* the incarnation of the Logos, that Jesus in his humanity *is* the fullness of the Godhead bodily. *ὁμοούσιον* is the best word Athanasius could use to express these claims, for it connotes that two things are one substance in some way. 

Athanasius did not invent the word. The Roman Neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus (died 270) used it to describe how all reality flows from the One, the indescribable ultimate reality. Even the Roman Gnostic Valentinus (died 180) chose it to describe how all truths emanate from the ultimate spiritual Mind. Origen of Alexandria (died 253) possibly (though there are some textual difficulties) used it to explain the bond between the Son of God and God the Father. Paul of Samosata in 268 used it, as well as the Libyan Sabellians a hundred years earlier (though they were not trinitarians). Thus, the word carried linguistic weight in the 4th century Mediterranean Greek speaking world, and Athanasius selected it to describe a fundamental feature of the biblical testimony of how God reveals divine reality in creation, especially in Christ as the Son of God. 

With it, Athanasius found a way to express the profound reality of Christ as the incarnate person who manifests the actual divine reality. Just as light is also radiance but still the same reality (which is Athanasius' analogy), so is Christ the same substance with God the Father. With this notion it becomes possible to envision how the Creator can unite with creation, of how an eternal being can experience creaturely existence, of how we can accurately relate to God. Thus, for Athanasius, the word *ὁμοούσιον* becomes the linguistic tool to refute dualism and to secure the church's theology and consequently her piety.

Torrance says this about the place of *ὁμοούσιον* in the Creed. 

> The evangelical significance of the *homoousion* is very apparent in its direct bearing upon the saving acts of Jesus Christ, in healing, forgiving, reconciling and redeeming lost humanity, for it asserted in the strongest way that they are all done out of a relation of unbroken oneness and communion between Jesus Christ and God the Father. (p. 141) 

Even though the word has relevance in philosophically describing the ontology of the godhead, according to Torrance its lasting impact upon the generations of Christians since the council of Nicaea is on the faith and godliness of the church. The word helps communicate a metaphysical truth about Christianity--God really does reveal the substance of deity in the person of Jesus Christ, and thereby intellectually fortifies the church's claims about Christ; hence, the word emboldens and enriches the church's preaching and the Christian life. 

We could say that a 4th century Greek word, laden with metaphysical implications, is not helpful for the 21st century church. That may be true, but the reason for its use is very relevant for today. The church (no matter what century) still must be faithful in its theology, beliefs, and practices to the scripture's witness of God and creation, of Christ as the Word made flesh. We may find better English words (or German, or Hausa, or Mandarin, etc.) than the word *ὁμοούσιον* to describe this reality, but we still must find the proper way to reject the dualism of Arius and affirm the motives and aims of the Nicene Creed.
### Freedom to be Bound: Religious Liberty from Moses to Madison
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/freedom-to-be-bound-religions-liberty-from-moses-to-madison/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:37:08.000Z
Religious liberty is a paradox. While *liberty* (from Latin *libertas*)implies a lack of constraint, the word *religious* signals the opposite. The Latin root *religio*, from *religare*,means “to bind fast.” Religion, [according to](https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12738a.htm?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) fourth-century Christian philosopher Lactantius, means that “we are tied to God and bound to Him \[*religati*\].”

The literal sense of religious liberty, then, is the *freedom to be bound*. It is a tethered liberty—liberty that implies an allegiance. At its root, it is not a freedom from constraint, but the freedom to honor higher loyalties and fulfill fundamental obligations. 

In his 1785 [*Memorial and Remonstrance*](https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-08-02-0163?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), James Madison expounded on the political implications of the paradox. Man’s ultimate duty to God relativizes every other obligation, Madison wrote. So even when man enters society and submits himself to civil government, he does so “with a reservation of his duty”—a “saving of his allegiance”—to God. 

In the Madisonian conception, religious liberty is a reservation of ultimate allegiance. It is freedom not to do what one wants but to do what one ought. Religious liberty is never self-referential—it is never liberty for its own sake. It has a *telos*. Being bound to a higher sovereign (*religio*) necessarily requires freedom from lesser authorities (*libertas*). This is the essence of religious liberty: freedom for the sake of a more ultimate allegiance.

Nowhere is the paradox more vividly illustrated than in Exodus 5\. Here we find the first demand for religious liberty in recorded history. Deeper reflection on the passage yields insights for our modern discourse.

After being called by God to deliver the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, Moses and his brother Aaron approach Pharaoh with a demand: “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.’” When Pharaoh refuses, Moses and Aaron reassert the demand, though phrased differently: “The God of the Hebrews has met with us. Please let us go a three days’ journey into the wilderness that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God, lest he fall upon us with pestilence or with the sword.” This time, Pharaoh not only refuses but retaliates, increasing the Israelites’ workload and punishments. 

From here, it’s all downhill for Egypt. Because of Pharaoh’s recalcitrance, the Egyptians suffer ten horrendous plagues, including death of their firstborn. Moses leads the Israelites out, and God miraculously delivers them from Pharaoh’s charioted army, drowning horse and rider in the sea. Thereafter at Sinai, God establishes a covenant with Israel, gives them his law, and constitutes them a nation. They will commemorate their exodus from Egypt in the yearly feast of *Pesach* (Passover).

Two features of Moses’s demands in Exodus 5 deserve our attention. (I will assume here that Moses rather than Aaron makes the demands, though the text itself is ambiguous.) 

First, Moses specifically ties his demand for freedom to religious obligation: “Let my people go, *that they may hold a feast to \[God\] in the wilderness*,’” or later, “*that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God*.” These are not demands for political liberty as such. Moses does not say, “Let my people go, *that they may establish their own form of government*.” This is no Jeffersonian call for Israel to “dissolve the political bands” with Egypt and “assume among the powers of the earth” a “separate and equal station,” to quote the American Declaration of Independence. While national sovereignty is in Israel’s future, here in Exodus 5, freedom isn’t justified on those grounds. Rather, it is tethered to religious worship.

Second, as conceived here, religious liberty is corporate, not individual. Moses demands that an entire people be set free in order to worship in the way God has commanded. This people will, of course, go on to found a religious faith of biblical proportions, giving rise to what we now call Judaism and its offshoots, Christianity, Islam, and other sects. At its core, religion is corporate in this way. It binds a people together, binds them to their God, and commits them to a particular way of life. 

This in turn gives shape to religious liberty. It is not a mere individual liberty or a liberty of self-expression. It is, rather, the freedom to join oneself to something larger and beyond oneself, to fulfill obligations that this larger “something”—or Someone—demands. This doesn’t exhaust the concept of religious liberty, of course. Especially in its modern conception, it has a significant individual component. But Exodus teaches that before religious liberty is individual, it is first communal, even covenantal.

Both features of Moses’s demands to Pharaoh reveal what religious liberty at its core really is: *libertas* for the sake of *religio*, the freedom to bind oneself to and fulfill a higher obligation.

Thus far, we have treated Moses’s demands monolithically, but they are not the same. Reflecting on their differences yields further insights.

Rewind a couple of chapters. In Exodus 3, God himself tells Moses exactly how to approach Pharaoh and what to say: “You and the elders of Israel shall go to the king of Egypt and say to him, ‘The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us; and now, please let us go a three days’ journey into the wilderness, that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God’” (3:18).

Despite the clarity of these instructions, Moses doesn’t quite follow them and instead adds his own glosses. When he goes to Pharaoh in Exodus 5, he doesn’t take the elders of Israel with him, only Aaron. His opening demand identifies the deity as “The Lord, the God of *Israel*” rather than “the God of the *Hebrews*.” The phrase “Let my people go” is a Mosaic innovation. And he initially portrays the religious obligation as absolute and unlimited rather than a simple three-day journey.

By contrast, Moses’s second demand hews more closely to the divine instruction. And herein lies a puzzle. The second demand seems far more modest than the first. It begins with “please.” It seeks a time-limited religious accommodation. And Moses even appends “lest \[God\] fall upon us with pestilence or with the sword,” perhaps appealing to Pharaoh’s self-interest in productive slave labor. Yet it is the *second* demand that sets Pharaoh off. Pharaoh responds to the first demand with a simple, almost bored refusal. He responds to the second with furious retaliation.

Why? Why does the seemingly more modest demand infuriate Pharaoh so?

The answer lies, I think, in Moses’s verbal pivot from the “God of Israel” to the “God of the *Hebrews.*” The latter phrase implies a bolder political claim, even a radical one.

Put yourself in the ancient Egyptian mind. Pharaoh was a god-king—the living embodiment of Egypt’s gods, maintainer of cosmic order, and the source and summit of both civic and spiritual life. It’s no surprise, then, that Moses’s initial appeal to “the Lord, the God of Israel” landed flat. There was no such deity in the Egyptian pantheon. At best, Moses was pointing to a foreign, local god with no power in Egypt. So it was perfectly rational for Pharaoh to respond as he did: “I do not know this god. I do not answer to him.” Insert here a dismissive wave of the pharaonic hand.

But when Moses says—as he had been instructed—that “the God of the *Hebrews* has met with us,” that was something different. For Pharaoh, that must have been a theo-political earthquake. In the original language, the key word here, “Hebrews,” is *Ivri*. The literal sense is the “people from beyond” or the “people who cross over.” This is not some local deity, Moses is suddenly saying. This is a God who crosses jurisdictional boundaries, who watches over his people wherever they may be found. A God unconstrained by geographic limits must stand above a mere local pantheon. Moses is now positing a different *kind* of God—a God of gods, a God over all. 

Pharaoh is about to learn this lesson the hard way through the experience of the plagues, each of which is intentionally designed to reverse Egyptian cosmology and demonstrate the supremacy of Israel’s God. As Moses’s father-in-law Jethro will later proclaim, “Now I know that the Lord is greater than all gods” (Ex. 18:11). But even before all this, in the dramatic royal court scene in Exodus 5, Pharaoh seems to instantly grasp the implications of the Mosaic argument. A local and distant “God of Israel” is one thing, but a transcendent and present “God of the Hebrews” is quite another. Pharaoh’s reaction is angry, swift, and punitive. 

This brings us to a third lesson this passage teaches: religious liberty necessarily limits the power of the sovereign. Pharaoh conceived of his power as divine in origin and absolute within its realm, subject only to the geographical limits over which that power could be extended. Yet in Exodus 5, Moses is proclaiming a God who transcends those limits. Moses is not simply upending the foundations of Egyptian political order. He is forever reframing the way human beings will think about political order at all. If indeed there is a God who stands above every human authority, then there is an allegiance more ultimate than human authority can ever command. 

It would have been remarkably easy for Pharaoh to permit Israel a short religious festival. Yet to grant Moses’s request, however modest it seemed, would have been to concede a more consequential principle. It would have meant accepting inherent limits on the king’s authority. It would have meant relativizing his rule. This, Pharaoh was unwilling to do. And as the biblical text makes clear, God then used that very unwillingness to demonstrate his divine power and cosmic supremacy. 

Pharaoh may be the first ruler in history to bristle at divinely ordained limits on earthly power, but he will not be the last. Nearly every king, Caesar, governor, and legislator after him will chafe at the demand for religious liberty in much the same way. 

This brings us back to Madison. What is remarkable about the United States—what is perhaps most distinctive about our constitutional republic—is that the very men who, at the founding, held political authority not only acknowledged limits to that authority but actually *locked them in*. Constitutional protection of religious liberty supplies the paradigmatic example. 

Attending to Madison’s reasoning in *Memorial and Remonstrance*, it is impossible not to hear a Mosaic echo: “\[Religious\] duty is precedent … to the claims of Civil Society,” Madison asserts, because religious man is bound to something that transcends political authority. We owe ultimate allegiance to one whom Madison calls the “*Universal* Sovereign.” 

Pharaoh, when presented with this same argument, couldn’t accept it. America’s founders, by contrast, made it a cornerstone of our system of government.
### Musical Taste, Beauty, and Love for God
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/musical-taste-beauty-and-love-for-god/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:37:11.000Z
I have a vivid memory from childhood of a well-meaning follower of Jesus nearly driving me away from the faith. At the time, my family could be found in the directory of an independent baptist church in the suburbs of Chicago. The man was a P.E. teacher, and I can’t recall if I was in Sunday school or Bible class. Either way, a small cadre of students received a lecture about how rock ’n’ roll and all other adjacent genres of music were sinful - that was a given - *and* bad for our physical health. 

I remember my gut-level, threefold response. First, there was a tinge of nervousness, because maybe he was right. I loved punk rock, not to mention hip-hop and various other implicated genres, and for better or for worse this was an authority figure.

Second, there was some disgust. I wasn’t convinced of the first part of his argument, though I lacked the intellectual ammunition and the intestinal fortitude to enter the fray, and the backend felt nothing short of conspiratorial. 

Finally, there was a commitment to secrecy. I was just rebellious enough to believe he was wrong and to continue to listen to the music I found mesmerizing, but not rebellious enough to wear that badge in public. Not very punk rock, I know. 

To this day I find his thesis woebegone. Rather than helping young people navigate the complexities of their relationship with a potent art form, the art form most likely to send my soul into the atmosphere and ground it again like the falling leaves of an autumn afternoon, he bound their consciences to a legalistic facade that would, in its best form, limit their discernment and enjoyment of a sweet gift from God.

A couple decades later, I’d like to attempt a response. Not a direct one. I’m not interested in the relationship of beats per minute, heart rate, and physiological health. Instead, I’d like to make the case that my teacher’s understanding and theology of music, and beauty more fundamentally, was emaciated to the point of masochism. Legalism is much like an eating disorder in the soul. It binds choice to instinct; it warps perception; it seeps life from the individual and those close to them. 

As with many of God’s most moving gifts to us, music is best received humbly and enjoyed in community, while acknowledging and adjusting for the limitations in oneself and one’s neighbor.

Taste in music is a wild and, at times, fickle thing. Everybody has it, and almost everybody has strong feelings about it, even when they pretend not to. There are two interweaving components of our musical taste that can be hard to distinguish, but they’re important.

Rightly concerned with the impact of algorithms on the human experience, a cultural commentator for *The New Yorker*, Kyle Chayka, articulates the first component succinctly: “Taste is a word for how we measure culture and our relationship to it.” As he sees it, taste is an attunement mechanism for what is happening around us, notably among human endeavors. It is to know what is or will or *should* have cultural cache based on what one experiences and feels in response to some created thing, whether that be food or music or whatever the mechanism is attuned to. And, it’s our intuition toward “should” that clarifies Chayka’s assessment, because our taste unavoidably affects our relationships with people. “Taste,” he argues, “borders on morality, representing an innate sense of what is good in the world.” We don’t merely feel the music (or food or whatever) we enjoy is good; we often think others ought to feel the same way. 

The reason for that inclination toward projection onto others is Chayka bumping into the second component of our musical taste, and it’s the word he avoided in his own definition. It’s taste as the capability and capacity of both creators and receivers to discern the beauty of an object. We know we’ve encountered beauty the moment it happens. Our gaze gets transfixed. Our gut opens to a chasm. Our mind enters a whirlpool. Or maybe, more simply, we’re arrested to the moment. In the eloquent words of Roger Scruton, “These moments are precious to us. When they occur it is as though, on the winding ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across a window, through which we catch sight of another and brighter world – a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter.” Human culture becomes an important ingredient for its influence on and in the making of taste, but there’s something more foundational - beauty itself.

There was a brutalist limitation in my P.E. teacher’s taste in music. His was mostly a cultural definition of beauty. Music ought to have a certain combination of instrumentation and a particular lyrical ethos. It’ll come as no surprise the cultural preference under the surface of his musical inclinations had a lot in common with America pre-1960s, and a white America at that. 

In adolescence, the nervousness and secrecy I carried regarding my own taste in music were not conducive to understanding, so it wasn’t until many years later that I began to learn why I was drawn to music in the way that I was. In fact, it took more than a decade and full geographic removal to begin to discern how my heart and mind interact with the music I hear. Here’s something interesting: lyrics have never had much of an impact on me, and that sword cuts both ways. Positive, rich, even theological lyrics…little impact. Negative, flippant, derogatory language — no problem.

Some might say I’m not attending to the music sufficiently. That may be, but you’ll find I have great interest in attending to music and encouraging others to do so. And, it’s not unique to me as a way of receiving music. 

Simultaneously, I know people who relate to music in almost precisely the opposite way. They need to hear and understand the lyrics to feel like they've listened to the music at all. For these folks vocal styles matter a great deal, because they can make or break a song on the intelligibility of the lyrics.

Here’s what’s both fascinating and confusing about the range of musical taste though: if Christianity is to be believed, beauty is objective. Beauty is real; it’s not merely a subjective experience. Despite what can feel like an individualized awareness of it, beauty transcends any one particular take. It’s out there to be discovered and cultivated. 

It took scholars like Peter Kreeft and Donald Williams to help me finally connect the dots. Beauty’s objective tie is God’s glory. So, when we experience beauty, we encounter a reflection (through a glass, darkly, as it were) of the very real glory of almighty God. 

We’re threading a fine needle here, but the beauty to glory connection explains how our experience of beauty happens on a kaleidoscopic spectrum. God’s glory is infinite and capable of wonders for which we have almost no words, and we are painfully finite and traffic in brokenness and confusion. The vast and unpredictable array and diversity of experiences with the beautiful are nearly self-evident. Some of us can hear the beauty of the accordions of polka music; some of us can hear it in the bass-boosted rhythms of hip-hop.

Our response to beauty (God’s glory) is never a limitation of beauty as such. We are the limiting factor. Likewise, our finite attempts to create beautiful things always contain the inherent limitations of human involvement, which means it is certainly the case that some artistic creations are more beautiful than others. This is why some songs ostensibly about God can feel cheap or ugly, and it’s why some of the most beautifully written songs can have abhorrent subject matter. And if you won’t grant the latter point, at least acknowledge the fact that some of the most beautiful music ever written came to us from the minds and hearts of non-Christians.

Thankfully, God’s glory is uninhibited by our imperfections and limitations, which is why beauty’s allure can be felt by all of us. And it’s why beauty can be life-changing. A mountaintop sunset. Stargazing away from light pollution. A deeply true poem. Lovely music. It’s because we’re bumping into the glory of God, and the glory of God is capable of transforming whole persons. 

These philosophical musings help make sense of one of the fascinating but noticeably strange patterns in the scriptures. The closer the characters get to God’s glory, the more inexplicable their experience becomes. Often, the author reaches indiscriminately to the outer limits of their vocabulary to get it recorded. What emerges is a pattern of God’s glory or beauty itself being measured by the extremes of awe-inspiring natural phenomena - earthquakes, lightning, jewels, etc. There simply aren’t many words capable of describing a firsthand encounter of the beautiful, which is a limitation I think we can all relate to.

The people of God arriving at Mt. Sinai, where Moses encountered God’s presence and glory, describe the mountaintop as thunder and lightning with clouds and smoke and fire and an earthquake. 

The prophet Ezekiel in numerous visions describes God’s presence as a whirlwind, a huge cloud with fire that gleams like amber. God’s own words to the prophet describe beauty with a variety of gemstones in an exquisite arrangement.

This kind of thing happens all the way to the end of the scriptures with John’s apocalyptic visions containing a corresponding linguistic impulse toward poetic pictures borrowed from nature.

We are inescapably drawn to God and his beauty; it’s an integral structural beam in the architecture of our hearts. It’s embedded in the very essence of humanity; we bring it up in the most important questions about life and meaning. Here’s the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism:

> What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.

This is what we do. And, this is what makes beauty distinctive within all of our human experiences. A genuine encounter with the beautiful can cut through us into the deepest recesses of our psychology and worship, and it can do so in an instant, like nothing else can. It’s primal and intuitive, and we may never be the same.

When Moses came down from that mountain, he’d been in much closer proximity to God’s glory than his contemporaries, and he had visibly changed. He couldn’t help it, and the people couldn’t help but see it.

There have been manifestations of the beautiful that have changed me. For example, words have that power. I’ve been instantaneously and irrevocably changed by the fiction writings of figures like C. S. Lewis and John Steinbeck and Leo Tolstoy. I’ve experienced something similar in the nonfiction of Wendell Berry and the poetry of Dante Alighieri. These writers have captured truth and goodness via beauty, and I knew in a moment I wouldn’t be quite the same.

It just so happens that lyrics don’t tend to do that to me, which is presumably a limitation in me, but the melody and accompanying music do. I feel something resonant in my chest with a collection of sounds that communicates an emotion long before the lyrics have had any real bearing. Emotions and ideas arranged in beautiful music can clarify or alter my feelings and perspective because instrumentation and melody can capture feelings better for me than words can (most of the time). That’s how beauty works, in spite of my limitations and in spite of the limitations of artists. God’s glory breaks through my faults and defenses and transforms.

That’s why my taste in music is the best. It’s why you feel similarly about your taste in music. My particular story with my requisite limitations marching in fierce pursuit of beauty and truth and goodness - that’s a recipe for beholding something real, something of God himself, and being remade by it.

All of us think our taste in music stands out because our imaginations are ignited by different artistic renderings, different manifestations of beauty, which is symmetrical and proportional to our stories and emotions. Rest easy though, the beauty is real. We have different vantage points and limitations, but the way forward and the way deeper is not to stop engaging with beauty. This was the grave error of my P.E. teacher. The heartbreaking but inevitable result of his teaching would mean the limitation of my discernment and/or my enjoyment of a sweet gift from God.

So let me put my money where my mouth is. If I were a teacher helping my middle school self process his own musical inclinations here’s what I would prioritize communicating, though perhaps not in these words:

## Love

The most essential ethic of the way of Jesus is love. It’s central to who God is, and it’s the undeniable north star of a virtuous life. The deliberate enjoyment of God’s glory (which we encounter in beauty), a proper form of loving him, is a good and foundational start. A middle schooler's desire to find and create beauty is, thus, an inherently good one. It’s one to be celebrated and empowered. The challenge is to promote and not lose sight of this perspective as we engage and make art. 

Love must motivate and clarify our relationship with art, with the artist, with other listeners/receivers, who are our neighbors, and with ourselves. The good news is the young version of me, for all of my many faults, was full of love. I loved the music I was listening to, I loved my friends and family, I loved the intersection of relationships with people and beautiful things. 

I think that basic set of impulses is unavoidably human insofar as we all bear the image of God, so it’s only in the most dire and traumatic of stories that a person might not relate to feeling full to the brim with love for certain people and various forms of beauty. What that means in practice is that love ought to be celebrated and encouraged wherever it can be found. 

In hindsight, the saddest part of my response to my P.E. teacher was the secrecy. I longed to know and be known through music, but I shelved that desire during my most formative years. I stayed secretive in more than one way around most adults, including my parents, and one of the surest ways to break down those barriers would have been in conversations about the music I was drawn to.

I gently propose the remedy can be reverse engineered. The places I might have opened back up could have begun right here with the stuff I found beautiful because it resonated deeply in my heart. With music. Admittedly, it may not be music for everybody, maybe it’s theater or hiking or cooking, but the logic holds. If my love for music had been encouraged and nourished, it’s hard to say what might have changed, but it’s not difficult to imagine a world in which I had become more trusting and vulnerable. And as a natural consequence, I might have been more open to the musical inclinations and preferences and, dare I say, recommended restrictions of the authority figures in my life. Should love have been the starting point, I would slowly but surely have wanted to learn how to love music and people even better than I had before. 

That’s how this works in practice. Love of music and love of others collides with knowledge of oneself and one’s limitations. In the words of Jesus, we love God, and we love our neighbors.

## Community

The context and culmination of artistic engagement is communal. At a minimum, even the most unintentional bump into the beautiful includes a person and God. Think of it. Aloneness fades away as we’re awestruck on the beach before a breathtaking sunrise because we’re nudged toward our Creator. To exclude God is a choice which must truncate the experience. Aimless awe has a lower ceiling than awe headed toward the infinite divine. I’ll come back to this idea in short order. 

What’s more, since beauty is a gift bestowed to all, its trajectory and experiential zenith includes a person and God and more persons. And of course this is true - God considered Adam’s aloneness in the garden in Genesis 2 to be not good, paving the way to another person. The impulse to share that which is beautiful is simply a human instinct to share in God, to be present to and delight in God’s glory together. In fact, that is at the very roots of what it is to be human. 

That’s why you should go to live shows and concerts. It’s why you should share your art with your family and friends, and you should be present to and absorb the beauty of the art of your family and friends. It’s why you should play and write music with others. At the very least, when you’ve seen or heard or felt something beautiful, Kyle Chayka is all too right, you ought to share it with others. Talk with your friends and family about the album that moves you the most. Write about a painting that captures something distinct. Make good food and delight in it with others. Take others to the place with your favorite sunset. Get into it - help one another see/hear the beauty in what moves you. Humbly listen to others’ experiences of the same. 

Should any of those actions feel difficult or aspirational, start with a question: what’s your favorite song or album? What do you love about it? Instigate relationships that include and wrestle with the beautiful. Go on the hike together; buy an extra ticket to the concert and invite a friend. Above all, account for others’ experience of beauty and learn their limitations. 

This intersection, where one’s love of beauty and love of people meet, is the very center of the challenge. It’s the creative challenge of love, and it’s where the most is at stake. You can lose your brother or gain him here. Your understanding and appreciation of beauty can be multiplied or fractured here.

If a certain song or type of music makes your friend uncomfortable or prone to wander, then you can and should adjust because of your love for them. Likewise, if your friend is in good conscience able to listen to a wide range of music, you ought not restrict them. These are the kinds of case-by-case, creative decisions that loving relationships demand. 

This was where my P.E. teacher failed so confidently yet precipitously. The root of his restrictions was something insidious masquerading as love. Either, he demanded that others find beauty in music the way that he did, thus inhibiting the connection of beauty and love that’s possible in relationships. What could have been mutual and two-way became one-way and conscience-binding. Or, he feared what certain types of music might generate in others without sufficient knowledge of their hearts and minds. Whether it was pride or fear, if you squint, you can see how he likely meant to be loving, but it’s twisted. This is not love; it’s legalism. It drove a wedge between my love of music and my interest in Jesus.

## Intention 

To defend him for a moment though, the great temptation of western cultural interactions with beauty is something like the opposite of the wrongs of my teacher. We are inundated with options and access and forceful algorithms. We’re mostly prone to consumerism and decadence. Like cartoonish royalty of a bygone era: Hey Siri, bring me my shows, my music, my daily bread with as little friction as possible. I’ll just sit here and keep scrolling.

In that context, one is painfully unlikely to discern and enjoy and share with others in God’s glory without intention. We must reawaken to beauty and love and pursue it deliberately, and it’s not because God’s glory has declined or beauty has faded. The tailwind of our culture is strongly pointed in another, addiction-forming direction.

Our general struggle isn’t with legalism; it’s with antinomianism. We lack both restrictions and any plan at all. 

In my experience we can hardly notice beauty. First, we’re flooded with economically motivated, brain-chemistry-affecting entertainment and distraction. It’s a deluge; it’s nearly omnipresent and nearly omnipotent. You already know the statistics about how many hours we all spend on our phones per day. Yet, so few of those hours cultivate beauty or connection.

Second, to do something outside of the morphine-drip of our predicament is akin to choosing physical therapy instead of narcotics. It’s more painful, slower, and has mixed results. Searching for, finding, and interacting with beauty is often laborious, draining time and attention and energy. Why make the switch at all? To view a sunset will at the very least demand getting off the couch and walking to where you can see it. Why do that when the next episode of the show I’m binging starts in five seconds?

So to this hypothetical middle school student, I’d commend intentionally and rhythmically engaging with the things they love, the things they find beautiful. I’d help them consider their options and encourage their persistence. 

Discerning the beauty of an object is a skill, which is to say it can be cumbersome and frustrating, but it’s also a task ripe for experimentation and development. And since beauty’s roots are God’s glory, we ought to. My love for and enjoyment of music only increased as I learned to play the guitar in adulthood, then again increased when I helped write and record an album. And, yes, it was a punk rock-adjacent project.

Because we’re finite, there’s a limit to how much we can prioritize and pursue, but if the result is seeing and hearing the glory of God, that we should intentionally seek it out rhythmically and prayerfully is undeniable.

## Religion 

As a pseudonymous writer recently put it, “The Church didn’t always live up to \[Jesus’s\] ideals, but it did something else: it preserved them.” Followers of Jesus ought to be practitioners of his teachings, and they normally aspire to that, but they are never less than his scribes. We refuse to forget, even though we’re prone to precisely that shortcoming. Our gargantuan group project is to continue to remind one another and point back to the staggering kindness and vital beauty of our Savior.

My final bit of advice to this middle schooler would be to do all of the aforementioned things in the context of religious practice. 

Palpable contact with the divine, or at least its rehearsal, is what rounds out our pursuit of beauty. I need to be reminded that my encounters with the sublime are not incidental or vacuous. That I’m more than a hapless wanderer in a world that has real beauty. To have our experience of beauty, our taste in music, validated by knowledge of the God who gifts it lovingly is to become more wholly human. It’s to find a home for our wandering hearts. Our aesthetic instincts are under-formed without our religious and doxological ones, because it’s akin to rewriting the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism:

What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify and to enjoy forever.

It’s missing the main point, even as it gets the actions right. To seek out beauty without allowing it to drive us toward the Source of beauty is to choose loneliness where relationship ought to be; it’s to dam the flow of the river of life. 

Go to church and become part of the life of the body of Christ. Speak and read and sing the truth to one another; receive the word and the sacraments. Occasionally it all may even strike you as beautiful. In the end, our inclination toward beauty is an inclination toward relationship with God. That’s what religion is for, so don’t allow yourself to wander far.

Love. Community. Intention. Religion. All of them overlap, of course, and each one of them was within easy reach of this middle schooler. Helping the younger version of me take steps toward the beautiful was an opportunity to help me see more clearly and love more deeply. I wouldn’t have understood it all, and I would have still made plenty of mistakes. When it’s all said and done though, the glory of God is worthy of our lives, and to enjoy it is to be made new. So, send me your favorite albums.
### Aristotle in the Coffee Shop
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/aristotle-in-the-coffee-shop/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:37:15.000Z
Picture yourself sitting at a coffee shop. At the table next to you are two friends chatting. One of them is explaining that she wants to buy a dog but cannot stand the prospect of dealing with white fur everywhere. Her friend responds simply: “Why not get a dog without white fur?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” The reply is heard, “All dogs have white fur.”

The friend hears this and is puzzled. “What are you talking about? Dogs come in all sorts of breeds, colors and patterns. You can have white, brown, black, puffy, spotted…”

“No, that’s silly,” the first insists. “All true dogs must have white fur. And I can prove it. The next dog we see will be white.”

Just then a stranger happens to stroll by the window with a big white dog in tow.

“There! A dog! And it is white! You admit it’s a dog, don’t you?”

“Yes, of course but–”

“Then why are you arguing with me? You’ve just seen with your own eyes that the creature outside has white fur and you admit it’s a dog. You clearly agree with me. Why are you making such a huge fuss? You are getting hung up on something that does not matter.”

If you or I were sitting nearby, we’d probably find the exchange maddening. Indeed, this whole scenario seems widely unrealistic. But if we study it closely we realize this is not merely a case of confirmation bias, but a structural flaw in the logic itself. It is the mistake of assuming that because a predicted result occurs, the theory behind it must therefore be true. If we read our Aristotle we would have a name for this. 

In formal logic, this is a classic case of affirming the consequent. The structure goes something like this:

If P, then Q.  
Q is true.  
Therefore, P is true.

When we plug in the variables “all dogs” and “white fur,” the flaw becomes obvious. It’s the error of using the very phenomenon we expect to see as proof of the belief that produced it. It sounds silly yet, if we’re honest, this same pattern often creeps unnoticed into our conversations on matters far more serious. 

To my mind, we encounter it most frequently in two forms: conspiracy theories and bulverism.

One of the great appeals of conspiratorial thinking is its endless speculations. We’re handed a jumble of “facts” and coincidences and then invited to weave them into one grand, all-explaining narrative. But this kind of reasoning easily collapses into affirming the consequent (among many pitfalls). This is why conversations with conspiracists often feel like they go in circles: they think they already have proof. But their “proof” is that something happened. Even clear opposing evidence is creatively absorbed into a grand theory (“That’s what they want you to think!”). 

Now, sometimes it is the case that a conspiracy theory actually does turn out to be correct. And when that happens, it can feel like a vindication of the conspiratorial mindset. But this is often no different, formally speaking, from finding a white dog on occasion. White dogs certainly exist, and a particular observation may be true, but it does not necessarily validate the hypothesis that predicted that phenomena. 

The trouble lies not in the truth of the conclusion, but in the manner by which it is reached. When the outcome is taken as proof of the very theory it was meant to test, the reasoner begins chasing his own tail. Yet time and again, we find ourselves excusing such faulty logic simply because it occasionally delivers an answer that we agree with. Yet permitting such intellectual shortcuts trains us to think poorly, exposing our minds to all manner of nonsense and danger.

This trap extends beyond tinfoil-hattery. It shows up in supposed polite conversation as well, a kind of variant of what C.S. Lewis might call the fallacy of bulverism. Bulverism works by this rule: instead of engaging with the substance of an argument, we *pre-assume* the speaker is wrong and immediately focus on explaining *why* they would hold that belief. 

Lewis illustrates it this way. Suppose we encounter a man who insists he has a million dollars in his bank account. We may be tempted to think him mad or delusional—but first, we should check the sums ourselves. If he turns out to be correct, any attempt at psychoanalyzing why he believed he had a million dollars is not only premature but entirely irrelevant. This is why C.S. Lewis provides the simple rule, “You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong.”

Of course, a person might genuinely be delusional, self-serving, tyrannical, or morally corrupt. That may even be the hypothesis we’re trying to test. But when we assume the conclusion from the start, we distort reality by interpreting every action as evidence confirming our bias, falling into the same cycle of flawed reasoning. This often manifests as: “If you’re an X-ist, you’d support Y policy. You support Y policy, therefore...” Here as well the “evidence” is merely the predicted outcome, with support for an idea taken as proof it *must* be due to prejudice, envy, virtue-signalling or other ulterior motives (see also: *Reductio ad Hitlerum*). 

In everyday talk, speaking with a bulverist can actually be more draining than arguing with a conspiracy dabbler. This is because bulverism often presents itself under the guise of empathy and moral high ground: “I am only trying to understand where you are coming from.” That of course is good polite advice. But sometimes this courteous statement hides a prior judgment. 

To the bulverist, “where you’re coming from” is already the position of the villain, so naturally, they may find your behavior “makes perfect sense” and pat themselves on the back that they have you figured out. But once that psychological profile is assigned, every word, every gesture, every attempt at clarification is absorbed into the conspiracy they themselves have constructed. 

This may be what is meant by the counsel to “assume the best” or “believe all things.” It is not a license to excuse wrongdoing, nor to find something admirable in those who are reprehensible, but a guide for sound reasoning. Our task is to test our hypotheses rigorously, seeking out counterexamples to see whether they hold up. A practical rule of thumb for the bulverist would be to pay special attention to those who defy expectations. To look for those who do not fit the psychological profile we imagine (“You are so ordinary, and yet seem to be collaborating with those who oppose you; why are you on the wrong side?”) and to judge our theory by the arguments and evidence they present.

Affirming the consequent occurs all around us. We may be unlikely to overhear the absurd conversation about dogs at a coffee shop, of course. Yet if we keep our ears and minds open, we will encounter the same error in other forms: in conversations with friends about the news, in podcasts, or even in our own psychological assessments of “the other side.” 

It is all too easy to fall into this habit of poor reasoning, to wander in a circle with no clear way out. And I think a sure sign that we are off on the wrong track is when a theory or character analysis (our own or another’s) becomes completely immune to disproof or correction, rendering it unfalsifiable. Another sign, no less telling, is that those who live by such methods often make for rather tedious company.

In any case, we might still profit from consulting someone like Aristotle who, even after all this time, continues to instruct us in the disciplines of sound thinking and good friendship.
### Light in 'Jane Austen's Darkness'
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/light-in-jane-austens-darkness/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:37:17.000Z
Drawing room banter, rustling skirts, stately bows, laughter over cards, scintillating conversation, dashing gentlemen mooning over witty girls—this is the scene many of us conjure when we think of Jane Austen. Perhaps a bit of those restrictive Regency waists and stiff, high collars, but overall, surely, “light, bright, sparkling”—the words Austen herself used to describe *Pride and Prejudice*.

In contrast, Julia Yost casts light upon the shadows in Austenland. In *Jane Austen’s Darkness*, a worthy salvo in the resistance against the chick-lit-ification of Jane Austen’s legacy, Yost elucidates the umbral features of each main novel—financial precariousness, cruel treatment of the meritorious by the foolish, and, perhaps most strikingly, the evil of the unequal marriage.

Indeed, despite the conclusion of each heroine’s travails in a happy marriage—a classic symbol of healing and restoration—Austen’s books feature more unhappy, foolish marriages than admirable ones. Even the heroine’s ultimate nuptials are not in every case cause for unalloyed consolation—in particular the Ferrars family. Yost makes the case that even for some of Austen’s protagonists, we expect something more modest than the best: a tolerably happy union, or perhaps just tolerable.

D.W. Harding’s essay “Regulated Hatred” provides a key interpretative lens for Yost’s analysis of the darker side of Austen’s works. Austen’s omniscient narrator is famously unsparing when it comes to satirizing human vices, showing how the dull and the cruel cause misery for the virtuous characters. “It is possible,” writes Yost, “to view Austen’s novels as animated by disgust with the selfish, obtuse, middling, or vicious people who dominate in families and society at the expense of the meritorious, and as haunted by the realities of precarity and poverty, sickness and death, that such people scant or exploit.” The sisters in *Sense and Sensibility* are in a similarly precarious financial and social position as were Jane and Cassandra Austen themselves, and are treated with outrageous cruelty by their own family.

Remarking upon the weight of the influence of the vicious and selfish in the world brings “temptations of cynicism and misanthropy, which assail the morally intelligent person and turn pride from a virtue to a vice.” It becomes necessary, then, both to hate hateful behavior, but also to regulate that abhorrence so that one does not become hateful oneself.

This is where Harding’s idea of “regulated hatred” comes in. How do we deal with a proper abhorrence of evil—especially when abhorrent behavior is so quotidian as to be almost conventional? In *Northanger Abbey*, for example, young Catherine Morland uncovers no titillating, hushed-up murder at the Tilney house, but is treated with capricious callousness—with an everyday viciousness.

Social convention helps—the expectation to say “thank you,” to return a call, to rise when a woman enters the room. Social convention, argues Harding, keeps “evil and stupid” people “on reasonably good terms” with one another (what would the neighbors think, after all, if we said what we *really* thought?) partly *because* it can mask wickedness and stupidity (not mutually exclusive qualities). How many violent brawls have been avoided because, well, violence can be rather messy and embarrassing? How often has someone—how often have you and I, dear reader—said, “Thank you,” and not meant it? Thank goodness for that! Otherwise we may have said something nasty and regrettable. It is better not to be authentic—better, in many cases, to be forced to mask our impatience, bitterness, and resentment because it would be rather mortifying to display our vices openly. Without such everyday hypocrisies, says Harding, life would scarcely be bearable.

Of course, the hope is that the boundaries of etiquette provide paths for us to walk in such that we are given proper consideration to each other. Our heart will not necessarily follow our hands, but the rule of “what’s done and what’s not done” often stays our hands from worser evils.

So devastating a wit as Austen, a master of mocking wicked and featherbrained behavior both, can be in danger of falling into misanthropy. But as Laura Mooneyham White argues in *Jane Austen’s Anglicanism*, Austen’s mature work places the proper use of wit in the service of virtue: goading us both to laugh at ourselves and to be better selves. White points to the older definition of candor—according to Dr. Johnson, a sweetness of temper that desires to be generous rather than to find fault—as Austen’s standard for her satire. Indeed, her greatest heroes, such as Mr. Knightley, are exemplars of who we ought to imitate.

Alas, however, though Emma can ride off with her Mr. Knightley, and the Darcys ensconce themselves at Pemberley, in ordinary life there is no clear victory for the meritorious over the meretricious. But even in Austen’s novels, fewer characters than we might think end the story good or happy, let alone in a good or happy marriage.

Perhaps the foolish, unequal marriage is darkest, or at least the most striking, thread Yost traces in Austen. To be married, *contra* Mrs. Bennet, is not the same as to be married happily. The unequal marriage, Mr. Bennet avers, is a great evil. As he tells his favorite daughter: “I know that you could be neither happy nor respectable, unless you truly esteemed your husband, unless you looked up to him as a superior. Your lively talents would place you in the greatest danger in an unequal marriage. You could scarcely escape discredit and misery.” Then he adds, with perhaps some painful reflection on his own situation: “My child, let me not have the grief of seeing you unable to respect your partner in life.” Here we sense that he feels not only is he not “looked up to” as a superior in his own marriage, but also that he does not respect his wife; indeed, neither respects the other as a spouse ought.

If, as an old saying goes, a man is the head while the woman is the heart of a family, Mrs. Bennet has too little wisdom in her heart, and Mr. Bennet’s head lacks a chest (as C.S. Lewis would say), letting his daughters grow too untended. He has been a poor spiritual steward, a neglectful husbandman, of his household, so perhaps it is appropriate that it is Mr. Gardiner who takes care of Lydia after her own father expends a tokenish energy and then returns home. (Indeed, the Gardiners have one of the few happy and admirable marriages in Austen’s entire oeuvre.)

\*

One of the most intriguing points Yost makes regards another suitor who seems to lack a chest: *Sense and Sensibility*’s Edward Ferrars.

Popular interpretations of Elinor’s sense and Marianne’s sensibility, such as Ang Lee’s film adaptation, tend to laud Marianne’s rejection of convention for rejection-of-convention’s sake, rather than for her nobility of soul and laudable, albeit undisciplined, desire for beauty and chivalry. She blinds herself to the seedy side of Willoughby’s charm, but her sadder and wiser self is able to see the true nobility of the quieter Colonel Brandon. However, asks Yost, is Elinor not also blinded by her beloved? Is she more like Jane Bennet, so fixed on thinking of the good in others that she refuses to see real moral culpability in Edward’s sloth—and hence has set herself up for a marriage in which she will need to be always the active party, the one pardoning and pitying her enervated spouse until—heaven forbid—pity finally gives way to contempt?

Where Yost really helped take Edward Ferrars down a peg for me is this question: Why did he not break his engagement with Lucy Steele if no love or attachment was left between them? Yost notes that “morally intelligent” characters in other Austen novels are quite all right with breaking engagements for good reasons—though she notes, there is more chivalric weight on the man to uphold his part (she cites Wentworth’s sense of duty toward Louisa Musgrove in feeling he *might* need to wed her). A sense of duty and chivalry is all very well, but is this what happens with Edward? Or is he indecisive and even gutless, such that he waits for the women to make the decisions for him?

Elinor, to be sure, is admirably, even heroically forbearing, but doesn’t Marianne have a point in seeing scarcely anything worthy in Edward? Is it his dullness, his not-being-an-obvious-cad (except for that bit where he dallies with Elinor’s feelings), that makes him acceptable to Elinor, in the absence of someone of real worth?

Yost notes that it is notable that Elinor believes Edward to be deserving of her, all in “a novel that stresses the necessity of sorting the meritorious from the mediocre.” The “dark” thought here is that, rather than Elinor “deserving better,” perhaps—if she truly believes Edward is meritorious when he is merely milquetoast, and therefore deceives herself—she doesn’t.

If Elinor does indeed “deserve better” than Edward, but views herself as the lucky one, does this reveal rather a lack of judgment on her part or youthful gratitude? And if she misjudges Edward, does this make her more equal—that is, more deserving—of the insipid Edward?

But what is a girl to do, when one does not find a man to look up to as a superior—if a girl is not so fortunate as Emma or Elizabeth Bennet? What if one must, in the modern parlance, “settle” in marriage—that is, settle for inequality?

Dark thoughts indeed, especially for this writer, who has always admired Elinor, but had to admit, on Yost’s reading, that Edward does seem to be a lackluster groom. In any case, we do not leave Elinor amongst friends who could be both delightful and honorable company, except for the Brandons. If Edward is even half as good as she believes him to be, she remains beset with mediocrity—unless her own merits can one day stir the coals of some virtue in Edward we haven’t yet seen. Yost does not show any such hope, but I hold out for such a turn for them. (After all, we’re told even Willoughby lived to “exert…himself,” and improved his character.)

\*

If Edward Ferrars is less than we hope he could be, is Henry Crawford of *Mansfield Park* less terrible than we think? Yost asks the provocative question: “what if the Crawfords aren’t so bad?” Perhaps they bring charm without virtue, but then they also seem to pity Fanny’s ill-usage. Yost notes that no Bertram, not even Edmund, equals the “fellow-feeling” shown by Mary Crawford when she spends an evening with Fanny in a direct response to Mrs. Norris’s heartless public reprimand for Fanny to remember her place. Indeed, though Henry Crawford is “unused to make any sacrifice to right,” and hence is vulnerable to Maria Bertram’s attentions even as he seriously pursues Fanny, his very attraction to Fanny’s virtues as well as Mary’s and his clarity of sight with regard to her unjust treatment is what opens the possibility of true happiness—that is, a life of virtue and love—for him.

To find the good appealing, even beautiful, as Henry increasingly finds Fanny to be, puts one more in the way of holiness than an abstract desire for moral rectitude. (We may look to how Jean Valjean, at age fifty-five, only becomes truly alive when he receives a “new heart” upon finding at last someone to love: “The Bishop had caused the dawn of virtue to rise on his horizon; Cosette caused the dawn of love to rise.” Love perfects virtue; or we might also say that Valjean’s earthly virtues are transfigured into the theological.) Indeed, the tragedy of Henry Crawford is that such an awakened desire is squandered before he is strong enough to pursue it to the end. Like another Henry, one Dr. Jekyll, Crawford “chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.” It is striking that, as Austen’s narrator describes his renewed flirtation with Maria as based in wounded pride rather than any affection, he is also described (albeit in a negative form) as having Fanny’s own signature virtue of constancy: “He was entangled by his own vanity, with as little excuse of love as possible, and without the smallest inconstancy of mind towards her cousin \[that is, Fanny\].”

Admittedly, Edmund is, like Edward Ferrars, unimpressive, especially when set beside those deserving heart-throbs Mr. Knightley and Mr. Darcy. But Edmund Bertram is less passive than Edward Ferrars, and Fanny’s estimation of him is not entirely colored by her naive high regard. Edmund does grow to value Fanny, if not as much as she deserves, then surely more than Edward values the longsuffering Elinor.

However, Yost points out a greater growth in character in a different corner: that of Sir Thomas Bertram, whose eyes are opened to his parental folly by the end, and who too can name his follies while also learning rightly to esteem Fanny’s virtues.

Emma Woodhouse is almost the mirror opposite to *Mansfield Park*’s heroine: Unlike the foundling Fanny, Emma is “clever” and “rich” and charming, and she needs to grow not in confidence but in humility. Where Fanny is “put in her place,” Emma is spoiled. But they are similar in perhaps a surprising way: Both are trapped, Emma by her daughterly duties to her hypochondriac father (marriage is almost out of the question), and Fanny by her near-servant’s treatment in her aunt and uncle’s home. Also like Fanny, Emma’s eventual husband is first a mentor to her, but in Mr. Knightley’s case, he has always been significantly older than she, and has never been in a brotherly position. It’s not clear that Emma is “too good” for him as Elinor and Fanny are for Edward and Edmund.

Not so with Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax. Yost describes Frank as “an Edward Ferrars who enjoys the game.” Instead of silently suffering in a secret engagement in order (supposedly) to preserve honor, the ironically named Frank relishes putting down his beloved Jane in public and openly flirting with Emma.

Jane Fairfax and Frank do seem to be ready for an unhappy life together, judging by his treatment of her and of her acceptance of him despite his caddishness. Indeed, one feels the tight corner in which both Jane and Charlotte Lucas find themselves: Charlotte worries about being a burden to her parents as an old maid, and Jane herself does not have a promising life outside of marriage.

It is doubtful Fanny and Elinor will truly respect their husbands as Elizabeth and Emma are able to do, though they are blessed at least not to be in Charlotte Lucas’s state. Hers is a calculated marriage, rather than the carousal that leads to Lydia’s (a similar carousing presumably led to Mr. and Mrs. Bennet’s own marriage). Even so, Fanny and Elinor’s marriage, though happy enough, in Yost’s reading perhaps make *Mansfield Park* and *Sense and Sensibility* her “‘problem plays,” similar to Shakespeare’s *Merchant of Venice*: For comparison, in the latter wholeness and harmony are indeed restored, but they are not without complications, and there are some things—Shylock’s treatment, the dangerous ring game of the married couples—that nag us at the end.

The examples of two fathers, Sir Thomas and Mr. Bennet, point to perhaps the greatest consequences of the unequal marriage: When one marries foolishly or wisely, one is preparing in either case a home for the natural consequence of marriage: children. The possibility, even imminence, of children in marriage makes very clear the considerations of virtue, affection, and prudence with regard to the decisions one must make in choosing a spouse. The economic is certainly a factor, for one must be able to take care of living human beings, but it is not all. Charlotte Lucas’s acceptance of Mr. Collins is a fine decision viewed mercenarily, but has Charlotte considered what kind of father her husband will be?

\*

All marriages are a mistake, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to his son Michael.

> Only a *very* wise man at *the end* of his life could make a sound judgement concerning whom, amongst the total possible chances, he ought most profitably to have married! Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the ‘real soul-mate’ is the one you are actually married to.

*Felix culpa!* None of us can see the whole of our life, as we can look at the whole of a piece of art, such as a painting, or a novel of Jane Austen. We are characters in God’s drama.

Vladimir Nabokov said that “Mansfield Park is a fairy tale, but then all novels are, in a sense, fairy tales.” And as Christians, we believe that our own dramas are, ultimately, the shape of a fairy tale—the true sort, not the trite or modern imitations. Rather, we are in a fairy tale that Tolkien would recognize, wherein we traverse in the perilous realm, the sublunar world, and there is the great good catastrophe at its finish. There is darkness aplenty in the meantime, however, and we need the most piercing discernment to see through deceit and disguise, and to see truly and to love purely.

In these pages I’ve written of [old fairy tales compared to modern ones](https://mereorthodoxy.com/modern-fairy-tale): “The old fairy tales work their magic in a different way. In the midst of a dark and grim world, they showed the power of a pure-hearted act—offering an old woman a drink of water, serving selfish sisters without complaint—to dispel the darkness.” Julia Yost helps us see more clearly the darkness that her heroines wrestle against, and we hence appreciate more clearly the good-heartedness of a Fanny Price or the discerning charity of an Elizabeth Bennet in the midst of a world so often petty and perverse.

But what about marriage? In [a review of Rachel Cohen’s *The Austen Years*](https://mereorthodoxy.com/book-review-austen-years-rachel-cohen), I noted Cohen’s suspicion of the happy ending, that she “substitutes a jaded eye.” Cohen writes: “The ends of her books are not in weddings, about which Austen generally strikes a note of uncertainty, if not outright mockery; instead, the real endings point toward adjustments that make way.”

Rather than this muddled, obfuscatory view of Austen’s endings, I proposed rather that, as Alasdair MacIntyre wrote, that Austen “wrote comedy rather than tragedy for the same reason that Dante did: she is a Christian and she sees the telos of human life implicit in her everyday form.” Austen’s endings are neither mocking, as Cohen wants it, but neither are they trite. Instead, they strike the right balance:

> In truth, Austen’s endings strike a sensible, rather than sentimental, note of virtue rewarded, entirely in keeping with her worldview, her sense of natural law, and the Great Chain of Being. \[In\] Austen’s own fiction…virtue and sacrifice are rewarded with happiness, and vice with destruction and misery. …  
>  
> For Austen, happiness is not opposed to order; marriage is not opposed to true love. Rather, marriage is the harmonizing of different keys, a generative union, an icon of eschatological hope.

Yost, in highlighting the darkness and some of Austen’s “problem endings,” helps us see that more clearly as well. No happy ending on this earth is ultimate (there was still scouring to do in the Shire at the end of Tolkien’s great fairy tale) but is an icon through which we can see rays from the last and greatest ending, that is also a new beginning.
### Secular Protestantism is America's Religion
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/secular-protestantism-is-americas-religion/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:37:21.000Z
Nearly everyone agrees that American Protestantism is in crisis. Once comprising a supermajority in the country that lasted for centuries, Protestants now [count less than 40% of Americans](https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religious-landscape-study-religious-identity/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) as adherents. Many exiting Protestants are part of the [nearly 30% of Americans](https://religionnews.com/2021/03/24/the-nones-are-growing-and-growing-more-diverse/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)—especially younger ones—who now identify with no religion (the “nones”). Explanations of declining American Protestant fortunes span a broad range in our contemporary moment, from a renewed version of the [classic secularization thesis](https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Doubt-Secularization-Society-Secular/dp/1479814288?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that religion goes private in scientific and pluralistic societies, to the increasing religious pluralism through immigration and the growth of non-Protestant religious communities, to a [Charles Taylor-esque](https://www.amazon.com/Secular-Age-Charles-Taylor/dp/0674986911?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) focus on the immanent frame and buffered selves, to sociologist [Christian Smith’s most recent book](https://www.amazon.com/Why-Religion-Went-Obsolete-Traditional/dp/0197800734?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) on the obsolescence of religion starting essentially with the Millennial generation. 

Of course, Protestants aren’t going anywhere in an absolute sense. Both “professional Protestants” (pastors and other religious workers who are Protestant) and Protestant culture remain fixtures of American society. Protestantism remains, at least in a historical sense, something unavoidable for understanding past and present American history. [Molly Worthen](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/746737/spellbound-by-molly-worthen/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) recently described this inheritance as an “exaggerated, messy version of the Reformation” that has indelibly shaped American culture, comprising “a saga of supercharged individualism and meaning-making that is unique to the United States.” To the extent, in other words, that ideals like individualism and freedom of conscience are core “American values,” we need to understand their inspiration and persistence as in significant part due to the continuing influence of Protestantism. This inheritance isn’t disappearing. But it is changing its shape and influence amid shifts in demographics, denominations, and beliefs.

Yet the decline of Protestantism is real, and not just in the demographic trends. In key sectors of society—corporate culture, higher education, the arts—Protestant influence has waned. Handwringing about this trend has launched culture wars, filled hundreds of books, articles, and podcasts, and likely thousands of sermons. The fear has been a staple of American culture since at least the Civil War, but that does not diminish the real decline in recent decades. In this sense, the United States is a country with increasingly smaller numbers of Protestants demographically, and fewer Protestants shaping American society writ large, even as the nation itself remains quite culturally Protestant.

This state of affairs doesn’t comport to the traditional understanding of secularization (the absence or privatization of religion). It also doesn’t align with the common explanation that blames, alongside the philosophical and theological rationales, [the longstanding culture war](https://www.amazon.com/Churching-America-1776-2005-Winners-Religious/dp/0813535530?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) [between](https://www.amazon.com/IMMORAL-MAJORITY-Ben-Howe/dp/0062797085?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) [liberal (or mainline) Protestants and evangelicals](https://www.amazon.com/End-White-Christian-America/dp/1501122320/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) for self- or mutual destruction: one or both sides became too politicized, too polarized, too captive to their respective cultural camps. In this view, liberal churches became indistinguishable from social clubs; evangelical churches became indistinguishable from political rallies. American Protestantism, this version goes, destroyed itself through internecine warfare.

This explanation makes some sense and has been endorsed by a wide range of commentators, as the links above to quite popular books illustrate. But there is another angle to this same quandary: what if neither side destroyed itself in the culture wars, but, in the struggle, each side actually won a significant part (and only a part) of its agenda? In fact, what if each side won in such a way that the arguments they made about the essence of Christian belief were so successful that they took on a life of their own, becoming entirely unloosed from Christianity but woven into the fabric of contemporary American religion and culture?

Examining the last century of the struggle between liberal Protestants and evangelicals reveals that each achieved remarkable cultural victories in the 20th century. These victories were not just on the cultural attitudes about the rightness and legality, or wrongness and illegality of certain practices (abortion or same-sex marriage), but related to the “deep structures” of religious culture—what [James Davison Hunter defines](https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Solidarity-Cultural-Americas-Political/dp/0300274378?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) as “the tacit assumptions and latent frameworks of meaning embedded within the structures of social life.” These deep structures are not the things we tend to argue about, but rather the things we take for granted because they seem so commonsensical or, if rejected, immediately place someone into outsider status. 

Liberal Protestants achieved their “deep culture” victory by promulgating, over the course of the twentieth century, their “liberal value set”—in [the words of sociologist Jay Demerath](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1387339?ref=mereorthodoxy.com): “individualism, freedom, pluralism, tolerance, democracy, and intellectual inquiry.” Derived from modernist theology, democratic ethics, and scientific reasoning, this set of values produced Christians who downgraded adherence to orthodoxy as a marker of Christian identity and instead extolled the ideals of pluralism and tolerance far beyond liberal Protestant circles, primarily through academia, government, and media that have been hospitable to liberal Protestantism and shape so much of the culture. The values became so ubiquitous that liberal Protestants were left with little to offer. And in a dark turn for their own cause, progressive promoters of this “liberal value set” had to contend with those same values being deployed against them in the name of expanding equality and diversity. Many non-liberal Protestants have attacked a policy like affirmative action or the liberal culture of modern university campuses using the very values that liberal Protestants and others relied on to promote them in the first place.

On the evangelical side, the resounding cultural victory was to make it virtually uncontested in American culture that a “personal relationship with God” and subjective spiritual experience were the dominant paradigms of American religiosity. As Smith writes, by the twenty-first century, evangelicals helped establish a much broader American assumption “that subjective individual experience is the litmus test of authentic faith” no matter what religion (or no religion) an American ascribed to. Yet this victory put evangelicals in a bind. It did not extend to the broader context within which evangelicals endorsed a personal relationship with God. Evangelicals never intended to convey that a personal relationship with God should be pursued apart from community and orthodox theology; however, by making that personal connection the center of spiritual life, they inadvertently did. 

Like the “[monkey’s paw](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FMonkey%27s%5FPaw?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)” parable of being careful what you wish for, both sides of American Protestantism created zombified forms of what they wanted, to a damaging effect on each of their causes and the overall health of American Protestantism. Combined, their victories contributed to a unique American version of “cultural Christianity” whose religious identity persists even as fewer people personally practice the faith. Both Liberal Protestant and evangelical churches lost their distinctive message, or—in attempts to remain relevant—doubled down on ideas that further diluted their distinctiveness. The further irony is that the growth of the “nones” and the “spiritual but not religious” evidence millions of Americans who hold both the primacy of subjective individual experience and the values of inclusivity and diversity. Once a “personal relationship with God” became the measure of authentic faith, institutional belonging, doctrinal accountability, and communal practice became optional—even suspect—for swaths of American Christians. Similarly, once liberal Protestant values became synonymous with “American values,” the distinctive contributions of mainline churches faded to the point of marginalization. The current religious landscape is, then, the product of the dual victories of liberal Protestants and evangelicals and a story as much about pyrrhic victories and unintended triumphs as gradual decline and secularization.

## **Liberal Protestant Victory: The Liberal Value Set**

The divide of American Protestantism into “[two parties](https://us.amazon.com/Souls-Social-Order-Two-Party-Protestantism/dp/0926019546?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)” is a recent development, historically speaking. It wasn’t always the case that one party advocated for the salvation of souls over against social engagement, and another party prioritized the improvement of the social order over souls. Through much of the nineteenth century, the two coexisted—never evenly or entirely, but also not clearly divided into opposing camps. The ties began to fray in light of the Civil War and Reconstruction, biblical higher criticism, Darwinism, industrialization, Jim Crow, and many other forces reshaping American society and religion. The two nascent groupings (not yet parties) of white Protestantism continued to work within the same denominations, mission fields, and seminaries. A great sorting occurred, albeit slowly, marked by moments of crisis. These included the death of the great unifying figure Dwight L. Moody in 1899; the creation, in the new Federal Council of Churches, of a Commission on Evangelism to balance its Commission on the Church and Social Service; the coining in 1920 of the label “fundamentalist” by Curtis Lee Laws to “do royal battle for the fundamentals” in the Northern Baptist denomination in 1920\. 

One tipping point that signaled a permanent break—and that charted the line between which liberal Protestants and evangelicals would mark their parties—happened in 1922\. A war of sermons and pamphlets was initiated by the most well-known liberal Protestant minister in the country, [Harry Emerson Fosdick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry%5FEmerson%5FFosdick?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Manhattan's West Village. Fosdick, a Baptist preaching in a Presbyterian pulpit, was the embodiment of the ecumenical, liberal Protestant leadership in the country. His sermon on May 19, 1922, [“Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”](https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5070/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (quotes below taken from this text), has often been interpreted as an attack on fundamentalist beliefs—the virgin birth, inerrancy of scripture, and the premillennial second coming. It *was* an attack on these beliefs, but that wasn’t Fosdick’s primary grievance. He treated these doctrinal disputes as examples of the “sin” of intolerance, which had come to define fundamentalism in his eyes. Liberals, Fosdick explained, were genuinely trying to bridge Christian faith and modern society. “The Fundamentalists,” he concluded, could not brook this attempt and “are out on a campaign to shut against \[liberals\] the doors of the Christian fellowship. Shall they be allowed to succeed?”

Fosdick sought to refute the fundamentalist assertion that certain doctrinal beliefs were essential to Christian identity. “Has anybody a right to deny the Christian name to those who differ with him on such points and to shut against them the doors of the Christian fellowship?” he asked, reaffirming the metaphor of a “door” that was to remain open to everyone based on the ideal of Christ-like hospitality. He concluded that above all, “the Fundamentalist program is essentially illiberal and intolerant.” The charge of “intolerant” or “intolerance” appeared more than ten times in his sermon. Even if the fundamentalists were right on the doctrine, Fosdick concluded, “cantankerousness is worse than heterodoxy." The liberal value set was, for Fosdick, at the core of what it meant to be a Christian, and fundamentalists were failing the test.

The fundamentalists exhibited intolerant qualities that were loathsome on their own, but particularly so, in Fosdick’s estimation, because debating the finer points of theology to quench the intolerance of fundamentalists sapped churches of the real work of Christian compassion and humanitarianism. “It is almost unforgivable that men should tithe mint, anise, and cummin, and quarrel over them,” he complained, likening doctrinal questions to ultimately inconsequential luxuries, “when the world is perishing for the lack of the weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy, and faith.” Referencing the Armenian genocide then taking place in Asia Minor, Fosdick declared that “in the presence of colossal problems…the Fundamentalists propose to drive out from the Christian churches all the consecrated souls who do not agree with their theory of inspiration. What immeasurable folly!”

Fosdick ended by sacralizing what Demerath would term the liberal value set: “God keep us always so and ever-increasing areas of the Christian fellowship: intellectually hospitable, open-minded, liberty-loving, fair, tolerant.” His own platform in New York City was significant enough to propagate these beliefs far and wide. Still, the influence of liberal Protestant intolerance for illiberal and intolerant attitudes became the bedrock of much of American elite culture—fueling liberal Protestant clerical support for civil rights, feminism, and gay rights, and opposition to the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons. Later figures like Wilfred Cantwell Smith, professor at McGill University and Harvard Divinity School through the 1980s, captured the larger frame when [he declared](https://archive.org/details/sim%5Fchristian-century%5F1960-04-27%5F77%5F17) humanity was entering an “age of minorities” where Western white people in particular “seem almost incapable of adjusting themselves to a new world.” Liberal Protestants understood themselves as bridging the gap between the old and new, the white and non-white, with the building blocks of liberal values. They were joined, and in many cases inspired, by religious minorities—liberal Catholics, liberal Jews, Mormons, and others—to create a broad coalition promoting the “liberal value set” as the essence of American values. 

Although often operating in elite circles, liberal Protestants undertook, with their allies, a long march through the institutions of American culture, ultimately shaping that culture in profound ways—from churches to faculty lounges to corporate boardrooms. The historian David Hollinger [hails](https://history.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/2011%5Fcloven%5Ftongues%5Fhollinger.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) the Young Men’s Christian Association as the paradigm of success on this front: “an organization that began in the nineteenth century as fervently evangelical and then in the twentieth century became increasingly ecumenical and egalitarian has, in the twenty-first century, proclaimed itself to be virtually secular and in the name of diversity.” No promoters of the YMCA in the early 20th century did so with the anticipation that tolerance and pluralism would become so ubiquitous in American culture that organizations promoting those values on religious grounds would become redundant. Indeed, embracing the liberal value set was key to the YMCA's success, according to [a 1963 study by sociologist Mayer N. Zald](https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315129648-6/evangelism-general-services-transformation-ymca-zald-mayer-denton-patricia?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). The organization would have been cut "off from the mainstream of American life," Zald wrote, if it had stuck to its "narrowly evangelistic goals." Today, after the YMCA has rebranded to just “the Y,” it has not so much been cut off from American life as become inconspicuous in it.

Like the Y, the footprint of the seven “mainline” denominations has seen better days, even as their championing of inclusion and diversity is received positively by most Americans on a range of issues, from rejecting racial and gender discrimination to embracing ecumenism and interfaith cooperation (taking very different forms across the political spectrum) to the [leftward drift on economics](https://news.gallup.com/poll/694835/image-capitalism-slips.aspx?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that a majority of Americans now hold. Even so, those denominations have shrunk so much in terms of membership that they [barely outnumber](https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/religious-tradition/mainline-protestant/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) the Southern Baptist Convention (which has itself declined and ceded momentum to non-denominational and charismatic forms of Christianity). If a church’s message is indistinguishable from *NPR* or the *New York Times*, what distinctive purpose does it serve?

## **Evangelical Victory: Personal Belief**

Evangelicals can also trace their deep cultural victory to 1922\. Of the many rejoinders to Fosdick’s broadside, the one that gained the most traction was written by [Clarence E. Macartney](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence%5FE.%5FMacartney?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), pastor of Philadelphia’s Arch Street Presbyterian Church. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin and Princeton Seminary, Macartney came from the same social stratum as Fosdick: white, educated, urban, Protestant. Macartney was friends with the same Protestant elite as Fosdick. This made the “sorrow and pain” of Fosdick’s words feel all the worse for Macartney.

Similar to Fosdick, Macartney’s point of contention was different than the square “fundamentals.” Though the bulk of [“Shall Unbelief Win?”](https://pcahistory.org/documents/maccartney-shallunbeliefwin.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (quotes below taken from this text), published later in the same year as Fosdick’s missive, took up a defense of the Virgin Birth and divine inspiration of the Bible, Macartney concluded that his “chief complaint against the rationalist and modernist” was not over these creedal statements. Instead, it was over Fosdick’s abandonment of the doctrine of atonement: the “rejection of the one great truth of Christianity, that through His death we have remission of our sins and are justified with God.” The individual, personal stakes of the atonement in fundamentalist and evangelical circles are obscured in the collective language in Macartney’s quote. Yet Macartney’s favored [Westminster Confession](https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/creeds3.iv.xvii.ii.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) emphasizes it is the “true believer” and “each one by himself” who is the recipient of Christ’s atoning work, and whose responsibility it is to “walk in newness of life.”

Macartney was explicit that he did not want to be classified with the fundamentalists. “The name has come to be applied to a group,” he complained, “who indeed hold to conservative views, but whose chief emphasis is upon the premillennial reign of Christ on this earth.” This doctrine was a distraction to a traditional Calvinist like Macartney, who was not a premillennialist. Yet by the very act of responding to Fosdick, Macartney had sealed his fate. Not only would he be grouped with fundamentalists, but the many conservative denominational Christians that were like him would find themselves on the same side of the watershed as fundamentalists and evangelicals with premillennialists, revivalists, tongues-speakers, and faith healers over the coming decades.

One reason among many is that the fundamentalist camp was united by an emphasis on the classic Protestant doctrine of the atonement and its role in providing redemption for each individual, which could be accepted on an individual basis, relying on a personal relationship between each person and God. In the following decades, the centrality was hardly expressed so precisely as in Macartney’s exacting Calvinism. But it was the lifeblood of fundamentalism and one of the chief continuities between the interwar fundamentalism of the likes of Macartney and Carl McIntire, and the postwar evangelicalism of Carl F.H. Henry and Billy Graham. 

It was a bridge between generations, between theologians and revivalists, between differing sects and traditions, and created a wide dispersion through its popularization and personalization. We can see it in the rapid growth of the “Sinner’s Prayer” as the near-universal mode of prompting conversions, or “decisions for Christ.” The term “Sinner’s Prayer” has a long history of alternative usage. From [Shakespeare](https://www.litcharts.com/shakescleare/shakespeare-translations/hamlet/act-3-scene-3?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to the country musician [Jimmie Davis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwc76dflaq0&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), “sinner’s prayer” meant something like the ineffective petitions to God from sinners. However, under the influence of Dwight Moody, and later perfected by Billy Graham in the 1940s and beyond, the phrase came to mean something entirely different: the initiation of a personal relationship with Jesus. Graham’s [widely circulated version](https://peacewithgod.net/steps/?outreach=LP-home&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of the prayer went: “Dear Lord Jesus, I know that I am sinful and I need Your forgiveness. I believe that You died to pay the penalty for my sin. I want to turn from my sin nature and follow You instead. I invite you to come into my heart and life. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.”

Witnessing conversions, historian Joel Carpenter [explains](https://www.amazon.com/Revive-Us-Again-Reawakening-Fundamentalism/dp/0195129075?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), became “fundamentalists’ most powerful experiences of the holy.” The soul saved from hell and brought into the presence of God through grace did for fundamentalists what signs and wonders accomplished for Pentecostals and what the Eucharist performed for Catholics. The “altar call” became the location of the climactic moment not only of revival sermons but of fundamentalist church services. Words, sounds, rhythm, and mood worked together. “This ritual,” Carpenter concludes, “performed with the musicians softly playing, the congregation singing or praying, and the leader speaking in an almost liturgical cadence, had become the high and holy moment of the fundamentalist church service, the time when miracles happened.”

The Sinner’s Prayer and the altar call are perhaps the most ubiquitous examples of the evangelical priority of a “personal relationship with God,” but they aren’t the only ones. Another was an innovation of the mid-20th century by Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru), who created the “[Four Spiritual Laws](https://www.cru.org/content/movementlife/ph/en/how-to-know-god/would-you-like-to-know-god-personally1.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).” The first—“God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life”—has probably been presented to more college-age Americans than any other religious phrase in the last 80 years.

Yet it is only the first law. The Four Spiritual Laws as a whole are, in fact, a perfect microcosm of the partial yet significant victory by evangelicals. Severed from the other three, the first law can be the basis for a thousand definitions of “God,” “love,” and “wonderful plan.” Its refrain is agile enough that, on its own, it could be favorably compared or synthesized [with Oprah](https://shop.becauseofthemwecan.com/blogs/culture/oprah-says-she-lives-inside-god-s-dream-for-her?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (“I live inside God’s dream for me”) or the [lyrics of Lady Gaga](https://genius.com/Lady-gaga-born-this-way-lyrics?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) (“I'm beautiful in my way/'Cause God makes no mistakes”). 

Yet combined with any of the other three laws, the evangelical specificity increases dramatically and the popular cultural utility decreases in equal measure: “2\. Man is sinful and separated from God; 3\. Jesus Christ is God’s only provision for sin; 4\. We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.” While reaffirming the centrality of a personal relationship with God as the basis for salvation and spiritual living, the laws, taken as a whole, direct the first spiritual law in a direction that, upon later examination, is far from the tastes of Oprah and pop music. Yet for every time an evangelical’s “full presentation of the gospel” reinforced the need for a personal relationship with God, how many more times was the message shortened or muddled (from the perspective of the “full presentation”) to be about subjective religious experience and personal authenticity as the basis for true communion with the divine (however that might be conceived)?

## **Conclusion**

Protestants were not the only active agents promoting tolerance and a personal relationship with God in the 20th century. Still, they were the most influential and well-positioned to extend these themes across American society. Before the breakup as a result of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, America was *de facto* run, in the [memorable phrase](https://archive.org/details/righteousempirep0000mart%5Fi9o8) of historian Martin E. Marty, by a Protestant “righteous empire.” Yet with its crack-up, Protestants on both sides pled their case with extra fervency, perceiving each other as competition for assuming the mantle of the American conscience and the soul of the American church and nation.

Ironically, both sides understood some of the negative tendencies of the other. Writing of the modernist camp that Fosdick claimed to speak for in 1922, Macartney predicted that “the movement is slowly secularizing the Church, and if permitted to go unchecked and unchallenged, will ere long produce in our churches a new kind of Christianity, a Christianity of opinions and principles and good purposes, but a Christianity without worship, without God, and without Jesus Christ.” Hollinger’s [conclusion](https://history.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/2011%5Fcloven%5Ftongues%5Fhollinger.pdf?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) nearly a century later is a kinder way of stating the same insight, that liberal Protestantism created “a cascade of liberalizing consequences extending well beyond the diminishing domain of the mainstream churches, running through the lives and careers of countless post-Protestant Americans distributed across a wide expanse of secular space.”

Fosdick, for his part, admitted that there were some doctrinal grey areas that fundamentalists had a right to probe within the bounds of liberal values, but predicted in 1922 that in the long run their zeal for boundary policing would become all-consuming. “There is one thing I am sure of: courtesy and kindliness and tolerance and humility and fairness are right. Opinions may be mistaken; love never is.” As the [recent survey data](https://www.amazon.com/Why-Religion-Went-Obsolete-Traditional/dp/0197800734?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) of Christian Smith reveals, Millennial and Gen Z Americans overwhelmingly are “turned off to religion” by their perception of the Christian right and have attributed to evangelicals labels like “fanatical” and, indeed, “fundamentalist.” Whether or not it comports with reality, Fosdick’s characterization has led many Americans to reject evangelicalism, even while internalizing the need for a personal commitment to God. 

The pyrrhic victories of the two parties are, of course, an oversimplification of what has happened in the last century. Religious pluralization—by immigration, the growth of non-Protestant religious communities, and the influences of technology, political polarization, and secularization—also deserve mention. But contemplating the religious-turned-cultural values can help us see ourselves today not in a death spiral toward secularism, but as continuing to be profoundly shaped by Protestant categories and concerns, albeit when appropriated selectively, often producing quite heterodox outcomes. In ways they hardly register themselves, the emerging plurality of “nones” and the “spiritual but not religious” aren’t rejecting their religious heritage but perpetuating it in unexpected ways. Recent speculation of a Gen Z “[religious revival](https://religionnews.com/2025/10/21/is-there-religious-revival-among-gen-z/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)” illustrates that the story isn’t over–this revival, if it is real, may remix inherited cultural Christianity or may reject it. In either case, Gen Z Americans who have been raised in Protestant households are on the bleeding edge of the [tens of millions of ex-Protestants](https://www.amazon.com/Nonverts-Ex-Christian-America-Stephen-Bullivant/dp/0197587445?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) who remain, in certain ways, all too Protestant, which seems to me to be a tragedy produced by a particular past, but also points to the seeds of a different future.
### How the Mere Orthodoxy Discord Helped Me Quit Twitter
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-the-mere-orthodoxy-discord-helped-me-quit-twitter/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:37:22.000Z
I wonder what the prophet Daniel’s retirement party looked like–if he even got one.

Dragged away from his homeland as a consequence of the sins of his fathers and forced to serve multiple pagan kings with a skillset given to him by the Lord, I can only imagine how Daniel felt when the day finally came and he was no longer responsible for serving the empire that ruined his life. Perhaps he never consciously saw that day; we do not know how Daniel died. Yet I imagine that, deep in his bones, he looked forward to the day when he was free of the calling the Lord had given him. He must have been eager to get out of Babylon–and get the Babylon out of him–for good.

I resonate with Daniel’s life because I too looked forward to a similar day: the day where I would be free from social media management and the horrible addiction that it brings. Specifically, I dreamed of the day I could be freed from Twitter (now X). I have been addicted to X for more than ten years, about the length of my career as a social media professional. Like Daniel, I did not ask for this. The story of how I ended up in this field, culminating in becoming the social media manager of The Gospel Coalition in the fall of 2023, is too lengthy to tell here, but suffice to say it was not a path I chose for myself. Like Daniel, I had to wrestle with the fact that what I wanted to do with my life in pursuing vocational ministry was not, in fact, what God was calling me and gifting me to do. Like Daniel, I had to learn [how to live faithfully to the Lord in Digital Babylon](https://digitalbabylon.substack.com/p/by-the-glowing-shores-of-digital?r=1r9sl), seeking its welfare while yearning for the Lord to restore the fortunes of Analog Jerusalem.

When I left my role as social media manager for TGC this past August to finally take a pastoral ministry role, I had a window of opportunity for the first time in nearly a decade to escape X for good. But leaving X was challenging for two reasons. The first is there were things I used X for that were legitimately good: people whose work I wanted to keep up with, peers that I wanted to stay in touch with, and conversations that I wanted to pay attention to. The second is that, well, I was addicted to X. The imaginative gridlock that comes from addiction, from resigning yourself to the fact that your circumstances will never change and you can never escape them, is too powerful for logic and reasoning alone to break. I had lived so long in Digital Babylon that I had just accepted that I would never get the chance to leave it. I wanted a life without X, but I could not imagine one. Where else would I go? 

But thankfully, I got out. Three months later, I never want to go back. It’s all thanks to the Society of St. Anne’s, the Mere Orthodoxy Discord server.

## **Returning to Digital Campfires**

When social media changes–and it is changing, again–it usually does by addition. Existing features are constantly adjusted, but the addiction is so deeply set in that most users register just a sigh and keep on swiping. It’s the new features of social media, added on top of platforms full of bloated features that rarely get used to begin with, that makes up most “change” in this industry. But as social media enters its maturity as a product category, every combination of text, image, and video that could exist now does in several platforms. There is competition, but also stagnation, because social media is now largely “solved”.

What then is left to change? To go back to an older way of using the Internet: huddling around digital campfires.

*Wait a minute*, you may be thinking. *I’ve been using the Internet for a long time and I’ve never heard the phrase “digital campfire”*. You’d be correct. The term is new, but the concept is not. [One marketing guide](https://www.marketerjolt.com/news/what-are-digital-campfires?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) describes them as “spaces where people can engage in deeper, more focused conversations rather than scrolling through an endless feed of content.” A digital campfire does not require an algorithm to mediate between you and the people you want to talk to. You can talk directly to them, in semi-real time, and *only* them if you wish; no unwanted ads, engagement rage bait, or AI slop required. While the term is mostly being used to describe the meteoric rise of Discord and increased importance of Reddit and Substack in the social media ecosystem, you can think of Facebook groups in the early 2010s, web forums in the 00s, even AIM chat rooms in the late 90s. As people grow tired of [“unconnected content”](https://www.fastcompany.com/91386830/meta-social-media-ftc-monopoly-response?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that leaves them alienated from the people and causes they care about, these spaces are growing in popularity once again. Traditional social media may not be going anywhere, but it is no longer the only choice on the table.

What makes the Society of St. Anne’s, Mere Orthodoxy’s Discord server, truly special are the people who use it. Only available to those with a Mere Orthodoxy membership, the server includes people from all over the world, in vocational ministry and secular trades, readers, writers, musicians, and more. Some of the conversations in the server have already born fruit outside Discord, [such as Haley Baumeister’s writing on Protestant social teaching on fertility and reproductive ethics within Christian marriage](https://substack.com/@haleybaumeister/p-169329677?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Inside-baseball conversations between pastors of different Reformed denominations can get ugly in the public spotlight, but inside the walls of the server become mutually edifying conversations serving ministers in the Reformed catholic church. This winter, a group of us are reading through C. S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, some of us for the first time. The Society of St. Anne’s has proven to be some of the best of what Christian X once was–and this, ultimately, is what convinced me that there was a life beyond X.

But the benefits of the server go even deeper for me. Social media managers have a unique perspective on how social media corrodes their souls. You routinely witness the worst of sinful human behavior at scale. You are required to view trash, slop, violent, and sexually explicit content, sometimes on an *hourly* basis. Your work goes wherever your phone goes and you do not get to look away; as I used to joke with my colleagues, “it’s my job to know so you don’t have to”. To be able to use a social media platform like Discord in ways that refresh the soul, rather than cause it to shrivel away, is an indescribable gift. To see Christians interact with each other in Christlike ways on the Internet is healing to someone who has seen–and even *studied–*some of the worst behavior among evangelicals on X. It doesn’t have to be this way, and the Society of St. Anne’s is a Christian vision for social media realized, a very small foretaste of the communion of the saints in glory to come.

## **Supporting A Worthwhile Cause**

Mere Orthodoxy is financially supported by its readers. The mission of Mere Orthodoxy is broader than running a Discord server, but the Discord server is one of the many ways Mere Orthodoxy serves pastors, theologians, seminarians, and other "Christians who are faithful, reflective, and patient \[and looking to find\] guidance, support, and encouragement as they seek to follow Jesus in our cultural moment.”

Could the Society of St. Anne’s carry on if MereOrthodoxy disappeared? Perhaps. But the shared appreciation of MereOrthodoxy and its mission fuels this community and the people who belong to it. Without MereOrthodoxy, the collaborative support, encouragement, and critique among individuals in this Discord server would not easily happen, and would make platforms like X appealing once again. To be clear: X is not going anywhere. It is a critical region of Digital Babylon, and depending on the life God has called you to live, you may not have a choice in using it. But for those who have the option to leave X–for Christians who are looking for deep conversation about worthwhile topics and fellowship without the dangerous side effects of a public algorithm–X is no longer the only place to get what Twitter once promised you.

For less than the price of an X Premium Plus subscription, you can support a rival alternative to X that is good for the souls of the Christians who use it. [Become a member of Mere Orthodoxy](https://mereorthodoxy.com/membership), join the Society of St. Anne’s, and let that satrap Musk find others to throw into his lion’s den.
### Amish Millionaires and the One 'Yes'
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/amish-millionaires-and-the-one-yes/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:37:24.000Z
Years ago, at a men’s breakfast, I listened in amazement to an 80-something-year-old Jerry Bridges share openly about an instance of fighting lust.

When our pastor followed up Bridge’s message, he immediately spoke to the discouragement that he knew many young men were feeling. The idea that we would still have to fight lust into our eighties was a daunting thought. The pastor wanted to guard against the frustration and resignation that can grow when we realize how long and inescapable the fight against temptation can be.

It’s a similar feeling that I get from knowing that there are Amish millionaires using cell phones.

Seeing solar panels above a horse and buggy would feel strange for most of us, but it's a pretty common sight across the street from my parents house. So are fluorescent yellow construction jackets hanging alongside bonnets and head coverings on a washing line while women use leaf blowers to clear the driveway. The Amish of northern Lancaster County sometimes still replace tractor tires with wooden wheels, but they have modernized in a number of other ways that uniquely demonstrate the unrelenting spread of modern life.

My uncle, who lives down the street and was a dairy farmer for most of his life, now hauls goods for various neighbors, including the Amish. And he told me two previously unimaginable things about the Amish that he works for: all of them are millionaires, and all of them use cell phones in one form or another.

It’s a little easier to accept the concept of Amish millionaires when we consider farm ownership in light of rising real estate values. But Amish cell-phone use is harder, and more disturbing: if even the Amish can’t resist the modernizing pull of cell phones, what hope is there for the rest of us to manage our phones in a healthy way?

Of course, the Amish who have cell phones (probably) don’t use them for social media and all the other soul-draining uses like so many of us do. But the feeling of knowing that they have them at all is kind of like hearing someone you admire confess sin: if even *that* person struggles, what hope is there for me?

I don’t want to become Amish and I don’t want to give up Wordle, let alone the entire internet. But somehow I felt a little safer thinking that there were some people who were (seemingly) successfully and effortlessly resisting the trappings of the modern world.

This isn’t to say that fighting the troubles of technology isn’t beneficial. I agree that [parenting can be easier without screens](https://www.newsweek.com/eliminating-screens-made-parenting-easier-not-harder-opinion-1916754?ref=mereorthodoxy.com#:~:text=But%20on%20the%20whole%2C%20not,solitaire%3B%20they%20read%20chapter%20books) and that there are significant, untapped benefits to boredom. [Fidelity to daily tasks](https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/waste-your-time-your-life-may-depend), [government regulation of smartphones](https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-soft-tyranny-of-smartphones?utm%5Fsource=jakemeador&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=the-weekly-march-25-2024) and [technological ascesis](https://www.thefp.com/p/rage-against-the-machine-ai-paul-kingsnorth?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) are all needed and of great benefit.

But the failure of the Amish to measure up to the imagined vision I had of them forces me to seek a greater solution than ascetic, disciplined commitments.

We need to see technological asceticism as a matter of both yeses and nos. John Mark Comer quotes Ronald Rollheiser as saying, “Every choice is a thousand renunciations,” and then explains, “every *yes* is a thousand *nos*. To say yes to Jesus’ invitation to apprentice under him is to say *no* to countless other invitations.”

A thousand ‘nos’ is a very hard way to frame the life we are to live, not unlike hearing that Jerry Bridges was still fighting lust in his 80s. We need a more positive framing: we don’t need to say ‘no’ less often to digital temptations, but we do need to clearly see what we are saying ‘yes’ to.

Sabbath rest is one clue toward finding the yes. To ‘sabbath’ means ‘to stop’, and this stopping is for the sake of rest. ‘Nos’ are for the sake of the ‘yes’; they go together, as paradoxical as that may be. As Comer points out: 

> No wonder the writer of Hebrews, speaking of Sabbath and its spirit of restfulness, called us to “make every effort to enter that rest.” Notice the irony of that command; we are to work hard to rest well.

The fight to say ‘no’ must be connected to the fight to say ‘yes’. Or as Flannery O’Connor put it: “The struggle to submit… is not a struggle to submit but a struggle to accept and *with passion.*”

Recently I have been rereading John Piper’s *Desiring God*, both nostalgically and critically. My criticisms of Piper remain but I’ve found the forcefulness of his driving point to seek pleasure in God to be helpfully orienting in my willingness to say thousands of no’s:

> For many… childlike wonder and awe have died. The scenery and poetry and music of the majesty of God have dried up like a forgotten peach at the back of the refrigerator.  
>  
> And the irony is that we have aided and abetted the desiccation by telling people they ought not seek their own pleasure, especially in worship.

It’s not that thoughtful asceticism towards technology is wrong or unhelpful–it’s essential! Those who advocate for ascetic responses to the troubles of smartphones and social media are not wrong, they are completely right. But we cannot end there.

It is one thing to be frustrated at the world we live in and the life of a thousand ‘nos’ that we must live–it is another thing to fall into resignation. The willingness and necessity of saying a thousand ‘nos’ can only be sustained by the pursuit of the ‘yes’ we get in God. As Piper writes, “The enemy of worship is not that our desire for pleasure is too strong, but too weak!” And to guard against resignation in the face of digital temptations, we might say, ‘the challenge to our asceticism is not that our desire for pleasure is too strong, but too weak’.

What pleasure might we gain in God when we say no to the demands of digital life?

Let us fight hard for a thoughtfully ascetic response to modernity and phones, and let's do that all the more *because* we fight for delight in God.

The Amish can be millionaires with cellphones if they will.
### Misunderstanding Porn
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/misunderstanding-porn/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:37:28.000Z
How can we stop men from looking at porn? 

There is a growing group of online provocateurs who claim that porn would cease to be a problem if more wives lost weight and turned themselves into their husband’s own “personal porn star.” (I wish I was kidding.)

This assumes that every man is walking around with some sort of horniness quotient that can be fulfilled through orgasm, much like every human requires 1500-2000 calories per day to survive. Just as one can get those calories through a grande frappuccino or a dinner of beans and rice, so people seem to assume that one can have this quotient satisfied through some kind of sexual activity.

This “horniness quotient” hypothesis (let’s call it HQ for short) is untrue. While the redpill influencers represent this view taken to its extreme, their misunderstanding is found more broadly. As deep and powerful as a person’s sexual desires are, no one will die if they are denied sexual release. A husband whose wife gets a terrible stomach virus on the night of their wedding anniversary will be disappointed, but he will not waste away from sexual starvation if he has to wait another week or two before the next time they come together. If watching porn was simply a matter of sexual release, it would not be the social catastrophe that it is. There are many ways in which people misunderstand porn, but perhaps the best way to summarize the corrections necessary is to say that *porn is not the same as physical sex and porn addiction is not merely a matter of sexual temptation*.

It may seem obvious to say that porn and sex with another person are not equivalent, but the confusion about this lack of interchangeability is fueling tolerance towards porn-watching and encouraging people to make excuses for those who are corroding their souls through this behavior. It is undoubtedly encouraging people who are watching porn to make excuses for themselves.

## The Problem

Despite a multitude of filters, books, resources, conferences, articles, and men’s groups, Christians are still watching a lot of porn and reporting that they’re addicted. (The more religiously observant someone is, the [less likely](https://www.christianitytoday.com/2019/06/pornography-conservative-protestant-men-still-resisting/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) they are to watch porn.) Sadly, more and more Christians are not only watching porn, but they are also [more likely](https://puredesire.org/beyond-porn-phenomenon/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to think watching porn is no big deal. This problem is not going away anytime soon.

There is already an abundance of resources explaining why watching porn is bad and how to quit (or [how to help people you love quit](http://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/relationships/freedom-from-porn-addiction?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)), so this essay is not about those things. Rather, it’s about correcting misunderstandings about porn that lead people who don’t value the pursuit of holiness to make excuses for watching porn. Among Christians who believe that sex is a gift of God designed for marriage, a belief in the HQ seems to [sneak in](https://madewellmarriage.wordpress.com/2024/03/12/book-review-sheet-music-by-kevin-leman/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) from time to time. These misunderstandings also confuse and frustrate Christians who understand, on some level, that watching porn is bad: how could any Christian invite such evil into their minds, particularly Christian husbands who can and do have sex with their wives?

There are probably some people for whom porn is functionally equivalent to sex—they feel sexual desire, they watch porn and masturbate, and then it’s over and done. Yet this is not the typical activity of a porn addict. They are often scrolling for hours and hours, searching for more and more intense highs. Very often this leads to a search for images that are more varied and extreme—few men, for example, start off looking at child porn, but tend to seek it out after looking at adults starts to bore them. Porn is a [hyperpleasure](https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-rise-of-hyperpleasures), a divorce from reality that reshapes the minds of those who watch it until it begins to [define](https://reason.com/2025/08/14/maga-frat-guys-and-bitter-incels-agree-sorority-girls-are-objects/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) all of their interactions. Like opioid addicts who no longer get high but use drugs just to feel “normal” and avoid withdrawal, so porn addicts are often miserable whenever they are not looking at porn.

There is a natural confusion between the nature of porn addiction and the act of looking at porn itself. This is entirely understandable for people who do not look at porn and is especially painful for wives who first discover their husband’s pornography addiction: why is an otherwise decent Christian man doing something that he knows to be sinful, harmful, and time-wasting? Why can’t a porn addict’s habit be broken by sex with his wife?

The simplest answer is to ask another question: could a Christian husband’s temptation to idolatry be broken by sex with his wife? Of course not. Neither would his anger or pride. It is like asking if a person addicted to cocaine could have their desire satisfied by eating a delicious steak. If someone’s choice to sin by looking at porn is merely a matter of sexual temptation, then overcoming this temptation is simply a matter of growing closer to Christ, and Paul’s exhortation that couples give generously to one another in 1 Corinthians 7 should be heeded. If it’s more than that, we have a much bigger problem on our hands.

Someone who is addicted to porn is almost never simply tempted by sex. For porn addicts (and many non-addicts), looking at porn is not merely a matter of giving in to sexual temptation because they are facing a whole host of other temptations. They are using porn to deal with other problems in their lives. The temptation to look at porn, in many cases, is a temptation to pride, acedia, control, despair, or any other number of sins—which is why having sex, even good marital sex, cannot fix the problem. Men who are addicted to porn can even experience a profound sense of disappointment when they have sex with their wives—for if they are hoping to get from marital intimacy what they are used to getting from porn, they will inevitably be unsatisfied. 

## The Solution

Addiction is [not one thing](https://www.patheos.com/blogs/evetushnet/2016/06/dont-medicalize-my-eschaton-or-what-if-addiction-isnt-a-thing.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), but it is at least both a disease and a choice. Medical and psychiatric authorities may not recognize porn addiction as an addiction, but it bears enough similarity to other behavioral addictions like gambling to be taken seriously as such. Even if one rejects the idea of addiction as a disease, it is undeniable that the first time someone chooses to look at porn is very different from the 500th time he or she chooses to look at porn. Breaking any addiction requires a whole host of changes to one’s life.

Recovery from porn addiction requires a wide variety of new behaviors. There is a spectrum between a purely practical intervention like an internet filter and spiritual transformation to fully appreciate the grace and love of God. It is incredibly difficult for Christians to “just say no” and white-knuckle their way through temptation when they do not give thought to all of the different temptations that porn represents for them and the different hurts that they have been using porn to numb. Indeed, many recovering porn addicts will have to take an extended period of abstinence (90 days is generally recommended) in order to train themselves to live well without sex and give their wives time to heal from the wounds caused by their betrayal.

Redpill influencers are quick to blame “dead bedrooms” and a lack of wifely vigor for men’s choices to look at porn, but the reality that every addict must face is that they have a choice to sin or not. For some men, their porn addiction was a means of self-medicating profound trauma like sexual abuse when they were children. For others, an incredibly stressful job or a terrible marriage led them to seek out porn. In any case, no matter what happened to them, it is up to porn addicts to make their lives better by staying sober from porn.

Every addict learns at some point that even if they have described a good *explanation* for why they started or continued using porn, it is up to them whether they will choose to sin or not going forward. Recovery involves not only dealing with past issues that played a role in someone’s addiction, but also preventing relapses when they encounter new griefs, disappointments, or disruptions. Even if a husband is being mistreated in his marriage (or a man is being mistreated by society, another common trope on social media), it is up to him whether or not he will make his life worse by self-medicating with porn.

Most marriages will have ebbs and flows in their sexual intensity; bearing, breastfeeding, and raising small children all sap a wife’s energy for lovemaking (both physiologically and mentally.) Christians who do not learn sexual continence will be miserable whether they are married or not, for sexual sin will create deeper and deeper forms of hunger the more that it is indulged. Porn in particular will destroy a person’s appreciation for all of life’s joys and make real sex feel miserable compared to the hyperreality of virtual licentiousness. A man’s HQ can go to infinity if he chooses to allow Satan to take him to the bottom of that pit.

The good news is that God forgives us our sins and draws us near to Him. Hanging on the Cross, Jesus Christ saw us porn addicts watching vile things and still chose to remain there so that our lives could be redeemed. The Holy Spirit gives us power to overcome sin. The God-given plasticity of our brains means that we can construct elaborate prisons in our minds to help trap us in sin, but those prisons can be torn down and rebuilt as altars to worship God.

The meaning of sex is ultimately eschatological. All erotic longings are ultimately longings for the source of all goodness, and lately I have been praying that God would help me understand that my sexual temptation is merely a desire for Him that has been misdirected. Understanding the depth and shape of that misdirection will help people stop making excuses for sin and start helping sinners recover.
### Post-Liberalism as Right Wing Deconstruction
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/post-liberalism-as-right-wing-deconstruction/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:37:31.000Z
*Deconstructors write no gospels.*  
\~ Frank Kermode

In 2006 notable intellectual, if sometimes crank, Jamie Smith argued in *Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?* for a calm down for the crescendo of Christian hysteria around so-called postmodernism. Introducing Jacques Derrida, Francois Lyotard, and Michele Foucault, he argued that while none would want to be swallowed whole by the church, they could prove insightful and even essential companions for the ails of modern evangelicalism. In their *deconstructive* accounts of power, knowledge, text, and authority they helped draw the evangelical eye not only to other perspectives, but also to the sometimes badly needed renovations in evangelicalism’s own house of modernity.

This is not that kind of argument about postliberalism. 

In fact, if anything this argument underlines one of the underemphasized anxieties about postmodernism that Smith introduces in that book: that *deconstruction*, while sometimes wholesome, necessary, prudent, can also be a house swept clean, ready for “seven other spirits more wicked than itself” (Matthew 12:45).

Because, it seems to me, to begin somewhat unoriginally, that postmodernism and postliberalism are a closely related pair. In fact, let me punch that up a bit and put this argument into a formula:

Postmodernism | political left = postliberalism | political right

Before going deep into the intellectual patronage, let’s do a vibe check.

Both postmodernism and postliberalism are fundamentally deconstructive, they are about a *critique* of something that they are in some fashion meaningfully *after*. Such communities, if they could be called that, can hardly be constructively similar because they are about – fundamentally – what they are *against*. They agree, not unlike in the spirit of today’s political factions, on what they *hate* but not on what they *love*. So, of course it’s true that postmodernism’s balance sheet is packed full with all kinds of craziness, but then the same can be said for postliberalism.

Further, they each have a kind of emotional arc: there is a permeating sense of visceral *betrayal*. Deconstruction happens often when a thing we trusted, that was solid, that was our ground, is moved out from under us. We are disoriented. We are sometimes angry. We are often sad. But we are also resentful and feel betrayed. This thing we were told was solid ground, on which we stood but a moment ago, was never as neutral, or solid, or safe as we thought. It turned out to be prejudiced. It turned out to be vaporous. It turned out to be dangerous.

That’s a vibe that postmodernism and postliberalism share.

I also think there is a rather similar intellectual pedigree to what we might call modernity and liberalism. Charles Taylor would probably fail to separate them at all, calling both intrinsic to his *modern moral order* in his ponderous, widely recognized, but less widely read *A Secular Age*. The two are hardly separable in an intellectual sense, in their views of human nature, knowledge, even morality (optionally transcendent as it may be).

In fact, when I read the complaints of famous postliberals like Patrick Deneen about liberalism I often find I could substitute modernity into the complaint and it comes out sounding more or less the same. If anything, modernity is the more sweeping category, since liberalism – at least as a *political philosophy* – could be conceived of as a narrowly technical tradition of the management of political power as, for example, Yuval Levin does. Further, liberalism has intrinsic to it a set of limiting principles – checks and balances, transparency, rule of law, separation of powers, etc- which modernity does not strictly address. But this tends not to be the liberalism that postliberals are speaking about. Or, if it is, they argue that such a limited definition of liberalism is naïve in its assumption that a whole *worldview* does not underlie these technical principles, and will not over time absorb the whole of society and culture into itself. So, in fact, the postliberals cast liberalism as something *more like* modernity: a whole world and life view, or – at least - a worldvision.

Whether we agree with the above or not is less relevant than noticing that this makes postmodernism and postliberalism remarkably similar. They are deconstructive approaches to the modern moral order that want in some meaningful way to be appreciably *post* the assumptions of that order which have, on some level, proved to them prejudicial, vaporous, and dangerous.

This is a real-life horseshoe, then, but one that is better explained by the experience of politics and economics across the different constituencies of the so-called American left and right. It was the left, in Vietnam, the collapse of Bretton Woods, the stagflation and deglobalization of the 1970s, that found their comfort in the European continentalists. The right retreated to something more like Reagan, hardly postmodern at all, hardly deconstructive. But the combination of a security shock (9/11), an economic shock (the sub-prime mortgage crisis), and the cultural and identity shocks of the pre-pandemic and then pandemic world, drove the political right into the same set of conclusions the political left reached 50-years ago: postliberalism is the right-wing version of left-wing postmodernism.

Does it matter? Well, for one I think this helps group the movements in a way that makes sense of their sometimes-startling affinities, including their somewhat disconcerting fixation on the Jews. They are both populist in their mistrust of power and elites (also where Jews come in), which is a core premise of any deconstructive school.

But perhaps the main point is these movements are not entirely intellectual. They are lagging rather than leading indicators. I do not mean very smart people are not in them; they are. What I mean is that these movements are a vibe, a feeling, especially of betrayal, and often of dispossession, sadness, rage. It may sound very intellectual, but the streams that feed that river are often more personal, more vocational, more intimately familial, more self-referential. Postliberalism is an experience and feeling put into argument. It was not an intellectual argument first. It’s about how liberalism and modernity were never neutral (which is true), but it’s also about how that betrayal becomes the focal point for why we can’t buy a house, or have more kids, or find someone to marry at all. It is about dislocation, disorientation. It is a mood.

And it’s a mood we have been in before. The political left, God willing, will find their way out of it, and make a constructive case for the goods of American life. No one is saying there are not evils nestled into American life that must still be exorcised. But exorcism is the beginning, not the end of the story. The same we can pray will be true for the political right and its dalliance into postliberalism. America is not a country of unrepentant racist imperialist thugs, anymore than it is a country of smutty, decadent patsies, losers who must rise up and reclaim a past that never existed. Both postmodernism and postliberalism have done their deconstructions. They’ve burned what they can to the ground. They’ve had their revolutions.

Now the real work of reformation begins.
### The Bog King of Athelney
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-bog-king-of-athelney/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:37:33.000Z
**I.**

Deep in the night, he groans.  
Pain twists and winds  
across his stomach, a knife  
serrated, wicked.  
Sweat beads on his brow;  
he shuts his eyes tight  
until it passes.

Weak, a fire gutters in  
the corner, feeble,  
wood gone to ashes —  
so unlike the war flames  
blazing beyond the door.  
Those fires are unquenchable.  
They strangle the heavens.

He closes his eyes again,  
and he prays to the one God.  
The king of kings.

Pagans are slaughtering  
his people. On winter hills,  
barren fields, in the ruins,  
haunted, of Rome’s old cities.  
Burned hills, now.  
Burned fields.  
Burned cities.

Burned bread lingers still  
in his nostrils, his  
fevered dreams.  
His is an empire of ashes.  
Smoke drifts above  
and here below,  
all is ash.

Bog, also, at the very edges.  
Marsh and salted brine,  
where warfires don’t reach.

**II.**

In Athelney, the Danes’ vaunted lightning  
bearer doesn’t have enough kindling.  
The wood, sticks, twigs: They’re all soaked through.

Soggy, sodden, crumbling.  
Soaked, more sweat, and Alfred cries out  
as if at the last hour, heaving, gasping,  
life on the brink, death in the shadows.  
He is King of the Bog.  
Sick, broken, lord of mud, the rushes.  
Commander of worms. Might feed them soon.

Ruler of fish, too,  
schools of them.  
An irony to that, bitter,  
and a hope barely cogent flickers:  
that his overturned throne, charred,  
is being baptized in the muck,  
made new in this frigid, swirling bracken.

But cinders cool where flames  
that hardly warmed before  
are snuffed out, thin embers dying.

Midnight’s darkness triumphs  
in Skaði’s foul  
howling wind.  
Ice in the air,  
a blade in his belly,  
and darkness.  
Hope is a foolish thing.

A splash outside, not far from the hut,  
and he brings ink-stained hands up,  
reaches for his sword, shaking,  
so frail, daring to pretend  
this is enough, that he can stand  
if the sons of Ragnar have found him.  
Or ealdormen. Wolvish Wulfhere, vipers, witan.

He shivers, waiting, thinking  
of Twelfth Night, burned bread,  
burned kingdoms. An old man at thirty.

**III.**

Wiglaf pushes past the curtain,  
bright recognition though unseen.  
Such sure certainty.

Hope is not foolish for Wiglaf.  
He has stayed when all else betrayed,  
has defied those who sold the lion of  
Wessex for false peace, empty security.  
He strikes flint on stone, sending sparks  
into the deadened fireplace — *Rest, lord —*  
and he helps Alfred back into bed.

The king sees a path that night in snatches of sleep,  
and at morn he joins Wiglaf by the fire to etch a plan,  
hand trembling, murmuring, a stick on the loamy floor.  
For he knows down deep that God may,  
when He will, replace bad with good,  
grief with happiness. And did not the Lord himself  
spend forty days in the wilderness?

Selwood. In May, at that old gathering place  
where his grandfather stood tall.  
Ecgberht’s Stone. The mottled forest’s hall.

A call for the fyrd, the shepherds, the men  
of the land who want to live as men in the land:  
Meet at Ecgberht’s Stone.

And the Bog King stirs on the margins,  
a whisper, a rumor creeping from village  
to village, on farms and now-planted  
fields, during Eostre’s fervid celebrations,  
in the white bleached bones of Rome.  
A ghost on the smoldering fringes,  
yet flesh.

The true king lives.  
He will be at Ecgberht’s Stone in May.  
Alone, those gray eyes, God-possessed  
— or, perhaps, with an army.

**IV.**

Dizzying, on the eve of that assembly  
to behold sharp stars no longer choked  
by Guthrum’s putrid smoke.

Those pinprick lights set into the firmament  
are cold, remote. Alfred’s stomach tightens  
gazing at them, yet as Íringe’s Wec wheels closer  
to first light he senses benevolence — a blessing.  
He is one of Abraham’s numberless children  
grasping at peace, security enough  
for his people to be grafted into the olive tree.  
Preserving the way, knowledge of faith,  
on this small island battered by foamy sea.  
When the stars dissipate and day breaks,  
the deposed king will know if he can stand,  
if his vision of Anglaland will advance.  
A country of schools, books, burhs to thwart  
the vikings’ bloody plans.

A weighty burden to carry, that dream, in this time.  
Kings who don’t feel the weight of the task assigned,  
who don’t answer the dark with defiance, should not be kings at all.

Alfred, burdened, does not sleep.

Rosy red dawn greets him all too soon, and  
his loyal company — then illumines the arriving  
steadfast four thousand who have journeyed  
across hills, fields, to be with him in the trees.  
No fear of heathen would hold them back.  
Nothing at all could harry that unlikely  
undaunted gathering at Ecgberht’s Stone.

They march to Iley Oak, then Ethandun,  
where, outnumbered, they cut down the Danes  
who had made great slaughter in Anglaland,  
who had thought to reverse the world’s turn to Christ  
and point the people to worship of stone and iron.  
Thor’s hammer is not all-powerful; Woden’s one eye  
cannot see all things.

Wise, patient, Alfred offers a choice to the remnant:  
Repent, bow to the one who does see all things,  
who does hold all power in His hand.

To some, this looks like folly. It is far too trusting.  
But the spear-Danes accept Alfred’s mercy, and Guthrum  
upholds his word, promised at the treaty table in May, after Ethandun.

They sit by the warming fire together, then, a feast,  
and a new pattern is writ in the hearth’s dancing flames.  
Peace in the land, for now, and a king who will forge  
peace all the more,  
immense weight laden on his shoulders,  
ever with fear and trembling before  
the throne of the King over all kings.
### Preaching for Human Persons
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/preaching-for-human-persons/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:37:34.000Z
There is nothing more vital to the health of Christ’s church than faithful preaching. The Westminster Shorter Catechism, question 89, affirms that it is the preaching of the Word of God that our God *especially* uses for the salvation and sanctification of His people.

Nevertheless, in our current evangelical landscape, there are several views and practices that have distorted the preaching of the Word. Every generation of preachers faces subtle pressure to soften their message, to impress rather than instruct, or to build a following instead of building up their congregations. However, the pulpit is not a platform for self-promotion; it is the “sacred desk” for the exposition of Christ’s Word.

The minister of the gospel stands between heaven and earth, declaring the unchanging truth of God to people who desperately need it. Such preaching may not trend online, but it nourishes souls and strengthens churches. In my mind, faithful preaching bears five essential marks: courage, simplicity, plainness, pastoral focus, and application.

## **1\. Preach with Courage**

True preaching begins with courage. Courage is not arrogance or a confrontational personality, but the conviction of the preacher’s calling. The preacher stands as an ambassador of Christ (2 Cor. 5:20). His authority does not come from eloquence, education, or personal charisma, but from the Word he proclaims. That Word must be declared in its fullness, whether or not it fits the spirit of the age.

Paul could say with clear conscience, “I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27). That included both the comforting promises and the uncomfortable commands of Scripture. Jeremiah knew the same burden: “If I say, ‘I will not mention Him,’ there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones” (Jer. 20:9).

Courageous preaching flows from a man who fears the Lord and has first trembled before God’s Word in his study. The preacher who fears God will not fear men. He is not reckless, but resolute. He speaks truth in love (Eph. 4:15), knowing that eternity is at stake every time he opens his mouth.

## **2\. Preach with Simplicity**

If courage gives preaching strength, simplicity gives it light. The goal is not to impress the listener but to make the truth plain. A sermon may be rich in theology, but if it is foggy in expression, it fails to feed the sheep.

Jesus taught with breathtaking clarity. “The common people heard Him gladly” (Mk. 12:37). He used illustrations drawn from daily life so that divine truth could be understood by ordinary people. He never diluted the message nor did He bury it under needless complexity.

Simplicity in preaching is an act of love. It takes hard work to make deep truth clear. As the Puritan William Perkins wrote in *The Art of Prophesying*, the preacher must “speak plainly and perspicuously” so that all might profit. Simplicity is not the absence of depth; it is depth delivered with clarity.

The best sermons are not those people remember as “brilliant,” but those they remember as *understood*. Faithful preachers aim not for his congregation to comprehend and apply the message.

## **3\. Preach with Plainness**

Plainness is the moral integrity of preaching. It means saying what God says, without disguise or dilution. The preacher must never turn the pulpit into a stage for clever rhetoric or vague moralism. God commands His messengers, “Cry aloud, spare not; lift up your voice like a trumpet” (Is. 58:1).

Plain preaching confronts sin and points to Christ. It does not flatter the proud or soothe the unrepentant. Thomas Watson called it “a key that fits the lock.” It unlocks the conscience and speaks directly to the sinner’s need and the Christian’s growth.

There is a pastoral tenderness in plainness too. It is not harsh speech, but honest speech. The preacher who truly loves his people will tell them the truth, even when it is unpopular. As Paul told the Galatians, “Have I then become your enemy by telling you the truth?” (Gal. 4:16). Plainness keeps the preacher small and the Word of God big. When sermons are plain, the voice of God, not the voice of man, rings loudest.

## **4\. Preach with a Pastoral Focus**

One of the most subtle dangers of our time is the temptation to preach for a platform rather than for a people. With every sermon capable of being clipped, streamed, and shared, the lure of digital numbers is real. However, pastors are not called to build online platforms; they are called to build disciples.

I vividly remember a ministerial colleague who asked if he could offer a critique of my preaching. Even though I was taken aback by a unordained man wanting to critique an ordained Teaching Elder in the PCA, I told him that he could share his concern. His comment was, “You preach like you are preaching to a congregation in Dillon, SC.” What he meant as a critique, I took as a great compliment…I was preaching to a congregation in Dillon, SC!

A faithful preacher remembers that his congregation is the one before his eyes when he looks up from the sacred desk. His congregation is the people whose names he knows, whose stories he shares, and whose burdens he bears. These are the souls God has entrusted to his care (Heb. 13:17).

When a pastor shapes sermons for social media or online platforms, he often begins preaching *at* people instead of *for* them. He crafts lines to impress the internet rather than feed the church. But the pulpit is not a stage for a performance. Preachers have missed the mark if their goal is to become an online personality. Their focus cannot be “reformation” for the nations, but promoting faith and faithfulness in his congregation.

Faithful preachers preach for their people, not for their platform. Shepherds are not influencers; they are servants. Heaven rejoices over one sinner who repents, not one post that trends.

The truest fruit of preaching is not engagement metrics but transformed lives. If your people are growing in grace, the Lord is pleased even if no one online notices.

## **5\. Preach with Application**

Finally, faithful preaching presses truth into life. Faithful preaching moves doctrinal truths from the page to the heart. “By manifestation of the truth,” Paul wrote, “we commend ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God” (2 Cor. 4:2).

Application moves the scriptures beyond “what is true” to “what must we do?” Jesus did this constantly. He did not only explain the law, He applied it. He comforted the weary, rebuked the proud, and invited sinners to Himself.

A preacher who never applies truth leaves his hearers informed but unchanged. Application requires both conviction and compassion. Faithful preachers must know the Word of God, yes, but also know the people. It means preaching not only *about* Christ but *unto* Christ, calling every hearer to trust, obey, and rejoice in Him.

## **Faithful Preaching in an Unfaithful Age**

The church does not need entertainers, commentators, or content creators. It needs men who open their Bibles, open their mouths, and declare, “Thus says the Lord.”

When preaching is courageous, it confronts sin.

When it is simple, it enlightens minds.

When it is plain, it pierces hearts.

When it is pastoral, it builds up the body.

When it is applicatory, it transforms lives.

May every preacher pray as Paul did, “that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel” (Eph. 6:19).

For when God’s Word is preached courageously, clearly, plainly, pastorally, and applicatorily, God is glorified, the church is edified, sinners find grace, and Christ is exalted. That is success. That is faithful preaching.
### The Kind of Service God Requires
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/glorious-service/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:37:41.000Z
> For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles— assuming that you have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for you, how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly. When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit. This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.  
>  
> Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace, which was given me by the working of his power. To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things, so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him. So I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you, which is your glory.  
>  
> —Ephesians 3:1-13 (ESV)

In the first and second chapters of Ephesians, Paul unveils the mysteries of creation and of Christ, who died, resurrected, and was seated in heaven so that we who were outsiders to the promise could be one with him. It seems that next, Paul should teach us how to live accordingly. But then in chapter 3, Paul suddenly hits the brakes and talks about his own ministry, and suffering. The logic as we typically understand it seems a bit off. But upon closer examination, we realize this passage is crucial.

Paul deeply understood the nature of sinners and the sinfulness of the saved. We love truth, and we love to study theology. But we spend very little time truly understanding how to live out God's life. Learning to be like God is hard. 

Often in church, we sing, "Oh Lord, consume me, send me." Then after singing these songs, everyone goes off to eat barbecue. So before continuing with his teaching, Paul first tells the saints in Ephesus, “You know this great teaching about Christ and the gospel. But let me show you how I live out this great teaching. If your life isn’t a testimony, your preaching is empty."

Some theologians have graduated from reputable theological seminaries and seem to teach flawlessly. But they do not care about holiness, and their lives are no different from sinners. This is the greatest taboo in our church. Some in the house churches are afraid of earthly powers. They say, "If the government arrests me, our church will be without me. So, without me, my church is finished." But the church is not finished without you; the church can do well without you. It is often precisely *because* of you that the church is unwell. Only without Christ will the church be finished. Without you, Christ's church continues as usual. If you read the Bible carefully, you find that God buried his servants and continued his work. 

As pastors, the biggest complaint we often hear is, "How can my congregation be so ungrateful after all I've done for them?" If you serve with such a heart, you are serving wrongly; you are serving yourself, not God. God grants you blessings and peace; people are those whom you serve. Only such service is God-centered; otherwise, our service is merely to please people.

So, dear brothers and sisters, we need to know how to serve God. Through these thirteen verses, Paul tells us two things: what kind of service God requires, and what kind of people God needs to serve him.

## **A Prisoner Praying For the Free World**

First, what is the work of glorious service? It is serving even while in prison. It may seem as though serving and being imprisoned cannot go together. When pastors meet, they ask where you serve. You might say, "I serve in Beijing, Shanghai, Vancouver, or Jakarta." Or you might say, "I serve in the Baptist Church, the Presbyterian Church, or the Evangelical Church." But few would answer, "I serve in prison." Yet pastors also serve in prison. 

I once met a theology student and asked him where he first believed in the Lord. He said, "In prison." I asked who led him to believe in the Lord. He said a pastor in prison led him to believe. I asked if it was a pastor who went to prison in order to preach and evangelize. He said, "No, it was just that when I was in prison, the pastor was also in prison." I often joke with him, saying, "To save you, God sent that pastor to prison." God is truly wonderful, sending his faithful servants everywhere, even to prison, to carry out his ministry. 

A pastor’s primary ministry is prayer. Ephesians 3:1 says, "I, Paul, a prisoner for Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles..." The first verse tells us what Paul was doing in prison. A person in prison has many things they want to do, but usually a person in prison can't do anything. But Paul was different; Paul was not idle. Paul was praying. You might say, "What's so great about praying? Lazy Christians, people-pleasing pastors, people who want something for nothing, love to pray."

I've visited prison to preach the gospel and to pray for prisoners. When I'm healthy, it is easy to pray for a sick person. That is normal. But if you think about Paul, it's different. In the churches of the free world, that haven't suffered persecution, everyone can pray. Many churches especially like to pray for persecuted churches because we like to consume the church. We enter the church as consumers and therefore many pastors and churches engage in performances that don't cost anything yet can appear very spiritual. It's a service that doesn't require payment; it's an opportunity to consume the church.

Once, I received news that a pastor from another church had been arrested. So I asked everyone to pray for them after our gathering. However, I heard a young theology student say a prayer that deeply saddened me. The prayer went, "Lord, we thank and praise you that we have not been arrested, we thank and praise you that we can gather freely. We thank and praise you for our peace." At that moment, I nearly cried out, "Lord, have you called the wrong person into ministry?" We should not engage in self-serving prayers.

What is different about Paul's prayer? First, the place of his prayer. Paul prayed in prison, whereas we like to stand on the streets or in our churches to pray. Paul said to the Ephesians, "I pray for you and I care for you, even when you can't see me.” Often the time when we most need to pray, when we have no power, instead of praising God we complain to God. But Paul, while in prison, prayed for those outside the prison; a prisoner prayed for those in the free world.

Dear brothers and sisters, do you realize that when Paul prayed, he was in a place without freedom, praying for those who were free? Just like the ministers Yang Xibo and Pastor Wang Yi, who have no freedom, but at this very moment, are praying for us. How beautiful and precious are such prayers. 

Why would someone say, “All the good fortune is yours, the suffering is mine, and yet I still bless and pray for you”? Where else could you find such a deal? Not in this world, but in the gospel, because Paul's faith was not in a religion called Christianity, but in Christ. Paul knew his calling; he knew he had received everything; he lacked nothing. "My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 4:19). Therefore, now I am to comfort others, a prisoner praying for the free.

So often, our ministry is filled with sorrow. When you find yourself in hardship, for whom do you pray? The people of the world, and selfish Christians, pray for themselves. They pray for their status, wealth, marriages, careers, for their church to be blessed and for other churches to close, so more people will come to theirs. This is the reality for many pastors.

Dear brothers and sisters, if we cannot bring people closer to God, we are failing in our calling. Thus, we see the wonder of Paul's ministry. He served you by the grace God gave him, caring for you as was his duty. He said, "You should not feel burdened, and there is no need to send money or gifts. It is not about your worthiness, but the grace given to me by God." Those of you who serve, thank God. And those of you who are served, thank God.

## **A Prisoner Who Knows the Mystery**

Next, we see Paul’s ministry in prison was to preach the gospel to the Gentiles. God called Paul to proclaim his name before Gentiles, kings, and the people of Israel. Paul said, "I am chosen to preach the gospel, to show how much one must suffer for the name of the Lord."

Most of us would like to say, "I served such and such president, or such and such official,” just as Paul testified before Caesar, before the high officials of the Roman Empire. But now that he is suffering in prison, he can also say, “I want to spread the gospel to the people in prison, and to the guards in charge of the prison.”

Where can you find a complete society? In prison. There are presidents, governors, and committee members in prison; all levels of society are there. I think the best place for a seminary would be in a prison. Today we say, "We can't afford to buy property for a seminary, could the government provide a free space?" Pastors and Christians squatting in prison, sentenced to four years, could then graduate, even with a government-recognized degree. If God wants to save the most intelligent, cunning, and sinful people, what should he do? He should send the wisest, most intelligent, and most loyal people to prison. Do you want to become the most intelligent and loyal person? Now is a good opportunity. 

Pastor Wang Yi has been sentenced to nine years to be precise, the equivalent of a Ph.D. He is almost ready to graduate. I think after he comes out, his preaching will be even more powerful. He will be able to preach to committee members in prison, to big businessmen in prison. In this world, all who were once glorious are now slowly gathering in prison.

Many pastors say, "I have no congregation, I lack sheep to shepherd." There are definitely sheep to shepherd in prison. Our biggest worry during gatherings is, "The gathering time has come, where are the people?" We can barely gather people to pray for only an hour, but it's different in prison. A pastor told me, "I preached for three hours in prison. Every time I preached for half an hour, I got tired, but the audience in prison said, 'Pastor, continue, don't stop. You have plenty of time, we have plenty of time, keep preaching.'" What a great training ground. 

We see pastors saying, "We cannot bear the cross." Our faith is a faith of life-on-life discipleship, not just saying, "I've preached, brothers and sisters, now you try to live it out." So Jesus said, "You cannot bear the cross," and therefore he bore it, and then Paul bore it, and then Timothy bore it, and then Titus bore it. Paul's biggest concern after preaching Ephesians 1-2 was, "What about you? You have been raised from the dead, you have been saved by grace, how are you living?" And in chapter 3:1-13, he says, "I am living in this mystery, in this gospel.” To truly imitate the life of Christ is to live in the life of God. Without truly breaking oneself, without living the values of Christ's life in one's own life, it is very difficult to lead anyone or to bring the spirit of God to them.

Those of Paul's generation, those who followed the Lord generation after generation, bearing the cross, chose to suffer. Suffering shapes life. In our era, many people also like to suffer. We endure much hardship for the sake of losing weight, refrain from eating what we desire, and wake up at three in the morning to run. If we are not naturally attractive, we even undergo surgery to make ourselves look more wonderful. 

Today’s preachers have learned to complain about suffering, but do you know that only through suffering can one attain glory? Some preachers, whom I call "degree collectors," spend all their time studying theology. Studying theology cannot be separated from knowing God. Do you know that with electronic books, it's very convenient for me to gather the gospel from all over the world into my computer? But how do you become a boxing expert? How do you become a master of martial arts? You must suffer, bleed, cry, and sweat. 

What is authentic service in God's kingdom? In our times, many have confused it with worldly achievements and grand enterprises. As Christians and shepherds of faith, how do we define truly meaningful service? We've begun to mirror secular leaders - acting as politicians directing world affairs, entrepreneurs expanding church territories, and investors accumulating wealth. This mindset has permeated both clergy and congregation alike. Some envision building Christian nations and establishing religious governance. Others adopt corporate strategies, creating "Kingdom Investment Funds" and developing global church enterprises. Though these endeavors may shine with apparent success, we must discern: Is this the true glory of God's kingdom, or merely its shadow?

Do you understand now what service is? We need people willing to serve in this way. A prisoner is someone without wealth, without love, without anything. But when I speak of prisoners, can you imagine a person who is upright, kind, holy, and loving? You would say that is an apostle, not a prisoner. But Paul tells us here that these two can be one. The most despised in the world are prisoners, and the most noble are apostles. But apostles on earth can be prisoners because the Lord himself could be a prisoner. 

The biggest problem for us preachers and Christians is the issue of face. We say, if someone who does not believe attacks me, then we lose face. But our Savior, when he was crucified on the cross, didn't even have a piece of cloth to cover his shame. Jesus lost both face and substance to save you. Do you still want to save face? 

Paul didn't want to save face; he served you in prison. Those who serve the Lord are shameless. If you want to save face, then don't serve God, because our Lord gave his life for you without saving his face or life. So Paul tells the church in Ephesus, "I am an apostle, now I am a prisoner; I want nothing else but to serve the Lord." What kind of prisoner is this? Paul says, "I am not a murderer or arsonist, but a prisoner who knows the mystery." 

People in prison have mysteries. A prisoner once told me, "Prison is the best place to hone skills.” He was caught for robbery, and once he was inside, he met an older more experienced robber who gave him pointers. Next time he robs, he will know how to do it with better skills. Paul says, "I also have a mystery. I know who I am, who you are, and how we together can find true peace and joy in Christ." 

More importantly, we know who God is. So Paul says, "God has given special love to the unspecial. And I can't just know the mystery; knowing the mystery gives me a mission. If my mission is to let the world know this hope, then I know how to live.” 

If someone in Thailand says that real estate will increase tenfold within five years, you wouldn’t keep it hidden, and after ten years, see what happens. You would quickly sell your house in China and hurry to invest in Thailand. So, those who know the mystery must take real action. Today, many Christians know the mystery of eternal life, but invest every day in this life and this world. I can only say that they still don't understand. 

## **The Aroma of Christ in Prison**

Everyone is incarcerated; Earth is a big prison. In America, there is a man named Elon Musk who wants to begin interstellar travel to escape Earth. But sinners tainted by sin polluted Earth, and we will pollute Mars once we get there too.

So where can you flee? The pandemic has opened many people's eyes, and it has shut many other people's eyes. After the pandemic, many pastors say, "Should I continue to stay in China, or should I go overseas to serve?" I say, "I'm not your Lord, why are you asking me?" Some say that because Pastor Wang Yi stayed, so we must stay. Others say, if we leave, the gospel can be spread globally. So there are excuses for leaving, and reasons for staying.

Why do we struggle with this question? We are all in a great prison, where the life of the jailer mirrors that of the inmate. During my university years, I worked as a security guard at a nightclub located in the basement of a dormitory for prison guards, within the prison itself. Surrounded by walls, inmates on one side and guards on the other, I observed both groups diligently keeping time and earnestly working. Whether asking a guard how long they had been there, or an inmate, the language was the same. Yet, the nightclub was different, frequented by the city's most beautiful, who were repeatedly drawn by the desires of the flesh and material wants. Is there a difference between us? No. What difference exists between us here and our brothers and sisters in prison? Not much. We are all appointed a time and place to meet God, to see him wherever we are, at any moment. Thus, we are all eventually subject to divine governance.

Everyone must die, and death is certain for all. There is a song called "The Peaceful Ox," which says, "Whether plowing or offering sacrifices, let the Lord use you." In death, the difference between the rich and the poor is slight. It is said that in ancient Egypt, the poor were wrapped with fewer spices, if any, while the rich could afford hundreds of pounds of spices for their preservation. Studying the Bible made me wonder why there was this disparity. Perhaps in death, some might smell worse than others. Yet everyone emits the scent of death, except for Christ, whose death exudes a fragrance of life, a sweet aroma even in death. Let us die in God's appointed time, and live according to his will.

Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 2:14-16, "But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life." 

We are grateful for life and death, for in both, we belong to Christ. Let us not miss any opportunity to glorify him, whether in China or abroad, in prison or free. Let us know the Lord, recognize him, and live a life of purpose, for this is the life of his Son, the eternal life, belonging to the eternal kingdom. 

*This article was originally a talk delivered to house church pastors and leaders in 2023\. This English edition, including the introduction and footnotes, are copyright © 2024 by the Center for House Church Theology. All rights reserved. Used with permission. Explore* [*the Center for House Church Theology's Resources Page*](https://housechurchtheology.com/resource-library?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) *for more resources from Chinese house church theologians and pastors.*
### The Necessity of Gratitude
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-necessity-of-gratitude/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:37:45.000Z
Gratitude is an attitude that is highly cherished culturally, socially and more so in the Christian life. Ingratitude on the other hand is frowned upon. In my culture ingratitude is likened to the sin of witchcraft. People are called out for failing to show gratitude. 

Culturally every time I do some act of kindness to my relatives, they express their gratitude and pronounce a blessing over my life. Gratitude is cherished in most cultures.

When it comes to the Christian life, gratitude is imperative. It is taught, commanded and commended as a way of life for Christians. It is something that should flow out of one’s relationship with Christ and an understanding that I brought nothing in this world and everything I have is a gift.

> “Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name. For the Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.” (Psalms‬ 100‬:4‬-5‬ NIV‬‬)

How does gratitude play out in a Christian’s life? First there is gratitude towards God for who he is and for what he has done and is doing for us. We must recognize that he is the source and sustainer of our lives. 

> “For who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?” (1 Corinthians 4:7 NIV)

This is something that Job recognized and acknowledged, even after losing everything. Despite his loss he was not filled with bitterness but praise and worship that flowed from a heart of gratitude.

> “At this, Job got up and tore his robe and shaved his head. Then he fell to the ground in worship and said: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.” In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.” (Job 1:20-22)

Gratitude flows easily and naturally when I accept that life owes me nothing and neither does anyone owe me anything. Lately as I have visited sick friends and family in hospital some of whom are totally incapacitated, I have become grateful for the gift of full body functionality. 

I realize that each person I see lying in bed, sick and incapacitated, did not choose to be in that position. Therefore, the fact that I can sit up on my bed, stand, and take a shower is a gift for which I am thankful. 

The second area in which we need to show gratitude as Christians, is towards others for their commitment to God and service to his people. Being grateful for how God is at work in and through others helps me to positively encourage them instead of seeing them as competitors.

> “We always thank God for all of you and continually mention you in our prayers. We remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Thessalonians‬ 1‬‬:2‬-3‬ NIV‬‬)

The third area to show gratitude is for what God is doing in and through us to fulfill his purpose as we serve him and his people. This should never be used as something to draw attention to us or make a name for ourselves. Instead we should be grateful for the opportunity to participate in what God is doing.

One of the things that kills gratitude is a sense of entitlement and attachment to things. If I live as though God and the world owes me something it’s hard to have a heart of gratitude. When I feel unappreciated and that am not recognized for my role and contribution, I complain and grumble instead of being grateful. 

> “Suppose one of you has a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Will he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat’? Won’t he rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink’?Will he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do?So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’” (Luke 17:7-10 NIV)

Ultimately gratitude is a mark of the Christian life. It helps me to stay focused and balanced in my service to God and his people. Wherever gratitude is missing there is strife, competition, and complaining, all of which hinder progress and fruitfulness in the Christian life.
### Gratitude and the Good Life
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/gratitude-and-the-good-life/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:37:49.000Z
What makes life beautiful, true, and even good? Many things could and should be said, from oxygen and calories to growth and confession. Each of those items, and many others, warrant attention. I want to reflect on how gratitude is a crucial yet easily overlooked element of the good life. That also means that a life of ingratitude is, by contrast, a bad life. Let’s examine each idea briefly.

First, what makes for a bad life? Perhaps two modern voices can help. 

In *The Brothers Karamazov*, Fyodor Dostoevsky tells of the devil’s visits to Ivan. The devil approaches in the darkness of night. The devil comes when he – when all – are tired and weary. In one such occurrence, the devil offers the confession that “all the best emotions, such as gratitude, are formally forbidden me.” The devil cannot express gratitude, and the devil is shown to dwell in the darkness. 

In *The Genealogy of Morals*, Friedrich Nietzsche spends some time depicting the slave morality of the many who willingly take upon themselves or, at the very least, willingly persist in the shackles of weakness. Religion – especially Christianity – is a gateway to this enslavement and this persistent yoke. Such enslaved persons find it might difficult to fix their own circumstances, much less their own character. *Ressentiment* or contemptuous resentment is the far more appetizing posture they can much more easily express. Of them, Nietzsche says that their contempt ensures that their “soul squints.” They can no longer see wide, far, and true.

The bad life is dark and narrow. It wanders as at night, and it journeys with but a squinting eye watching round about. The ungrateful soul can’t take in reality as its truly is. The thankless fool can only turn contemptuously to gripe atof others. Such is the devilish path. Thus leads the way of slavery.

Second, what makes for the good life then? Here two scriptures prove instructive. 

In Colossians 3, Paul seeks to direct Christians in Colossae to set their minds above. It is not mere moral exhortation, however, for he offers promise. “Let the Word of Christ dwell richly in you” (Col. 3:16). Here is the offer of Christ’s Speech not only coming to one, but dwelling within one. In that respect, it is intimate and abiding. Here too is the pledge of a Word from Christ that dwells “richly” in one’s midst. It is not a meager word and has not a small impact. It is a word with excessive generosity. With this summons to “let” this word dwell in you to that rich effect, Paul goes on to list a variety of means by which the Word abides. They appear in participial form, each modifying or characterizing the way the Christ’s Word dwells richly. Several things are said, but one alone is repeated. 

When you are “singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs,” be doing so “with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Col. 3:16). And then “whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col. 3:17). Sing with thankfulness – do everything as one giving thanks to God. The repetition conveys emphasis. The two statements portray gratitude as something one discretely does in singing thanks but also a posture or manner by which one does everything, gratefully before God the Father for Christ’s sake. Gratitude and thanks are here named as a means of grace, whereby Christ’s Word dwells richly. If you want the good life and want to know something increasingly of God’s rich generosity, then be grateful by singing thanks and by walking thankfully in and through all things. Gratitude is the way to such riches, because it marks the life of one in whom God dwells by his Word. 

In Ephesians 5, the same Paul writes to a range of Christians – in this circulating letter – about similar matters, albeit in a fresh and complementary manner. Paul warns against an unproductive behavior: “Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery” (Eph. 5:18). Paul is not content simply to rebut a bad pathway, however, for he goes on to address the underlying concern in his next statement: “Be filled with the Spirit” (5:18). Why does one get drunk? Other reasons can factor in, but surely the most frequent prompt would be the difficulties of life. There are seemingly intractable challenges without and within. If I can’t fix them or even myself, then I am left with the promise of hurt. Perhaps the only viable pathway is to numb the pain and disappointment with drink or pills. Paul warns against such a counterproductive response to pain and difficulty, but he in no way minimizes the pain or struggle. “The days are evil” (Eph. 5:16). 

The wise path is neither to wallow in the difficulty nor to tap out by use of a chemical aid. The call instead is to receive strength from God alone. “Be filled with the Spirit,” we are told. The Spirit comes to us in the evil age and our sense of weak insufficiency. He comes not merely to keep us going and to maintain us in a survival state. He comes to fill us, invoking language thate has resonated throughout the epistle thus far (see 1:23 and 4:10). As in Col. 3, so here Paul then names various means of God’s provision. We are told to “be filled with the Holy Spirit” and then participles explain how the Spirit fills God’s children. 

“Giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph. 5:20), appears amid three other items in the list. As in Col. 3, it is apropos to thank God for every good gift – “for everything” and “always,” in fact – and so it is described in an ongoing manner. If you want the good life and want strength to persist in the journey in difficult times, then be grateful for all things along the way. Gratitude is the way to such endurance, because it marks the life of the creature filled by God’s Spirit. 

Contempt and ingratitude beckon one to walk darkened and squinting. They disable our ability to see rightly, whether of God, the world, neighbors, or our very selves. The Word of Christ and the Spirit’s filling mark a path of gratitude and thanks that brings riches and fullness. If you want the good life, know that it comes as a path of gratitude. Be a creature. Sing praise and thanks. Own that you live on borrowed breath, and persist in naming those who makes your life possible (God above all). Devils do lurk. Slavery beckons. Refuse to squint and instead live in the daylight as God’s child, for gratitude marks the path of the good life.
### The Gratitude of a Romani Pastor
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-gratitude-of-a-romani-pastor/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:37:52.000Z
Some years ago I was in a Romani home. We call them “gypsies” but that is a derogatory term. I was traveling with a group of missionaries and we were meeting the Romani church leaders to get an update on the local ministry and hear about the plight of the Romani across Europe.

As we sat in this Romani home, on the floor, we drank coffee from a mishmash of chipped china, picked from a garbage dump. There was a dirt floor, set with scraps of mismatched carpet. They used a small flame for heat, nothing more than the lit end of a propane tank. There was one lightbulb for the whole room. The rich aromas of sweat and cooking lingered somewhere in the background. This was poverty, for real poverty. Not the kind of poverty you might find in a more rural setting, where everybody is poor (so nobody knows they are poor) but the kind of poverty that lives alongside wealth in a major East European city.

The Romani pastor thumped his hand on the table as he bitterly described the lack of assistance from the government in addressing his people’s needs. There was little interest by the majority population to help these people. They were given second rate schools, the hospital system discriminated against them, and they did not have simple things like sewer and water services in this area.

This group of Romani, like elsewhere, was the target of discrimination by the larger culture. They were a textbook example of an oppressed people. On top of that, I was sitting with the Christians. Romani are typically Muslim. These Christians were a minority group within the minority group.

As the conversation went forward, we were each asked to tell a little bit about ourselves. A member of our group had served in northwest China, among North Koreans. This piqued the interest of the Romani pastor, and he asked for details.

The visitor recounted how the North Korean Christians were swimming across the ice-cold river to China where they received discipleship training. They came hungry, both physically and spiritually. They were given medical care, food, and spent a few weeks in relative freedom of China before going back to their flocks across the river. On their way back, they had to swim again, now weighted down with bags of rice wrapped up in plastic against the water to feed their starving countryman.

“Did anybody ever get caught?” asked the Romani pastor.

“Yes, and recently a young man drowned because of the weight of his food pack.”

It was a sobering sentence. Conversation stopped and we all fell silent as the reality of this situation hung in the air.

The pastor spoke and the translator told us that he had said, “We need to pray for the North Korean church.” And so we did. It was a loud and raucous prayer. In the midst of it, that pastor began to weep. The volume rose. He would cry out a sentence or two, and the other Romani pastors would respond. Back and forth they went and the prayer ended in a short song of amen. I did not understand a word, but I did not need to. It was a holy moment, a holy prayer, and the sentiment was clear.

When we finished, the translator explained to us what had been prayed for. Upon hearing about the North Korean believers, the Holy Spirit had reminded this pastor of the many good things he had. He had been convicted about complaining. Yes, they had problems in this community. They were poor and they suffered discrimination. But they also had many good things. He had been recounting these gifts from God and the others had responded in agreement. With thanksgiving in his heart, he had been praising God for his relationship with Jesus, family, home and friends.

I was humbled.

No matter who we are, we have blessings in Christ that should make us fall to our knees in gratitude. Even this poor Romani pastor could thank Jesus. Unfortunately, in our self-pity, we seldom are reminded of the wonderful blessings we have in our lives. We justify our bad attitudes, complain, and carry on like spiritual babes. Perspective dissolves this self-pity and leads to gratitude.

Lord, help me to be grateful like that Romani pastor.

[*originally published on Substack*](https://tedesler.substack.com/p/lord-give-us-perspective)
### Holy Joy
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/holy-joy/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:37:55.000Z
I was 23 when I moved to Germany for the first time. From my university studies, I was already reasonably conversational in the language, but it wasn’t until I lived in Berlin that I started to get a handle on German history and culture. Berlin, as it turns out, is exactly the right place for a foreigner to discover that there’s one date that sticks out remarkably in Germany’s last two centuries, to the extent that it’s been called the Germans’ “day of destiny”: the ninth of November.

Among other events: in 1918, the so-called “November Revolution” began on that day in Berlin when Germany was declared a republic. In 1923, the young Hitler’s coup attempt, the “Beer Hall Putsch,” was quelled in Munich. Fifteen years after that, synagogues and Jewish businesses across the country were terrorized in the *Reichskristallnacht* pogrom, and finally, famously, the Berlin Wall fell on the same date in 1989.

Striking as this is, it’s not so strange to think that further events taking place on a date that has become important for one reason can develop or even seriously complicate its original meaning. This year, German Thanksgiving (the first Sunday in October) fell just two days before the beginning of the Jewish festival of Sukkot, the Feast of Booths or Tabernacles, which was established in the Law of Moses as the same sort of observance—a feast of thanks for the completed harvest. Though it never lost that basic identity, this thanksgiving festival came to mean far more as the centuries in Israel’s history moved on.

It was the beginning of the seventh month in the Jewish religious calendar nearly 2,500 years ago as the eighth chapter of Nehemiah opens: the city walls of Jerusalem had been completely rebuilt after a whirlwind 52 days of construction (Neh 6:15). This meant far more to Nehemiah (governor of the Persian province of Judah) and his countrymen than improved security; they knew their Bible and sang songs like Psalm 48, which calls Jerusalem the “city of the Lord of Hosts” and Zion the “holy mountain,” where “God has made himself known as a fortress.” It was a city that God had rescued miraculously (see Isaiah 36–37), a city he had promised to protect forever: Jerusalem was meant to be “the joy of all the earth” (Ps 48:2).

The final verses of the psalm had surely gripped Nehemiah: it was God’s will that one should be able to “walk about Zion, go around her, number her towers, consider well her ramparts, go through her citadels, that you may tell the next generation that this is God, our God forever and ever. He will guide us forever” (Ps 48:12-14). This beauty and strength were to be a testimony to all generations of who God is and what he means to his people: grace and justice, joy and salvation, even everlasting life. In Jerusalem, all the hopes of a future for God’s people under the eternal dominion of the Messiah converged.

The rebuilding of the walls was never just about security. Nehemiah, together with Ezra and the other leaders of the Jews, were laying claim to God’s promise that Jerusalem would be known as the “holy city” (Isa 52:1), and what the people of Judah and Jerusalem do in Nehemiah 8 shows their grasp of what it means to establish Jerusalem as just that. If they want a holy city, they must recommit themselves to God’s standards—and if they want to do that, they need to know God’s will.

Four days after the completion of the walls, the seventh month begins, and no time could be more fitting for this renewed commitment to holiness. It’s the month when the festal calendar reaches its climax: the month starts with the joyful Feast of Trumpets, followed ten days later by the great Day of Atonement, when God’s dwelling would be purified of his people’s sins. And then, right in the middle of the month, begins the Feast of Booths—by Nehemiah’s time far more than a simple harvest festival.

Ezra, both a scribe and a priest (Neh 8:1-2), knows its meaning better than most. Part of the law for the feast required the Book of the Law to be read publicly there every seven years (Deut 31:10-13). It was surely fitting, too, that five hundred years before at this feast, King Solomon had dedicated his marvelous temple in this very city. What better time could there be to put God’s word back in its rightful place at the heart of the life of God’s people?

This is the whole idea behind the events in vv. 1-12: if the Jews want to see God’s promises fulfilled, then they have to know how to live as a holy people in a holy city with a holy temple. We can see this in the planning details—it doesn’t take place on the temple grounds, but on the public square at the Water Gate on the city’s east side (v. 1); God’s commands don’t apply to the sanctuary only, but to all of Jerusalem and its inhabitants, so admission must be open to laypeople as well as priests. A platform (v. 4) is set up to allow the most possible people to hear (v. 5).

Everyone who can be there is invited—only men had to attend the greatest feasts, and only elders attended other important meetings (such as the one in v. 13), but this event is for men, women, and children alike (v. 3). Every member of God’s people is to participate; each one has the right to know what God has to say. It’s especially important that the younger generation be included: the children and youth, too, who have little to no control over their own lives, are nevertheless obligated to keep covenant with God—and they need to learn how to do it.

In service of this purpose, the Levites don’t just read aloud; they interpret (v. 8). Many of the people likely didn’t speak Hebrew, at any rate not enough to understand the readings; they had been subjects of other empires for 140 years. The lingua franca was Aramaic, which had become many people’s first language. The word “clearly” (v. 8 ESV) alone already means more than “easy to hear” or even “in translation”: it means explained, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. The point is not for the people just to know what words the Law contains, but to grasp its meaning, context, demands, and promises.

It's clear to everyone involved how special the occasion is, and it’s clear to the attentive reader as well. What sort of a text lists the names of everyone on the stage with the reader (v. 4), along with the exact date and location? There’s a good example tucked away in the Bundestag, the German parliament building: the original manuscript of the *Grundgesetz*, the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany. On one page, all the members of the parliamentary council who signed it are listed along with the date (May 23, 1949) and location (Bonn) of ratification. What happens in Nehemiah 8:1-12 is more than a nice Bible story—the text itself is documentation of a massively important historical event.

The Jews recognize this and act accordingly: they assemble and make a formal request for the law to be read (v. 1); they stand as the scroll is opened (v. 5); before the reading begins, Ezra offers a prayer of praise (v. 6), which the people confirm with a loud, double Amen, then prostrate themselves before God. For modern Christians, Bible reading can be something so normal and everyday—a blessing, to be sure!—that we easily forget the privilege it is to have God’s word available to us. Yet every time we open it, we experience just such an occasion: the near presence of God and the opportunity to renew our relationship to him.

The people of Jerusalem felt the weight of this encounter, and we would do well to ask ourselves what sort of an attitude or atmosphere is fitting to the circumstances. Their response sets a fine example in a number of respects: they’re eager to hear, attentive and convinced of the value of what they’re hearing; they’re reverent and respectful, knowing who it is who speaks in the Law.

There is one point, though, on which they’re admonished: they weep as they hear and understand (v. 9). Why is that? In the first place, keep in mind that “the Book of the Law” means all five books of Moses, Genesis through Deuteronomy. It would have been impossible to read every word of those in half a day, particularly with live translation and exposition—undoubtedly Ezra used some reading plan or lectionary with selected excerpts from across all five books, and those excerpts would have been far more than just rules.

The whole story of the creation of the world, man’s sin against God and that sin’s terrible consequences, the call of Abraham and God’s making him into a great people, Israel’s sojourn in Egypt and deliverance out of slavery there, the covenant at Sinai and how it was broken almost immediately, the forty years of following God through the wilderness to the boundary of the promised land, and finally Moses’ exhortations and foretelling of their future history before his death beyond the Jordan—the assembly at Water Gate Square hears it all, and is confronted with the fact that not much has changed in all those years. They stand there as subjects of a foreign empire because their ancestors were consistently unfaithful and rebellious against their God. With too few exceptions, the history of Israel is tragic—yet Nehemiah and Ezra and the whole leadership of Judah say, “No! Don’t cry! Don’t be sad, don’t grieve!” (vv. 9-11)—“No, it’s time to party!”

Why?

Why not mourn? Is it not as bad as it sounds after all? Or is all this morbid introspection emotionally unhealthy? Or does all the weeping and wailing just get on the Levites’ nerves?

No, they give a reason: “This day is holy to our Lord” (v. 10). It’s a holy occasion—so go have fun! Does it seem strange? Here in Germany, there’s a tea company that markets a variety called “*Kleine Sünde*,” “Little Sin” (it’s blueberry-vanilla, if I recall correctly). Those of us from Christian-influenced Western societies get the point immediately: it’s so delicious that it must be sinful. We hardly notice how often this instinct is invoked, that anything particularly delightful can’t be really allowed; pleasure is sin, period.

Yet exactly what the tea merchants call a “little sin” is what Nehemiah commands: eat and drink the very best, the most delicious things in your larders. Make sure *everybody* does—and it’s not a sin, but a profound expression of holiness. How can that be?

It has everything to do with who God is and what he is like. The Lord is a God who gave Israel a church calendar in which (count them) *one* day a year is a required fast day, compared to three feasts at which the people are *commanded* to eat, drink, and be merry, the last of these (Booths) lasting a whole week. There is an important place for penitence, humiliation, and abstinence in life with God, of course, but he seems much more concerned to make clear that his presence is a place of joy: “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Ps 16:11).

The very word “holy” is best understood as meaning “for God alone, dedicated to him”—and so people who are holy must grasp that God is like this and must reflect it by being able to feast well. Nehemiah himself insists on this, famously telling the people, “The joy of the Lord is your strength” (Neh 8:10). It sounds lovely, but what does he actually mean? We might read it this way: you are strong when you have joy in you that comes from the Lord. No doubt that’s true enough, but it’s not the only way to read it.

The people’s strength (one might translate it “stronghold”) is “the joy *of* the Lord.” Think of the master in Jesus’ parable in Matthew 25 who tells the good and faithful servant, “Enter into the joy of your master” (Matt 25:21, 23). Or think of the story of the prodigal son in Luke 15, where the father welcomes his wayward son with open arms—after the son has flushed his inheritance down the toilet—and he throws a party so loud it can be heard in the fields all around.

*That* is the joy of the Lord, and it really and truly is an aspect of his holiness. And because God is like this, we can come to him in the assurance that there really is nothing to fear in his presence. And whoever comes to him like this *does* receive joy from him, joy that is real strength.

This record of events two and a half millennia ago in Jerusalem is, then, an invitation to us all to enter into the joy of our Lord. If you’re not a Christian yet, know that you’ll have to be confronted with what the people then realized, that you haven’t lived up to God’s standard and still don’t even now—but if you do realize that, the wonderful news is that *you are welcome anyway*, if you will turn to God in Jesus Christ. You don’t have to fix yourself up in advance, you don’t have to get your life in order first. Jesus’ death is enough to make you clean; his life is enough to make you new; his joy is enough to make you strong.

If you are a Christian: do you ever consider that God rejoices when you are near him, particularly as you gather with his people? Do you realize that—if it’s not too impious to put it this way—it’s *fun* for him to have you there? Even, maybe especially, when you have to come to him confessing your sins and repenting, the truth that he is a God of joy needs to be present to your mind. In repentance, you *get* to put away the things that rob you of real happiness. People ought to be able to say of us Christians that of all people, we really know how to celebrate, how to party right. And that joy and pleasure in the company of God and his saints is *holy*.

Back to the text: the people listen, and they do what Nehemiah says. They lay the table, share their delicacies with each other, and “make great rejoicing” (v. 12). We’re given another reason for this rejoicing, besides the fact that they were told to: they rejoice because they have “understood the words that were declared to them”—even though what they heard grieved them at first, now they experience God’s revealed will as a precious gift.

The rest of the chapter proves this, as the civil and religious leaders gather the next day (v. 13) to make plans for the rest of this holy month based on the Law. There in what we know as the Book of Leviticus, they learn how the Feast of Booths is supposed to be kept—with booths, oddly enough—and it’s so ordered (v. 14-18). It seems to develop quite naturally out of their joy at having God’s word and understanding it that the people want to arrange everything according to it; their obedience only brings more joy (v. 17).

It's only at this point that we discover what a momentous experience this really is: it turns out that it’s been nearly a thousand years since the Feast of Booths was kept according to the Law of Moses—it took all that time for the people to rediscover the joy of the Lord such that they would really do what he said. They had to experience their second great deliverance from captivity through God’s intervention, see how all the hostility of their neighbors and internal contradictions in imperial policy couldn’t prevent the rebuilding of first the temple, then the city of Jerusalem. This is how they’ve experienced their God, and this is what makes obedience into holy joy.

This is, surely, what God intended the Feast of Booths, Israel’s Thanksgiving, to come to mean all along. Each year was a week of soaking in the goodness of what the Lord had done in making seed grow and fruit ripen, sending the rains in their season and showering blessings on his people. Every seven years was to be a week of remembering centuries of goodness and faithfulness and mighty deeds, of being reminded of their holy calling and the rightness of God’s revealed will. And again and again, something remarkable would happen—a temple dedicated, a city rebuilt—to bring them into the joy of their master in fullness, however fleeting.

At least since the German Reformation gave birth to the Heidelberg Catechism, it’s been a bit of a commonplace to identify thanksgiving as an engine—maybe *the* engine—of the Christian life. But it needs to be the right sort of thanksgiving, the sort that hears the voice of Jesus saying, “Do not mourn or weep!”: never a mere sober reckoning, a correct acknowledgement of a debt owed. It is just this sharing of good things at Christ’s table, a trial run for a feast at the end of the age, an entering into the holy place where there are pleasures forevermore.
### Modernity, Secularism, and the Struggle for a Christian Civilization
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/modernity-secularism-and-the-struggle-for-a-christian-civilization/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:37:58.000Z
Jean Daniélou. *Prayer as a Political Problem*. Cluny Media, 2020 (reprint edition). $19.95\. 130 pp.

To produce a spark of historical thinking in my church history students’ minds, sometimes I ask them to imagine what it might have been like to live in northern France in, say, AD 1200\. Acknowledging the risk of oversimplification, it is possible to imagine vividly some details of life in that place and time. We would likely have all been commoners, tied to the land, and thus tied to a feudal contract with the lord of the manor. Generation after generation, our family would have tended the land to produce enough to provide for our obligations to the lord and to the church. Our society would have been strictly hierarchical. Finally, our lives would have been monotonous in labor, dirty in ordinary living, communal and not individual, and brightened by the celebration of the Mass, which would have pointed us beyond our temporal existence to another world of eternal life and light.

Religion animated the Medieval period of Western European history like no other feature of human endeavor. Medieval Europe represents the apogee of Christendom, a civilization that was Christian in every respect. When I describe it as “Christian,” I am speaking historically more than theologically. In other words, Medieval Europe was Christian in the way that people in Western Europe would have understood the term at the time. Thus it was a civilization infused with sacramental understanding of the cosmos as informed by church tradition, the Great Chain of Being, and the sacral nature of contract between lord and vassal. The culture was thoroughly Augustinian—meaning, people understood authority to be beyond question and saw the world of the eternal as superior to the world of the temporal.

Such was pre-modernity. Modernity emerged slowly from the soil of Thomas Aquinas’s synthesis of Christian theology with the philosophy of Aristotle, the nominalism of William of Occam and his *via moderna*, the humanism of the Renaissance, the discovery and colonization of the Americas, and the biblio-centrism of the Reformation. It also came about through the rise of cities and trade, the appearance of a middle class, and an awakening of nationalistic consciousness over and against the temporal dominance of the Catholic Church. Technology played a decisive role in these dynamics. Advancements such as the printing press, the lateen sail, the stirrup, the longbow, the compass, and gunpowder, developed in the late Middle Ages and served as midwives to the birth of the modern world. Modernity was, in fundamental ways, a reaction against the premodern conception of civilization. It was a rejection of the old order, dominated as it was by a pope at the head of a unified Christendom. Modernity had prevailed over premodernity by 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia. Modernity sought to crush premodernity through the deployment of Enlightenment philosophy. In Romanticism, modernity sought a revival of premodernity, but on its own terms. By the twentieth century, modernity annihilated premodernity in the World Wars. 

As modernity was a reaction against premodernity, so postmodernity was a reaction against modernity. Metanarratives would now be shattered through deconstruction. Authority would be reckoned as oppressive. Politics would be seen not as the means for a government to provide conditions for a society to flourish, but only as a means of one group exercising power over another. The individual person would be the only test for truth that could matter, and individual identity defined through sexual, gender, and racial matrices would form the basis for a new social hierarchy. 

In the premodern West, religion was dominant, and worldview started with metaphysics. Modernity shifted religion to be the servant of the State, while epistemology replaced metaphysics as the starting point for worldview formulation. Late modernity witnessed the subjectivization of religion, and ethics replaced epistemology as the basis for worldview. And in postmodernity, religion has lost all meaning outside of experience and individual preference. Politics—a branch of ethics but seen as a means of power—has become the starting point for how reality gets ordered. I am speaking in general terms, of course. We can quibble over the details, but I think we can recognize the historical trend of the past 500 years that historian Jacques Barzun aptly described in the main title of his magisterial history of modern Western culture: *From Dawn to Decadence.* 

In 1965, Jean Daniélou, a French Jesuit and cardinal, reflected on the meaning of civilization, particularly Christian civilization. He wrote his short book, *L’Oraison problème politique* (*Prayer as a Political Problem*), in the context of great cultural change occurring in the West. Liberation theology was gaining acceptance in the Catholic churches of Latin America and the Philippines. Jacques Derrida was inaugurating postmodernity with his book, *Of Grammatology*. France had been recently driven out of Indochina by the Viet Minh, and the Americans were confidently committing hundreds of thousands of troops to secure South Vietnam from a Communist takeover. The Catholic Church just instituted sweeping reforms after the Second Vatican Council, representing a departure from the traditional sixteenth-century Tridentine program, known by Protestants as the Counter-Reformation. Prayer and Bible reading were outlawed in public schools in the US in 1962 and 1963\. The Civil Rights Movement was at its height, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but race relations in America were more fraught than ever. The sexual revolution would advance to incorporate the Gay Rights movement in 1969, and abortion would be legalized in the United States in 1973\. Advanced communication and transportation technologies were becoming normative, with the exploration of space and the development of computers. 

Put simply, Daniélou wrote about Christian civilization during a time when such an idea may have seemed quaint to many of his readers.

The quaint quality of Christian civilization was precisely the issue Daniélou sought to address. He stated in the preface of the book that “there is no true civilization that is not religious; nor, on the other hand, can there be a religion of the masses that is not supported by civilization. It would appear that today there are too many Christians who see no incongruity in the juxtaposition of a private religion and an irreligious society, not perceiving how ruinous this is for both society and religion. But how are society and religion to be joined without either making religion a tool of the secular power or a tool of religion?” Such was, for Daniélou, the primary problem for Christian civilization in an age of change and the dehumanization attending over-trust in technology, secularization of the state, the decline of cultural Christianity, and the privatization of religion.

Daniélou argued that the church was best expressed in the Christendom of premodernity, “when everybody was baptized, and it is this state of affairs that is much to be desired.” He did not advocate for a Christendom dominated by the papacy or by a state church. But he did insist that the role of the state is to create the conditions for persons to reach the highest state of their potential, both physical and spiritual. Because of this, the state needs the church and the church needs the state. The state needs the church to sustain a vision of reality ordered by the God who revealed himself to humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. The church needs the state to foster the conditions for it to conserve its tradition, communicate its message, and facilitate its growth. 

Daniélou is at his best when he argues against an atomized society of individuals in favor of a society marked by local and familial societies. In this way, Daniélou is a conservative, not a libertarian. His words also ring of traditionalist conservatism, as he defines religious freedom as “a right that belongs to communities as well as to individuals. It implies not only that people should be able to practice a religion publicly, but also that they should have the scope and mutual support necessary to order their lives in accordance with the demands of that religion. Hence, a religion has the right to set up at the family, educational, cultural, and social levels those institutions which it has need to ensure its continuance and development.” The church can reasonably expect the state to acknowledge and support such freedom.

In his discussion of art and technology, Daniélou is also persuasive and eloquent. Technology is not an evil, but it comes with the temptation of overreliance. Even with this temptation, technology has a way of forcing us to consider those things that make us truly human, and those things that cannot replace personality and community. And while science, the mother of technology, does tell us something about the universe, it cannot tell us how it is ordered, nor can we find meaning for life in a universe that seems cold and indifferent to our existence. Art augments the ability of science to uncover knowledge about the universe through creativity. Human creativity derives from God, the Creator of all things, and is a reflection of God’s character and activity. Through art, the universe becomes a cosmos that is ordered and meaningful, with an aesthetic quality as well as a physical one. 

In all this, the most significant and useful observation Daniélou makes is that Christ came to redeem every feature of humanity, including religion and politics. We are bound to take the world as it is, and even to love the world as it is. Daniélou sounds much like Augustine here. The world God made is good, because God proclaims it to be good, and because God endowed the world with an essence. That which is evil is so because of the influence of sin—but evil has no essence. So, we can love the world as a good creation without embarrassment or regret. Still, we see evil in the world and can hate it and turn our powers against it in the name of the good. “To be truly a man of one’s own time, one must know how to love all that the world offers that is positive and at the same time hate all that is by human malice compromised and destroyed—and this because one loves one’s world and all who live in it.” We must therefore take care not to put inordinate trust in technical progress, because technology sings the siren song of self-exaltation. Technology also fosters the erasure of particular cultures in the name of uniformity. “There is undoubtedly all too great a danger today of bringing everything to one level. How dreadfully monotonous and wearisome would be a culture of *homo technicus* that was exactly the same in Peking as in Buenos Aires or London or Dakar!”

The building of an earthly city wherein persons may have “a full material, fraternal, and spiritual life” is the task of politics and the task of the church. To be a Christian is to work to build such a city, even though that city is temporal. It is of this world. The earthly city the Christian is building is to represent the heavenly city to the extent possible in a fallen world, governed as it is by limitations. Building the earthly city is the steady work of doing ordinary, forgettable, hardly noticeable acts of redemption, like giving a glass of cold water to a thirsty brother or sister. That glass of cold water can take many forms, and the giving can occur in a range of different contexts. The point is that while we may not be able to change the world into a utopia, we do have the ability to shape our world into something redemptive by the grace of God through ordinary means.

*Prayer as a Political Problem* remains, after sixty years, deeply relevant. Daniélou’s project stands as a rebuttal to self-indulgent religion as well as a Marxist socio-political agenda. Its warning against a mindless submission to technology is particularly pertinent as we witness the dizzying developments in AI. It is a defense of civilization in a postmodern culture that decries civilization as overly “centric”—Euro-centric, Ameri-centric, White-centric, etc. As a defense of tradition, religious freedom, localism, imagination, politics for the temporal good, and Christianity as revealed truth, Daniélou’s book is thoroughly humanistic. A return to premodernity is not possible, nor even desirable. But a rejection of all things premodern is not found in Daniélou’s book, and for that reason, it continues to deserve a serious hearing in our postmodern culture.
### Rediscovering the Whimsy of Children’s Books
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/rediscovering-the-whimsy-of-childrens-books/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:38:03.000Z
During the early years of homeschooling my children, I kept seeing Elsa Beskow’s name pop up on lists of “living books.” Educator Charlotte Mason used that term to describe captivating works of high literary merit that also cultivate a love for learning. At the time, I usually had to request an interlibrary loan for Beskow’s picture books because my local library didn’t stock them. But alongside the rise in popularity of home education, classic tales like Beskow’s are experiencing a revival in interest. These stories from early 20th century Scandinavia have had enormous staying power in the English-speaking world. The 2018 publication of box set collections of Beskow’s titles by Edinburgh publisher Floris Books only further bolstered this interest. 

One look at Elsa Beskow’s whimsical children’s books makes it obvious why she is called “the Swedish Beatrix Potter.” The attention to detail, a reveling in the natural world, and a commitment to beauty in Beskow’s vibrant watercolor and ink illustrations set her on par with her English counterpart. Set deep in the forest of childhood imagination, Beskow’s simple stories feature talking flora and fauna, charming adventures, and (unlike in Potter’s books) plenty of fairy magic.

Not only is Beskow a favorite of adherents to certain educational philosophies, she was an educator herself. Not coincidentally, she was also a mother of six boys. Thus, I must imagine, like many of her young characters, she spent ample time exploring the woods. Her works feature themes especially enticing to the Waldorf school of thought developed by Rudolf Steiner. Steiner’s commitment to nature-based play, holistic learning, fairy tales, and positive interactions between adults and young people has always resonated deeply with my own parenting aspirations, even as I never became a strict Waldorfian myself. Like the Waldorf school, Beskow’s enchanting books are solidly anchored in the natural world, although she incorporates imaginative elements of magic, fairy, and whimsy alongside reality. Her tales often follow the natural rhythms of the year, tracing the weather changes from one season to the next or highlighting seasonal celebrations like the summer solstice. 

Beskow’s obvious interest and familiarity with botany allows her to guide the reader deeply into the magical world of the forest. While most children today would not be familiar with many of the plants and flowers that Beskow references, this is not a drawback, but a benefit. In *The Flowers’ Festival*, for instance, little Lisa is disappointed to miss the Midsummer celebrations but is invited by the beautiful Midsummer Fairy to enjoy the solstice with the flowers. While some of Lisa’s fellow partygoers (Mrs. Beetroot or Mrs. Potato) might reference plants familiar to the young reader, how many children would be familiar with Miss Pelargonium? In this colorful tale, plants like melanpyrum, bird’s foot trefoil, and bleeding heart are anthropomorphized characters that bring richness to Beskow’s forest world. 

The effect is similar to British writer Robert MacFarlane’s efforts in his book, *The Lost Words: A Spell Book,* to expose children to words describing the natural world, such as “kingfisher” or “bluebell.” He is convinced that such familiarity with the language of plants and creatures is necessary to a full experience of the world around us. It is a human act as old as Adam to give names to the natural things we see. And this deeper knowledge through language leads to a greater delight in God’s world. When our language becomes diminished and less specific, our appreciation is likewise decreased. 

I remember driving with a friend in high school and commenting on the height of the pine trees lining the road. “How do you know what kind of tree those are?” she asked in surprise. “To me, trees are trees.” I realized then that when she saw the trees lining the road, they simply blended in with every other tree because she had no language for this particular kind of tree. Reading Beskow’s nature-based stories, by contrast, inspires readers to overcome this lost knowledge and foggy view of the world around us and learn about the flowers and plants in our own backyards. When reading Beskow’s picture books to my children, growing up in swampy Florida and harsh Texas, Beskow’s Swedish forest experience was far from relatable. Still, the stories inspired us to encounter and name the flora and fauna of our own surroundings. 

Beskow’s tales also challenge the highly risk-averse trends of modern parenting. In her stories, children initiate their own adventures; then they must navigate them. In *Woody, Hazel and Little Pip*, the Acorn children sail through the forest on an obliging leaf, only to find themselves stuck delivering freshly laundered beards to the gnomes. They must plan their escape by disguising themselves and hiding in a hollow tree before being discovered by their friend Mr. Squirrel and returned to their mother, Mrs. Acorn. 

But as a children’s book editor, what captivates me most when I return to Beskow’s books is her meticulous commitment to write *for the young child*. These are tales to savor and enjoy. They are not didactic or, as is common in children’s publishing today, written merely to communicate a message that makes grown-ups feel virtuous about purchasing the title (whether it is actually interesting to a young person or not). Beskow’s stories are written with the young reader in mind and with the understanding that children are worthy of stories that are beautiful, charming, and sometimes silly. They are stories with an understanding of the young child’s psychology and her desire to know *what happens next* when following the simple narrative. They aren’t works of meticulous world building. After all, we do not know the backstory of Mrs. Potato or Mr. Cornflower. We do not know how Mr. Squirrel first became friends with Mr. and Mrs. Acorn before rescuing the Acorn children from the gnomes. As with classic fairy tales, the reader is simply plopped into a world of surprises, wonder, and magic. The events of the narrative take priority above the characters’ inner thoughts, motivations, or histories. 

Beskow also wisely cultivates a young child’s love for how tasks are done, step-by-step. Some of the stories remind me of picture books like Donald Hall’s *The Ox-Cart Man*, Patricia Polacco’s *Thunder Cake*, or even Laura Ingalls Wilder’s classic chapter books about pioneer life, because they walk the young reader through various practical tasks and how to achieve them. While grown-ups might miss the magic of such practical details, these simple tasks fascinate children who are just learning how the world works. Beskow’s charming story *Pelle’s New Suit* asks: How is a new suit made? What are the steps between shearing a sheep and weaving wool into a suit for little Pelle? When enjoying this story, I think of my youngest daughter’s absolute glee when she visits my mother, who has taught her the proper way to make a bed, set the table, or add ingredients to the soup. These tasks that seem like drudgery to grown-ups are still exciting to the young child. Beskow understands this truth.

The contemporary landscape of children’s publishing too often offers the lowest common denominator to children, from the most garish colors to the most crass jokes. By contrast, Beskow’s timeless stories offer enchantment, a love and respect for the child reader, a connection with the natural world, a rediscovery of language, engagement with healthy risk, and an invitation to see the magic in our own backyards–if only we can have the child-like eyes to recognize it.
### Hannah's Holiday
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/hannahs-holiday/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:38:05.000Z
The following excerpt from Sarah Reardon, [*Home Songs*](https://wipfandstock.com/9798385245215/home-songs/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), is published with permission from Wipf and Stock Publishers.

Her hands are quick with knowledge as she weaves  
Upon the robe its final vibrant strands.  
Her fingers quake, just momentarily,  
Then brush her face, and with resolve, she stands,  
Begins preparing for the yearly journey:  
The bread her hands have made, he never eats,  
The crops his family grows, he never sees,  
The crowd of brothers whom he never meets.  
“Not mine, O Lord, but yours,” she prays,  
As others have, and will, with tears and sweat.  
And Hannah, being feeble, binds on strength  
And climbs the temple steps, her face still wet  
But heart exulting and mouth wide with joy.  
The Lord kills and brings to life—all at once.  
She rushes now to meet her little boy,  
She looks to him as joyous as if drunk.
### Religion's Own Worst Enemy
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/religions-own-worst-enemy/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:38:08.000Z
Christian Smith. [*Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/why-religion-went-obsolete-the-demise-of-traditional-faith-in-america-william-r-kenan-jr-professor-of-sociology-and-director-of-the-center-for-the-stu/79d33971011d6d39?ean=9780197800737&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Oxford University Press, 2025\. $34.99\. 440 pp.

Though the signs, in retrospect, were all around, no one can pinpoint the exact day the Roman empire fell. 

The story of religion in America is similar. Religion in America once enjoyed widespread dominance. Its decline, like the fall of Rome, began slowly, invisible at first. Once religion had fallen out of favor, the fall seemed to some to have occurred suddenly, without warning. In truth, religion’s cultural prominence had been receding slowly, like a tide, until all at once it was gone.

There has been a cottage industry of dime-store prophets, attributing Christianity’s decline to any number of factors—politics, extremism, social media, and even the Protestant Reformation. Now that the decline is evident, it turns out that many can predict it. 

Christian Smith, fortunately, is neither a prognosticator nor a dime store prophet. Throughout 350 pages of meticulous research, Smith does not entertain emotional reasoning or nostalgia. What he does is carefully demonstrate how religion arrived at its current status–obsolete. In *Why Religion Went Obsolete*, Smith assembles extensive empirical data to track how American religion fell out of favor. He relies on 209 personal interviews and four focus groups, comprised of individuals who were asked to discuss their changing religious involvement. Smith also conducted extensive searches across the repositories of American culture, including book titles, scholarly publications, television news coverage, and newspapers. He analyzed the resulting data to examine the decline of religion’s cultural presence. Smith also conducted a national survey on religious questions, surveying over two thousand US adults, and conducted many interviews with adults of various religious persuasions.

All told, Smith is not interested in predictions or strategy. He has instead compiled an extensive study not merely of the numerical decline of religion, but its cultural decline as well. As he notes, *that* religion has declined is all but apparent. His interest lies in the *why*. 

He calls this decline religion’s *obsolescence,* and he tracks it through the “zeitgeist”, the cultural environment “during which American religion declined.” Focusing on obsolescence and the “zeitgeist” allows Smith to give an “alternative narrative to the ‘secularization’ thesis, suggesting that something more complicated and interesting has transpired that requires a more creative conceptual description \[than\] traditional secularization theory offers.” 

“Religious losses,” in Smith’s words, “do not automatically translate into secular gains.”

Additionally, “obsolete does not mean “useless” or “failed. *It just means having been superseded by alternatives that most users deem preferable*” (emphasis mine). What makes Smith’s account of religion’s decline uniquely useful is organizing his narrative around this concept of obsolescence. As he notes, there are individuals who still use electronic typewriters or cassette tapes. This habit, however, is rare and “quirky”—and likely an indicator of other varieties of quirkiness that such a person might exhibit. Under such an account, religion is for weirdos. But it is not gone. It is now simply the domain of the quirky, the insignificant, and the outdated. 

Obsolescence also answers questions that Smith might not even have anticipated. For instance, one challenge with obsolete technologies is that they become difficult to use because replacement parts or technicians who know how to fix them cannot be easily found. There are now many denominations that cannot find qualified pastors to staff their obsolete churches. Meanwhile, schools of counseling are glutted with practitioners aspiring to this new, more desirable trade—one that is surpassing religion in its popularity. Everyone, it seems, goes to counseling. Far fewer go to church when their souls feel restless or distressed.

For Smith, obsolescence has as much to do with function as with fashion. This may be the most innovative aspect of Smith’s book. In considering the cultural zeitgeist that contributed to religion’s decline, Smith points to one particular decade that assured it: the 1990s. 

Many factors that facilitated religion’s decline were well in place by the 1990s. They include “long-term social trends” like “higher education for the masses” and “women entering the paid workforce”, as well as “the deinstitutionalization of marriage and family.” They also include the decline of mainline Protestants and Catholic organizations and the spread of the religious right.

But perhaps most important is the role of the “moralizing of religion, \[and\] downplaying \[of\] transcendence” in religion’s own decline. In Smith’s words, “Religion, in this view, is not primarily about divine worship, timeless truths, sacred historical traditions, eternal salvation, theological doctrines, or the like- except as they might inspire morality.” Smith’s earlier work on spirituality among American youth led him to coin the term “moralistic therapeutic deism”—the view that religion is good insofar as it makes you better. The particular trappings of religion, from ritual to liturgy to historical practice, matter only insofar as they contribute to this moralistic goal.

A primarily moralistic view of religion did not immediately portend religion’s decline, because the broader culture of the mid-century reinforced religion’s mores and demands. But once the culture came to *undermine* religion’s demands, its fate was sealed. This happened, by Smith’s read, in the 1990s.

It was, on the face, a bright and optimistic decade. America was enjoying a season of economic prosperity and international stability, bolstered by the endorsement of American values that the end of the Cold War provided. 

Additionally, widespread cable TV and internet brought initial boons in connection and entertainment that seemed to encourage creativity and artistic expression. These were the years of dial-up internet and AOL messenger, of a “world wide web” that seemed focused on the weird, wild possibilities of connection and lowered barriers to entry.

But alongside the optimistic conditions that young people enjoyed was a darker shadow for religion.

For post-Boomers, religion had primarily become about morality. “Moralistic therapeutic deism” was the paradigm in which people thought about religion’s benefits. But for the first time, in the 1990s *being good was no longer cool*. The Zeitgeist of the 1990s prevailed against religion because the culture valued the edgy, transgressive, or anti-moral. Smith’s examples of this include: *The Simpsons*, *Sex and the City, Seinfeld* (“the show about “nothing”), and MTV. Though none of these shows had religious (or for that matter, anti-religious) messaging, together they accord with the “You do you,” “Do what feels right,” and “Do it your way,” zeitgeist—vibes *against* commitment to traditional religion. 

The conditions for religion continued to get darker. Once religion was judged to be about morality, evidence of *immoral* religionists served as solid evidence against religion. Smith notes several examples of religious scandals that gave fuel to the fire of religion’s decline; on the Roman Catholic side, the clergy sex abuse scandals was a species-ending event that destroyed faith in the institution of the Catholic church and the authority of the priesthood. On the Protestant side, the scandals began with the financial hucksters like Peter Popoff and the Jims (Bakker and Swaggart). It continued with Ted Haggard in 2006 and Mark Driscoll in 2014\. The capstone of them all was Ravi Zacharias, whose worldwide apologetics ministry was felled in 2017 by the discovery of his years-long sexual affairs.

Zacharias, in the end, provided the most thorough apologetic imaginable against Christianity. If religion is reduced to simple morality, the best apologetic against religion is an immoral religious leader–especially an immoral apologist. 

In Smith’s words, “In the first phase of the zeitgeist \[of the 1990s\], things seemed so good that people found themselves wondering why anyone would need religion. In the second, reality seemed so bleak that religion’s proffered hope and comfort seemed superficial and unrealistic.”

For Christian writers and thinkers, the implications here are startling.

Reduced to primarily a way of being good, religion can be evaluated alongside other possible ways of being good. For this reason, culture—even “vibes”—actually *do* have a lot to do with who remains Christian, and who never bothers to try it out. Once the vibes prevail *against* organized religion, it becomes increasingly difficult to persuade anyone to be religious. We see the effects of this theory in the misbegotten evangelistic and church growth movements of the 1990s that paired the nihilism of the 1990s with church planting, yielding an admittedly head-scratching generation of church planters who dressed like Kurt Cobain and brought along worship leaders who sounded like him. It should not be surprising that such an odd pairing of nihilistic vibes with traditional religion didn’t work. It should have been obvious that pairing the message of Christianity with the vibes of a nihilistic culture would fail. But it wasn’t, and we still haven’t learned. 

Just like Kurt Cobain’s vibes turned out to be bad for organized religion (shocker!), pointing our fingers so persistently at the weaknesses of traditional religion does nothing, in the end, to strengthen it. You only need to give a cursory glance to popular Christian writing and podcasting in 2025 to notice that there is an appetite for grievance. The same themes repeat: church trauma, spiritual abuse, abuse of power, and sexual misconduct. By the look of it, you would think that the abuse of power and mishandling of harassment claims are endemic to Christianity and are present in every church and parachurch situation. Curriculum offering training on how to be a “safe church” and on “narcissistic pastors” presumes that church is otherwise *unsafe*, and that narcissistic leaders abound. *Christianity Today*, Protestant evangelicalism’s premier publication, is now on its second podcast detailing the sordid failures of the evangelical movement. The appetite for such productions remains immense. 

Today the worlds of media and publishing are swarmed with memoirs, tell-alls, and post-facto evaluations of religious institutions that have gone bad, written by exiles from these movements. My concern is not that the sins so revealed are not lamentable and evil. My concern, rather, is that our appetite to pick apart and denigrate our own religious failures is feeding the very same forces that seek to hasten religion’s demise. 

If the orchard is diseased, we should indeed cut it down. But if it is not, and we’ve been sounding the alarm regardless, it is likely that we have been doing so to gain cultural cache. We want to make ourselves look better by publicly ruminating on how bad religion has gotten. It makes us look sophisticated and cultured. When the vibes of the moment tip *away* from anything that smells of organized religion, with its outdated rules for life and social mores, the best way to gain an audience and some cultural clout is to agree with your listeners. Since the vibes are off, we *must* renovate religion to make it abuse-proof and anti-hierarchical. We *must* make it uninterested in imposing itself on those who don’t want anything to do with it. The perverse incentives here are obvious.

The problem with this way of thinking is that Christian intellectuals come to reinforce the anti-religious sentiments that are already prevalent, adding fuel to the fire. By endlessly bemoaning harassment, sexism, patriarchy, hierarchy, and abuses of power, we are preaching to the cultural choir. Yet it is a pointless effort: Our secular audience was already convinced of the depravity of religion. We are doing nothing to improve the public’s perception of religion or even to “raise awareness.” We’ve just made ourselves fools for the vibes.

The robust market for retelling stories of Christians’ depravity is surprising. We might imagine readers would prefer edifying content. But what is novel, and I think evidence of religion’s obsolescence, is that *we are entertained by hearing stories of how depraved religion actually is*. We find these stories appealing and seek them out, reading about Christianity’s hierarchical past or scandalous pastors. This hunger goes beyond mere curiosity and being “informed”; if information was all we sought, one telling would do. Instead, presses are acquiring dozens of books about how patriarchal Christianity is, in 2025, when women can be pastors at many denominations. Our appetite, it seems, is to *feel bad about religion*.

Once the vibes have shifted so far, it is hard to imagine much can change. Religion is *already obsolete.* But it is worth considering how our thought leaders and intellectuals might have served as amplifiers, granting voice to religion’s decline and hastening it in the process. On its last dying breath, Christianity’s intellectuals and creatives have kicked a dying horse. We have committed our best energy and waking hours to proving something our audience already believes instead of undertaking the harder, deeper work of construction. But the tide of religion is already out, its empire has fallen, and we can bring ourselves only to laud its demise. We have been, I’m afraid, religion’s own worst enemy.
### The Tragedies of Longing for Home
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-tragedies-of-longing-for-home/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:38:09.000Z
Paul Kingsnorth. [*Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/against-the-machine-on-the-unmaking-of-humanity-paul-kingsnorth/1fd1b2b275afb40f?ean=9780593850633&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Thesis, 2025\. $32.00\. 368 pp.

I have a very distinct memory of sitting in a Manhattan hotel room back in 2016, crying hard after finishing Nancy Jo Sales’ *American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers*. Long before TikTok and Haidt’s *The Anxious Generation* were on the cultural radar, Sales’ book was an early report on the distortions and damage digital platforms and devices wrought in the lives of young women. It broke me and made me resentful of digital technologies and the companies behind them because of their willingness to prey on the vulnerable and take advantage of young people’s search for identity and belonging.

I expected Paul Kingsnorth’s *Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity* to have the same effect on me. Having worried over the evolution of digital technologies since the late 1990s, I looked forward to encountering a kindred spirit. In many respects, Kingsnorth did not disappoint, rolling out a devastating analysis of how we are increasingly coerced out of our humanity by the behemoth force he calls the Machine. Indeed, Kingsnorth proves to be an unyielding prophet when he writes in staccato: “Want is the acid. Capitalism is the battery. Growth is the engine. Greed is the forming energy that moves us to where we are inevitably headed.” Where most naysayers of this digital age warn of the coming apocalypse, Kingsnorth sees the Antichrist—the Machine has already taken over. What is sacred has been made profane, and what is profane has been made sacred. The essential elements of our humanity have been destroyed. The only move left is to head for the hills. 

**+++++**

Kingsnorth begins by putting a finger on the disquiet we have all felt knowing that no one is driving the accelerating bus of technological change. Surveying the post-pandemic landscape and seeing such seemingly disparate phenomena as the state-mandated digital proofs of vaccination, the totalizing digital surveillance that reduces our lives to data, the decline of Christendom in the West, and the unregulated advances in artificial intelligence, he posits that there is something bigger behind them all: the Machine.

The Machine means not only digital technologies and their commercial industries. It also includes the modernist ideologies of positivism, scientism, and progress that have led us to this precipice of Western civilization. Here, Kingsworth identifies “technique”—Jacques Ellul’s name for the instrumentalizing spirit that prioritizes efficiency and control over all else—as the fuel for the technological manifest destiny found among today’s transhumanists, evolutionary biologists, and techno-cheerleaders like Kevin Kelly and Ray Kurzweil. 

While Western modernity is typically associated with the benefits of modern science, industrial capitalism, and liberal democracies, Kingsnorth reminds us that these benefits have come at the cost of uprooting the “older ways of seeing and speaking.” Grounding himself in Simone Weil’s claim that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul,” he laments the loss of “real culture” that is sustained by past, people, place and prayer. Kingsnorth grieves the folly of this modernist uprooting most acutely in globalization’s disregard for local culture and particularity. His critique of cosmopolitanism’s casual dismissal of longstanding traditions that once defined what it meant to belong is reminiscent of the 1995 book *Jihad vs. McWorld.* There Benjamin Barber raises concerns about the diminishment of traditional tea culture in the face of McDonald’s expanding presence in Japan. 

In one sense, Kingsnorth echoes modernity’s earlier observers and critics. Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber worried that a spirit of transaction and indifference would grow as people found their lives increasingly mediated by the market and state, rather than their family and village. Where these late nineteenth-century thinkers wondered how industrial capitalism and urbanization might deaden the soul, later critical theorists like Jurgen Habermas and Herbert Marcuse warned that the totalizing logic of consumer capitalism would result in the “colonization of the life-world.” And yet, while these thinkers saw the shifting sands of the self and community stemming from changes in social structure and institutional systems of power, Kingsnorth seems locked in a mode of analysis that only sees ideology and belief as the determinants of historical change. As a result, his arguments easily slip into the binary ways of thinking that define the culture wars between liberal progressives and conservative traditionalists.

This slippage is most evident when Kingsnorth moves to link the technocratic impulse for power and control to the politics of progressivism. He writes: “The Machine is the liberal anticulture made manifest.” Seeing a through line of radical individualism running between transhumanist faith in human progress and contemporary social justice movements advocating on behalf of racial and sexual minorities, he views venture capitalism and progressive politics as advancing a “culture of inversion” that subverts and destroys foundational ways of being human. 

In this ambitious argument, it’s curious that he doesn’t account for the significant differences between techno-libertarianism’s prizing of freedom for freedom’s sake and civil rights activism’s prizing of dignity for the historically disenfranchised. Further, his preference for seeing the world in terms of ideological battle—where we are all forced to play on one team or the other—becomes a strategic weakness that cuts off the possibility of finding common cause with those stationed on “the other side.” 

For instance, he would likely consider someone like sociologist Patricia Hill Collins as problematic liberal elite invested in the culture of inversion for her critique of Eurocentric masculinist epistemology. But, in doing so, he would miss out on the fact that his fight against the coercions of Enlightenment positivism and scientism is exactly the same as her fight to create space for black women’s ways of sense-making. In fact, her advocacy for a black feminist epistemology that values received wisdom, personal narratives, and bonds of sisterhood is aligned with Kingsnorth’s nostalgic longing for a world that has room for “mythology, folk cultures and the mythical underpinnings of religious faith.” To simply dismiss advocates of progressive liberalism as parts of the Machine is to give up on building a coalition of co-belligerents needed to effectively resist it.

Finally, in suggesting that today’s technological and capitalist excesses are merely a manifestation of a leftist revolutionary impulse to dismantle social order, Kingsnorth chooses not to consider the possibility that an older justice-seeking set of progressive ideals has been co-opted and distorted into a social media-friendly identity politics that is fashionably coercive. This omission is especially puzzling given Kingsnorth’s personal account of feeling betrayed by an environmental movement that changed on him. When he saves his most bitter words for describing the vapid promises of machine environmentalism that wants to “3-D print out our food,” it is clear that the corporate takeover of the environmental movement is what most violates his sense of what was good, true, and sacred in the original movement with which he once identified. 

Indeed, the impetus for collapsing corporate capitalism and progressive politics into his notion of the Machine begins to make sense when he expresses exasperation with finding his advocacy of living in the small, the simple, and the rooted to now be dismissed as the “wrong” kind of green in the face of the modern, global, and progressive kind. And, as the Western world unevenly reckons with its legacies of colonialism and racism, he is upset to find himself yet again on the “wrong” side of the identity politics ledger simply because he is white and male. 

In the end, even though I might disagree with his conflation of technocratic capitalism and progressive politics, I get it. I really do. When we are betrayed by the causes to which we had sincerely given our lives, and when we feel ourselves and our loved ones threatened by strident forces that display no regard for the particularities of our circumstances, we become radicalized. I understand because I have had the same experience, and I know what it is to be left embittered. Sadly, it seems that the particular past, people, place, and prayer that Kingsnorth longs to protect and champion are part and parcel with the very features of Western imagination and the centering of white experience that have become the sources of my own encounter with betrayal and pain. 

His blanket derision for left-leaning movements that seek to amplify the voices of the marginalized make me doubt that people like me are included in his picture of the good life. And his ease in regularly scoffing at the rhetorics of “liberation,” “openness,” and “diversity” signal an indifference to how those terms can represent hope and healing for those who have endured exclusion and being silenced. Even when he seems to be pulling his punches—"I can’t stand what these woke people are doing. But I can understand why they’re doing it. The fact is that the culture which is crumbling… is also a culture I never felt comfortable with”—it feels too little, too late. 

Kingsnorth longs for a restored sense of home in his post-imperial Britain. In contrast, as a child of transpacific migration, I have always been cut off from a mother culture that rejects me for being too Americanized and rendered perpetually foreign in the United States where I was born and raised. The experience of Asian Americans like me is often one of liminality defined by tension and exile. As a result, the very question that Kingsnorth values—“Where are you from?—is the very same question that is notoriously alienating for Asian Americans because we are *always* asked this question. It is the sharp end of a stick ever poking at the fact that we obviously couldn’t be “from around here.” We are only culturally legible in the Western imagination if we confirm that we are from Japan or Korea or China. And in the same breath, our chances of belonging are best if we abandon this particularity of racialized experiences and keep our heads down when aspiring to live the American Dream. Where do those of us defined by such homeless liminality fit in Kingsnorth’s vision of local particularity? I’m not so sure that we do.

So here we are: the plight of living in a pluralistic society. Kingsnorth and I are both invested in fighting off the dehumanizing and impoverishing effects of our technological systems, ruthlessly powered by a ravenous capitalism and imperialistic visions of human mastery and technological control. And yet, because of our social locations and respective life experiences, we have each become radicalized and suspicious of those who have hurt us and taken away what we value and find essential to our sense of safety and personhood. How do we live together in a pluralistic society where different kinds of people with different kinds of life experiences would like to find belonging and feel at home? How can we be human together? This is the perplexing question we desperately need to address to have any chance of resisting the Machine. 

Honestly, I’d be delighted to be among Kingsnorth’s reactionary radicals and raw ascetics who carve out a new way of living, free of the digital dictates and the tyranny of technique. But I would want to know this: how do we cultivate a life-world where we not only live on a human scale with a meaningful sense of place, but seek the welfare of all people, actively reaching beyond those who look and think like us? And how do we live into such local particularity without descending into the dark sides of tribalism?

We all long for dignity in a world that is constantly stripping us of the very things we treasure. And Kingsnorth is right: Our problems are ultimately spiritual problems in need of spiritual solutions. Perhaps, amidst the duress of this present age, we ought to heed Wendell Berry’s call to return to the surest place where we can submit ourselves to the restorative powers of the divine and seek clarity and healing: 

> *“When despair for the world grows in me...* 
> *I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water….* 
> *I come into the peace of wild things* 
> *who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief…* 
> *For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”*
### After the Machine
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/after-the-machine/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:38:11.000Z
**Paul Kingsnorth.** [*Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/against-the-machine-on-the-unmaking-of-humanity-paul-kingsnorth/1fd1b2b275afb40f?ean=9780593850633&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Thesis, 2025\. $32.00\. 368 pp.**

"*I won't die from it, but I will die with it.*" This is how an older saint—a clergyman, in fact—I once knew described the kind of cancer with which he'd been diagnosed. Five or six years since, the remark has stayed with me. This cheerful resignation at the prospect of an aging body, of life continuing in the midst of death, was new to me as a younger man. I had heard terminally ill Christians speak movingly of suffering, death, and the life to come before, but this was different. It spoke of a slower affliction, a perennial weeping wound like the Fisher King. Plus, it's a great line.

I thought of this line often whilst reading Paul Kingsnorth's *Against the Machine*. The Machine, as Kingsnorth describes it, is like that cancer: We might not die from it, but we will all die with it. It is inescapable now. We've all ingested the microplastics, and even the monks of Mount Athos have smartphones. The real question is how we "stagger onward rejoicing," as W. H. Auden had it.

Another way of putting this question is: To what extent is reconciling oneself to The Machine the same as simply reconciling oneself to the fallenness of the world in general?

As I pondered this question, I returned to Kingsnorth's sadly overlooked 2019 book *Savage Gods*. A highly lyrical work of non-fiction, its chief concerns are *words* and *belonging*. Both these eluded Kingsnorth when he relocated to a smallholding in the rural west of Ireland—a nightmare scenario for a nature-loving localist writer. He faces up to the question of whether language (and writing in particular) may be unavoidably a poisoned chalice, and whether the eternal difference between the map and the territory, particularly when it comes to the natural world, is the source of man's woes:

> Is language the trap? The field is full of language. Everything is speaking to everything else, and some of it I can hear and some of it, because of my biology and my cultural inheritance, I am not equipped to. All nature is a language — but none of it is written down. Writing: converting a living, dancing speech, a pattern of sounds from a pulsing animal body, to dead, unmoving symbols on a page. Writing: fossiling life, replacing life with representations of life, representations which can be more attractive than life itself if you're not careful.

This inability to get one's words to match reality contributes to—or is perhaps a manifestation of—an inability to feel at home anywhere:

> I am lost, and is that what life is, what modernity or post-modernity is, a rolling sense of being out of place, of being tangled up in the gauze, of being alienated by language, perception, of having eaten the apple and fallen, and is *fall* another word for *life*?

I once heard of a Frenchman married to a non-French speaker say that speaking to his wife in English was like "always only touching her with gloves on." This is what Kingsnorth articulates in *Savage Gods*. Do we only ever touch the world with gloves on?

It is curious, in retrospect, to read *Savage Gods* knowing now that Kingsnorth was not far off his sudden conversion to Christianity. To my mind, there are some well-established Christian answers to his questions in that book. Language by itself is no trap, since man is made in the image of a God who speaks and names. Accordingly, the first thing man does is name things. Remarkably (and I never tire of pointing this out), Adam is never commanded to name things—he just *does* it, as if he can't help himself. And his Creator delights in it: "Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man *to see what he would name them;* and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name" (Genesis 2:19). But now, it is true that for man "fall" is another word for "life", since there is no unfallen life for man on this side of glory. This affects everything, including our language and sense of belonging and the relationship between the two. Words will always fail us, and homes will always leave us marooned at the hearth like Tennyson's restless Ulysses, to whom "all experience is an arch wherthro'/ Gleams that untravelled world." And yet none think that, even after the Fall, man should try to live without words and homes. 

This is a roundabout way of asking: Is the Machine the same principle applied to technology? And if so, should we relate to it in much the same way as we relate to the rest of our fallenness, accepting that the Machine we will always have with us? Should we be ever watchful but rest easy lest we delude ourselves into visions of a Machine-less utopia? Is *the Machine* another word for *life*?

Kingsnorth has been discussing and defining the Machine for years, but consider his most pithy summary in this newest book:

> This, then, is the Machine. It is not simply the sum total of various individual technologies we have cleverly managed to rustle up--cars, laptops, robot mowers and the rest. In fact, such 'technics', as \[Lewis\] Mumford calls them, are the product of the Machine, not its essence. The Machine is, rather, a tendency within us, made concrete by power and circumstance, which coalesces in a huge agglomeration of power, control and ambition.  
>  
> The Machine manifests today as an intersection of money power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies, which constitute an ongoing war against roots and against limits.

The Machine, then, is "a tendency", and clearly a sinful one. Is it one like any other? Perhaps on the abstract moral weighing scales, yes. But the Machine is set apart from its fallen cousins like *language* and *belonging* by its particular ability to manifest itself in the conditions of the twenty-first century. 

I wondered as I read *Against the Machine* whether technology, language, and belonging might not be a kind of unholy trinity, coequal in malice in their fallen states. They are the chief themes of the tower of Babel: “a people with one language and a common speech" deploy advanced technology to "reach\[\] to the heavens, so that \[they\] may make a name for \[them\]selves" (Genesis 11:1, 4). Yet I find it convincing that "the Machine" is a more overarching reality, subsuming fallen language and belonging via technology. Such technology is what Kingsnorth calls "the Grid", "a physical manifestation of the values of the Machine on the landscape itself," those technologies by which the Machine wages its war on roots and limits. Babel seems a kind of pre-Grid abortive first attempt at a Machine-world. Unsuccessful, the Machine continued "slouch\[ing\] toward Bethlehem to be born" as Yeats put it in a poem of which Kingsnorth is fond. Now, in Kingsnorth's view, the paths have been made straight and lo, the Machine comes.

Kingsnorth's idea of the Machine is not merely synonymous with a fallen attitude toward technology. This specific tendency relates to different kinds of power in certain ways and has come into its own in the material conditions of modernity. Now that artificial intelligence has been added to the Machine’s armoury, it may be a project as genuinely demonic as any pagan religion, since Kingsnorth suggests (as convincingly as anyone I've yet read) that the AI revolution is "ushering in" an age of "spiritual machines".

If the Machine is not merely “technology + sin,” then another question presents itself: Is there a non-Machine way for a society to live wisely and humanely with digital technology, even knowing that it will never be perfect? 

Kingsnorth gives the arresting image of “raw” and “cooked” barbarians as a model for the lifestyles of individuals and smaller elective communities learning to live within and without the Machine respectively. But is another life possible for society *as a whole* in the digital age, for the political community? Could we ever manage a humane, post-Machine digital existence at the national level? Long before the Machine reached its current state, the Christian West managed to develop societies that reined in words, sex, money, violence, and plenty of other volatile forces—or at least aspired to (or at least *said* they aspired to). Excesses came and went, crimes were punished, taboos embedded restraint, and functioning—even prosperous—societies grew up. Could we tame digital technology in the same way?

One possibility is that this is doable, but only after another fall of Babel. The fall of the first Babel was a judgement, but also a mercy. Part of Babel’s sin was its resistance to mankind’s vocation to fill the earth. Although man’s confused tongues and dispersal were a judgement, they also served to advance him in his natural creation mandate. What’s more, the new creation of the church does not reverse the sounds of Babel. Rather, it redeems them at Pentecost as a community of every tribe and tongue and nation. 

The Machine is not going anywhere anytime soon. I am convinced enough of this to write sporadic reflections on parenting in the age of the Machine in my Substack, The New Albion. I in no way wish to minimize the manmade horrors we will see under its rule. But if its Babelic downfall comes, perhaps on the other side there will be some kind of realignment with our humanity which involves a maturation in our collective relationship to the forces of technology. My friend Joseph Minich has suggested that C. S. Lewis saw modernity as a kind of testing ground, a rite of passage, for mankind. In his contribution to my recently edited volume *Life on the Silent Planet*, Minich considers the “conversion” that Mark and Jane Studdock (the thoroughly modern protagonists of Lewis’ 1945 novel *That Hideous Strength*) undergo as they reconcile themselves to their respective genders:

> Elsewhere, I have characterized *the* defining feature of modernity as this: the simultaneous global renegotiation of all human custom. Although the basic principles of natural law don’t change, the “living dance” that particularizes these principles does. The *independent* conversions of Mark and Jane as perhaps a commentary on what Lewis expects will become increasingly normative in contemporary civilization. Putting these two points together, then, whatever it means for modern people to inflect the old patterns is liable to be more rooted in individual internalization of God’s way than “peer pressure” to behave in certain ways that modernity often renders practically impossible.

He continues:

> Even if individuality and choice take on a greater degree of prominence in the modern experience of our gendered selves, this can *result* in either curse or blessing. It will be a curse to the extent that our own radically peculiar (by historical standards) freedoms come to seem *more basic* in our vision than the self-giving patterns of interdependence that are stamped into our very bodies and natures. It will be a blessing to the extent that the individualism of modern civilization catalyzes a greater depth of engagement with the basic principles themselves.

Could the same happen in our relationship to digital technology? And could it happen at scale, with enough individuals taking ownership of the “basic principles” of their humanity to affect a genuine societal shift? In principle, I cannot say no. In practice, it remains to be seen. But the Christian faith of which Kingsnorth is now a member has turned the world upside down before. It could do so again. *That Hideous Strength* was the fictional counterpart to Lewis’ lectures in *The Abolition of Man*, a non-fictional work whose title is synonymous with the subtitle of Kingsnorth’s book, *On the Unmaking of Humanity*. Lewis seemed to think that, between now and glory, there was some hope in the face of the Machine.

Yet this is likely a way off, quite possibly on the other side of some Babelic cataclysm. For now, though, Kingsnorth’s account of the Machine demands attention. Taking heed of it could well be the difference between dying from the Machine and merely dying with it.
### Imagining Life Outside the Machine
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/imagining-life-outside-the-machine/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:38:13.000Z
Paul Kingsnorth. [*Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/against-the-machine-on-the-unmaking-of-humanity-paul-kingsnorth/1fd1b2b275afb40f?ean=9780593850633&next=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Thesis, 2025\. $32.00\. 368 pp.

I have been reading Paul Kingsnorth since his days at the Dark Mountain Project, and I found his Buckmaster Trilogy absolutely brilliant. So I greeted the news of his conversion to Christianity with joy but not surprise; the trajectory of his thinking had been apparent. He has long seen the West’s environmental, technological, and political crises as symptoms of a *spiritual* crisis, and his essay “The Cross and the Machine,” which describes his conversion (after years of paganism, Zen Buddhism, Wicca, and more) and begins connecting these threads, remains one of the best essays I’ve ever read. Kingsnorth doesn’t exhibit the arrogance that marks some recent converts; he doesn’t think he’s figured everything out. He is, instead, a “come and see” disciple, one who has had his life upended by the incarnate Christ and humbly invites others to encounter this radical good news for themselves—and then rearrange their entire lives accordingly (John 1:46). 

His new book, *Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity*, synthesizes arguments he’s been making in his essays and talks since his conversion in the early days of COVID. For those who haven’t read Kingsnorth, this is the place to begin (but not to end). For those who have been following along on his Substack, there’s still much to be learned from reading through his revised arguments in book form. 

Kingsnorth is an ambitious and deep thinker—his aim here is nothing less than defining “the West,” understanding how it went wrong, and imagining some path toward renewal—so the book defies summary. Instead of making that doomed attempt, I want to set it alongside another landmark work of cultural criticism that kept coming to mind as I reflected on Kingsnorth’s project: Christopher Lasch’s *True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics*.

Kingsnorth doesn’t refer to Lasch’s 1991 magnum opus, though he does appreciatively cite Lasch’s posthumous *The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy*, but these two incisive works have much in common. Both are written by disaffected leftists who probe beneath the superficial conflicts between left and right, and both unearth an often unconscious, fragmented tradition that offers a genuine alternative to the Progressive or Machine consensus to which both sides of this ostensible divide adhere. Where Kingsnorth parts course from Lasch is in his more explicit search for a poetic and spiritual core: *Against the Machine* is a work of cultural analysis written by a mythic imagination. 

For Lasch and Kingsnorth, the camps we term left and right, conservative and liberal, free-market and socialist are bickering siblings within the broader Progressive family, one animated by the conviction that we can make a better world and overcome natural and human limits through the right technology and organization and systems. And what both argue—rightly, I think—is that such utopian aspirations inevitably cause real harm. Kingsnorth cites C. S. Lewis to this effect: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” Kingsnorth follows poets R. S. Thomas and Robinson Jeffers in naming this utopian-minded system the Machine. The Machine, then, is the target of his critique, as he exposes how its reductive and destructive logic crops up in scientism, globalism, colonialism, technocracy, COVID politics, transgenderism, transhumanism, AI, industrial agriculture, and more.

Like Lasch, then, Kingsnorth consistently refuses to be taken in by the simplistic framing that the culture wars impose on the political and cultural issues of our day. While Lasch exhibited sympathy with and admiration for Christianity in his later years, Kingsnorth is more explicit in arguing that the culture wars are a distraction from an underlying spiritual malaise: “When the *cult* departs from the heart of the *cult*ure, the thing starts to fall apart.” So what we’re left with now “is the equivalent of two bald men fighting over a comb.” It is “because we no longer have a culture,” Kingsnorth writes, that “we have a culture war instead.” Yet “the surface churning of these battles can distract us from the deeper currents,” which show these disputes to be part of “modernity’s long rebellion against nature,” limits, and God.

Take, for instance, Kingsnorth’s approach to nationalism. He is no fan of what he calls “the Grid” by which transnational capital hollows out particular places and nations, transforming them into profitable nodes of a global Machine. But he’s also wary of the ways in which nationalism makes immigrants into scapegoats and distracts from the Grid’s ongoing destruction of cultures and communities. Intractable contradictions are inherent to both sides of the typical conflict: “The left wants a world without borders that somehow also contains welfare states, while the right wants to defend the ethnic makeup of nations without acknowledging that traditional notions of ethnicity are increasingly impossible in the high-tech globalised world that has resulted from the capitalist economy they have always defended.” 

In other words, neither party seems perturbed that “the Machine is birthing its own ethnicity. It is a globalised, screen-enabled, placeless identity” that sucks the life out of regional or national cultures. As he concludes, “the point, as ever, is spiritual. . . Blame the immigrants if you like—it’s always the easy option—but they didn’t strip the soul out of the nations of the West. We did. Do you think you can build your country around nothing but money and then complain when people want to come in and earn some of it themselves?” 

If left and right are a distraction, where does the real conflict lie? The book’s epigraph signals Kingsnorth’s basic conviction. It records Wendell Berry’s resonant sentence, “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” Like Lasch, Kingsnorth’s extensive reading enables him to bring to the surface a tradition that’s too often gone unnoticed and unarticulated. 

He brings to consciousness a creaturely alternative, enabling those who are dissatisfied with the machine to recognize allies and fellow travelers from other times and places and glean from their wisdom. And there’s a great deal of overlap between the traditions that Lash and Kingsnorth uphold. Lasch praises a producer-populism that, he writes, “would find much of its moral inspiration in the popular radicalism of the past and more generally in the wide-ranging critique of progress, enlightenment, and unlimited ambition that was drawn up by moralists whose perceptions were shaped by the producers’ view of the world.” Kingsnorth borrows the term “reactionary radicals” from Craig Calhoun’s *The Question of Class Struggle*, and he defines this group in ways that rhyme with Lasch’s populist tradition: “reactionary radicalism . . . is a defense of \[a\] moral economy—a system built around community bonds, local economics and human-scale systems—in the face of colonisation by the Machine.”

Kingsnorth develops this contrast between machine life and creaturely life in different ways over the course of his analysis, but he offers a thumbnail version under the rubric of the Four Ss of the Machine’s anticulture versus the Four Ps that mark creaturely cultures across their genuine diversity. The Four Ss are Science (which tells us “where we come from”), the Self (which tells us “who we are”), Sex (which tells us “what we do”), and the Screen (which tells us “where we are going). Kingsnorth articulates how these work together to create a false religion: “If the self is our object of worship and science our new priesthood, then we could say that sex is our liturgy and prayer rule.” And this project is enabled by digital technologies that “can increasingly give us exactly what we want at any given moment.” Screens make tactile and plausible a sense of the world as manipulable, answerable to my every desire. Hence, as Kingsnorth points out, the Machine is but the latest iteration of the temptation that has bedeviled humans since Eden: “*Do what thou wilt* is the motto of our world: the motto of the Machine. *Thy will be done* is its older brother, and its challenger.” 

Those who live by this petition that lies at the core of the Lord’s Prayer will find their lives marked by the Four Ps: the Past, People, Place, and Prayer. Interestingly, when Kingsnorth spoke on this framework at the 2023 Front Porch Republic conference, he cited just three Ps, omitting the Past. But his revised, four-part model echoes the rich definition of place that Berry develops in his writings. As I’ve argued, Berry understands the proper human place as found at the intersection of four dimensions: tradition, community, geography, and hierarchy. The fact that Berry and Kingsnorth both land on complementary definitions of what it means to be rooted, healthy people indicates that they are drawing from a perennial well of wisdom.

His similarities to Berry (a collection of whose essays Kingsnorth edited for British readers) also highlight a key difference between Lasch’s approach and Kingsnorth’s. Like Berry, Kingsnorth writes not only non-fiction essays but also poetry and novels. His imagination searches for images and stories to lead us out of the ideological prison imposed by the Machine. So if his philosophical or historical analysis at times suffers from imprecision or oversimplification, this is because he’s searching for something deeper. Asking how an anticulture heals itself, Kingsnorth cites Robert Bly’s answer: “through story and ritual.” This is no quick fix. Rather, it’s “long, hard work: intergenerational work. It is myth work.” In the same vein, Kingsnorth praises the approach that Ian McGilchrist takes in seeking to recover a right-hemisphere, whole-oriented way of seeing the world that could then guide the tinkering and manipulating of the left hemisphere.

Kingsnorth has, of course, done this work in his own poetry and fiction. And even though this book emphasizes rational analysis and argument, it too includes plenty of stories. At one point, Kingsnorth recites a litany of ills unleashed by the Internet and admits: “if I had the energy, I suppose I could fill a hundred pages trying to prove” what a disaster the Internet has been for humans. Yet many pixels have already flickered on and off in this endeavor, “and by now you either agree or you don’t. . . . So I won’t try to prove anything. Instead, I’ll tell you a story.” This seems to be the choice he’s made in his Substack as well, where he pens fewer polemics and more often recounts pilgrimages to various holy sites and narrates the lives of “wild saints.” This shift makes me hopeful that we may yet enjoy more novels from him as well. Whatever Kingsnorth writes in the future will be well worth reading and pondering, but it is in this mythic vein that, I think, his greatest gifts lie.

Near the end of *Against the Machine*, he returns to the Four Ps: “Human community, roots in nature, connection to God, memories passed down and on. These are the eternal things.” And while they are threatened today by the ever-encroaching Machine, they also offer paths toward re-rooting for those of us who have grown dissatisfied with the Machine and its promises of material abundance and instead long for a more abundant life. Simone Weil concluded that the only path forward for those in the rootless West was “the growing of roots.” Kingsnorth agrees:

> This, in practical terms, is the slow, necessary, sometimes boring work to which I suspect people in our place and time are being called: to build new things, out on the margins. Not to exhaust our souls engaging in a daily war for or against a ‘West’ that is already gone, but to prepare the seedbed for what might, one day long after us, become the basis of a new culture. To go looking for truth. To light particularly little fires—fires fuelled by the eternal things, the great and unchanging truths—and tend their sparks as best we can. To prepare the ground with love for a resurrection of the small, the real and the true.

Rather than offer a grand, utopian political vision, Kingsnorth urges us to look around our homes and see what good work we might do here and now. “After all,” he reminds us, “we are still people, we still inhabit places, we have our inheritance, and God is still all around us, and within us, if we want to go looking for Him.” 

Neither nostalgic nor utopian, neither pessimistic nor optimistic, Kingsnorth embodies the “hope without optimism” that Lasch believed was the “spiritual discipline against resentment.” May this book and its hard-won hope prepare the seedbed for genuine renewal.
### Four Types of Christian Cultural Engagement
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/four-types-of-christian-cultural-engagement/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:38:17.000Z
As the fracturing dynamics that roiled within American evangelicalism between 2015 and 2024 begin to finally exhaust themselves, it is worth pausing to consider where we now find ourselves at the beginning of what may feel like a new era in the life of the American church. Old alliances and coalitions have fragmented and many institutions have fallen, either through moral failure or through actually closing their doors and ceasing to exist. Yet alongside these threats one can also see many signs of hope–there seems to be a new openness to Christianity amongst many people who once seemed quite closed off. This openness can be seen in everything from the response to the Asbury outpouring, to Canadian apologist Wesley Huff’s appearance on the Joe Rogan Show, to surprising conversions like those of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to soaring Bible sales numbers in 2024.

Indeed, the British broadcaster Justin Brierly has built an entire podcast and book around the theme titled “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.” More recently, Australian pastor Mark Sayers reviewed a wide range of data on his podcast “Rebuilders”, all of which point to a surprisingly bright future for the Christian church not only in the USA, but in Australia, England, and around the world.

Yet it is an odd and disorienting moment too: Social trust is low. Core institutions that define our common lives as people face serious challenges to their credibility and reputation–and many of the challenges they face are of their own creation. The combination of positive energy and social incoherence, perhaps even a pluriform public crisis or what Adam Tooze has called “polycrisis,” has created a moment with immense evangelistic opportunity as well as high risk and uncertainty.

So far, four basic responses to this mixture of factors have begun to emerge amongst anglosphere Protestants. Which of the four you tend toward is going to be a function of how you place yourself along two spectrums.

- Spectrum 1: When it comes to Christians relating to the world outside the church, do you value purity more or pluralism more?
- Spectrum 2: What is decisive in shaping societies and bringing about transformation: a plurality of individuals or key institutions?

You can plot the four responses on an x-y chart very easily:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7b/0b/7b0bd699-d78f-4472-8d29-233bd333f048/content/images/2026/04/ghost-upload-1776708917378-142986-undefined-Oct-23-2025-05-03-45-2794-AM.png)

To understand each bloc, we will first define the two axes being used and then will treat each of the four quadrants.

The first question has to do with your relative willingness as a Christian individual or as a small group of Christians to exist within spaces not owned or controlled by Christian believers. People more willing to participate in such institutions and social spaces are on the positive side of the vertical axis. People who desire greater uniformity in their social circles and specifically seek to live as much of their lives as possible in institutions and spaces controlled by Christians are the negative side of the vertical axis.

The second question concerns how societies and cultures change. Those who tend to view social change as resulting from mass movements of individuals are on the negative side of the horizontal axis. Those who believe societies and cultures are largely defined by a small number of key institutions and powerful individuals are on the positive side of the x-axis. (To put it another way, both quadrants on the right side of the chart above are basically “Hunterian,” meaning they agree with the theory of cultural change described by James Davison Hunter in his various works, particularly in *To Change the World*.)

With those terms defined, we can now define each of the four approaches currently common amongst Christians in the English-speaking world.

## Populism

The populist approach recognizes pluralism as an inevitable part of life which cannot be avoided. But they also tend to think in highly individualistic terms, building their vision for public renewal around a robust account of individual outreach and discipleship. This is the most common approach one will find in most American megachurches as well as with many non-denominational campus ministries.

I once heard a speaker with one prominent campus group explain the group’s philosophy of discipleship by proposing that if their philosophy were actually implemented, you would get something like an exponential growth of Christian disciples, thereby bringing about a renewal of our various communities. The logic was fairly simple: If I disciple two people–by which he meant meeting with two people regularly in one-on-one settings to study the Bible, pray, and talk about how they are doing–and then each of the two people I disciple goes on to do the same and then the people *they* disciple do the same… well, you can do the math for yourself.

It sounds great in theory. But there are problems.

First, discipleship is not necessarily something accomplished primarily through conversation, important as that is. Most of the highly significant and formative moments I’ve had in my own Christian life are not over conversations in coffeeshops or at Bible study, but simply happened organically as I was living my life, having conversations, carrying out my responsibilities, asking for help, offering help, and so on. Discipleship is not really something one “schedules” in the way one schedules a coffee date.

There are two other problems: A number of people simply won’t pursue two mentor-mentee relationships of the sort envisioned by the speaker. And that isn’t necessarily wrong–perhaps they simply don’t enjoy meeting people for coffee, or perhaps they have focused their energy elsewhere. But enough people *won’t* adopt this vision of discipleship that the math will very quickly fall apart.

Finally, cultures and societies aren’t really functions of mass movements of individuals. One example might suffice: Think about the most influential TV shows made in the late 2000s. Probably the shows that come to mind are *The Sopranos* and *The Wire*, both from HBO, and AMC’s *Mad Men*. You likely do not think of *The Mentalist* or *Desperate Housewives* or *Ghost Whisperer*.

But if you crunch the numbers, you’ll find that in the 2008-09 season, *The Mentalist* averaged almost 11 million viewers, *Desperate Housewives* averaged nearly 10 million, and *Ghost Whisperer* averaged 6.6 million. By comparison, Mad Men’s season finale in the fall of 2009 had 1.7 million viewers and *The Wire*’s final season in 2008 averaged under one million viewers per episode. It is not wrong, of course, to note that both *Mad Men* and *The Wire* attracted far more critical attention and are regarded as more influential. Indeed, both are still remembered today while I couldn’t even tell you the premise of *Ghost Whisperer*. But in terms of raw numbers, even a forgotten show like *Ghost Whisperer* wildly outperformed *Mad Men*.

The issue is that culture isn’t shaped by raw numerical superiority. It is shaped by a small number of highly influential elite institutions and figures. So the populist strategy, attractive as it is, simply fails on its own merits.

There are other pitfalls to populism, however. A populist approach can quickly devolve into a race to the bottom as the sole goal of a church or Christian community becomes the amassing of a large number of people who occasionally attend services at the church. But if your goal is simply numeric, you will not have many controls or limiting mechanisms to guide your decision making beyond that. A common saying in some megachurches today is that “we will do anything short of sin to reach people for Christ.” But the goal of the church is not simply to *reach* people for Christ; it is to help people to know and love Christ. And while there are things that might be pragmatically justifiable to help us *reach* people, those things should be rejected if they will hinder our ability to walk with people toward Jesus over the “long obedience in the same direction” to which we are called.

## Separatism

The separatists are Christians who agree with the populists that society is largely a function of mass movements of individuals, but they are less comfortable participating in public institutions, businesses, voluntary organizations, and so on which include large numbers of non-Christians.

On the one hand, this means separatist communities will generally have a stronger private practice of certain Christian disciplines than do the populists. They are usually far more rigorous. They also can be highly energetic and entrepreneurial because the desire to maintain what they see as appropriate separation from the world necessitates the creation of parallel institutions that do for their members what other organizations and groups do for their neighbors. So they build their own small businesses, youth sports leagues, schools, and so on. But the primary purpose of this is simply to raise up individual believers who will care for other individual believers in their pure Christian communities. There is no aspiration toward cultural transformation.

The reasons for these limited ambitions are mixed. In some cases it is a function of the group’s eschatology. Many separatist groups will be dispensational and as such they often have a more ambivalent attitude about society because they regard all social bodies as basically temporal and “earthly,” and therefore not worth their investment. In other cases, separatist groups simply have very low expectations when it comes to how neighbors will respond to the Gospel. Indeed, a mass response to the Gospel is virtually always dismissed as itself being evidence of a lack of purity or rigor. This, for example, is why many separatist groups are deeply critical of Billy Graham–they saw him as compromised and worldly because he failed to separate himself sufficiently from the world outside the pure Christian community.

What this means is that separatist communities are often far thicker in terms of relational and communal experience than populist communities. However, they are also more brittle: Your experience of a separatist community can change overnight simply because of a careless word or a changed opinion or a personal choice that is seen as evidence of your own worldliness. To borrow from Daniel, you could almost picture separatist communities as a mixture of iron and clay–quite strong, but also surprisingly vulnerable and weak at the same time.

## Revanchists

Revanchism refers to an attempt to take back territory that has previously been lost in a military conflict. It is a useful term for describing individuals who are both institutionalist and high purity. For revanchists, it is true that society is shaped by institutions rather than mass movements of individuals. But also it is important to maintain purity from the world and from corruption. For that reason, one should not seek to participate in the existing dominant institutions simply as a member of that group, but should instead either conquer existing institutions or build new ones to replace the corrupt institution.

In practice, the revanchists could be understood as a kind of reactionary Hunterian, so named for James Davison Hunter, the University of Virginia sociologist whose book *To Change the World* continues to be a defining text for these conversations. The idea that unifies the Hunterians is the importance of institutions in forming society. They agree that societies tend mostly to adhere to something like the pareto principle in which 20% of the parties involved exert 80% of the influence.

One way of naming this dynamic is to consider two changes that came about during the fracturing years. First, Doug Wilson has become a more prominent voice within American Protestantism. Second, many former Acts 29 pastors once closely associated with the urban missional sensibility of Mark Driscoll have taken a hard turn toward the political right wing, becoming sharply critical of figures like Tim Keller as well as former colleagues in Acts 29 like Matt Chandler.

What is interesting about this is that there is actually a great deal of overlap between Wilson’s project and Keller’s, counter-intuitive as that will seem to most readers. But both men are Kuyperian in as much as they believe that social renewal and reform is an entailment of the Christian faith taking root and growing in a specific place or community. Both men are also Hunterian, in as much as they agree with Hunter’s assessment of the necessity of influential institutions to bring about social change. Both men also shared a fairly strong critique of a sort of metaphysically agnostic liberal individualism. So if they shared so much, why is it that their general posture as well as the communities they work in are so wildly different? The answer has to do with the the dynamic on the right side of our chart above.

Wilson has explained many times that his family moved to Moscow, ID because Wilson’s father, Jim, saw it as a strategic location. For Jim Wilson, Christians seeking to influence culture needed to aim at “decisive points,” as he explains in his book *Principles of War*. What makes a point “decisive” is two-fold: First, it must be important in some way. If a point is not important, it is not decisive. Second, it must be feasible as a point that can be taken. If it is important but not feasible as a point to subdue, then it cannot be decisive.

What made Moscow “important” is that it had two large universities within eight miles of it: the University of Idaho in Moscow and Washington State University in Pullman. What made Moscow “feasible” is that it is not a large town. A small group of well-funded, energetic Christians could feasibly take over the city.

This is, essentially, the foundation of the revanchist project: Their frame for understanding social life is that it is a war between irreconcilable sides, one standing for Christ and one for the world. Christ’s side triumphs by taking decisive points. And while for Wilson the point about feasibility was chiefly about size, feasibility can also be understood in other ways as well. If an institution is seen to be both highly visible and influential but also surprisingly weak, then it can be possible to either take over that institution or to subvert the institution and replace it with a friendly one.

This, then, is the revanchist model of engagement: It draws on the same entrepreneurial tendencies of the separatists, but whereas the separatists largely aspire to quiet faithfulness amidst an intractably and unchangeably hostile world, the revanchists aspire to actually building a Christian regime either through taking over existing high-influence institutions or replacing those institutions with comparable bodies that they themselves control.

How healthy is this as a project? Well, that is a complicated question. On the one hand, the instincts of the revanchist movement are clearly informed by biblical texts: scripture does sometimes speak in the war-like language favored by Wilson, and it is clear at many points about the importance of maintaining separation from the world. Moreover, the revanchist project, like the separatist project, recognizes that sometimes mainstream institutions and communities can become so corrupt that one cannot really participate in them in a healthy or appropriate way.

That being said, there is an issue here that is in some ways cousin to the pragmatism of the populists. When the encounter between the body of Christ and the life of the world is framed purely in terms of war and militarism, it is easy to develop a number of mental habits that are highly corrosive to Christian piety. Those habits include:

- A posture of aggression toward anyone perceived as an outsider
- A tendency to think that any enemy of your enemy must be your friend
- An inability to regard civic society as a commonly shared project amongst all the residents of a place

In other words, the revanchist posture tends to militate against several qualities Paul regards as indicative of Christian faith, such as kindness and gentleness. It also has little space for mercy, and it struggles to make sense of biblical exhortations to care for the sojourner.

None of that is to say, of course, that common progressive readings of biblical texts concerning the sojourner are correct. I am simply noting here that those texts *do* exist and they mean *something*. You do not need to agree with a no borders radical to affirm that the Bible seems to have a particular concern with the status of the vulnerable and that it includes “sojourners” in their number.

And so that brings us to the final quadrant: the reformers.

## The Reformers

The Christians who are high pluralism and institutionalist are the Reformers. These Christians are defined by two basic convictions that shape their approach to public life: First, engaging in the life of groups, businesses, and other institutions that are deeply pluralist is unavoidable, at the very least, and can actually be a good and desirable thing, in fact. Second, cultural change happens through institutions, not individuals.

Based on these two beliefs, reformer Christians tend to take the Keller side of the Keller-Wilson dispute. They share the Hunterianism and Kuyperianism of both men as well, quite often, as their strong critique of a certain type of liberal individualism. (Go back and re-read *The Reason for God* and you’ll see how surprisingly sharp Keller could be in his critique of post-Cold War liberalism.)

Their point of departure from the revanchists is that they do not primarily view the public square as a war zone. Rather, they view the public square and civic society as being a complex mix of good and bad actors with a mix of motivations and desires, all trying to accomplish various things in a people’s common life together. The reformers, in other words, rely less on a black/white analysis of the public square, attempting instead to make distinctions and promote the common good where they can through partnerships aimed at specific goods and done with men and women of good will. In short, they adopt Hunter’s idea of “faithful presence” as their primary guide in participating in the life of their city or neighborhood or nation.

At this point it’s perhaps helpful to make a few limiting observations: 

First, if you imagine the graph as an x-y chart, then there are stronger and weaker forms of each of these four tendencies. Because of that, one can easily imagine a situation where someone who is a more centrist reformer might find themselves agreeing more with a centrist revanchist than they do a stronger reformer. 

Second, the point of this exercise is not simply to identify good teams and bad teams. The goal is to identify distinct ways that Christians are responding to the particular challenges of our moment and to identify pitfalls and challenges with each response while also, hopefully, establishing that some responses genuinely are better than others while still remaining imperfect and having certain vulnerabilities and dangers.

In this context, it is worth considering the most common failure amongst reformers and what that failing should teach us going forward. Too often, Christians working in the reformer quadrant found themselves falling into the very traps that motivate separatist and revanchist Christians to take the stands they do. There is such a thing as loving the things of this world and, through that love, being drawn into deep moral compromise. While Keller himself admirably avoided those traps and truly exemplified both elements of Hunter’s “faithful presence” many others in this quadrant tended to overtime simply become “present” without being altogether “faithful.” One of the core temptations facing reformers is to over-value either their place in elite institutions or to over-value those institutions themselves and, as a result of that, begin making unacceptable compromises to retain their place or their group’s reputation. This is the path toward failure because it is a path away from Christ and for Christian believers anything that leads us away from Christ should be rejected.

That being said, the above nuances and observations do not entail that we must separate from the world in the way that revanchists or separatists claim. Surely Paul’s warnings in 1 Corinthians apply at this point: 

> 9 I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— 10 not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. 11 But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister\[c\] but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people.  
>  
> 12 What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? 13 God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked person from among you.”

What does reformer work look like in practice? There are layers to that answer. But much of it is simple and perhaps even common sense: to live in the world is inextricably to live amongst mixed communities of people with varying beliefs and convictions and desires. The Christian must learn to live wisely, gently, shrewdly, and carefully amongst their neighbors, both so that they are able to love their neighbors well and so that they themselves remain faithful to Christ. Two stories might suffice to conclude this meditation and explain the goal:

First, during the peak of COVID and aggressive DEI policies, a friend of mine was working for a fairly large corporation that implemented some quite extreme policies around transgender identity in particular. The policy included a requirement to use preferred pronouns and all employees were expected to sign their name on the policy, indicating their willingness to submit to it. My friend knew his conscience would not allow him to sign that. He believed, as do I, that using pronouns in that way is to participate in a sort of lie because it is stating something that is not true given the design of human bodies. So my friend had a problem: He could violate his conscience, sign the policy, and keep his job. Or he could refuse to sign and be fired. What happened next is the difference between high purity and high pluralist Christians: Because high purity Christians tend to rely too strongly on militaristic concepts and metaphors to guide their life in the world, they can easily begin to operate in a world overrun by false dichotomies. For, of course, those were not the *only* two options my friend had. But the other options only existed because my friend had worked to build relationships with his coworkers and was generally well-regarded by his employer–and those are two things that high-purity Christians struggle to do in mixed groups amongst non-Christians.

So my friend went privately to his contact in the HR department. He explained that it would violate his sincerely held religious beliefs to accept certain requirements in the policy and, therefore, he could not in good conscience sign the document. However, he was willing to use the chosen name of transgender coworkers whenever he was working with someone, and he was not seeking to create scandal in the company or to antagonize transgender individuals. He was simply trying to figure out if there was a way for him to submit to his conscience as it was informed by his sincerely held religious beliefs while keeping his job. And, turns out, there was: The HR official accepted his compromise and did not require him to sign the doc that had been circulated to employees.

Now imagine how this might play out in our media discourse: If my friend were a prominent church member at a megachurch with a famous pastor and if it became known that employees of a certain company had to sign a certain policy and this friend worked for that company… well, what do you think would happen? I think we all know: My friend would be blasted on social media, accused of all sorts of things, and would likely also face some awkward in-person encounters with people at work or church due to the social media controversy. And, infuriatingly, all of that controversy would be basically fake because it proceeded from premises that were false. But the only way my friend kept his job *and* the only way it would be known that the imagined claims against him were false would be through conversation. And this is why communities seeking to live by faithful presence need to have a great degree of trust in each other.

A second principle follows, which has to do with shrewdness: Years ago I heard a story about a university that adopted an “all-comers” policy for all registered student organizations (RSO) on campus. What this meant is that any RSO needed to welcome anyone who wished to join the group, including anyone who wished to join the group’s leadership team. For many Christian orgs, this policy effectively drove them off campus because they obviously could not have atheist students serving on their leadership team making decisions about programing, organizational priorities, and so on. One group was relatively unaffected, however: Reformed University Fellowship, the official campus ministry of my home church, the Presbyterian Church in America. Why was RUF unaffected? It wasn’t because they compromised in unacceptable ways. It was because of how the organization was set up. In RUF, a given chapter is run by the campus minister, who is an ordained pastor in the PCA. He makes all the decisions, under the guidance of the local presbytery. So it wasn’t a problem for RUF to have–theoretically–an atheist on their student leadership team because the student leadership team was basically just a way of identifying students who were committed to RUF, such that they came to large group gatherings regularly, met regularly with the campus pastor, and so on. You could even make a case that having an atheist on leadership team is desirable, if only because it means that atheist student has committed to regular lunches with an ordained pastor to talk about life and big questions.

In this respect, groups like RUF as well as many university study centers who purchase office space across the street from the campus they serve so as to minimize their exposure to university policies, are models of how reformers can be shrewd in their outreach and advocacy. By adopting policies that simply exclude certain possibilities by definition, these groups allow themselves to faithfully engage the life of the university while preemptively closing the door on certain dangers and temptations. Through policy and organizational decisions they effectively make decisions in advance. I once spoke to a director of a study center at a major public university about this and asked him what would happen if the university adopted policies that targeted Christian organizations. He laughed. “Well, they could take away our RSO,” he conceded. But that wouldn’t really affect them because their event programming all happened in their building, which was technically not on campus anyway. This organization does not adopt a confrontational posture toward the university in any way. On the contrary, they are immensely clear that they love the university and desire to see it flourish, and they act in a thousand small ways to aid it toward those ends every day. They are clearly reformers rather than revanchists or separatists. And yet through wise stewardship of their organization they have been able to protect themselves from some of the chief temptations that afflict many reformers.

*That*, then, is the work before us, as far as our lives outside our local churches are concerned: How to be constructive, fruitful members of mixed communities and organizations while genuinely serving them and promoting their good and living shrewdly enough to recognize the dangers and protect ourselves from those as well. It is hard work and often quiet. But, of course, hard work done quietly is often the best and most long-lasting sort of work there is.
### What Has War to Do with Motherhood?
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/what-has-war-to-do-with-motherhood/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:38:21.000Z
Leah Libresco Sargeant. [*The Dignity of Dependence*](https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268210335/the-dignity-of-dependence/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). University of Notre Dame Press, 2025\. $28.00\. 200 pp.

One of the most haunting scenes in Greek tragedy reflects on the two defining experiences of men’s and women’s lives in much of human history: war and motherhood. The protagonist of Euripides’ *Medea* is a foreigner and a sorceress, who sacrifices her barbarian family of birth to move to the Greek world with her common-law husband, the hero Jason. Except Jason turns out to be a faithless opportunist. Offered the chance to marry a Greek princess, he gives Medea her proverbial walking papers, although he graciously offers to retain custody of their two children. Medea’s gut-wrenching monologue in response concludes with this: “Men say that we live a life free from danger at home while they fight with the spear. How wrong they are! I would rather stand three times with a shield in battle than give birth once.”

Medea’s comparison is apt, as many have recognized in the 2,400 years since this comment was first uttered to an all-male audience on the Athenian stage. Just as the most life-threatening activity in which men traditionally engage is war, so is childbirth the most life-threatening experience for women even today, Leah Libresco Sargeant reflects in her new book, *The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto*. But while war has historically offered men a way to exercise their strength to protect their state, childbirth for women is a time of profound vulnerability. It requires a dependence on others that will continue and even intensify after the baby’s arrival. 

It is this dependence and its ramifications for articulating a well-ordered anthropology that forms the focus of Sargeant’s book. Why does this matter? Because “no just society can be built on the basis of a false anthropology.” No matter how much people may deny this reality in words, deeds, and policies, “vulnerability cannot be solved; it can only be shared.”

The present essay is part of a roundtable of essays by women (all mothers, to boot), on a book written by a woman (herself a mother), defending the dignity of dependence as a “feminist manifesto.” It might be easy for some readers to dismiss this conversation and this book as a women's issue that is not relevant for the other half of the human race. And yet, part of the argument of this book is that the dignity of dependence concerns us all, because we all start our lives carried by our mothers, birthed by them, nourished by their bodies. Furthermore, even the strongest of male bodies wear out and grow weak by life’s end. But I'm not going to dwell on these particular points, which other contributors to this roundtable have so beautifully addressed already. Rather, I am a military historian by training. So I'm going to take this conversation outside the realm of traditional women's lives—not that it ever was fully in that realm alone.

The story of war across world history is a story of absence—the absence of recognition of the dignity of the weak, those who depend on others for their protection. To be dependent—to require protection from others because one cannot effectively offer such protection to oneself—has historically entailed a recognition of inferiority. The author of one Byzantine siege warfare manual says this quiet part out loud, as he describes the individuals who cannot fight in the military but must be protected during a siege as “the useless ones.” It’s a terrible drag on military resources, he notes, that some military personnel must be assigned to these useless people during war, lest they interrupt the military activity that actually matters. Can’t have hysterical civilians running around the city streets unsupervised while enemy projectiles rain in.

Indeed, we could say this is the default mentality across world history in times of war until fairly recently. Society in wartime organically splits into two categories of people, which have historically been heavily (if not absolutely) gendered. First, of course, there are the defenders, the ones who possess the strength and the financial resources to bear arms. They are most often men. And second (in more ways than one) are the dependents, the ones who cannot fight in the military. Their numbers include women, children, the elderly, and the disabled—categories that can, to be sure, overlap in various ways. They are the people whose dignity will be denied them altogether in case of their state’s defeat in war. Slaughter, rape, and sale into slavery are the trifecta of outcomes awaiting them, should their defenders fail. 

It is striking that the ancient Greco-Roman world did not possess clear terms for this category of people in wartime, even as precise language existed for describing military personnel. This absence of language is, in and of itself, telling. Such absences are an admission that some people are not necessary to talk about, except when their very existence presents a problem, a disruption to the oxymoron of orderly warfare. At that point, calling them “useless” or “worthless” is appropriate, because from the perspective of the doers in time of crisis, useless is what everyone else is. It is likewise no less telling that today we do have specific internationally and legally recognized terms for such individuals. They are “civilians” or “non-combatants,” the latter term effectively defining them by what they are not. 

Section IV of the Geneva Conventions, formulated in 1949, in the wake of the stunning horrors perpetrated against civilians in WWII, attempts to protect civilians from harm. These laws recognize the dignity of dependence of the vulnerable in wartime. Taken together, they proclaim that civilians in a supermarket shopping for food, or women in maternity hospitals, or children in schools or on playgrounds or undergoing cancer treatment in a hospital all possess an intrinsic dignity and right to life, even if their state is under attack by another. 

These laws remind us that the dignity of dependence, already under threat from the default settings of our world, which Sargeant so poignantly describes, is even further eroded in wartime, especially in the modern era of strategic bombing. Why else would international laws need to spell out places where one state should not attack another? Shouldn’t it be common sense that a hospital or a pizzeria or a playground or a residential apartment building are not military targets? 

To take the principles Sargeant presents and apply them to war means, ultimately, to confront the continued existence of genocide in our seemingly civilized modern world. The problem is that any one of us, if we were to find ourselves in the wrong part of the world at the wrong time, could be the object of a brutal missile attack or a nuclear bomb or a terrorist group invading a peaceful kibbutz on a holiday morning. It is not only that our own society does not recognize the dignity of the weak. It’s that the weak are considered worthless even today in war zones the world over, deemed good for nothing other than violence and outright destruction. The very attacks on the weak that the Geneva Conventions outlaw are repeatedly violated with no visible consequences for those committing these war crimes—just ask Victoria Amelina, the Ukrainian mother and poet, who sent her son away from Ukraine and became a war crimes investigator in 2022, until she was killed during a bombing of a pizzeria in summer 2023\. In wartime, such simple acts as meeting friends for dinner can be deadly.

The recent history of war crimes brings us back to something Sargeant hints throughout her book and that is worth emphasizing more overtly: The recognition of the weak as a category of people who should be treasured, rather than annihilated, is revolutionary and exceptional in world history. Put simply, it is unique to Christianity, although Christians too have struggled to live out this call to mercy in full. Indeed, it is no coincidence that a faithful Christian would write this book—Sargeant is a conservative Catholic, and the assumptions of her faith emerge in such tender and beautiful reflections as this reminder of the ties that bind us all: “Our lives render us stochastically vulnerable to each other. We don’t know for sure when or where the next need is going to emerge, but as with the atomic model, we know something about the shape of the cloud of probability. What we worry more about is whether, when that need comes, we will be able to offer a stable bond in response.” 

As a conservative evangelical I agree, but I would note that we cannot take the value and the beauty of this vulnerability for granted. Sargeant’s book makes no sense outside the Judaeo-Christian worldview today, just as it would have made zero sense to, say, the pre-Christian Mediterranean world. The earliest Roman law code, the Twelve Tables, includes a striking command to the *paterfamilias* to kill a visibly deformed newborn immediately. While in all other areas, the father of the family had authority and choices to make for his family, the law in this instance is clear in denying him any choice: to not kill his own disabled newborn would have been legal disobedience, likely to carry severe consequences for any parent tempted to choose mercy. In other words, children like David, whom Rachel Roth Aldhizer describes in her essay, would not have been allowed to live in the Roman Republic.

Thus I would go a step further than Sargeant does, when she assumes that the argument she makes can be convincing solely on its own merits. Without the Judaeo-Christian value system, there is no framework to have any concern about meeting the needs of others, because there is no reason to think that other people have value. Multiple societies and religions around the world in both the past and present have seen nothing wrong with ranking people based on categories of usefulness or convenience or caste or strength or wealth or social power or any other criteria suitable for the moment. Such is the natural default in all human societies and religions apart from Christianity and Judaism. 

It is much easier and cheaper and more efficient to declare people as sometimes disposable than unconditionally precious. Without the doctrine of the *imago Dei*, there is no clear justification for treasuring the weak, the broken, the dependent. By taking on the vulnerability of a human infant and living a life in a human body that was vulnerable to violence, Christ demonstrated the dignity of dependence to us in his own life. And so, Christ continues to call us to himself, proclaiming the beauty and revolutionary power in weakness—that of our children and our own.
### Leah Sargeant Replies
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/leah-sargeant-replies/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:38:24.000Z
I’m delighted to be able to respond to my trio of thoughtful reviewers. Writing a book can be a lonely pursuit—and the long lag between when the author is finished and the book is in the hands of readers is a hard wait. I tried to approach *The Dignity of Dependence* in a convivial spirit. Throughout my planning and drafting, I had the substack community of Other Feminisms to turn to for an ongoing conversation. It clarified my thinking and was always a welcome break from the maelstrom of social media. Every chapter went first to my husband for his read… with me incorporating his last set of notes just a few hours before I went into labor with our youngest. This trio of reviews were the first I got to read in the run-up to publication, and I’m so lucky to begin with these careful, curious interlocutors. 

I am grateful for Agnes Howard’s emphasis on pregnancy as the paradigmatic human experience. I know well that there can be a reluctance to place too much weight on pregnancy. If pregnancy is so important, aren’t you asserting that the male half of the human race is cut off from something essential to being human? And, on the flip side, don’t you pose a danger to women, making all other rights and responsibilities secondary to the capacity for childbearing? And isn’t this salt in the wound for women who hope to bear children but are unable to conceive or struggle to carry a baby to term?

What I think all these critiques neglect is that pregnancy is a two-way relationship. As Howard writes, “Like confusion over a story when the reader’s imagination inserts her as the wrong character, such worries approach this human condition from the wrong direction. In this story you are not the mother, you are the baby.” I make parallel arguments in my public policy work, when I advocate for expanded family benefits, especially a baby bonus paid out to families after a birth. This isn’t a matter of squeezing childless adults to subsidize families. Everyone, including people who grow up and do not have children, begins as a baby. A benefit for babies is the most universal social support we can offer. Everyone has an infancy, even if not everyone lives long enough to collect social security.

Our own origins can feel irrelevant to or alienated from our sense of self, because we do not remember our time in the womb, our long lazy afternoons at our mothers’ breast, or the unstable steps that marked a new independence. That means that to know ourselves, we must be around young children, the disabled, the elderly, etc. Their visible need and others’ love in response to need shows us what we once wordlessly demanded and hopefully received. As Howard sums up, “We are even dependent on people to show us we are dependent.”

Dependent on *whom*? A mother at the very beginning. Even before she knows her child is there, her body is reaching out, twining tiny capillaries around a poppy seed-sized body, preparing to feed the child. As we grow, we must ask for help more explicitly, and we rely on someone to choose to give an active Yes. But beyond all those human relationships of need and being known, there is one great dependence in the background. It is God who conserves us moment to moment in existence, and it is Jesus who pulls us out of the pit that we could never escape on our own. 

My book is more a work of anthropology than theology, but it is impossible to examine men and women without seeing the shadow of our Maker. I’m grateful for the way Nadya Williams and Rachel Roth Aldhizer deepen this argument in their own reviews. I walk a slightly narrow path in the book deliberately. Just as I hope men will not dismiss a book on dependence as solely for women, I pray that the book can reach secular readers without being dismissed as irrelevant because I am religious. For my hope, I’m indebted to Daniel Williams’s *Defenders of the Unborn*, a history of the pre-Roe pro-life movement. When I read it, I recognized many of the pro-immigrant, anti-war, progressives I grew up with—the kind of people who always want to err on the side of the voiceless. Reading Williams’s book made me feel like part of my own patrimony (matrimony?) had been lost, and advocacy for the unborn had somehow been severed from the history of civil rights advocacy I grew up with. 

My book leans less heavily on theology because I think the *fact* that we are dependent, that a human being is someone who *cannot* stand on his or her own, is as accessible to all of us as the rest of the natural law. As Nadya Williams points out, Christianity becomes indispensable when we consider the moral implications of our own dependence. It takes more than just the natural law to see our dependence as an invitation to love, not despair. My hope is that by telling the story of who we are warmly and clearly, I can draw the reader’s attention back to the reality of who she is and give her some faith that being human is not humiliating. 

I was fascinated by Williams’s exploration of my book through the lens of war and the weakness of civilians. Unfortunately, many of the nations that advocated for the weak by writing the Geneva Conventions now see the weak as legitimate targets for killing in peacetime. Far from the battlefields, it is the euthanasia clinic that now applies the pagan calculus of who is dead weight, excess need. The surest sign of our post-Christian collapse is that it is the word “dignity” that is used to justify their deaths. 

It is partially for this reason that my book leans so heavily on the word “burden” which I’ve been repeatedly warned sounds pejorative. I don’t think any other word can encompass all the people I want to shelter. I am relying on “burden” for my own protection if I live long enough to undergo serious mental or physical debility as I age. As Aldhizer notes, it is “becoming a burden” that her father-in-law sees as the red line that would justify his own disappearance. A reassurance that he will never cross that threshold cannot comfort. It is not a promise we have the power to keep. As Aldhizer explains, his life has already been reshaped by his dementia. 

Here, again, is the moment we need to move from the natural law to its Author. Saint John Henry Newman put in clearly in a sermon titled “Remembrance of Past Mercies:”

> We cannot be our own masters. We are God’s property by creation, by redemption, by regeneration. He has a triple claim upon us. Is it not our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any happiness, or any comfort, to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous.… But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man—that it is an unnatural state—\[that\] may do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end. No, we are creatures; and, as being such, we have two duties, to be resigned and to be thankful.

There is no escaping our creatureliness. I think all readers of my book already know that. For some of us, like Aldhizer’s son David (or Aldhizer herself, given her ties to him) our dependence will be the loudest fact about us when we venture into the world. For others, the truth about ourselves can be pushed to the side for years at a time, until one’s own body or that of someone beloved makes its needs loudly known. I want to give my readers permission to speak what they already know. I hope my books are passed from friend to friend, and they make it easier for both to ask for help, even when they cannot reciprocate what they receive. It takes practice to learn that we can be loved when we cannot “earn” it. We rely on others to instantiate the utterly unmatchable love of God. If our worldly relationships depend on being “even,” we will not be prepared to accept the unrecompensable gift of the Atonement.
### The Presence of Christ in Our Dependence
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-presence-of-christ-in-our-dependence/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:38:26.000Z
Leah Libresco Sargeant. [*The Dignity of Dependence*.](https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268210335/the-dignity-of-dependence/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) University of Notre Dame Press, 2025\. $28.00\. 200 pp.

There’s a child in my son’s summer school program who sits in a specialized chair. He’s small, perhaps four or five years old, with bright blue eyes. He has a tracheostomy. The tubes connect to a ventilator that sits in a bag behind his chair. Small winter mittens cover both hands, attached to thin elastic bands that are tied to the arms of the chair. This is so that when he hits himself, the mittens soften his blows to his face. 

Today, as I was picking my son up from class, this boy’s trach tube popped out. Without a constant watchful presence, a dislodged trach tube is a death sentence for the ventilator-dependent. His nurse calmly reinserted the tubing back into the opening at his throat, so his breathing could resume. The tube that the nurse’s hands reconnected to the machine, and the machine that pumps air into his lungs, and the little mittens, and the chair all talk very loudly, although the boy himself can’t speak. They say: “Help me. I need you.” 

I know, because my son has some of those things too, and they speak to me. My son hasn’t spoken to me, and I don’t think he will, but every time I help him breathe or eat or walk or change his diaper, I am talking back to him in a language of our own making, a language without words. His needs call out to me, and I answer back. I talk to his birth defects, his blindness, his brain abnormalities when I touch him and care for him. My touch says “I’m here. You are not alone.”

The needs I see in my son and in his little friends aren’t simple needs. They don’t smell nice, and they make you sweat. They leave you bruised. When I picked my son up the other day from his classroom, all of us—I, the teacher, and my son’s nurse—were covered in his vomit, down to our shoes.

Most people have experienced the helplessness of a newborn baby. This is an acceptable need, one welcomed and expected. Something happy. But babies grow. Dependence, for most parents, is fleeting, or at least circular. Children grow and change. Adults appear more or less self-sufficient. Then, of course, as we age, our helplessness reemerges. As I write this, my newborn son is developing before my eyes. This is the fifth time I’ve welcomed a baby, but the miraculous change of a tiny baby quickly gaining independence is always fresh. 

But for some, like the boy with the trach, or my son David, the world is fated to be small. My son knows only what is offered to him. Needs, like the care they demand, are not equitably distributed. Yet David and I are not as far apart as we perhaps appear. It would be a grave mistake to assume that only the recognizable “other” has needs. As Leah Libresco Sergeant argues in her new book, *The Dignity of Dependence*, “our need is what makes us human.” “Vulnerability,” is a reality that “cannot be solved, it can only be shared.” 

But the world is not built for those with needs, and it therefore incentivizes the pantomime of autonomy, Sargeant argues. She demonstrates many ways our culture penalizes dependencies. This can take the form of policies, like no standardized paid maternal leave in the workplace, or in the careful façade society has built around the myth of the autonomous individual. At the core of this pretense is an avoidance of shame—an unwillingness to see ourselves and others for what we really are. And what we really are is quite needy. “Abandoning the false ideal of autonomy is our route back to reality. The shift is painful,” Sargeant writes, because “we have grown accustomed to feeling guilt for being human.”

Need and dependence do not touch all of us in the same ways. Women bear the burden of living in a society shaped for men; the shape of women’s unique bodies, built to care for others, rendered irrelevant, and worse, inconvenient. Sargeant’s meditations on the physicality of motherhood are rich and poignant, noting that “a culture that idolizes autonomy can’t value pregnancy,” seeing “childbearing as an interruption of the human project.” 

The powerful are better able to sustain the illusion that autonomy is truly possible. Pretending we don’t have needs is achievable for a while in an economy where care is for sale. But this comes at a cost, always passed down to the most vulnerable. It is “impossible to tell the truth” about who we are without “accounting for mutual dependence.” Building a culture on the basis of a “false anthropology” is doomed to fail. “Building a just society,” Sergeant writes, “requires a moral revolution.” This, she acknowledges, will be costly, and painful, noting that “openness to the reality of pain goes alongside intimate dependence on others.”

Recently, my father-in-law told me that if he ever thought he’d become a burden to someone in his old age, he’d “walk off and never come back.” The great irony of my father-in-law’s statement is that he suffers from dementia, and the burden of that disease touches each member of our family daily. Sargeant argues that “a culture focused on expressive individualism and suspicious of the natural and the needed finds it easy to pathologize the real and idealize the pathological.” The old, the ill, and the weak in this type of world are inherently at risk—problems to be solved—by such means as abortion or euthanasia when possible. 

As society grows richer, human labor becomes more precious. Sargeant explains that when “workers produce more with the same amount of labor, wages rise,” but when it comes to care work, productivity is ultimately limited, and “the core work of parenting and caregiving, which depends on presence, doesn’t scale.” As caregivers have the increasing ability to command higher wages on the market outside of caregiving, the “better” the product of caregiving must become to justify lost wages. This section of the book is a thought-provoking explanation of two extremes: the rise of intensive parenting and the growing reluctance of young people to form families, with dire costs for an aging world. 

Sargeant’s most beautiful writing is reserved for personal reflections on motherhood and family life. She concludes by arguing that “it is the largeness of our love that exposes us to risk. I count my treasure in my exposure to catastrophe. I measure my humanity in how little my life and my loves can be sustained by my own strength.” Here she demonstrates the paradox of coming into one’s own only by losing ourselves. She is confident, self-assured, and full of agency, even while describing immense physical and emotional self-sacrifice. “I grew up prepared to use my strength to advocate for my sisters, but the more I grow, the more I have found I must offer the testimony of my weakness as well.” I recognize this change; I know it too.

Yet if I could offer one critique of Sargeant’s work, it is that she relies too handily on a particular givenness of the world without duly considering underlying metaphysical priors. 

What true reality does human need and dependence illuminate? The metaphysical framework that presupposes her central argument and makes us human deserves explicit treatment. “The human project,” Sergeant writes, “is better understood not as self-creation…but as apprehension of the world, with the self being the one to grow and change and harmonize with what is true.” Yet the nature of the true world is not so easily apprehended by fallen man. The truth that Sargeant alludes to is our creatureliness, ever in need of our Creator. As Psalm 100 sings, “It is he that has made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people and the sheep of his pasture.” 

The embodied reality of the incarnational Christ is the true template for a life of dependence. This provides a transcendent framework for those living under the burden of providing care. Sergeant meditates on the annihilation of the self that she experienced while giving birth, likening it to an apocalypse. “Apocalyptic annihilation makes me focus on the crucible of caring as transfiguration,” Sergeant writes, acknowledging that this transfiguration reaches “beyond the veil,” and “wants to remain curious about what that might be.” She explains that “the world I had come to feel at home in often turns out to be passing away. I need to be ready to explore and accept the deeper reality that my circumstances and crosses reveal.” 

The deeper reality is the Kingdom of God. It is indeed at hand. It is at hand when I touch my son. It is in my hand. 

The transfiguration we experience when caring is the tool of a God determined to forge us into the likeness of his Son. Faced with the deepest, unsolvable needs of others, I am tempted to despair, without focus on the face of Christ in my touch. The Son of God needed nothing from us. Yet he became someone who needed shelter, food, care, friendship, family, community. He came to humble himself, even to his death. We depend on Christ even as He depends on the Father.

Presence is what dignifies dependence. Nowhere do we have a better example than in the presence of Christ. He is always with us. We serve a suffering Christ who gives himself over and over as a sacrificial presence in the face of our own pain. Yes, all of our dependencies are “concentric circles of need,” as Sargent argues, but they are anchored by the image of the crucified Christ firmly at the center.

David doesn’t just depend on me to complete tasks that fall outside the realm of his abilities. He requires a witness to his reality—no fix necessary. 

“The world is the wrong shape for women,” Sargeant argues in her opening chapter. But the deeper truth is that the world is shaped wrong for us all. The space David’s body is groaning for doesn’t exist this side of heaven. The type of community that could truly meet all of his needs—or all of my needs—simply isn’t there. It’s dependence on a teleological level that reveals our humanness, not just needs in relation to the material. Our need for God is what makes us human, more than our need for others. 

I will do what I can for others, knowing it is never enough. Who gives dignity to dependence? Christ alone. What gives dependence true and lasting dignity is only the “right side up” logic, as our priest says of the kingdom of God. We live in the upside down, where weakness is pitiable, discardable, and worthless. But in the kingdom of God, last becomes first. David is ministerial, priestly even, in his dependence. David magnifies the gift of Christ, who came to be poured out among us like a drink offering, so that we can keep pouring, each of us with our little cups, bailing heaving helpings of God’s grace out of our little boats.

Our bodies are to be doled out for each other, consumed by one another, dose by dose, some strange medicine mixed by the hand of God. 

“Long after we are dead,” Sargeant muses, “we leave a physical record of how we answered two questions: Who counts as humans? What do we owe those who cannot pay us back?” In the end, we all pass away. But this remains—how we served, and what we gave, because this lives on in the bodies of others, bearing our gifts, on and on, until heaven descends.
### Dependent in the First Place
URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/dependent-in-the-first-place/
Last updated: 2026-05-18T14:38:28.000Z
Leah Libresco Sargeant. [*The Dignity of Dependence*](https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268210335/the-dignity-of-dependence/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). University of Notre Dame Press, 2025\. $28.00\. 200 pp.

Early in *The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto*, Leah Libresco Sargeant invites readers to see pregnancy as “the foundational human experience.” Childbearing for Sargeant is fact, metaphor, model. What is so special about pregnancy and birth, besides the fact that it’s the process that brings every person into existence? Sargeant explains why the way each of us got here—through the wonder-working body of a woman—matters for who we are and how we should live. Explaining that significance is surprisingly hard to do. The reason for this difficulty is related to the book’s opening line: “The world is the wrong shape for women.” 

In fact, the world’s language is the wrong shape to name what happens in the bearing of new life. Language about birth defaults reductively to the biological, sentimental, clinical, or political. Our poor language partly accounts for why it can be so hard to say apt words about birth, and also why those apt words can be so hard to hear, because even in those few minutes when we aren’t holding our hands over ears yelling LALALALALA I CAN’T *HEAR* YOU SAY I CAME OUT OF THE *BODY* OFMY *MOM*,we approach the experience from the wrong point of view.

Pointing readers to the womb, Sargeant encourages more creative reflection on pregnancy and infancy—not the woman’s morning sickness or the fetus with the fingerprints, not mom’s goddess power in labor or a cute baby’s toothless smile. Sargeant wants our attention first not on either participant but on their engagement with each other. Pregnant woman and developing baby proceed together because of what the mother does: “Every person’s human life begins in utter dependency. Every human person begins their life intimately dependent on the mother who carried them…. they will never be able directly to observe how their own dependency reshaped her life.” 

A woman’s response to fetal need is active, not merely instinctual or automatic. When a woman gestates a fetus, she exercises her agency to provide care. Consider maternal-fetal circulation, a process where “the smallest capillaries of mother and child lie tangent to each other, and nutrients and oxygen diffuse across the gap. The most intimate connection still involves a small separation.” The gap requires that “caregivers also must commit to a more active choice to sustain the one who depends on them.” During gestation, the woman will repeatedly reach across the gap to provide what the baby needs. The pregnant woman’s reach across that gap demonstrates right call and response to need. After birth the gap gets bigger, and it lets other people see more clearly how a woman provides for the baby’s needs. Then other people can reach across the gap to provide for the needs of both mother and child. 

An infant cries and wants not just anybody but the voice and the scent and the resonant shelter of the one from whose body he came. The giver gives. The recipient receives, then forgets. Dependence is our original and occasional condition. But humans, at least contemporary Americans, may prefer to think of dependence as a preparatory step we take before we turn into what we really are—autonomous self-makers. Sargeant skewers this folly. She argues that humans are frustrated to live in a society that presupposes independence and thereby makes need seem shameful and exceptional. Bodily circumstances make unjust the social expectations for women to shrink themselves to fit into a world shaped for a “model man.” Yet all humans do need help: “We depend on the echoes of other people’s need to know how we began.” That is, we are even dependent on people to show us we are dependent. Forgetfulness of what we really are figures among the reasons communities and policymakers sometimes make it even harder to help others in dependency.

A woman who bears, births, or cares for a child might find the process like an immersive intro course that equips her thereafter to meet the needs of others. Simultaneously, it teaches her how to request and receive what she needs herself. Sargeant doesn’t deny thatserving others can be physically demanding. But the physical expansion of a woman late in pregnancy illustrates another important kind of growth. With the maternal body as exemplar, Sargeant shows how other occasions of dependence can bring transformation too. Being called to serve the need of another pulls me to grow in ways I couldn’t otherwise. Confronted with a need that a beloved or a suffering person puts in my path, I recognize my own inadequacy to give what is required. To do what needs doing, I become larger. I also may have to depend on someone else to serve the one who depends on me, and then we become larger together. 

The reader may follow Sargeant this far and grudgingly admit that dependence is a fact of life. But wait. There’s more. She wants us to remember that dependence is more than an unpleasant fact. Dependence underwrites our dignity. It tells the truth about what we are. It builds relationships, promotes growth, strengthens character. Dependence enlarges humans rather than reducing them. In the generative whirl Sargeant shows spinning outward from dependence, help given to one who helps to meet another’s need, humans can fill out astonishing capacities. Imagining women who live as Sargeant advises (and as I think she actually lives) made me feel like some oafish character in a Flannery O’Connor or C.S. Lewis story, a bystander gawping at the surprise glory rising up out of the ordinary looking woman on the street. Sargeant is among the best writers I know in her ability to name matter-of-factly the marvelous parts and the difficult parts of embodied human life—and then hold them together. 

Dependence in human life is not just true but beautiful. Treating dependence as flaw or anomaly squanders a gigantic bonus, buries the lede, hides our light under a bushel. The experience women have of inhabiting a body practiced in dependence is boon, not impairment. And so, itemizing injustices to women and impediments to caregiving, Sargeant confronts with befuddlement the wrong turns that lead Americans to manners and rules directly opposite those that best suit our humanity. 

It’s a risky move to make arguments about human dignity rooted in messy reproductive realities. Sargeant slips past every potential tripwire. She issues no summons to go back to traditional roles measuring female success by big bellies and bare feet. She issues no screed for rigid division of domestic labor, insisting that particular connections between the bodies of woman and child configure that division. 

An argument framing dependence in the call-and-response rhythm of motherhood might risk distancing from those goods humans who do not become mothers. Sargeant clears those obstacles too by addressing men’s avenues to healthy dependence, especially in fatherhood. Still, the implications of her argument for women who are not bearing, birthing, or lactating deserve more time. I trust Sargeant more than I do myself to develop these implications. Developing them would serve an audience that I count among her most sympathetic—those women who anticipate relationships that could bring them to motherhood in the future. These readers might gladly appraise Sargeant’s appreciation for the capacities of the female body in a world designed for men.

Appreciating those capacities need not wait for marriage and a baby carriage. The capacities of the female body, moving in cycles and seasons, already instruct. The sexed body demonstrates relationality rather than interchangeability. Adult humans and their offspring are not just new copies of a single, static model. With parts that shift shape and invite special care, the female body has dexterities enabling distinctive excellences. The very variability of the female body opens awareness that humans do not always occupy a single size, shape, or function. Gladness and gratitude for one’s embodiment can come in advance of potential future fertility. Given the long cultural advantages young women enjoy over matronly ones, and Christian traditions’ occasional elevation of virginity over maternity, it would be odd if sympathetic readers had to wait until motherhood to get cognitive immediacy of Sargeant’s link between femaleness and the dignity of dependence. 

I would anticipate with interest the further analysis Sargeant may offer young women remote from childbearing. Still, worrying too much that an anthropology rooted in pregnancy may alienate those who can’t or won’t be pregnant misses an unmissable point. Like confusion over a story when the reader’s imagination inserts her as the wrong character, such worries approach this human condition from the wrong direction. In this story you are not the mother, you are the baby.

The reason to relate dependence to motherhood is not just to tout motherhood. The reason is that we all implicitly understand dependence as accurate anthropology, because our lives already depend on it. Humans’ origin in dependence—the fetus who depends on the mother who depends on others to help her in this condition—is both a given and an opportunity. Sargeant advises that “pregnancy can offer a pattern for the choice to share vulnerability with others and to meet the vulnerability of others with generosity.” 

Humans arrive in the world through this relationship of need and response. Reliance on others from the beginning assures us that we will return to that condition again. That’s an enormous compound gift, and so is Sargeant’s elegant reminder of it.

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